Glycerine by Bush

As grunge's most beautiful love song, "Glycerine" captures what is significant and meaningful about the music in this genre. It's dark, longing and sincere. It's a statement of defiance to the world and also a promise of commitment to the love of his life.

As you watch Gavin Rossdale defiantly performing against the forces of nature in the pouring rain "Glycerine" makes sense. There is something beautiful with his primal scream at the end of the song that reminds us not so much of who we want to be but who we are.

Jeremy by Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam - New Music - More Music Videos

Violence in schools sadly seems like a commonplace occurrence in our society. Not just in America but across the world stories of students acting out in unimaginable ways seems to emerge every couple months. While there are many more people in this world who are killed in horrific battles in war-torn countries, they don’t get to me in the same way. I don’t work in a war-torn environment. I work in a school and every time I hear of a school shooting, I feel physically sick.

“Jeremy” is a nightmare. It’s horrific and scary on a visceral level. Is it beautiful? That depends on your definitions of beauty. However, what is indisputable is that “Jeremy” expresses darkness in the human heart that is uncomfortable but very real.

“Jeremy” is an amalgamation of two true stories: Jeremy Wade Delle, a 15 year old who committed suicide in front of his English class and a shooting at a school that lead singer Eddie Vedder attended. The lyrics tell about a boy at home drawing disturbing images of death with parents who don’t seem to care.

The second verse is the narrator telling about how he used to pick on Jeremy and later realizes “we unleashed a lion." Between the verse the haunting line, “Jeremy spoke in class today." While the lyrics never explicitly say that Jeremy got up in front of the class and committed suicide. Most people know the story from the controversial music video.

After watching the video, you realize that Jeremy “speaking” is not so much a reflection on something he said but on what he did. Even if you’ve never seen the video, there is something unhinged about the way that Eddie Vedder sings the chorus that foreshadows a tragic ending.

The words “Jeremy spoken” rise up and down in a smooth contour but the words “in class today” are awkwardly crammed together. Vedder dips into a full baritone for this line with singing it like a man possessed. You can see a young boys hands shaking in anger in the uncomfortable intensity of Vedder’s voice.

Pearl Jam, thought initially characterized s a grunge/alternative rock group, arranges their music with a clarity and intricacy that transcends the distorted punk chords that characterize most grunge music. The melodic bass line in the beginning, the slick use of vocal overdubs to create a schizophrenic feeling are advanced music devices that add to the feverish energy that permeates this song.

I don’t get any joy from listening to “Jeremy.” I somehow feel hurt, sad and at a loss when this song is over. I don't understand why I feel this way. I don’t understand how someone could feel this alone, this hurt and this angry. I don’t know how someone could contemplate let alone act in such violence.

We fear what we don’t understand, and I am afraid of "Jeremy."

Karma Police by Radiohead

“Karma Police” music video
“Karma Police” live performance

The Beatles recorded some weird stuff.

There’s “Revolution 9” made up of sound clips, tape loops and reverse sound effects and the Indian-inspired “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Both of these songs represent the musical experimentation that was prevalent throughout the Beatles’ career.

The musical legacy of the Beatles is as much in songs like “Yesterday” as it is in their more progressive work. The Beatles continue to influences musicians combining musical ideas from the Beatles with their unique perspectives. While most bands draw their inspiration from songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Radiohead’s music grew out of the less popular and more progressive songs like Happiness is a Warm Gun.

Radiohead is not a mainstream band in the sense that you hear their music played on most radio stations. However, they have an enormous fan base and receive great admiration from critics and other musicians who recognize the high level of musical invention in their music. Many of their songs feature complex meters, adventurous harmonies and song forms that are both inventive and original. Radiohead continue the Beatles musical experimentation for future generations pushing popular music to new creative heights.

For many people, including myself it was “Karma Police” that introduced me to Radiohead. In 1997, I was a freshmen in high school and my daily dose of music videos from and MTV provided entertainment but didn’t musically challenge my ears. So when I saw the music video for “Karma Police” for the first time I was stunned.

First off the music video plays like a David Lynch film. The video starts with someone getting in a car and chasing a person down a road. The lead singer Thom Yorke is in the back seat, barely mouthing the words of the music as the car continues to chase this man. After a while, the man falls down, turns around and like a scared child the car backs up revealing a trail of gas from the car's broken gas tank. The man lights the trail of gas on fire, the car speeds backwards and we are in the car as it is engulfed in flames.

Yeah, that made for some messed up dreams for about a week.

The song itself is similar in form to later Beatles’ songs like “Hey Jude." In “Hey Jude” there are two distinct sections, the “Hey Jude” part and the “Na, Na, Na, nanana Na” section. There is some transition between these sections but it’s pretty abrupt and unlike a verse chorus form the music from the first section never comes back. "Karma Police" does the same thing building up slowly to the second section providing a sense of arrival and release.

“Karma Police” is a dark song. The bare piano, the plodding guitar and Thom Yorke’s vocal performance all create a feeling of despair. This song feels like walking into an abandoned apartment building and it’s within this feeling that Yorke sings with devilishly sarcastic tone accusing others of crimes that are never revealed.

The first section of the song is a call to the “karma police” to arrest a man and a girl for messing with the narrator. His descriptive of the man who “buzzes like a fridge” and the girl with “her Hitler hairdo” are slightly demented, a little funny and depict our narrator as being psychologically unbalanced.

“This is what you get, when you mess with us” builds into the second section, which features one line that is repeated: “and for a minute there, I lost myself.” This man realizes how caught up he was in revenge that he wasn’t acting like himself.

I don’t really like dark music, but there is revelatory about “Karma Police” and much of Radiohead's music. Through the bleakness there is true human emotion that wallows in the depths but often reaches grand heights. The music takes us somewhere and even though you may not want to go to the place the music leads, being part of the journey is amazing experience.

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer in this interview talked about how he never really liked “reset” television. Shows that end exactly in the same place where they start every week. A lot of music is similar where nothing changes within the narrator from the beginning to the end of the song. Often the same sections in the beginning of the song return and are exactly same. Sometimes this is great but other times our soul thirsts for more.

Like the Beatles' more experimental work, Radiohead does not always create the most accessible music, but I encourage you to give this band a try. If you dive into Radiohead and let them take you away, you may hear sounds that aren't pretty and you may hear words that are disturbing but I promise you that it will be an unforgettable journey and you will be amazed at the places that you will go.

Buddy Holly by Weezer

“Buddy Holly” music video

“Buddy Holly” live performance

When “Buddy Holly” was released in 1994 a combination of grunge music, corporate pop and gangster rap ruled MTV and the radio stations and for a 7th grade at Islander Middle School it was all a lot to take in.

I grew up on Mercer Island which is a suburb of Seattle. It’s a mostly upper-class city with a combination of gated communities and retirement homes. It’s also the home of the first drive through Starbucks (which was the central hangout spot). Instead of a junior high in my district, there was elementary schools for grades 1-5, a middle school for grades 6-8.

Like most middle school students, I struggled to find define my social identity. I wasn’t going to do the grunge thing. I didn’t really fit in the Gap crowd, which was more of preppy thing then it is now. I didn't really find a place to fit in. I did have couple people I talked to in class but in general. . .yeah, that was my awkward stage (which lasted for about another 10 years. . . j/k . . kind of).

I knew I didn’t like grunge music. Grunge music just seemed like a mess. It didn’t make sense to my ears and I couldn’t really relate to the pessimism and anger in the music. Since then, I’ve come to understand the subtleties and craft in artists like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and there’s nothing like high school to make teenage angst actually make sense.

When I first saw the video for “Buddy Holly” on MTV my first thought was to turn away to the safe haven of VH1 (which at that time was an adult contemporary channel as opposed to the Celebreality channel it has turned into). The opening of the song sounded like a grunge sound with distorted chords moving in parallel motion between the chords (going from chords that are right next to each other like C chord to the D chord as opposed to a C chord to a G chord). A pretty angry sounding melody, and then “woohoo." It was with this exclamation that Weezer hooked me.

What Weezer did in “Buddy Holly” is bring together different layers of popular culture uniquely reflecting both the past and present in American becoming the future of modern pop music. Weezer started with what was happening around them taking the sound of grunge music and combining them with lyrics borrowed from the gangster rap. This reflected not only the gangster rap vernacular but the weird phenomenon people living in the suburbs hopelessly attempting to utilize gangster rap slang in their everyday speech.

Weezer references every decade in this song since the 1950s. Buddy Holly is one of the fathers of rock & roll who gained prominence before his death in 1959s. The “woo-ee-oo” and the “woo-hoo” hearkens all the way back to the doo-wop era of the early 1960s. Mary Tyler Moore is one of the most important woman in television history who started in The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970-1977. Then there’s the distorted guitar lines used in the transitions, which are a throw-back to 1980s synthesized rock.

The inclusion of these many facets of culture makes “Buddy Holly” both an retrospective and interesting representation of American culture but its joyous and devotional message is what makes it meaningful.

The feel of the chorus is reminiscent of a 1960s pop song but instead of playing around with the an idealized vision of love, Rivers talks about love in a more realistic way. “Buddy Holly” describes a relationship that lead singer Rivers Cuomo had with an Asian girl, “your tongue is twisted, your eyes are slit.” Rivers’ friends frequently made fun of her and this song is a statement of support. During the song Rivers states how they belong to each other and how he doesn’t care about what other people say which is bittersweet as he is being supportive in the face of difficult situation.

“Buddy Holly” explored the expressive possibilities of grunge music. There is a wide array of possibilities in all kinds of music and Weezer’s creation of a song which they initially thought sounded “cheesy” opened up my ears acting as a gateway to a whole new world of music.

What is most important to me about “Buddy Holly” is that through its video and widespread acceptance that I could like a certain kind of music and well, not have to dress a certain way. By appealing across genres, Weezer showed that music was not so much about the way people dressed or even the way they acted but the music itself. "Buddy Holly" showed me that it was okay for a this suburban bred Asian kid to rock out to whatever he wanted to and for a 12 year old that means the world.