About This Time 20 Years Ago… It’s The Hits Of August-ish 2004!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

What sort of music would you say that Maroon 5 play?

If you owned a record store in the year 2004, on which shelf would you stock them?

Since Maroon 5 were always in the charts that year, you could probably just plop them in the Top 40 display, right next to the counter, thereby sidestepping the whole issue. Otherwise, I guess you might put them in the rock section? You might put them in the rock section even though they didn’t really rock?

If you put them in the rock section however, you would be going against the wishes of Clive Davis, who seemed to be quite adamant that Maroon 5 were not a rock band. Their press releases always described them as a funk or an R&B band!

Maroon 5… R&B? You mean, like, Beyonce or Nelly? Like… HOW??!?

Honestly, I’ve heard more convincing soul-funk grooves on a Hozier album! Still, a surprising number of media outlets decided to run with it.

If Da 5 don’t sound especially committed to the funk, then it’s probably because they weren’t. They had previously considered going in a more country direction. I wonder what that would have sounded like. Probably pretty much the same.

This begs the question: was the rock scene of the early 00s so unfunky that this counted as an innovative funk-rock fusion? I guess so. I mean they were competing with – obvious target alert here – Nickelback!

Let’s see if we can find any fragment of funk in Da 5’s music that might justify their being described as a funk band.  I guess the rhythm guitar lick is vaguely funky. Adam described it as “expensive sounding,” whatever that means.  

An interview with their drummer mentions that they were fans of the Neptunes – but then, who wasn’t – and sure, I have to admit, I can kind of see it.

Before they decided to become a funk band, Maroon 5 had been Californian Weezer rip-offs, Kara’s Flowers. That’s before Adam went to live in New York, where he had this whole Road To Damacus/ “Play That Funky Music” revelation, the result of being constantly surrounded by hip-hop and hip-hop culture. Based on an interview with MTV, Adam seemed particularly excited about the fact that he had a hip-hop friend called Chaos.

To hear Adam reminisce about those times, it’s as though he’d never heard hip-hop or R&B back home.

So Adam was hanging out in New York, hanging out with his man Chaos, and he started hearing R&B everywhere. And he thought – needless to say, delusionally – “I can do that!”

I would really like to know which R&B singer we are talking about here. Who is it that Adam thinks he’s emulating? It probably wasn’t contemporary stuff. It probably wasn’t Usher. I do know that Adam was listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder.

Maroon 5 seem to have thought they were the only white boys playing that not-so-funky music. They got excited when they discovered that Robin Thicke existed.

Stevie Wonder wasn’t the only influence on this period of Maroon 5. The biggest influence was a girl. A girl named Jane. A girl named Jane that Adam met at a gas station and for whom he wrote “an awful song” – his words – seducing her by singing it to her at the store in which she worked. Then they broke up and Adam kept on writing awful songs about her – my words – an entire album of awful songs, calling the album Songs About Jane. Subtle. I wonder if she knew it was about her.

I’m finding this even harder to get my head around than the thing about the funk. Which lyrics exactly did Adam suspect would “hit her like a tonne of bricks”?

“I tried my best to feed her appetite
Keep her coming every night
So hard to keep her satisfied, oh”

I honestly think this reflects worse on you, Adam, than it does on her. It makes me wonder (ha!) whether Adam really deserved to be declared the Sexiest Man Alive by People Magazine in 2013.

“My pressure on your hips, sinking my fingertips
Into every inch of you because I know that’s what you want me to do”

Is this a break-up song, or an attempt to win the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Award?

“This Love” is a 6.

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Meanwhile, in Indie Land:

Speaking of break-up songs, what would you say was the ultimate band-break up song? The song seemingly written with the deliberate intention of soundtracking the band’s final turbulent moments? The song that acted almost as a montage of the band’s entire mythical history? The song that so spitefully recalled the bad times, that the band simply could no longer continue to function? The song that perversely became their biggest hit?

Would that song be, “Can’t Stand Me Now” by The Libertines?

They also shared a weird obsession with a mythical British boat – or a boat that was Britain, I’m a bit hazy on the details here – called Albion. They were so obsessed with this mythical British boat called Albion that they called the flat they lived with together, The Albion Rooms.

Pete and Carl were constantly banging on about this mythical British ship in interviews, and occasionally writing about it in their lyrics, but nobody really knew what they were talking about.

You imagine trying to do a rock interview and finding yourself talking to these two guys who want to sail this mythical ship to Arcadia where cigarettes grow on trees.

Weirdest thing of all, they were talking rubbish like this before they started taking way too many drugs. Although they were probably already taking quite a few. They would soon take many, many more.

Similar to the early days of Oasis, The Libertines were famous for dropping an impressive series of indie bangers but were probably more famous for acting like complete and utter twats. Or at least Pete was. Pete managed to play the role of both Noel – writing most of the hits – and Liam – acting like a twat – a potent combination that even Alan McPhee, who had managed Oasis, found impossible to deal with. At least Liam had showed up for gigs. At least Liam didn’t end up in jail (arrested, yes- jailtime, not so much).

Also a harmonica. Remember that little detail. It will turn out to be relevant later.

When he wasn’t in jail, Pete was in rehab, including one stint at the Buddhist monastery in Thailand, said to have one of the best success-rates for sobriety in the world. Pete only lasted for a couple of days before heading for Bangkok.

Carl may come across as the sensible one of the two, but he only comes across as sensible when compared to Pete. Compare Carl to virtually anyone else in the world, and you would find that he too was extremely messed up. He woke up one morning with blood-soaked sheets after he had taken a bottle of whiskey into a bath.

All of which was perfect headline fodder – “Scrapping, Screwing & Getting Trashed” boasted the NME in one front page headline “With Britain’s Most F***ed Up Band” – and a perfect indie-rock soap-opera!

In one particularly convoluted episode of this soap-opera, Pete organized a Libertines’ gig to say farewell to The Albion Rooms where he and Carl had lived together. Which would have seemed like a nice gesture, except that it was on the same night as Carl’s birthday, and Carl was celebrating it somewhere else. The other two Libertines had to choose which party to go to. When they chose Carl’s, Pete got offended, cracked a tantrum, and didn’t show up on their European tour.

This put The Libertines in a weird situation in which the rest of band was constantly throwing Pete out of the band, even though he was the main reason why they were successful in the first place. Even though Pete wasn’t turning up to gigs – a key part of the job of being in a band – he was probably doing more to promote the band than the rest of the band put together.

His new band, Babyshambles, got a big hit single out of it – “Fuck Forever” – despite presumedly not getting played much on the radio. (“Fuck Forever” is a 7)

It was only right that “Can’t Stand Me Now” would be The Libertines’ biggest hit. It became a hit after Pete was thrown out of the band – for the umpteenth time – and was written by Pete basically about being thrown out of the band. It was recorded during a turbulent session during which both Pete and Carl had to be assigned bodyguards to prevent them from attacking each other. Not that it worked. They attacked each other anyway.

The intro to “Can’t Stand Me Now” is a thing of wonder – and not just because of the satisfyingly prominent cowbell tapping – seemingly heading in all sorts of directions before finally committing to a groove. This was partially just because of the way that the track was cut and pasted together; sticking all the crashes at the end of the song on to the beginning. It was “an ending fitting for the start.” Those clever, post-modern bastards.

As the song continues, Pete and Carl start bickering with each other about whose fault everything was. Carl sings the first verse, Pete the second. For “Can’t Stand Me Now” is a duet. It’s “Don’t You Want Me” with guitars. Pete wrote Carl verses, including the lyrics that blame himself (that is, Pete), for everything, and mention the fact that he broke into Carl’s gaff. Despite writing the lyrics, Pete still got offended when Carl sang them, and he marched off the stage in a huff…

Then Pete plays a harmonica solo.

“Can’t Stand Me Now” is one of the most self-referential hits ever penned, it’s every newspaper headline about the band, every nasty quote that had ever been printed about each other, all cut up and pasted together like a collage. And it became the biggest hit they’d ever have. People were really invested in this soap opera!

And that’s why “Can’t Stand Me Now” by The Libertines is the best breaking-up-the-band single of all time. Not their final single – being the lead single of their breakup album there was obviously more to come – but the one that ensured that the band would die. So much so that the follow up single – “What Became Of The Likely Lads” – was basically a eulogy.

Imagine that, singing your own eulogy. “What Became Of The Likely Lads” is an 8

A slightly premature eulogy perhaps since they would get together to record some largely ignored albums a couple of years ago, and – a bit more surprisingly – run a hotel in the seaside resort town of Margate, a hotel that they decided to call, what else but: The Albion Rooms.

“Can’t Stand Me Now” is a 10.

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Meanwhile, in ‘Rappers Have Feelings, Too’ Land:

So, when we last left Mike Skinner: he’d just come back from his holidays, where he’d met a girl, and like he said, she was really fit, but my gosh, don’t she just know it. Then she went off with that white shirted man.

But what does Mike give a f*ck? He’s got a girlfriend anyway.

Or, does he?

For now Mike’s back in Blighty, and things aren’t going too well. It turns out that Simone, Skinner’s slapper bird, has been seeing his mate Dan.

To anyone paying attention to the plot of A Grand Don’t Come For Free, The Streets’ rap-soap opera this was not exactly a big revelation. There had been hints and foreshadowing for tracks and tracks. In “Blinded By The Lights” for example, Mike actually sees Simone pashing Dan! That should have tipped him off! If he hadn’t been out of his head on proper rank pills that taste like hairspray and distracted by shitty mobile phone reception – f*cking phones man! – he probably would have figured it out.

Just to be clear, “Blinded By The Lights” – the version inside the A Grand Don’t Come For Free album/rap-opera – is not set at a wedding. This video completely contradicts the entire plot of the album, and I refuse to consider it as canon.

Still, it takes until Scott spells it all out to him at the end of “What Is He Thinking?” for Mike to understand the duplicity of Dan. Poor Scott. One minute Skinner’s suspecting him of shagging Simone, the next he has to rat out his friend.

And then, a moment after Scott reveals that the duplicity of Dan, the violins begin to swell, and in one single moment, Mike’s whole life has turned ‘round. And we are treated to that rarest of things: a tear-jerking UK grime power ballad.

A tear-jerking UK grime power ballad filled with in which Mike actually comes across as clumsily romantic:

“She wraps her fingers ’round mine with the softness she’s blessed with”.

It’s sweet. It’s sentimental.

Also, this:

“’Cause I can’t imagine my life without you and me, there’s things I can’t imagine doing, things I can’t imagine seeing”

Which honestly doesn’t seem to reflect their relationship at all. It isn’t as though he was planning to go see The Great Wall Of China with her or anything. That part where he suggests that they have an open relationship seems far more on brand.

“everything’s just gone, I got nothin’, absolutely nothin’.”

And then he starts getting a bit sweary. The words “I’m not gonna f*ckin’ just f*ckin’ leave it all now” have never felt so touching.

“Cos you said it’d be forever and that was your vow” he continues, so upset that once again he seems confused about what sort of relationship they had. Which, again, just to clarify, mostly involved getting stoned in front of the TV. Just to be clearer, they weren’t exactly married.

The best thing about “Dry Your Eyes” though is… well, actually there’s two.:

• Firstly, the word “mate.” There simply aren’t enough big hit singles – certainly not enough big hit singles that might nominally be referred to as rap – that feature the word “mate” in the chorus.

• Secondly, there’s Mike’s tendency to over-describe every single thought that’s going through his head, fixate over every single tiny little detail of what is happening, as if he’s living this moment over and over and over again.

“I look at her, she stares almost straight back at me
But her eyes glaze over, like she’s looking straight through me
Then her eyes must have closed for what seems an eternity
When they open up she’s looking down at her feet”

Mike spends about half the song reading out such stage directions, seemingly under the impression that this is how you create dramatic tension, when there’s a very real chance that instead, it’ll come across as a comedic piss-take.

Somehow, against all the odds, it manages to do both.

• “Dry Your Eyes (Radio Edit)” is a 7.
• “Dry Your Eyes (Album Version)” is an 8.

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Meanwhile, in Medical Drama Land:

Somebody needs to talk about “Portions For Foxes.” The song doesn’t even have its own dedicated Wikipedia page. Like seriously? This is like the song of the decade! Or at least the sexiest song of the decade. Certainly the sexiest indie-rock song of the decade!!

Some TV shows seem designed to produce hit soundtracks. Usually ones with teenagers in them. The O.C. at this point was at the height of its cultural relevance, so one might assume that I’d be writing an entry on Phantom Planet. Or Rooney, or Death Cab For F*cking Cutie. I probably should be.

But no, I’m writing about Grey’s Anatomy.

First scene: Meredith Grey: – who bares a vague resemblance to Rilo Kiley lead singer Jenny Lewis, or at least have the same color hair -wakes up on the floor.

She’s just had sex with a stranger. Turns out that it’s McDreamy, but she doesn’t know that yet. She’s late for work. It’s her first day. So she throws McDreamy out of the house, has a quick shower, then races off in her car to the sounds of Rilo Kiley’s “Portions For Foxes”, presumedly because McDreamy is “bad news.”

The phrase “Portions For Foxes” is a Biblical reference, somewhere in Psalms, where, as best as I can tell, means that you are dying in the desert and foxes are eating you. Or, as Meredith might put it, you’re “screwed.”

“Portions For Foxes”, random Biblical reference aside, is one of the most sexually frustrated indie rock songs of all time.

And you know what happens next… The talking leads to touching. The touching leads to sex (or, as Jenny sings it “seeeeex”). And then there is no mystery left.

“Portions For Foxes” is both sexy, and incredibly said.

“Portions For Foxes” is a 10.

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