Every once in a while, when we discuss the merits of a particular song or album on a deeper level, I’m reminded of the fact that the range of emotions covered in rock songs typically covers only so many emotional dynamics: new love, heartbreak, friendship, humor, sexuality, religion, burnout, politics, and mortality. We’ve discussed the fact that some of these dynamics, such as humor and politics, can be more challenging to write about successfully in the rock song medium than others. However, this morning, as my heart beats faster with the approaching fall soccer season (I’m a coach of a boy’s team), I’m wondering if there are uncharted rock terrains? For instance, I often think there are too few, if any, songs that capture the spirit of competition (not necessarily athletic).
So, there are at least two questions I hope to answer today: 1) Am I wrong? (not about everything, wiseacre!), and 2) What uncharted rock terrains would you like to see explored more deeply?
It goes without saying that I look forward to your responses.
As for the spirit of competition, how about a stadium anthem like We Will Rock You?
The Curtis Mayfield song We’re a Winner popped into my head when you said competition, but it’s actually more about striving to be a better person and making the world a better place. You don’t hear too many of those anymore, or at least I don’t, but they were common in the 60s.
Recently the Sundance channel ran a Robyn Hitchcock documentary called Sex, Food, Death, and Insects, in which he says he was accused of writing only about those four topics. (This doc was filmed during the recording and touring of the recent album with the Venus 3, and I recommend it, if you like Robyn.)
There ought to be more songs about food. Remember Nick Lowe’s Let’s Eat on the Live Stiffs album? “Let’s eat, let’s eat, I wanna movemovemovemovemove my teeth, let’s eat.” They don’t write ’em like that anymore.
Maybe those days aren’t gone, Big Steve. I like the song What’s For Dinner by King Khan and BBQ Show. “Mash potatoes chicken pie, mash potatoes chicken pie…..and a side of beans. What’s for dinner?”
Mr. Mod, I think people have sung rock songs about just about everything. Sure they’re always supposed to mean something else, but damned if I can tell if “Little Black Egg” is about a Magic 8 Ball or some supernatural thing or just a little black egg. There’s songs about car transmissions, surfing, skateboarding, lazing on sunny afternoons, straight love, gay love, love of your fellow man. There’s even songs about rock and roll itself. Still, songs about drinking and it’s joys and curses are the best songs. I don’t think there is any uncharted territory lyrically. There’s a song by a defunct local Cleveland band called Beer Bummin’ At The Opera, and I guess if people are doing that, then that’s got to have covered it all. If you made the whole list, you’d sound like that shrimp guy Forrest named his shrimp company after.
So yeah, you’re wrong. I think Eye of the Tiger is the funniest song related to competition. Is that supposed to make the competitive juices flow? If it is supposed to have that effect, I think it’s more because the guy in the video had a sweatband on his head more than anything else. So now I’m gonna spend my day bebopping with that dumb, giant riff in my head. Dunh! Dunh Dunh Dunh!
So BigSteve suggested “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions” as a possible example of a rock song that captures the spirit of competition. I’m not sure that it is, and I’d like to tie into this response an answer to Dr. John’s continuing confusion over my term Winner Rock, which will be provided as a Glossary entry in the coming week (time provided). Here goes…
“We Will Rock You” is a canned anthem, but I don’t think it in any way describes the emotional range that comes from intense competition. Again, I can’t think of a rock song that really does lay out the emotional landscape of competiton. To me, competition allows for the expression of animal aggression as well as the potential for unbridled joy. It allows for a type of bonding with the “enemy” while trying to deny the enemy his or her objectives. It provides a rush. As much as the song sucks donkey dick, at least Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” makes a concerted effort at confronting the notion of competition. I wish I could think of a more tolerable example, and lately I’ve been thinking about seeing if I could find a way to write about these feeliings I have in regard to athletic competition. Not some novelty song about favorite players from my past. Not some joke song about sucking at sports. No, I want some music that reflects the sporting life. Perhaps it’s out there and I’m not thinking of it or have yet to hear it.
Also, as this ties into Winner Rock, it’s not the outcome (ie, the win) that defines winner rock but the intent to win. A band’s got a “game plan” and executes it with a degree of confidence and ferocity, with an intent of succeeding. Winner Rock. This band’s not sneaking in the backdoor, no one’s sitting by the bay window, twirling a stray curl as a lone raindrop drips down the windowpane. No one’s waiting for that other sensitive soul in the world, the only person who can understand the singer’s pain. This artist plays to win, even if the victory is Pyhrric (sp?).
I agree with BigSteve that songs about food are excellent fodder for rock.
2000 Man, I will await one example of a song that truly speaks to the joys of competition before admitting that I’m “wrong” on that particular count. Songs like “David Watts”, which speak to the anti-jock feelings prevalent in rock, do not count. I want some quality jock rock, if that’s what you want to call it!
However, focusing on either the outcome or the intent still begs the question of what it means to “win.” I can imagine different bands as defining these things differently. For instance, The Minutemen. They never made much money, but they had confidence and ferocity, and if their goal was, perhaps, to be taken seriously, then I think they got there.
You and almost no one else in the universe.
The Minutemen surely played to win, and yes, they won. Listen up: Winner Rock is not dictated by commercial success and crap like that. It’s about wanting it and getting out there and grabbing it. The Rolling Stones rarely did anything but grab for whatever it was they wanted. Two rare exceptions are Goats Head Soup and Their Satanic Majesties Request, the latter the saddest example of a great rock band playing back on its heels.
As this Winner Rock discussion progresses, I must warn folks, sports analogies are likely to increase. If you don’t get what I’m talking about, tough! 🙂
Mwall dismisses my call for “quality jock rock.” Can people get any more threatened by the mix of competition and the arts? Jeez! Please tell me there’s one more person in the world who understands me. Come on, I’ll be sitting by that bay window, stroking my stray curl as a lone raindrop runs down!
Moddie, you may not like it, but the fact remains that one of the greatest Winner Rock practitioners was Ted Nugent, back in the mid-late 70s.
Mr. Mod, it’s starting to sound like Winner Rock can simply be defined as rock by people who actually want to be doing what they are doing. How wrong am I?
Rick, they need to do it with gusto; they need to do it to win…and for them to win, someone else has to lose.
Hrrundi, the Nuge was definitely a Winner Rock practitioner. That’s fine by me. I don’t have to like every team out there, but I respect them.
Really?
Seems to me, if we’re going forward with this defintion, the old perception of “loser rock” no longer applies. If you can spin “winner rock” into a positive, i can do same with the losers.
Pfft, “Eye of the Tiger” isn’t even Survivor’s best entry on the subject of the grudging respect forged in the fires of combat between true competitors.
In the warriors code – there’s no surrender,
Though his body says stop, his spirit cries: never!
And
It’s a battle of wills
In the heat of attack
It’s the passion that kills.
I’m also reminded of a number by a former boxer who was compelled to weigh in on the subject of competition before the siren song of tequila demasiado killed his drive:
First the mind, then the soul
And when the heart gets pumped up for the goal
There’s no defeat, you’d sooner die
It’s man to man as we stand eye-to-eye.
Winner takes it all.
Loser takes a fall.
Fight to the beginning of the end.
Winner takes it all.
‘Til he breaks the fall.
In time he’ll make it…over the top.
I’m pretty sure he was singing about climing Mount Everest or something.
Your initial post indicated that competitiion wasn’t necesarily athletic. Does it then include competition for a girl or guy? Would a song like “Jimmy Mack” by Martha Reeves qualify (“Jimmy, this guy is trying to win me away from you and he’s gonna do it unless you get back here”)? I’m sure there are lots of other similarly themed songs although I can’t think of them offhand.
Or “Showdown” by Archie Bell & The Drells about a dancing competition.
Oats, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with Loser Rock, in and of itself. The Kinks were probably the masters of Loser Rock. I would encourage you to work in tandem with me so that we can prepare Glossary entries for each of these terms.
Townsman Al, GREAT suggestion of “Showdown”. That’s by far the closest thing to a song about the joys of competition yet. Those “you’re gonna that girl”-type songs aren’t bad either. Now we’re getting somewhere. I’d still like to hear a true classic of a rock song involving the wealth of emotions that come through competition.
Right on. I think it’s important to note that both approaches can be done exceedingly well, and both can sink to depths of painful self-parody.
There is, I suppose, an argument to be made for applying sports/corporate/military terms like “game plan” and “execution.” But I would rather rock to some degree remain separate from such thinking. Granted, rock has already been corporatized–but to go any further robs it, for me, of any enjoyment.
Hey, just because Satanic Majesties came out during a time when everyone was a winner, even if they came in last or got all the wrong answers, is no reason to accuse The Stones of slacking. They were playing by society’s rules, and society was really high and groovy. Besides, it’s got 2000 Man, Citadel and 2000 Light Years From Home on it. You can’t ask for much more.
I think the ultimate Winner Rock song is Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Beret. Those guys don’t accept defeat, and they don’t wear shorts with long socks.
2000 Man, I did not accuse the Stones of “slacking” but, by saying they were playing on their “heels” I meant they weren’t playing their game; they let the market dictate what they did on that album. Specifically, they let The Beatles dictate the pace of the game. The thing that always marked the fantastic rivalry between The Beatles and The Stones was that each band came prepared to play its own brand of rock ‘n roll. This may have been the only time when the Stones really let their guard down and got out of their rhythm.
Mr. Mod, the following songs by one of my adolescent favorites, Judas Priest, are all songs in various ways about facing down the competition, and all of them are designed to give that fist-pumping buzz that only rock and roll winners can have. My assertion that these are quality songs about beating the competition (of various kinds) points up the issue of just how good any song about beating the competition could possibly be.
“Running Wild”
“You Don’t Have to Be Old to Be Wise”
“The Rage”
“Desert Plains”
“You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'”
From “You Don’t Have to Be Old,” the following lyrics affected me deeply at 15, before I even knew about punk rock:
“I’m sick and tired of being programmed/and told what I’m gonna do/let’s get one thing straight/I’ll choose my fate/It’s got nothing to do with you.”
It’s time to kick some ass!
By the way, perhaps the most well known song about winning in jazz is “New York New York.”
I can’t tell you how much I have appreciated your heartfelt call for tunes of this kind, or how much I have enjoyed, on many levels, the idea of sending you this post, with friendship.
“My Way” is a great song about the thrill of winning!
Damnit, I don’t know the title of that song, do I, and I don’t know how old I was when I first heard “You Don’t Have to Be Old”–a discographical check suggests that I must have just turned 17.
So much for my memory.
We’ve been focusing too much on lyrics, so I’ll just throw this out there on the subject of competition — I think the sound of the Who on Live at Leeds is a good example of the spirit of competition and its capacity to exalt players who risk failure in the struggle to excel.
Big Steve, speaking personally I quoted lyrics mainly because in these text boxes I can’t quote sounds. But you’re right; it would be worthwhile to ask whether some specific sounds define a song as Winner Rock. You can’t be too mellow, you can’t meander: you have to bring it and mean it. You have to get carried away but never completely lose your self-possession. You have to “Deliver The Goods,” another Priest song–by which I would be suggesting that the Priest numbers I mentioned before all define the essential sound of Winner Rock, in all its limits. Well-defined male aggression made specific within the concept of group dynamics.
I actually don’t have much to say about Winner Rock, a concept I’ve never had much of a grasp of. But how about the last line of Thunder Road? “It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.”
BigSteve and Mwall, you guys are getting it, on many levels. The sound of The Who on Live at Leeds surely is athletic. I was thinking yesterday that “Baba O’Riley” and other grand songs from Who’s Next somehow fit my bill. I’ve long wanted to choreograph an evening at a Phils game in which only Who songs are played to introduce players.
mod,
where do the early beach boys songs about drag racing (shut down) and such (be true to your school) fit into your winner rock scheme?
“I Get Around” has a little bit of the competitive thrill to it, as do some of those other early songs, but none fit the bill I’m looking for. It’s not just songs about sports that I wish I could find but songs that really capture the thrill of competition. People write about the thrill of love or a new car, why not athletic pursuits? Doesn’t Belle and Sebastian have a song about long-distance running? I can’t remember much about it other than I liked it. I’ll have to see if that one does the trick.
I think you’re thinking of Stars of Track and Field (on If You’re Feeling Sinister). It isn’t really about sports, but it is about winners and losers and sexual competition. I think the lyrics might interest you. I love the song for the arrangement, but beware — there’s a trumpet (flugelhorn maybe?) solo at the end that you might not Love.
How about hate as uncharted territory for rock lyrics? Even punk tended to be more about alienation than actual hate. I can’t decipher cookie monster lyrics, but is the same true in that genre?
How about anger? John Lydon chanted “Anger is an energy” on some PiL song, but I find that emotion difficult to convey convincingly, even though, like a lot of people, I have lots of barely contained anger inside of me. Maybe rockers get this emotion out most effectively by bashing on their instruments instead of by writing lyrics.
If anyone can point me to well-done angry or hateful lyrics, be my guest, but these emotions are certainly under-represented in song, despite the fact that they are present in life on equal footing with love and happiness.
mod, your points re. the beach boys are well taken. but i would like to add that until we get to “don’t worry baby”, where the protagonist wallows in momma’s boy loser-dom after boasting his way into a drag race he couldn’t win, the other songs seem to advertise / embody / advocate a winning attitude that goes beyond sis-boom-bah affectations to espouse a lifestyle; an early form of “winner rock”, no? i’m not exactly sure what YOUR definition of it is (i see you being less circumspect than some in this thread have accused you of being; you’re making a genuine effort to articulate it), but these examples would certainly fit the bill for me upon first hearing the phrase “winner rock”.
BigSteve, re. hate / anger in rock: there seems to be too many hardcore, ca. ’83 to mention. i’m not saying it was one dimensional. but much of it was hateful, filled with anger. we’ve got righteous anger, irrational anger, inarticuate anger…. but for a specific example, see dez era Black Flag (“authority!!…bullshit!!!…authority!!!….bullshit!!!”).
BigSteve, that is the B&S song I remembered. I like it up and down, no problem with the trumpet part or that type of instrument in and of itself. It’s just bullfighting rock I don’t Love.
Also, THANK YOU for bringing up your own uncharted territory in rock! This was the original intent of the thread, not only to respond to my personal concern. Hate is a good one. What do you think of Lou Reed’s most hateful lyrics? I like them and find them to contain more than a kernel of truth. I’m thinking of stuff from Berlin, Street Hassle, and the like.
Although not exactly a “hateful” or “angry” song, lately I’ve been thinking that Elvis Costello’s “Pay It Back” is a good expression of an emotion that’s not often tackled in rock songs.
As for politically vengeful lyrics (also not exactly hateful but angry in a slow-burning way that I find realistic), I keep marveling at songs like “Big Ax” and a few other songs from Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Burnin’. The album’s got a handful of songs that have that quiet, rebellious, night before the siege quality.
Saturnismine, the only reason I won’t fully open the can of worms on The Beach Boys vis a vis Winner/Loser Rock is because the official definitions are still being hammered out. At that point I would like to test out a sneaking suspicion I have in this area regarding The Beach Boys compared with The Mamas & The Papas. Personally, I’m very curious to see how this hypothesis plays out.
Early Dylan had a lot of hate/anger songs – Masters Of War (“I’ll stand over your grave til I’m sure that you’re dead”) and Positively 4th Street come to mind immediately.
Yesterday, I was considering where songs about cars might fit into the competition theme, but discounted most of them as being just about cars or about sex, which falls back into more conventional song themes.
The one that stood out was Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” where it seems like his car is just a means to the end of trying to be freer than the other guys around him, on his metaphorical road. But then I noticed that he used the terms “wee wee” and “drizzlin’ showers” in back-to-back lines and laughed like a ten year old for a few minutes and forgot to suggest it.
Before moving on from the sports-in-music theme, I do want to say that I regret not jumping into the Creedence post from a few weeks ago, and also not giving due to the dead-on Fogerty as a closer comparison.
But on to the Winner Rock vs. Loser Rock discussion, I would like to suggest that those in the Loser Rock camp are far more likely to write songs that wander into the Uncharted Rock Terrains than are the Winner Rock types. Maybe I think this because I’m not yet grasping the terms fully, but perhaps this is an idea worth exploring.
mod, re. my beach boys suggestion, do whatcha gotta do. i trust you with it.
BigSteve, i almost forgot: F.O.D. made an album called “hate rock” (c. ’94). unbelievable that i forgot to mention it since i engineered the demo session and produced the recordings that wound up on the album. They followed up that masterpiece with “Everything Sucks” (i wanna say that was ’97). clearly, as the title indicates, they hadn’t moved far from the “hate rock” genre they were purporting to have invented.
Mr. Mod, can I suggest how much the terrain of Winner Rock crosses into 70s hard rock, whose limitations we’ve discussed on this list before. For instance, the following all seem to be Winner Rock songs:
Nazareth:
“Hair of the Dog”
Thin Lizzy:
“The Boys Are Back In Town”
“The Rocker”
Rainbow:
“Man on the Silver Mountain”
Against all odds, and a determined opponent (male, female, or a mythic natural world), in each of these songs the singer has come out on top in tandem with some chunky riffs.
Alex, did you bring up Fogerty in order to point us towards Centerfield, a song that might tie together the Winner Rock and music/sports ideas? Am I stating the obvious?
I was out last night and listening to the car radio when on comes NRBQ’s “Riding In My Car” and I thought “Wistful, there’s a terrain that’s rarely tackled in rock & roll”. Only other song I came up with and it’s not wistful in the same way is Rod Stewart’s “You Wear It Well”.
Alexmagic, you were onto something good with that Berry song and then something even better came from it. Bravo!
One of the problems I have with the concept of Winner Rock is that Spinal Tap throughly tore apart the competitive, locker room mentality that informs it.
Some of my favorite songs are satires of Winner Rock. When I listen to the live version of “Lonely at the Top,” I always enjoy hearing Randy Newman snicker as he sings, “All the applause, and all the praise. And all the money that I have made.”
NRBQ has a good example of a food song — RC Cola and a Moon Pie. And It Was a Accident is about an unwanted prgnancy that turns out to be a false alarm, very much uncharted territory.
Late Sunday night pince nez — the lyrics for Randy Newman’s Lonely at the Top” are “all the applause, all the parades.”
Masters of War has hate AND anger. Mr. Mod, good call on Lou Reed as a source of hate songs. I think my problem is that hate and anger are usually mixed with other emotions for a more complex emotional landscape to a song, but I was trying to imagine an expression of the hate or anger in undiluted form. The later hardcore bands turn it into one kind of cartoon. The earlier punks turned it more inward, as exemplified by the X song The World’s a Mess It’s in my Kiss.
Dylan singing “I hope that you die, and your death will come soon” is pretty direct. Street Hassle has a song called Dirt that goes beyond the put-down song, a noble rock tradition, all the way over into pure cold hate:
It’s been a long time
Since I’ve spoken to you
Was it the right time?
Your current troubles
And you know they’ll get much worse
I hope you know how much I enjoy them
You’re a pig of a person
If there’s justice in this world
Hey how about that?
Your lack of conscience
And your lack of morality
Well more and more people know all about it
You remember that song
By a dude named Bobby Fuller?
It went like this
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
We sat around the other night
Me and the guys
Trying to find the right word
That would best fit and describe
You and people like that
That no principle has touched
No principle has baptized
How about that?
They’d eat shit and say it tasted good
If there was some money in it for them
Hey you remember that song
By this guy from Texas
Whose name was … Bobby Fuller?
I’ll sing it for you it went like this
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
You’re just dirt
You’re just dirt
The only word for you is dirt
That’s the only word that hurt
You’re just dirt
That’s all you’re worth
Cheap cheap dirt
You know they call it
Cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown dirt
You’re just cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown dirt
You’re just dirt
Nothing but cheap uptown dirt
That’s all you’re worth
Just cheap cheap uptown dirt
That’s all you’re worth man
Cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown dirt
You’re just dirt
Cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown dirt
Cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown dirt
Cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown dirt
Cheap cheap cheap cheap uptown
Yeah, after posting, I realized last night that I got the lyrics wrong. Even funnier with the correction.
I think Joni Mitchell explored some different rock terrains. More on this idea to come.
Now that I’ve had time to collect my thoughts, here’s my argument for why I feel that Joni Mitchell has done more than almost anyone to explore uncharted rock terrains.
It’s not simply that she wrote often and perceptively from a female point of view and played off the difference from that of a guy. It’s that she was writing heartfelt songs about her time and place: an established artist still not fully accepted by the boy’s club, a person in multiple relationships, a person trying to balance her desires for career and family, a person torn between home and travel, United States and Canada. In the early 70’s this was indeed new terrain.
And yet, she also used characters to explore her own thoughts and feelings. One of the most perfect songs she wrote was “Blond in the Bleachers” (off of For the Roses), addressing in third person the sort of artistic and emotional competition between her and her rock star boyfriends.
Her style is often called “confessional,” but to me it is more like trying out new ways to voice and explore her experiences, which take on a certain political and social significance in the era that her best records were released.
And if that weren’t enough, her use of alternate tunings on guitar really breaks new ground in rock. Her style is extremely idiosyncratic and thus almost impossible to duplicate.
Is that really how you read it? That song took on a whole new life for me once I got the idea that the narrator is delivering the song brimming with confidence as he is walking to his car for the race, in which he will crash, burn and die.
I think I may have finally found a good song that covers the uncharted terrain of athletic competition in an original way. It’s got a wistful memory component, but it also gets down onto the field with the players. Steve Earle’s No. 29 (from his second album Exit 0):
I was born and raised here this town’s my town
Everybody knows my name
But ever since the glass plant closed down
Things round here ain’t never been the same
I got me a good job alright but some nights
Take me to another time
Back when I was No. 29
I was pretty good then don’t you know watch him go
Buddy I could really fly
Everyone in town came, hip flasks, horn blasts
Any autumn Friday night
Sally yelled her heart out push em back, way back
I was hers and she was mine
Back when I was No. 29
We were playin’ Smithville big boys, farm boys
Second down and four to go
Bubba brought the play in good call my ball
Now they’re gonna see a show
But Bubba let his man go I cut back, heard it crack
It still hurts me but I don’t mind
Reminds me I was No. 29
Now I go to the ballgames cold nights, half pints
Friday nights I’m always here
We got a pretty good team, good boys, strong boys
District champs the last three years
Got a little tailback pretty slick, real quick
I take him for a steak sometimes
Nowadys he’s No. 29
I don’t follow rainbows, big dreams, brass rings
I’ve already captured mine
Back when I was No. 29
That Steve Earle song seems less about competition than it does about Glory Days (same reason I didn’t mention Glory Days.)
By jove, I think BigSteve’s found one! I’ll have to hear the song itself. I actually like the lyrics without music, which is rare for me, but then again, I simply like interviews with Earle as much as or better than almost any music I’ve heard by him. Thanks.