Some of the best heavy riffs, bar none. Rad chorus drums. The unique scream ranting (not really rapping) breakdown never gets old for me, and it drops perfectly into just the most delicious headbanging conclusion. In the final chorus, the instruments hit great accents in unison to add some variety, plus it works really well to end the song with dramatic emphasis.
100. "Fly Like an Eagle" by the Steve Miller Band
You can take all other Steve Miller music and compost it. Please leave me "Fly Like an Eagle," with its trippy synths, great blues guitar, the chill gaps of silence, and those lyrics.
This is a song with a soundscape of such creativity as to be immediately identifiable - and still I think most people associate it with the lyrics first of all. That's a hell of a testament to those words.
It turns out that everybody spaces out and plummets into this insight: "Time keeps on slipping into the future." I don't care who you are, how buttoned down and pragmatically strategic your personal brand is, the concept of the elapse of time is inherent psychedelia.
The conclusion Steve Miller draws based on his insight is something that maybe not everyone would. Time's infinity demonstrates to us that we're all part of an unknowable puzzle. And yet for everyone alive, time is also startlingly limited. So: Let's just do the natural good things, take care of the needy and live free, unencumbered lives.
It helps if you can sing and play an instrument.
Others may not follow Steve to this promised land of simple virtue. Many others will dream of flying free like an eagle but have circumstances brutally preventing it.
But to me there is a small victory knowing that no matter who it is - the most stern machine mind will soften and lapse into space when thinking about the infinity of time.
99. "Float On" by Modest Mouse
There came a time when I left my prairie hometown, my family, all the friends I had, and went to college in central Minnesota. As well as having a profound academic experience, I expanded my singing and songwriting skills, and I fell in with a group of rogues from the area who were themselves producing some very impressive music, parties, hangouts, and all the rest. I graduated college, aloofly read Franny and Zooey during my commencement ceremony, and the next day moved to musical Minneapolis, where many of these rogues were moving also.
These people were a marvel to me, and I still haven't quite collected all my thoughts about them. They settled in a few residences in the city that became loci of artistic derangement and madness of all kinds, drawing in new personalities who themselves carried along their own wild associates. I often found myself with them, talking the long late talks, falling into my film and photography loves, falling in love with new excellent like minds, and hearing all manner of new music.
This song, of all songs, is the soundscape of the sweetest, most pure of my times with all these wonderful souls. I have stroboscopic-feeling memories of joyous bodies freeze-framing in dance to this then-new song. But I think it is, let me be clear, a brilliant song on its own merits.
Point of order: I don't have the widest experience with Modest Mouse. There are earlier albums that have greater cred with some of my associates. I've heard enough to know that this song sticks out like a sore thumb in their commonly darker, noisier repertoire.
But its incongruity actually has an important origin, something that also evokes those times in a different way. I'll let Modest Mouse singer Isaac Brock summarize it:
"I was just kind of fed up with how bad shit had been going, and how dark everything was, with bad news coming from everywhere. Our president George W. Bush is just a fucking daily dose of bad news! Then you've got the well-intentioned scientists telling us that everything is fucked. I just want to feel good for a day."
Sometime last spring, I was talking to a young guy working at the Target checkout. He told me he was scared to death about potentially having Donald Trump as president. He asked me what I thought. I didn't feel like telling him my realpolitik answer, but I did volunteer that I spent my 20s under the cloud of George W. Bush, September 11, and his insane response to September 11 - and though I have never fully escaped the stress of those times, I still made pretty good use of years I was never getting back. And maybe that's the reason this blissful, funky, weird song sticks so desperately as an era-definer for me. Isaac Brock probably didn't realize that so many people needed a song like this - but in fact, this era ended up producing some of the most impressive surreal, dance-friendly new music across the board.
I'm not ready to pull all those strands apart for anyone. If I never do, at least I have my own teleportation in this song's funky guitar strum.
98. "Five Minutes Alone" by Pantera
This song is a master's clinic in the principles of heaviness.
Principles in play that I've previously covered:
* Two notes, close interval - check. This is the basis of the main, opening riff.
* Blues scale - check. The transition between the opening riff and verse is a theoretically whacked-out blues scale. The middle development and solo are also filled with a number of heavy blues scales.
* Hit the tonic note hard - check. The verses are essentially this, with a single chord (with subtle fingering variations) smashing in unison with the drums. Bonus: A delicious odd meter opens up unconventional rhythmic possibilities for the guitars/drums to crush.
New principles:
* Crash cymbal on the down and back beats: The opening riff takes the two notes, close interval principle and mixes it with this staple of heavy percussion: Drums on a simple one-two, kick-snare. And on each beat, the crash cymbal is being beaten to a pulp. You can play a Mozart rondo over drums like this and it will be savage. It is beyond a "heavy" principle. It gets into knowledge even more esoteric: The principles of head banging. Two-beats of this variety goad the head to swing.
* Drums accenting a scale: The instrumental transitions in play between verse stanzas and into choruses use this, the guitars in a vibrato downward scale, each note accented by a savage cymbal strike. It's a cousin to the "hit the tonic note hard" principle, but extending it to additional notes in the scale.
* Give those drums room!: As shown in the epic close of the guitar solo, there can sometimes be nothing as brutal as muting those guitars early and giving the drums choice gaps to smash through. It also brings a heavy impact to the next beat the guitars do play on.
These are simplistic summaries of the heaviness at play here. The truth is, very, very few bands threw so many principles of heaviness together in so many varied, hybridized, and rapid-fire ways as Pantera did. Their sophistication within this narrow world was off the charts. For being a bunch of Southern bumpkins, their musical acumen was elite order.
This extends to their talents as pure songwriters. When I was a teenager, I learned a lot about song structure from Pantera. Their CD liners provided not only lyrics but called out the formal sections of their songs (verse, chorus, pre-chorus, bridge, outtro, etc.). To have music this aggressive playing at top volume but also having it be a serious musical appreciation session was the kind of cognitive dissonance that still makes Pantera so addictively contradictory to me. I DEFY you to keep track of all the sections in this song (I don't go all-caps often). It morphs through numerous formal segments that are nevertheless interrelated and not just a mindless procession of thrash opportunities.
But now we get to the lyrics of this song. The song is a violence fantasy against a critic of the band, the father of a boy who was extensively beaten at a Pantera/Megadeth concert back in those heady days of mainstream metal. Not satisfied to exhibit simple violent savagery, there is an explicit accusation of "reverse racism" with all implications of white nationalism that it brings along with it.
You can go all over the map with what this means. I'll give my two cents, because I feel like somewhat of an authority.
I played heavy music for a long time, and I played in the most rural backwater you can find. My band started out simply wanting to write grunge mosh music, but we began adding heavier metal headbanging elements to what we were doing. Our popularity culminated in a handful of memorable packed performances at the largest halls available in the town, teeming with sweaty aggression.
North Dakota is currently in the throes of one of the most significant oil booms in world history. A whole new level of prosperity and outsider incursion is occurring right now, transforming the state into a frankenstein that year after year bears less resemblance to the place I called home. When I lived in Bismarck, North Dakota, we were a poor state. The roads and other infrastructure were horrible, the employment laughable. In our modest metro area of around 60,000 people, trailer parks covered expansive areas all around town. Entire districts of adjacent trailer parks. My grade school was surrounded on ALL sides by trailer parks. I considered myself lucky in that I was an apartment kid; then due to my mom's tenacity, we eventually moved up into a house in an affordable housing community just outside the Bismarck city limits.
I got to know a lot of kids living in these low-income areas. We played ball in the parks, trash talked, scrapped, joked, pile drivered each other. As teenagers, guys like this became a good share of the people who would come out to our shows. Most of them were incredibly sweet, affable, and intelligent. But their frustration and anger at their living conditions and future prospects found its expression in their music and in their appearances. They would horrify the eyes of middle class society.
My band and others like us who got their acts together were a lot of the entertainment for these kids, as well as other more well-off appreciators. Almost zero national bands ever came through our town. Garth Brooks did a few multi-night stands, but come on. Our shows took place in Amvets and Legion halls, and we would contract the spaces, rent the sound equipment, book the lineup of bands, run promotion, and distribute the proceeds all on our own. Large amounts of young folks turned out for these shows because A. we were that good and B. there was nowhere else to turn.
In my time in Bismarck, we hosted only three notable rock concerts: Kiss (saw it), White Zombie (mom forbade it, now my brother is friends with them), and Pantera.
I was at that Pantera show. After a few numbers, Pantera singer/screamer Phil Anselmo confessed to the crowd, "I only know one thing about North Dakota, and that's Virgil Hill." Anselmo was/is a huge boxing fan, and our Virgil Hill was at the time the light heavyweight champion, the sole North Dakota "celebrity." The crowd roared. A man of violent music, name checking a man of literal violence, applauded by a crowd whose attraction to violence was more deep-seated than anyone might suspect. And it all happened in the middle of nowhere, in a completely neglected backwater with no corporate value (yet). Essentially it didn't really happen, except that it did, because I'm now telling you.
97. "First It Giveth" by Queens of the Stone Age
For one album - Songs for the Deaf - the Queens of the Stone Age had ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Growl as their drummer. The result, I think, can be seen one of two ways: Either the band fully utilized the opportunity of the legendary drummer's services to push their songwriting to the stratosphere. Or the legendary drummer utilized the opportunity of recording with this talented group to force their songwriting into the stratosphere, by pure will of his relentlessly excellent drumming.
I will keep saying this, often with songs involving Dave Grohl: Drum creativity is song creativity!
The verse riff is great. About every drummer would either over or underplay it. Not only does Dave Grohl hit the right intensity and sharpness, but he creatively puts the snare on the down beat with the rat-a-tat kick drum on the back beat, inverting the usual order. When the song starts in with drums and bass only, the song is already in hyperspace. The guitars entering open a wormhole.
The chorus is another savage percussive creation of Grohl's combined with guitar work that exemplifies a principle of heaviness I haven't yet discussed: Doubled guitars, medium gain, small-interval chords. A single guitar cannot achieve the effect. Multiple unison guitars thicken the sound, creating density. Using small-interval chords compounds the density. Lowering the gain allows us to hear the colliding notes rather than obscuring them in noise. Bonus: Avoid hitting higher strings, further compacting the sound spectrum. With the right ingenious heavy drummer playing for you, the final effect is a headbanging sludgefest.
This is the low-fi heavy sound of Queens of the Stone Age par excellence.
The vocal is in a pretty vibrato typical of Josh Homme. Such smart, simple melodies with three-syllable lines, something that make this band the true inheritor of the grunge legacy in my mind. Homme's gift for uniting inventive melody and heaviness does proud the likes of Nirvana, the Melvins, and Mudhoney. At least I think he did for one fantastic album with Dave Growl drumming, urging the music to hunger for more and more.