The best Rage Against the Machine song? It's their consummate epic, flowing from riff to riff, all winners. The speed riff in the middle is impressively arrived at, then just as effectively switched out of.
It drags a little during the psychedelic middle interlude sprinkled with a collage of soft-spoken, highly-radical vocal soliloquy.
But then it bursts into the single best alarm clock ringtone ever recorded by an anti-establishment '90s agit-band.
This is the best, most beautiful song Benji Hughes has ever written.
There are two things I have to point out.
One: Benji Hughes has an exceptional ability to write lyrics that fit his melodies as if the words and music spontaneously self-generated pre-figured. In this song, there is unbelievably sublime power in the way he sings the key line, "You're gonna wait a long time." How he hits down on those words, "wait," "long," "time," with such exhaustion. Those words are to be sung that way. They simply are.
Two: To have an idea of the attention to detail in "Waiting For an Invitation" (and to all songs on Benji Hughes's first album, A Love Extreme), look no further than the final 30 seconds of this song.
It goes out on a long fade to quiet. At a point where it's nearly gone, you might catch the subtle addition of numerous new instruments: Piano, synthesizers, etc. This sparse little song, in its final fading seconds, suddenly fills out into quite a lush arrangement, but it's audible for only a matter of moments before the track completely fades and is gone.
Long ago, I wrote a fan letter to Benji Hughes, my only fan letter, thanking him for these moments.
This is not about the more widely known "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," which closes the same album, Electric Ladyland. "Slight Return" is the radio rock song that rightfully has a place in the hearts of many people the world over for its ridiculous guitar riff and solo. Can't argue with the legitness of that song. And it caps off one of the greatest complete experience albums ever made, an album that envelopes you, takes you up and down and up again, and defines entire nights that you'll remember for your life.
But elsewhere on the album is a very different "Voodoo Chile." Where "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" is a contained radio-friendly rock song, "Voodoo Chile" is a 15-minute blues experimentation recorded live for a crowd at Electric Ladyland studios, where the album was made.
This is the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Kind of.
The song features two of the three regular performers: Jimi Hendrix (guitar, vocal) and Mitch Mitchell (drums). But bassist Noel Redding had stormed out of the session, pissed about a mob of people being invited into the studio during the session. Stepping out of the mob to play bass in his stead was Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane. On organ was Steve Winwood!
Each of these guys puts their stamp on this traveling epic.
The slow, swaggering six-beat of the drums is a menacing, tired classic blues pattern. The bass lays an ominous texture over this. And Jimi's guitar wails out into the freaked out night. Why do I picture Jimi's music booming in Vietnam more than any anybody else's? Songs like this seem to take war and the racial issues underlying that sick war, the Black identity rising up in defiance of being thrown into this war, and build something explosive out of it.
Before this album, Jimi had mostly been content to experiment in the psychedelic side of things. Even his blues numbers from that time, like "Red House," were very polite versions of the blues for his admiring and largely white English fans to regard from their tiered seating.
In "Voodoo Chile," there is far more Robert Johnson going on than Jimi had ever let happen before. Go compare "Voodoo Chile" to Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues." There is a shared quality in the guitar, this whiny voicing with bending high notes. There is a loping pace, a mournful, blown-out attitude. Jimi's version just adds a level of technical radiance that his genius had over his roots precursors.
Jimi's soloing is just staggeringly wild, fluently expressive. I love the improvisations and variations in all the instruments. I love the energy of this being live. I love the crowd noise leaking in.
It seems to take a new trajectory every time.
Benji Hughes is maybe the greatest lyricist of artists working in my time.
You can tell by the fact that his lyrics are instantly intelligible and memorable. He composes words that avoid any sort of awkward inefficiency in pronunciation that would make them hard to understand, while simultaneously making these words so compelling and valuable as to make you want to think about them.
As he says in this song, in a line I memorized with zero effort, they are the last thing you think of when you go to sleep.
What goofy joy in this song, helped along with so many targeted little instrument contributions (distorted electric guitar, synthesizer, piano, cello, etc). The stomping verses break into swinging choruses, and those dissolve into delicate post-choruses ("I want you now"). The tonal and dynamic control is really impressive.
And it's so catchy!
Another in the genre of 2-minute masterpieces.
I give you Rolling Stone's 46th best Nirvana song!
It's part of a genre that was especially well-developed in 1990s heavy music: The 2-minute song.
I wrote plenty myself, some of which had nice little fanbases in my live playing days. There is nothing like the effect of a heavy song that ends after two minutes. Everyone knows the song shouldn't be over. It spites nature. Adding an abrupt end, such as the perfect one in "Very Ape," really accentuates the transgressive shock.
Plenty of punk songs in the '70s were two minutes long. It's not hard when you have a 1-4-5 chord progression and little incentive to get more out of your songwriting than a verse and a chorus, if that.
The heavy rock of the '90s, even rock as stripped-down as Nirvana's, tooled with much more thought-out musical developments, even in the abbreviated courses of their 2-minute mini-bursts.
"Very Ape" has a two-chord verse, but it compels the ear by being curiously syncopated ahead of the beat, while the drums pound out a pattern directly on the beat. There is a deft little instrumental build into the chorus, where everything just careens out of normalcy. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, complete.
The lyrics are full of some classic one liners that I keep memorized.
"I'm buried up to my neck in contradicitonary [sic] flies."
"I'm very ape and very nice."
The chorus lyrics are another large-scope life observation, similar to the four-line credo in the center of "Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter" on the same album (In Utero). Kurt Cobain seems to have been thinking about things in terms of life philosophy and hiding a bit of belief or mysticism within his usual shreds of lyrical anti-logic. His morality was the tough mindset of a minimalist artist who saw things in terms of the basics needed to construct his things. Leave it to a guy who made a three-note guitar melody as catchy as in 2-minute "Very Ape" to assemble a spiritual firmament this impactfully sparse:
"Out of the ground
Into the sky
Out of the sky
Into the dirt"