Steve Reynolds Program - Everybody's Fool
Power Through!
It’s a cold-ass January! It’s fine, though I’d prefer some good snow instead of this thunder sleet. Can’t build a thundersleetman in the front yard.
Got my first two star rating on Goodreads. But the person rated To Kill A Mockingbird 2 stars and The Great Gatsby 1 star so I’ll take it. It did remind me of another list I started compiling for McSweeney’s, “Items Receiving A Five Star Rating From Users Who Gave Moby-Dick A One Star Rating On Amazon.” For example:
Basic Coatings - Squeaky Concentrate Commercial/Residential Hardwood Floor Cleaner - 1 Gallon
Ovente Electric Can Opener with One Touch Start Button
Funko Pop Dragon Ball Z: Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan Goku Collectible Figure
This is strange because I’ve always called the Ovente Electric Can Opener “the Moby-Dick of electric can openers.” But hey, vive le difference.
Online reviewing is so sketch. Saw this this weekend and felt it.
Song #22
Everybody’s Fool
by Teenage Fanclub
What song signals the start of the decade of the nineties? And I mean the decade in which I lived, the one of reading The Baffler, Adbusters and Marshall McLuhan, casting a wary eye on political and consumer marketing aimed at what corporations/parties defined as my demographic (even using that term feels like an artistic compromise). The one of independent record labels, shows with less than twenty people in attendance, trying to create a decentralized system that challenged the status quo (as much as a cis white hetero male thought at the time).
“Everybody’s Fool” could be the first harbinger of the 90’s I was totally immersed in. I first heard it on a mixtape, a fine cassette made by freak guru Jon Mooneyham. The track followed the intro, the audiobook of Twin Peaks’s Agent Cooper dictations to Audrey, chopped up to make him say he had a coke party with young girls-- how nineties is that?
Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub belongs in that genre of guitar pop that took the blueprint from Big Star, The Replacements and I’m sure a few British bands I don’t know. Over the pond then, the genre was called C86, after an NME released cassette that featured a lot of white boy bands with guitars, bass and drums playing not too fast and not trying too hard. Teenage Fanclub separated themselves by being, well, better than the others. Their singing (usually) and playing was more inspired, catchy and warm than the other bands.
It opens up with a ringing minor chord on the electric guitar that holds out for a defiant moment before continuing on into the intro. A second guitar starts chugging after a few bars while the tinniest snare drums come in on the beat. And then a rarity for Fanclub, the singer sings badly. Reminiscent of Krist Novoselic’s squawlin’ at the first of Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings” or Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis’s croak, it’s almost as if he’s taking on the personality of another person who would sing the snide lyrics of the song. It could be a piss take of the nascent alternative scene across the pond (like Blur’s “Song #2” originally was) because it would have fit in well.
Tongue in cheek or not, it captures the attitude of the time. Sung to a scenester (I’m gonna bet something this vicious means the Fanclub had someone specific in mind), it starts with a sarcastic compliment (“You impress me with your style/I think you're looking cool") before sticking a shiv in the guy’s ribs. (I don't fuckin' care/What clothes you wear/You're still fucking square”). To devote a song to admonish someone for trying. After the crazed primary colors styles of eighties New Wave, the ridiculous trappings of hair metal and punk getting more outlandish, a big reaction was to just not try.
Hence, “Everybody’s Fool,” a song that ends with the repeated line “And I’m laughing at you all the time.” Of course, the converse is the fool is laughing at the band for going on stage in boring-ass street clothes and not putting on a show. Laughing at someone doesn’t help, but it can make a hell of a song.
Afterword
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “Venus” by Television. I honestly had to recheck my list to see if it was on there. Always my fave on Marquee Moon and I loved a live version on a cassette sampler I had that showed the amazing guitar work. RIP Tom Verlaine. Your soul still continues on this planet.