Winamp Wednesday: Lean Pristine Transparency
Welcome to the first Wooden Block Labyrinth dispatch from Buttondown! It's good to still be in your inbox. Apologies for the delay and dust as we move to the new platform. Here's the first of three delayed Winamp Wednesdays...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Nails, “88 Lines About 44 Women”
If you don’t have enough weird relationship stories when you’re a teenager, store-bought is fine.
There's probably nobody on Earth outside of The Nails who can remember every lyric of this song. It's one of those wonderful quick tongue-twister hits that seemingly came from nowhere, forever existing outside of provenance and direct inspiration. "88 Lines About 44 Women" just is for a lot of music fans; it's an oh-yeah-that-song that stands alongside bands like Timbuk3 and Haircut 100 in the turn-of-the-80s post-punk-slash-new-wave scene. Part of that comes from the fate of The Nails themselves, as their early-80s albums weren't released on CD until 2007. Even in the Napster era it was difficult to rediscover a band when all their output save a single was relegated to deleted vinyls.
So like The Monroes (coming soon on Winamp Wednesday) or The Jump 'n the Saddle Band (coming literally never on Winamp Wednesday), The Nails became a one-song-only affair, appearing on all manner of 80s compilation records alongside many of the songs we've covered here already. Check out this push Entertainment Weekly made during weekday Toonami blocks on Cartoon Network. I was a sucker for buying my copies on the newsstand; I could have had all this rather than just Backtrax USA with Kid Kelly!
But like its stablemates, "88 Lines About 44 Women" lives and dies not only on the imminently-singable lyrics but also a propulsive new-wave beat. You're not sticking around until Judy from OH-HI-OH if there's not a Casio drumbeat to make you boogie. Listening to the demo version makes it even more apparent that this song was built around the presets on a primitive keyboard, but it's such a solid backbone that it's difficult to complain. It's a rhythm section that runs on near machine precision, both the click-bang drums and the insistent bassline giving you every reason to move.
And then there's the lyrics. I gave myself a quick quiz before sitting down to write and I could recall roughly a dozen names and descriptions of the forty-four women, with others mumbled at some part of the line. Everyone remembers Jezebel who went forty days drinking nothing but Perrier because that line is fantastic, and the rest comes and goes depending on whether someone knew a woman by that name. Everyone joins in with "uh-uh, not Katherine" regardless of states of Katherines. It's a Rorschach Test for our pasts and the people we've known; the song gets darker and yet more sentimental the longer we've lived. To a fifteen-year-old kid just discovering not just their own taste in music but their own true interpersonal relationships this tune is aspirational: won't it be amazing to have all these adventures with all these different kinds of incredible people?
When you're nearly forty you remember that one and that one oh and that one too, oh my god what a weird time oh my god what a great time. And maybe you found someone to choose to end your list. The Nails really nailed it.
Members of The Nails maintain that they've only ever made money off of "88 Lines" due to lawsuits and licensing. These certainly helped to keep it relevant nearly twenty years later. If you were tuning into prime-time TV in early 1999 you would probably hear a tweaked version of the tune hawking for Madza at least once an hour:
Yes, this has all been sneakily a tie-in to 1999@25! This forgotten piece of January 1999 ephemera is most likely what kept "88 Lines" at the forefront of my mind and made it one of the first tunes I grabbed when Napster hit critical mass. There's no way to track this--and if there was I'm sure Lars Ulrich would have demanded it--but I would have loved to have seen how many times certain tracks were downloaded on the service. If you used Napster anything like I did it was for grabbing anything that was top of mind, and after this campaign The Nails were back top of mind. Everything is connected, and sometimes the reason we grab songs that stay with us forever is "I was watching TV." Maybe it doesn't have to be profound. Sometimes the things you do that shift your world a bit are just two lines in a longer song.
Next Time: Tell me I sold out, go ahead.