After buying a mandolin on six cups of coffee and a whim this past weekend, I rediscovered this song, which was a huge hit in my youth that I’d completely forgotten about. It’s the kind of song that pretty much everyone can relate to, especially once you realize it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, except the kind that centers around another person, to the exclusion of sense and reason.
Or more accurately, it’s about losing your values and ideals by obsessing about another person. I kind of wish I’d paid enough attention to figure that out as a kid, because I was an embarrassingly hopeless romantic. It would have saved teenage me a ton of heartache and drama.
But in hindsight, taking an ass-kicking, literal or emotional, is sometimes the best learning method.
I’m not as big of a fan of music as some people; I don’t collect songs or albums, and I certainly don’t obsess about the difference between digital and analog. But I do appreciate certain types of music, especially those that effectively convey emotion or set a scene. That’s something you don’t find too often in most pop music, beyond the conventional garbage bouncing around in the heads of teenagers or adults who still act like them.
Did that read as smug? Yeah, probably. But it helps explain why, in part, I’m not someone who follows music. (The other reason is that I’ve only got so much room for crap to bounce around in my own head.)
Anyway, as I get older I do appreciate certain artists from random genres; punk, rock, hell… even country. I don’t normally write about them, mainly because of that whole “room in my head” thing I just mentioned, but from time to time when I brush up against some of the music I do like, it gets under my skin like botfly larvae. For example, we went to go see the American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I hadn’t seen the original, or read the book, but the trailer hooked me. And that was because it used a Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”.
And that particular song did a good job of evoking the image of a viking horde on its way to battle. I know Zeppelin isn’t exactly some kind of underrated band, but it’s amazing how little influence they seem to have on current music. And the bands they did influence with their wide range of subject matter and musical styles, from tributes to Tolkien to hippies and even an attempt at a Caribbean-themed song, only seemed to have picked up on a few tidbits here and there (the entire 80’s “epic metal” scene, Dragonforce, etc.).
Whatever, I’m just writing for my own benefit here; mainly because I started. The salient point is:
“Holy crap, this is a cool cover, and I’d forgotten how much I liked Led Zeppelin”. Here’s the song:
I’m not sure if I should think this is nifty or roll my eyes at it. If only there was a word between “huh” and “meh”, that’s what I’d use. Wait, duh, there is a word for that:
The video’s a bit (a lot) too “generic preachy suburbanite white indignation” for my tastes, but the song is awesome. Maybe it says something about me that when I first heard it, I took it more as a message of empowerment than, as the video seems to imply, the fact that some people seem to have too much power. But screw it, if I listened to music on the terms of the artist I’d have very little left to actually enjoy.
Although Kanye West is still a simpering douchebag.
Anyway, here’s the song: “No Handlebars” by Flobots.
These guys are pretty cool. Napster doesn’t have anything on them and I haven’t checked iTunes though. Guess I could always download the MP3 straight off YouTube.
This song sums up the 90’s fairly well as far as I’m concerned.
Ignore the fact that for some reason it’s been added to a video from Evil Dead II… the actual music video for the song had embedding disabled (asshat) and this was the best I could get.
