This Year: 2008

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

I knew I'd have a song from The Indelicates on this list. I knew it would be a pretty song, filled with bile and spleen. I kept circling three songs - Savages, Mr. Punch, and this one.

In the end, I picked the song about being a song, the one from the very beginning of their career, the one that sums up all of that bile and spleen, the one that can stand in for all of the rest: We Hate the Kids.

Because Absolutely anyone can play the fucking guitar

It usually takes a band a while to get this cynical, to be this loud and negative about the industry they're in - somewhere later than the next-to-last song on their first record. But that's the secret weapon of The Indelicates: they're always disgusted.

Every generation gets fooled again
And every generation is the same
And its no good saying its not in your name
'cause it is in your name

Two great voices twine around that theme, cataloging this and that horrible thing about the music industry, throwing them out rapid-fire as if they could keep doing this for days.

Maybe they could.

It is a loud, demanding, driving song, making its case piece by inexorable piece about the horrors and crimes of popular music - the Indelicates have made a bunch of great songs in that mode over their career, and they're really good at it. (Let me also call out Mr. Punch (A Banishing) from the decade-later Juniverbrecher record, another rousing all-these-bastards-must-go song.)

Pop had a beginning, it grew and was tended
And now it is rotten. Let it be ended.

This is a song aiming to be the very last pop song, to sum up the entire rotten edifice, to make the case that it is all rotten and unsalvageable, and then end with the very last sound of pop music.

It didn't happen, of course. How could it? But that ambition, that sweep, is what great music is all about: demanding, insistent, unshakeable in its convictions. And it sounds marvelous: as it plays, you can believe that a song could end pop music.

No more music, thank you and goodnight.