100 Songs: "She Bangs The Drum" (The Stone Roses)

I have a real love/hate relationship with lists.  Especially "Best" lists.  For most of my life, I've been obsessed with such lists (he says in the midst of a post from what is a list itself), both creating them and studying them.  In school, I would almost never take notes in class.  Instead, I would create page after page of lists.  If I wasn't making up one, I was copying an existing one from memory (there was a time when I could do the AFI's top 100 list from memory.  All of the Oscar winners for Best Picture too.  I don't think I still can, but I can probably get more than 75 percent of each list still.)  But over the past few years, I've almost made myself stop looking at Top 100 lists, because invariably there will be a pick or two that will infuriate me, or a glaring omission that I will want to rant about to any poor bastard within earshot.  This strikes me as unhealthy.  But there's no denying I've learned a lot from lists.  The first AFI "100 Greatest Movies" list came out right when I was getting serious about film history, and I tracked down almost all of the movies on the list.  (I think I've been stuck at 93 or 94 of the 100 movies for years now, and I don't really see myself ever finishing it.  I just can't imagine watching The Jazz Singer or Ben-Hur all the way through).  In my systematic devouring of every book about rock music in the N.C. State library, I came across a 1980s book that polled a bunch of top rock critics on the best albums of all time.  While a few of the entries are hopelessly dated (Huey Lewis and the News' Sports album immediately comes to mind) it pointed me towards Richard and Linda Thompson and Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones and Graham Parker's Squeezing Out Sparks  and  Love's Forever Changes.  And in 2004, a list from a British music magazine (let's say Mojo, but I'm not one hundred percent on that, and it's not important enough to try and figure out through googling) of the greatest British rock albums of all time introduced me to The Stone Roses.  They were the only act in the top ten that I had never heard of, and seeing them placed alongside of Radiohead and The Beatles convinced me that I needed to hear this band.  (Granted, it's never been all that hard to convince me to spend money on a CD that I had never heard of.  It's just how I am.)  

So, I went to Schoolkids Records to buy the band's self-titled album, that was apparently in the same league as Revolver and OK Computer.  And they didn't have it.  But they did have a best-of compilation, so I picked that up.  I would later learn that buying a Stone Roses compilation is pretty similar to buying their first album- of the 15 songs on the Stone Roses' first album, 8 are included on The Very Best of the Stone Roses.  It's not wildly dissimilar to buying a Fugees' compilation when a store doesn't have a copy of The Score, but I didn't know that at the time.  When I listened to the cd the first time, I was struck by two things.  1- This is fucking brilliant.  2- These guys are obviously well thought-of in their home country, so how is it that I've never heard of them?  I mean, it's not like British rock has ever had a very hard time getting a foothold in the US, with only a handful of exceptions.  I'm still not entirely clear on that.  I think it has something to do with the band being such a product of the Madchester scene, and the way the band pretty much imploded after the first album, and something to do with the fact that their stuff doesn't really fit in with the popular indy rock of the late 1980s- it's not like lo-fi or Sonic Youth or the nascent grunge sound, and they weren't really shoe-gazey, and when Britpop made it to the US, the Stone Roses don't really sound like that either even if they were one of the big influences on it, so that might have hurt them.   But that's mostly just semi-educated guesswork on my part.  They might have just had a shitty American distributor.  But I feel like my interpretation is at least more romantic, even if I might not have the actual facts on my side.

I'm glad I found the Roses when I did.  I don't think I saw another reference to the band until I watched Shaun of the Dead, in the great scene where Shaun and Ed argue about which records they should use in their attempt to decapitate the undead in their backyard.  (After Shaun allowed Ed to hurl a Dire Straits LP, he simply says "No" when Ed asks if he can throw the first Stone Roses album.  When Ed asks if he can use the band's second album, The Second Coming, Shaun can only offer up "I like it".  God I love that movie.)

"She Bangs The Drums" is one of those song that's actually weirder than it sounds, something I always respect in a song.  Musically, it's fairly typical of the band's sound.  It's got an essential lightness without being at all delicate or inconsequential, with enough of the rhythm present to make it danceable (their audiences in Manchester were full of people who understood that just because they were wearing ridiculous clothes and on ecstasy that didn't mean they had to subject themselves to techno, which is very commendable of them).  It's a brilliant, sunny sound, but without any of the Byrds' jingle-jangle that one might associate with this kind of description.  The Stone Roses' music often reminds me of The Beatles, despite not really sounding like the Beatles.  Rather, it's that both bands had a sound that was almost unbearably perfect- you can't really imagine the song being played by this group of people in any other way, that there is nothing to be learned from outtakes.  The song sounds like a happy love song.

And the lyrics, especially if you aren't really paying close attention to them, sound like love song lyrics.  The chorus' "Have you seen her/Have you heard/ The way she plays there are no words/ To describe the way I feel/ How could it ever come to pass/ She'll be the first/ She'll be the last/ To describe the way I feel".  But then in the verses, there are a few lines that seem remarkably out of place for a love song.  "Kiss me where the sun don't shine/ The past was yours but the future is mine/ You're all out of time" is not a romantic sentiment.  In Alex Green's book about the album for the 33 1/3 series (I have no idea where these little pieces I'm writing would be without those books), he suggests that the lines might be a reference to Thatcher.  

It's certainly odd to stick a political section into a song that, if it isn't a love song, it certainly is a song about feeling almost unbridled joy.  But it isn't out of character for the band to get political in oblique ways and at odd moments.  The song "Bye Bye Badman" is actually about the 1968 Paris student riots- in fact, the line about "citrus-sucking sunshine" is an incredibly obscure reference to the student protesters' trick of sucking on citrus in order to counter the effects of tear gas.  The album's odd, abstract cover actually has two references to the riots- the orange slices on the cover, which might simply be taken as examples of the band being arty and weird (or possibly just liking oranges) are a visual reference to the line from "By Bye Badman", and the three stripes of red, white and blue paint are a fairly obvious (at least in retrospect) imitation of the French flag.  

At the time, I'm not sure if I was clever enough to wonder if the song might be about Mo Tucker, from the Velvet Underground (or at least to speculate if the lyrics were foretelling the coming of Meg White).  Perhaps I was clever enough to understand that such an interpretation would just be silly  (unless of course it's true, which, I suppose, is also possible).  Without too much study, the song is a blissful ode (god there's got to be a better way to say that) to love as music, or just love and music.  Looked at deeper, it's still that, just weirder, and possibly love as music as politics.  Which, of course, describes a great percentage of songs that are worth a damn, in one way or another.  In short, AMERICA JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE TWENTY YEARS TOO LATE IS NO EXCUSE FOR NOT DISCOVERING THIS BAND.  IF I DON'T HEAR A STONE ROSES SONG IN A COMMERCIAL FOR A SHITTY MUSIC SERVICE WITHIN THE NEXT NINE MONTHS I'LL BE VERY DISAPPOINTED.  Wait... is that what I mean?