Suede
Suede
Thanks to Jon Hall for this week's Throwback Thursday. The self titled debut from Suede is the subject.....
Today we are taking it back to the nineties. Arguably, the best decade for music, of all time. After we had the ground-breaking sounds of The Smiths, Sonic Youth and R.E.M it was inevitably time for alternative rock to dominate in the 1990s. At last, Rock & Roll was free to express itself in any way it chose. For the first time in history, humanity as a collective force had unrestricted self-expression. You could say what you wanted on a record now but it would be labelled ALTERNATIVE and it would be expected to sell next to no copies. But the greatest glory of the nineties was that The Masses soaked it up. Thank God the majority of us are all fucked-up angry perverts. Just when the millennium was threatening to turn us all into robots.
Nirvana were the crowning achievement of this decade. A beautiful weirdo wrote one of the best albums of all time. It had a naked baby on the front cover and it was all about depression and death and violence and that kind of love that Ian Curtis told us would tear us apart, again. To date it has sold thirty million copies worldwide. On the other side of the Atlantic the Manic Street Preachers gave us Holy Bible. It was a commercial disappointment that went on to make it into the top twenty of Q , Kerrang and Melody Maker’s greatest albums of all time lists. Nu-metal climaxed in 2000 with ‘Hot Dog Flavoured Water’ and ‘Hybrid Theory’ but the groundwork was laid down in the nineties with albums such as Limp’s ‘Significant Other.’ Nu-metal was never pretty, but it was bombastic and exciting.
Away from alt-rock we had rave, which the UK government tried to ban with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Plus, country music went mainstream, which would have been a crime against humanity if it hadn’t created the right atmosphere for Johnny Cash’s incredible American recordings. By 1992 West Coast Hip-Hop had eclipsed East Coast following Dr Dre’s ‘Chronic.’ We lost Marxist Hip-Hop (see Dead Prez) but we gained Gangsta Rap. For better or for worse and with it we got lines like, “At the same time with the dope rhyme that I kick. You know and I know, I flow some old funky shit.” Bombastic.
After Madonna caused a storm with ‘Erotica’ and its accompanying coffee-table book ‘Sex’ we had the Spice Girls. But on a brighter note we also had PJ Harvey, Björk and Tori Amos who were making astonishing music and being sexy women at the same time. The Spice Girls seemed to only master the former, and they say girls can multi-task. We all know Oasis were shit too but their songs still make you feel good in the same way. Just like the pop punk bands of the US. Blink 182 , Weezer, Green Day. It was a decade that you had to take with a pinch of salt and a good toke. Some of the music was truly terrible, but it was mostly rebellious. And the best Pop Culture sticks its middle finger up to Authority. Like a friend told me last night, “sometimes it’s not about the music. It’s about the story behind it.”
Which brings me to BritPop and the album which started it, Suede’s self-titled debut album. I haven’t listened to the whole thing. But I will, when I have time. I got as far as ‘Sleeping Pills’ a song about bored housewives using valium to give their lives a kick. By ‘Metal Mickey’ I couldn’t stand it in the kitchen anymore, cat purring, 1AM. Sorry S I failed the test. I had been thinking about sex all day. How it is both creative and destructive, in equal measures. Animal Nitrate sounded like Anderson was saying to me, “Life is too short. Stop fighting and start fucking.” He’s right too. There are two constants in life, love and hate and they both end in death. But one is despicable and one is beautiful.
Those wailing tones of Butler’s guitar, they told me to choose love. Hot, bleeding, sticky, love. But Anderson said of the album, it is about sex and depression in equal measures. I was warned. After the giddy highs of ‘Animal Nitrate’, ‘She’s Not Dead’ shakes off the magic like you shake raindrops from your coat. Suddenly, I feel like I’ve woken up after a night where I took it too far. And God Damn. She’s dead? No, not this time… Pulp are most people’s pervert band of choice but Jarvis is painfully fragile looking and embarrassingly heterosexual. Anderson on the other hand caused controversy at the beginning of Suede’s career when he described himself as “a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience.”
‘She’s Not Dead’ is inspired by a true story written about the joint suicide of Anderson's aunt and her black lover. Anderson said of the song, "the ankle chain and stuff like that, is the kind of detail that can only come from truth, that can't be conjured up." The words of a true poet. The rest of the album went over my head. Anderson’s vocals are some of the most enchanting on record and you easily get lost in the landscape of his voice. ‘Moving’ is the best Brit Pop song ever and after that I put 'Animal Nitrate' on again. Just so I could hear him scream, one more time in my ear, “what does it take to turn you on?”So chill out kids. An orgy is better than a war.
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