#100. 'I've blown you a kiss, it should reach you tomorrow'

Elbow "Fugitive Motel"

The long distance relationship is something I've never been part of, but knowing people who have done it I'm not exactly eager to try. The notion of it is kind of romantic, the idea that your love is strong enough to weather long periods of separation with little contact outside of words and pictures, but from what I've seen the reality is much less so. Aside form the part where your boy/girlfriend is miles away which would be enough to sour the theoretical romanticism, but add to that the pressures of being apparently single and yet not and trying to go on with what you're doing and it seems like it could get hellish, and that's before you factor in the part where you could be growing apart emotionally thanks to the physical distance. This is a load of armchair psychology on my end, but just thinking about the ramifications of such a set up is enough to convince me that it's not something I'd want to try.

It makes a lot of sense, though, that long distance relationships are a frequent topic for songwriters. Think about it, you're supposed to write about what you know and you're in a situation where you're likely leaving your current significant other at home for longer periods of times. As such the standard 'miss you from the road song' gets born and gets adapted into your setlists and onto your albums etc. etc. until it becomes an anthem for your fans who are also in a long distance relationship. Of course, for the rest of us they don't work as well, and 90% of the time these songs are total gash to my ears. It's mostly because they trade almost exclusively on melodrama and over-the-top declarations of love/fidelity or whatever rather than trying to paint a picture of what it's like. I'm a sucker for songs that do the legwrok to put you inside the situation they're describing rather than simply exist within it, if that makes sense. Essentially, if you insist on making a song about how much you miss your lover d oenough with that to make me understand your emotions instead of just throwing them out there.

Alternately, you could just write a line as simple and heartbreaking as 'I've blown you a kiss/it should reach you tomorrow/as it flies from the other side of the world'.

Elbow never struck me as a great band. A good one, sure, but despite standing out in the post-Radiohead crop of depressed British rockers they never really struck me as anything beyond slightly noteworthy. I came to them via "Fallen Angel," which is in retrospect probably one of their least noteworthy singles, but never got much out of its parent album, Cast of Thousands. It had it's moments, "Fugitive Motel" being chief among them, but it never really coalesced into something I found to be worth much more deep listening. Of course I was proven wrong about their non-greatness when The Seldom Seen Kid came about and found them finally living up to the potential of their best moments on previous releases. It's not one I love enough to put it in the album section of this overview, but suffice to say that it's one of the few truly deserving Mercury Prize winners of the decade, not a pick out of tokenism or flash in the pan-ism but a truly deserved reward for a band who took the time to grow into their sound and knock it out of the park for once.

It also contained what would have been the obvious choice for this list if it weren't for my pre-existing affection for "Fugitive Motel" in "One Day Like This." I deliberated for a long time as to which one would get the nod here, both are stellar singles that cast a long shadow over the rest of the band's discography, but in the end there was something that tipped it in "Fugitive Motel"'s favor. It wasn't just it's mild subversion of the miss-you-from-the-road formula, the fact that it sounded like a fairly subdued, normal Elbow single versus the excessive schmaltz that typifies this type of thing more often than it should, or it's rich, layered arrangement since it's was pretty well trumped on that front by "One Day Like This" - though the layering here is much more subtle and insidious. It wasn't necessarily the fact that I'd had more time to parse out the greatness of "Fugitive" though that probably played more of a role than the previous two things. It wasn't something I thought would be easy to determine, but the answer was simple.

As good as "One Day Like This" is, and believe me, if I weren't limiting it to one single per artist it's be not far below this one, it didn't contain a line as simple and heartbreaking as 'I've blown you a kiss/it should reach you tomorrow/as it flies from the other side of the world'.

Really, that line is the most succinct summation of long distance relationships and the emotions attendant to them that I've ever come across. It's such a lovely image, and more powerful than any sort of attempt to literalize the emotions behind it would ever be. Really, it's a perfect lyric to hinge a song like this on, getting to the heart of the matter without the need for flowery prose or unnecessary dramatics. Guy Garvey just hit the nail right on the head with that chorus and no matter what else happened in the song I'd still be fairly effusive in my praise for it.

Luckily the band pulls out an appropriate, interesting and layered performance that elevates the song into its position here. The combination of Pete Turner's almost elastic, drawn out bassline and some simple, understated strings with a light acoustic chord progression makes the perfect bed for the chorus to rest on. There's also the bits of colour that get added in throughout the song, from little guitar fills that don't distract from the main track to sprinklings of piano that are never too much or too little to add anything to the track. The instrumental of "One Day" is at least as good, but it's also much more upfront than this is. Elbow's best quality in their best moments is their restraint, and "Fugitive Motel shows this quality off better than anything.

Coming up tomorrow: Defining the first big hype band of the decade's faults and why they don't matter as much as you'd think.

#100: Faraquet - The View From This Tower (Dischord, 2000)/Stereobate - Selling Out in the Silent Era (Distance Formula, 2001)

As a music geek, nothing is more frustrating than discovering a new favorite band after they've already imploded. Even worse is when that band only ever manage to record one or two albums before dissolving, never getting an opportunity of fully realize the potential that they'd shown. It's frustrating to me at least because I love hearing a band's evolution more than almost anything else. Hearing a collection of people reconfigure, streamline and twist their sound as they make their way from album to album is the most interesting thing to witness in music, and when there's no chance for that to happen it leaves me let down in spite of the quality of the material that was left behind.

I've gotten used to encountering that situation when I'm delving into prior decades, but anytime it happens with a band who debuted this decade it strikes me as much odder. I realize that especially when it comes to the early decade it's a likely outcome given how few bands make it to 5 years together let alone close to 10, but it still feels wrong for a band who only started off this decade to have already shuffled off to Buffalo, especially if they did it after only one proper album and even more so if that album was among those I would consider for this list.

Long story short: I wish there were more Faraquet and Stereobate albums to sink my teeth into. These two won't be the last one-album wonders to get the spotlight shone on them - hell, tomorrow's entry fits this mold as well - but they're the two that seem most complimentary to each other. Both bands are tied to the DC scene on some level, both traffic in heavily angular post punk with math-rock shadings and both put out what I would rank among the best debut albums of the decade. Outside of those vague similarities though you've got two very different animals; Faraquet were Fugazi by way of King Crimson, leaning heavily on proggier touches and more varied instrumentation than on full bore aggression, while Stereobate were Girls Against Boys by way of Tortoise and Fugazi, leaning as much towards lengthy soundscapes as they did towards just plain rocking out. You'd never mistake them for each other, but there's enough superficial similarity to make for an interesting compare-and-contrast.

I'll start with The View From This Tower since there's more information available there. Faraquet was formed by Devin Ocampo, who drummed on under the radar DC art-punks Smart Went Crazy's majestic swan Song Con Art, along with SWC guitarist Jeff Boswell and drummer Chad Molter. As SWC were in the midst of imploding the trio was touring alongside them and making a slight buzz with a pair of 7" EPs and a split with Milwaukee quirk factory Akarso (all of which were recently collected on Anthology 1997-98, which came out last year). The View From This Tower was their lone full length, but Molter and Ocampo reunited in 2004 for an album and an EP as Medications (not heard those as of yet, so can't say where they fall sound-wise.) Despite their ties to SWC, Faraquet's sound has little to do with the band 2/3rds of their ranks were drawn from. For one, the three members of Faraquet don't seem to have set roles or even preferred instruments. Aside from the colour instruments that are added to key tracks, the members will occasionally use atypical variants on normal instruments to give tracks a different feel, such as baritone guitar and piccolo bass. It makes for a much more variable sound than the rest of their DC brethren, and a much more exciting one at that.

It's not that all the songs on The View From This Tower lie in different genres, but more that they show just how loose the definition for a genre can be. Most often I see them tagged as post-hardcore or art-punk, but those tags only tell half the story. Depending on the track you could easily call out as diverse influences as Dog Faced Hermans, (the brief, trumpet punctuated "Song for Friends of Me") bluegrass, (the banjo-aided breakdowns of album highlight "Study in Complacency") King Crimson, (the proggier touches that pop up on a lot of tracks) post rock, (closing instrumental "The Missing Piece" could be a sketch for a Do Make Say Think song) and yes, even their DC forebears Fugazi ('Cut Self Not") and Smart Went Crazy ("Conceptual Separation of Self"). It all fits under the umbrella of post-punk, but the variety that they show over the short (only 37 minutes) run time of the album is pretty staggering. Even within songs there's plenty of jarring left turns and tangents to keep things interesting, and even the weaker tracks are replete with interesting ideas even if the don't quite come to fruition. I suspect that if they'd managed a second album my praise would be much more effusive than it is here, all the more reason to be miffed at it's absence.

Stereobate, on the other hand are a bit of an enigma. All I know about the band is that they preceded their lone full length, Selling Out in the Silent Era, with an impossible-to-find EP and followed it up with a split with Brooklyn math-rockers The Distance Formula. I know that Selling Out was produced/engineered by Girls Against Boys leader Eli Janney. I don't know how many people are in the band or who they are, let alone what projects they went on to after this. I do know that Selling Out in the Silent Era is a great slice of post-punk/rock though, and sometimes that's all that's necessary to know. Maybe the fact that the album is such an enigma is part of its charm...knowing so little about who made it and what their backgrounds or futures were gives it an aura of singularity, making it seem like a true one-off rather than a part of a larger puzzle if you will. I'd still love to know what the guys(/girls?) in the band went on to if there is anything, but not knowing is kind of nice as well.

Like View, Selling Out has quite a bit of variety between its tracks, but it's to a much lesser degree. No song sounds quite like the one before it, but there are songs that cover the same ground on the album. For instance, "Here, Bass" and "Jerry Jones" are both heavy on the punk side of the equation, "The French Letter" and "Club Med" both tread in post-rockier waters, "When Radio Came" has it's toes in both camps and closers "TLT and "False Porno Alarm" add a bit of feedback-drenched quasi-shoegaze to the proceedings. The result is slightly disjointed as far as flow goes, but the songs are pretty uniformly excellent. Even the ones that reside in the same sonic space have different enough takes on it that they rarely feel inessential ("TLT" being the lone exception, though that has more to do with how good "False Porno Alarm" is than anything else.) For instance, "Here, Bass" and "Jerry Jones" are both moderately lengthy post-punk akin to Girls Against Boys minus the sexiness, but the former smokes along with a relentless drum pattern while the latter grooves until the chorus switches to 6/4 and adds a level of discomfort to the proceedings. The two post rock numbers do a similar thing, with "The French Letter" hitting on a more melodic level and "Club Med" relying more on groove and crescendo. It makes the band's sound harder to pin down since they're equally adept at both sides, but it provides the album with enough variety to keep the listener interested.

Coming up tomorrow: Three Texas boys make a concept album about the rapture, make it pretty and don't go overboard with the religion.

#101. 'I won't rest 'cuz I've heard it all before'

Xiu Xiu "I Luv the Valley, OH!"

When a band's introduction to me is by a song like Xiu Xiu's "I Broke Up (SJ)" it never seems likely that they'll be able to top it. If you haven't heard "I Broke Up" yet I urge you to do so right now, as it's easily one of the best songs the decade brought forth, a jagged slice of ultra-paranoid post-punk from the fringes of the genre that manages to be both melodic, visceral and catchy all at once. The problem with that being my introduction to Jamie Stewart's ouevre was that everything thereafter carried a hint of disappointment. Knife Play struggled to match "I Broke Up"'s singular greatness ("Poe Poe" came close) and the follow up EP Chapel of the Chimes may have contained another moment to rival it in "Jennifer Lopez (The Sweet Science Version)" - although that one was subsequently improved by the take on Fag Patrol - but it was also a weak release on the whole. 2003's A Promise was a stronger album, but a lot of the better moments seemed to be willfully destroyed with shards of noise. Ignoring the opening one-two of "Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl" and "Apistat Commander," two fully realized and jaw-droppingly great songs, A Promise sounded like a work of self-destruction where Stewart laid out a good song and set about the task of doing whatever he could to destroy it. It was almost as though he didn't want anyone to see that he could lay out a series of great songs, contenting himself with a couple of awesome numbers then making sure the rest were rendered all but unlistenable.

Then along came Fabulous Muscles where the willfull destruction that plagued A Promise was reduced to one bad song among 9 great ones. I'll talk about the album as a whole a lot more when I get to my top 100-or-so albums discussion (starts tomorrow!) but in brief it was proof that underneath all the oddly unsatisfying work that clogged up the past 3 releases there was one of the decades most unique and remarkable songwriting talents at work. Honestly, the stripped down incarnations of several songs from A Promise from the Fag Patrol EP tipped me off to that fact a few months before the release of Fabulous Muscles, but to see Stewart putting out a full set of good-to-great songs that weren't encumbered by unnecessarily disfiguring production was just the sort of confirmation I was looking for.

Think about it this way: on any other Xiu Xiu album "I Luv the Valley, OH!" would be the highlight, the album's "I Broke Up" that all the other songs couldn't come close to matching no matter how hard they tried. Despite the fact that it's album-mates are closer to its level than you might have expected it does stand as the definite album highlight and an obvious single choice if Xiu Xiu were the type of band who made some attempt at commercial success. It got a 7" release regardless, wouldn't be here otherwise, but I mean to say that if the band were making some sort of overtures to alternative radio this would probably be their only shot. It's the most straightforward song that Stewart's written in my estimation, and outside of one pained yowl toward the end it's his most reined-in vocal performance. If this were any other band I'd say it was a blatant attempt at a breakout single, but with Xiu Xiu it comes off as just a damn good song that happens to be pretty much ready for the airwaves.

It's also one of the best songs about suicide or suicidal thoughts that I've had the pleasure of hearing. I generally don't have much good to say about suicide songs on either side of the equation; generally they go too maudlin for my tastes and even the ones that don't fail to offer much outside of cliches, and that's on either side of the equation. "I Luv the Valley" is a bit more unique in that it's neither a dramatic 'goodbye cruel world' or a peppy 'don't try suicide!,' instead adopting the stance that's best summed up in the pull-quote here : 'I won't rest 'cuz I've heard it all before.' It's coming from someone who has probably had his moments of contemplating the pills or the razor he explicitly references here, but is moving beyond that now. It may not be the embrace of misery and depression that I've seen it referenced as (in a very well written piece at the late, great Stylus Magazine) but more of an acceptance of how hard life can get and how if you don't enjoy the lows (the valley of the title) you can't appreciate a lot of other things. It's not dealt with directly, little ever is in Stewart-land, but the tone of the song is positive enough - relativistically speaking at least - that I've come to see it as an embrace of bad times because there's nothing else productive you can do with them.

Having Stewart go through all that over what could easily be called a jaunty chord progression might seem a bit counter-intuitive at first, but the riffs his band-mates put down are a great example of subtle interplay. Between the trebly, skittering chords that introduce the song, the spare, echoing lead guitar line and the incessant thrum of the bass you've got a simple yet endlessly fascinating pallette to work from, but the key is the drums. They don't come in all that often, but when they do it's a booming thunderclap that doesn't last long but acts as a shock to the track every time it enters. The thing of it is that even without the drums there's a very percussive feel to the track, probably owing to the bass line more than anything, that would make any sort of constant drum presence seem like a bit of overkill. The short interjections of HUGE drum hits are the sort of 'colour' elements that can take a good song and make it that much better, the right sort of accoutrement to a fairly complete track that gives it something it's missing but not so much that it crowds out the core of the track.

On top of all that there's Stewart's vocals. I said before that they were relatively reined-in here as compared to other Xiu Xiu songs, but that's ignoring the one moment everyone, even those among you who hate the song, are likely to remember. You know the moment I'm talking about, the absolutely gut-wrenching shriek on the OH! of the title. It's odd that Stewart would save his most unhinged vocal moment for the song where he reined it in the most otherwise, but it's logical given it's place in the song. Even if Stewart's voices was reined in there was stillan edge to it throughout the song. Combine that with the subject matter and the music and you've got a lot of tension brewing. The OH! doesn't break the tension, it absolutely shatters it. It's cathartic in a way that few vocalists could manage anywhere near this effectively not just because I can't think of any others who could lay down such a visceral scream but because it's the screams placement that winds up being more important to the song than its tone. It's another notch in Stewart's favor as a songwriter that he knew exactly were to place the scream for maximum effect; close enough to the end that there's time for the tension to build but not so close to the end that it goes too long. The fact that you've got the riffs twisting into a near-jubilliant fanfare not long afterwards is just the icing on the cake.

Coming up tomorrow: Long distance relationships are saaaaad.

The top 100 or so Albums of the 00s

So here's phase two of the decade in review: starting tomorrow I'll be taking a look at my favorite albums of the 00s in a similar fashion as I have been with the singles. I'm not doing a strict top 100 list though, still have a LOT of delving and listening to do before I can get one that borders on accurate. What I've got instead is a set of ten albums for each year of the decade, many of which I'll use as a jumping-off point to talk about other albums in the same ballpark or by the same artist that would likely make the "official" top whatever-number-I-settle-on that probably won't get completed til about 2015. I think the total number of albums discussed will wind up closer to 200 than 100, but it'll be done in 100 posts at one post a day until the new year. Towards the end I'll probably only be doing 1 album per post, but in the early stages it'll probably be a pair or a trio of albums in each post. In the future I'll probably get the album posts done in the morning and the singles at night, and since I've (theoretically) got the next few days off I'm hoping to give myself a buffer that prevents me from rushing through either part. We'll see how long until I give up on that though.

Anyway, tomorrow marks the start of that with a two pronged discussion the frustration attendant to great debut albums that never got a proper follow up.

#102. 'We'll have Hallowe'en on Christmas'

Blink-182 "I Miss You"

Blink-182 matured.

It still feels way too fucking weird to type that sentence, even six years after it happened, but it's the truth. The band who made their mark with crude jokes, scatological humour and base-level pop-punk with undeniable hooks finally grew up. Sure, they hinted at it a few times before their self-titled swan song, but it never seemed like more than kids playing dress up even if the songs were good - and they were invariably the bands best singles if you care to think about that sort of thing. Even if the pall cast by the band's more juvenile aspects made it hard to accept the more mature material it was hard for me deny that they were damn good songs at their core.

It's also worth noting that these better moments were almost always anchored by bassist Mark Hoppus' vocals. Hoppus wasn't the distinct voice in the band, he was pretty much an average, somewhat boring vocalist all told, but look at the singles he was at the lead of: the borderline touching ode to a suicide victim "Adam's Song," the truly blistering divorce tune "Stay Together for the Kids," even going back to their breakthrough Dude Ranch he was the one behind both "Dammit" and the immortal "Josie." Somehow Hoppus just drove the band on their less annoying material; even the worst single he helmed ("Man Overboard") was moderately tolerable while Delonge's worst was downright unlistenable. while having the two driving forces in the band might have given them an edge of diversity compared to their peers the disparity in average quality between the two was somewhat jarring.

It may seem counter intuitive to say that their best single was the one that showcased the two vocalists in pretty much equal measure, but "I Miss You" is undeniably in that position. You could argue that it's just as much a Hoppus song as "Stay Together..." or any others that gave Delonge the chorus, but more than those others this one seems to have a collaborative feel between the two of them. It also acts as one of the better documents for examining the differences between Hoppus and Delonge since their vocal lines are both in similar settings. It's clear from other blink ongs that the two have vastly different vocal styles, but that stems as much from the types of songs they sing as from their own styles. It's easy to tell that Hoppus is the more restrained and melodic one while Delonge is the emotional one, but the contrast is clearest during the chorus here, where Hoppus offers a low key repetition of the song's title while Delonge fills the space between with a more wailing repetition of 'Don't waste you're time on me, you're already the voice inside my head' - and if you've heard any song where Delonge sings it son't surprise you to know that every second syllable is drawn out beyond necessity. The contrast is part of what makes the song work so well though; take either part out and the chorus isn't quite as good (witness the first chorus without Delonge for proof of that), and even if it finds one in their most over the top mode it's done to serve the song.

There's also the fact that sonically it's about as far removed from most blink-182 songs as you can get. Really, until Delonge comes in it could pass for some random lite-goth balladry - sounds a bit insulting but it's really good lite-goth balladry - that made its way through the gauntlet of mainstream radio on feeling alone. It always strikes me just how damn creepy the whole vibe to the song is. The guitar and bass reverberate almost endlessly as they move through a simple set of riffs and drummer Travis Barker gives the piece a shuffly, brush-drummed pattern that's miles outside his usual style. The word I keep coming back to for the song as a whole is 'restrained.' The instruments are subtle in their machinations, and the echoes of their riffs add more to the song than the riffs themselves, Hoppus barely registers any emotion in his voice as befits the rather sterile environs he's working in and Delonge basically says the same things his vocal foil does but does his thing where he sounds like he really means them to better effect than it'd ever have again. When I say it's the best blink-182 song I meant that it's the one where tehy work best as a unit, where the presence of their bandmates makes every person i nthe band shine brighter. If they'd managed that in a more typical blink song I'd have given it consideration, but part of me thinks that they needed to go so far off format to get the results they got here.

Coming up tomorrow: An argument against suicide, OH!

#103. 'Now we grieve 'cuz now is gone'

The Von Bondies "C'mon C'mon"

Ah, simplicity, my old friend and foe! It's hard to talk about songs as simple as "C'mon C'mon" without it seeming a bit much. After all, there's not much beyond three chords and a fierce full band performance to talk about here and trying to ascribe any larger meaning to it is kinda pointless. Really, this might just be the best pure rock song on the list in that it's not reliant on anythong besides brute force to get itself noticed. There's no subtlty here, no intricate riffing no deep, thoughtful lyrics to get wrapped up in at all, but that's probably 100% of the reason why it couldn't not be on here.

Honestly, this ticks every single box for what a great piece of rock 'n' roll should be, and it does it in a mere two minutes and thirteen seconds. It's absolutely fierce on every level, there's a great three-chord riff that anchors it, an inescapable bassline and a near-throat shredding performance from leader Jason Stollsteimer athat all add together to make it entirely memorable in spite of its wysiwyg nature. The MVP though is drummer Don Blum, who powers the entire track on the strength of his drumming and then pushing it further into the realms of aggression with some well placed, simple fills in the second verse. Sure the overall performance may feel a bit studio-neutered (I'd kill to see 'em tear this one up live) but it's still more in your face than most rock songs this decade, and that works to its advantage.

On top of that you've got Stollsteimer, who may be more famous for getting sucker-punched by Jack White than anything else, giveing a truly impassioned vocal performance. I won't go as far as some people in saying that it's a lyrical masterwork, but Stollsteimer's delivery is more than enough to make them work better than they should. And they shouldn't work if you start to think about it: 'c'mon c'mon' is the most overused lyric in rock music and the stuff around that repeated mantra is your basic break up catharsis, but there's such fire behind the words that I can give those issues a pass. When a song is this energized and the vocals are this passionate I'll forgive a lot really.

Coming up tomorrow: Another off-template single form the most dependable singles artist of the early decade.

#104. 'So for you this is just a good time'

City High "What Would You Do?"

You know, for a genre that tends to mention prostitution a lot I can't think of many hip hop tracks that do much to delve into the issues behind it that actually get some level of mainstream success. If anyone does it it's usually those on the conscious end of the hip hop spectrum and those guys haven't had much crossover success since the early 90s, but otherwise if a popular hip hop track mentions hookers its usually in the sense of picking them up, fucking them and leaving money on the night stand. It's a bit one-sided, especially since the plight of a working girl could on its own make for a readily compelling track (think about Ursula Rucker and The Roots' "Adventures in Wonderland" for example), but it probably ties into that old saying about how we look to the media for escapism as opposed to realism. Then again, if realism is catchy enough there's no reason it can't spawn a relatively massive hit.

That's probably the secret to "What Would You Do?"'s success: it doesn't sacrifice a damn good hook for moralizing or a deep analysis of the issue at hand. Sure the song is about the reasons behind one particular woman's decision to turn to prostitution in a dire time, but it's presented in the context of a relentlessly catchy bit of urban pop. It strikes an uncanny balance between the two sides if you want to think about it, never letting the hooks cloud the message and never letting the message get in the way of the hooks. And for a fairly simple pop song it's kind of amazing just how many different points of view it manages to give time to without sinking under the weight of its own importance. It also doesn't take a side in the debate so much as round out the views of all the involved parties, which makes for an interesting listen regardless of it's hookiness.

It starts out like any number of other R 'n' B singles with the scene taking place at a party, but then the song gets flipped from the superficiality of that event to a much more personal story. From the halfway point of the first verse we're introduced to half of our viewpoints on the issue; one is the man who sees his old schoolfriend having made what he sees as a bad decision to enter the world of prostitution, the other is the girl who understands that it's not an ideal situation but sees no other solutions to her problems. It's not an argument though, which is the smart way to go here, but more an attempt to get both parties to look at the bigger picture that informs what they're focused on. Sure having the prostitute have a tragic past and shutting down the debate with an appropriately earned 'I've been through more shit you can't even relate to' tips the song into the realms of melodrama, but the overall effect is simple: neither party is willing to see beyond their own notions of what can and should be done to realize that fact. It's not a song about prostitution, but about the narrow views that everyone on every side of the issue adopts without considering how many factors beyond that there are.

It's rare enough that a massive hip hop hit gets you thinking, period, so to go back and see that "What Would You Do?" was a top10 single makes for a bit of a retroactive chart-based 'hell yeah!' moment. It showed that you could get borderline deep social commentary into the public consciousness in an age where pop hits were getting more and more shallow by the month and urban pop was heading towards a much more sexualized ideal. It seems slightly anachronistic that it was a hit at any point after 1993, but the fact that it managed to be as big as it was at any point is enough to make me hate pop music less.