One of the things I occasionally daydream about is Time Travel. I don’t always daydream about going back in time and righting wrongs… sometimes I daydream about going back in time and messing with people’s heads.
One of the thought experiments I’ve toyed with recently is going back to 1959 and playing a record producer a song that will totally break his brain into a million little pieces. Here are the rules:
1) It has to be musically accessible. None of this Slayer “Raining Blood” stuff.
2) It has to use tools that will be immediately recognizable to the listener. You can use electric guitars and drums and even synthesizers… but no autotune. This means, probably, recognizable lyrics.
3) No swearing. (I came up with this rule when I described this game to Maribou and she immediately said “Cee-Lo“)
4) You don’t get to say The Misfits’ “Last Caress“. Yeah, that would win. Okay. Fine. Let’s think about second place, shall we?
The two songs that I came up with were Guns & Roses’s’s “Welcome to the Jungle” off of Appetite for Destruction and Soundgarden’s “4th of July” off of Superunknown (“Half” off of the same album was actually the song that make me think of this game but it doesn’t really fit 1 and the lack of recognizable lyrics disqualifies it from 2).
Maribou suggested Gnarls Barkley’s “Just a Thought“. I reckon that’s one heck of a contender…
Yours?
If we want to get as close to 1959 with our choices as we can… I would have to pick Gimme Shelter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iHWKew1K1M
Other thoughts:
Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio
Hounds of Love by Kate Bush
> Wolf Like Me
This is awesome. I bought. Thanks for the tip.
Tomorrow Never Knows is a few years before Gimme Shelter.
Vaseline by Elastica
Paid in Full, Eric B. and Rakim.
Super Bon-Bon, Soul Coughing.
Oh, we’re looking for a serious answer.
Culturally, I imagine “Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak” by Macy Gray would turn over quite a few brains. “Witch Hunt” by Rush would probably strike a chord. “Cop Killer” by Ice-T. “War Pigs” by Sabbath – never fails to blow my mind that song came out in 1971. “Suicide Life” by the Eels.
I thought of Cop Killer whilst driving around today. I think it breaks rule #3, though.
As I was editing this post before posting it, I thought of “Str8 Outta Compton” and did some googling about what Compton would have been like in 1959 to see if the song would make *ANY* sense on a cultural level. It wouldn’t have.
I considered a rule having to do with that but that made it waaaay too complex and danced too close to a political post for my tastes.
Yeah, I thought about the profanity rule. Amazing how many hip-hop songs are kaiboshed just on that rule.
“Sucka Nigga” by Tribe Called Quest passes. That would probably blow a couple of minds.
Heresy, Nine Inch Nails
Is this a nod to the ending of Back to the Future?
“Chuck, it’s your cousin, Marvin. Marvin Berry. Listen to this…”
No, it’s more that, occasionally, my mind gets blown listening to music. (I came up with this game listening to Half off of Superunknown.)
I was just wondering what other songs would sufficiently blow the minds of folks from, in this case, prior to Kennedy’s assassination (but post-Rock and Roll).
I mean, there are a number of songs that we all take for granted today (Jason mentioned “Eleanor Rigby” in the September thread on the main site) that are part of the gestalt shift that has so completely been absorbed that it wouldn’t surprise us to hear these songs on the elevator. (Indeed, it always makes me knit my brow to hear “Welcome to the Jungle” on the 80’s Rock Lunch at the local “My Music” radio station… this song caused riots! Now it’s nostalgia???)
I was just playing around with the idea of blowing the mind of someone who was hip deep in music from wayback. I wasn’t thinking of BttF, not consciously, anyway.