Forget “If You See Kay.” Forget “Touch Me I’m Sick.” Forget “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or, indeed, any Nirvana song–or even any Pixies song. For me, the Breeders’ version of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” was the ultimate in “grunge,” if you’ll agree with me that grunge’s greatest (and at-that-time-not-grossly-overutilized) tool was the quiet/loud dynamic. I’d never heard the Beatles’ version, I had no idea what the lyrics were going on about, but when that last refrain of “mother superior jumped the gun” came crashing in, well… This is one of only two or three songs that has literally given me rug burns. Blame Steve Albini, and blame my being all of 20 years old at the time. For that is how I used to listen to music.
On the Breeders’ debut, Pod, “Happiness” is followed immediately by “Oh,” and to help explain what’s happening with this one-two punch, what kinds of fluid are being exchanged between the shock and awe of the former and the sultry delivery / title of the latter, I offer a bit of Greil Marcus (writing about Fleetwood Mac, actually), from his excellent essay collection Ranters and Crowd Pleasers:
“Building in any successful rock ‘n’ roll record is a sense of the power of the singer to say what he or she means, but also a realization that words are inadequate to that task, and the feeling of fulfillment is never as strong as the feeling of frustration. The singer goes as far as he or she can go; the singer even acknowledges the quandary, gives in to its tension, abandons words and screams. But the singer still comes up short; the performance demands the absolute lucidity it has already promised, a promise from which it is already falling back…”
I would argue that the overpowering feeling of frustration Greil’s talking about can be just as sweet and sexy as it can be devastating, and that these two songs run the gamut within this “quandary,” from the angry to the blissful. The word “oh” isn’t exactly the chorus to “Oh,” but it does seem to be the first word of each line, and it’s easily the most important. Kim Deal trips over it, slurs it, moans it again and again, much like Molly Bloom’s “yes” in Ulysses. (Man, I hope I’m getting that reference right.)
So, back to my thinly-carpeted dorm room. When I was younger, I surrounded myself with impossibilities, intangibles. It seemed like the noble thing to do at the time (though now I see that a good chunk of it was just an effort to dodge whatever real things and people were right in front of me). The ultimate futility of rock music as I then understood it told the story perfectly. The Cliffs Notes would go something like this: “You don’t get it, man.” The afterward: “I don’t either.” I’m surely glad I’ve changed neighborhoods, you know? I’m glad now to embrace the ethereal without insisting it’s the only place worth investing anything. But while it’s no place to live, I know which record to put on if I ever need to visit.
