— Leesa Daniels
The rock and roll canon is largely the baby of drab baby boomer mag Rolling Stone and their quest to turn a once-rebellious medium into something as establishment as the government and giant corporations. Nauseating individuals like the magazine's founder Jann Wenner anointed themselves as a good taste brigade which dictated the popular music they deemed it okay to like and, equally crucially, that which they felt wasn't worth bothering with. With the rise of so-called poptimism in the twenty-first century, however, the canon was faced with a do or die choice: open it up to the candyfloss pop which they once despised (Wenner is the same person who won't let The Monkees even be considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) or be even more irrelevant than they already were. It was an easy choice to make.
Because poptimism stood against the idea of listeners having guilty pleasures, the reverse canon of crap has faded away over the last twenty years or so. You like what you like and that's all there is to it. Sure, make your 500 Greatest Albums or 200 Hundred Greatest Singers lists but let's all steer clear of the worsts. Why even have 'worst of' lists when it's okay to like everything?
Yeah, those worst of lists, they were something else. Maxim Blender, an ill-fated but noble attempt to bring Smash Hits/Q bitchy humour to North American music print media, was a big backer of these. Starship, which had once thrived with critics as Jefferson Airplane, typically topped them with their massively popular albeit now seemingly universally despised hit "We Built This City" but NYC quartet Spin Doctors also played a part in the canon of music you were supposed to hate. Not that there wasn't good reason to dislike this bunch of irritating slackers whose recorded work really made alternative music even more meaningless than it already was.
But what if Spin Doctors were never that bad? What if their biggest hit "Two Princes" was fun, uplifting and insanely catchy rather than annoying, overplayed and trite? What it it's something the majority of us wish to come back to on Spotify or YouTube from time to time rather than the kind of thing we could happily do without for the remainder of our days?
"Two Princes" has the grain of a good, sturdy song hidden underneath a load of nonsense. The drum part sounds vaguely sampled which lends it a familiarity that avoids making it sound exactly like everything else. (It's as if the band couldn't secure the rights to "Funky Drummer" and, thus, had percussionist Aaron Comess attempt to replicate it which he couldn't; this is something that jazz trumpeters have been doing since the heyday of Louis Armstrong: in failing to imitate their hero, they develop a voice of their own) The guitar is just about punchy enough without taking them too far down the grunge route. It all teeters on the edge of being legit indie but doesn't quite make it.
As the good folk at Maxim Blender said, "the very sound of "Two Princes" evokes the way the Spin Doctors looked". This is an uncharitable view — as they themselves acknowledge — if unquestionably true. Chris Barron "sings" like a lovable stoner idiot and that's precisely the way he looked. On the other hand, that was their charm. They looked like people out of Dazed and Confused (or, better yet, the sort of people who should have been in Dazed and Confused). Grunge acts had done away with attempting to make themselves presentable and we were now left with very little gulf between bands and their audiences. Did it matter to people who chose to put on Spin Doctors' CDs how goofy their lyrics were? No, I'm quite confident that they either expected them that way or they didn't care one way or the other.
Writing about this, I'm feeling rather lost. I don't love this song, I don't even like it much, but I don't hate it either — and, most concerning, I'm not feeling indifferent. There's so much to unpack (is it all calculated or did they fall ass-backward into a hit single?) with a great deal that fascinates me. Did I ever like this? (I don't think so) Did I used to hate it? (No, but I certainly recall getting sick of it, especially the infernal 'just go ahead now' line) Who did like this? (Well, people who looked like members of the Spin Doctors, obviously but there must have been others) Was it really worth the bother of anyone hating it? (No, the charts have seen much worse) With the benefit of hindsight, the backlash towards "Two Princes" says a lot more about its time than the song itself. The nineties were supposed to be a return to authentic rock but the Spin Doctors only revealed how hollow alternative music had become. "Alternative to what?" various grunge artists would ask in interviews. Well, quite.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
David Bowie: "Black Tie White Noise"
With the disastrous Glass Spider tour now a distant memory and that very pointless Tin Machine project out of his system, it was time for Dame David to have a much-needed return to form. Black Tie White Noise would be just that sort of thing and if you didn't happen to agree follow-up The Buddha of Suburbia would be his next return to form, followed by Outside the following year and so forth for the remainder of his career (except for Hours, which everyone seemed to know right away wasn't all that good). Top 10 hit "Jump They Say" was the more obvious hit but the title track was a worthy 45 in its own right and probably deserved a good deal better than the cup of coffee it "enjoyed" in the lower end of the Top 40. Not quite Bowie in peak seventies form but an impressive start to those 'return to form' years.
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