1993 #97: Kate Bush – Rubberband Girl

This is the sort of song that has been written out of early ’90s music history — particularly the history of the alternative music that was Triple J’s stock-in-trade. 1993 was supposed to have been grunge and riot grrl; Pavement and plaid. The kids were slacking off or snarling, and the best of them were doing both.

But “Rubberband Girl” is neither angsty nor ironic. It plies a mid-tempo pop thrum, and with its crisp drumming and springing bassline, might be better suited to the late ’80s than four years deep into the last decade of the twentieth century. When I was growing up in a small town yet to receive Triple J’s broadcast transmissions, the only exposure I had to the station were the commercials for it placed in the midst of the music video television program “Rage.” In those, Triple J looked like a chaotic expression of a youth culture I, having just hit double digits in age, was on the cusp of joining. Apart from some spastic moans and excitable horn blats in its outro, however, “Rubberband Girl” has little to do with jejune liveliness. With its stiff percussion and indie-disco groove, it comes off far too polite for a song about learning to loosen up.

This is more a problem with memories of early ’90s culture than with Bush herself. An alt. staple of the ’80s, she was grandmothered into this new era. Alfred Soto once compared a Bush song from this era to a party guest “with smeared makeup, drunk and warbling off-key, but friendly with a couple of the hosts and thus tolerated. But not invited back.” That makes sense; after all, “Rubberband Girl”‘s parent album, The Red Shoes, would be the last collection of new material Bush would release until 2005. In “Rubberband Girl” we see the untidy present succumb to ordered history.

Listen: Kate Bush – Rubberband Girl

How Hot: 56/100

1993 #98: Kev Carmody – Freedom

The jubilant optimism of Kev Carmody’s “Freedom” sounds aggressively, uselessly naïve today, which is not to say it was not the same in 1993. But Australia in the early ’90s was a land of racial optimism. With Yothu Yindi’s massive hit “Treaty” and Paul Kelly’s historical land-rights ballad “From Little Things Big Things Grow” in the pop charts and on the radio, Aboriginal singer Carmody’s secular prayer that “freedom, equality, justice will come” would have been less anomalous than might be supposed. This was an Australia, after all, in which Paul Keating was delivering his famed Redfern Address, where the Mabo and forthcoming Wik court decisions considerably expanded native title and drove a legal stake through the foul doctrine of terra nullius on which the country had been established. The country had emerged from “the recession we had to have” into a vibrant, progressive ’90s that promised a new Asia-oriented Australia, soon to become a republic, a country that had a real chance at achieving the reconciliation filling the public consciousness of the time.

And Carmody’s tune brims with this hope. It skips along with buoyant polyrhythms reminiscent of Paul Simon’s Graceland album. Or possibly not — this reminds me of the Westernised take on the mbaqanga sounds on the Simon record, and though a didgeridoo acting almost solely as a signifying element enters the mix in the coda, this doesn’t sound terribly Aboriginal to me. That said, however, I am terribly ignorant about the musical traditions of indigenous Australians, and I am happy to be corrected and educated on this point.

The lyrics, however, clearly connect the Aborginal culture’s spiritual understanding of the environment with the legal concepts enunciated in the tune’s refrain — “The womanchild/The Motherearth/The land, the law, the human birth/The spirit child within my womb/The cycle of the autumn moon” — marking this song as specifically not a tune of generic, nonwhite protest, but as something for and about Aboriginal Australians. Carmody turns grim lyrics like “When the Earth is denuded, her creatures oppressed/Then justice and freedom are put to the test” into a buoyant tune of hope.

Which doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Carmody is not anything like the “black Bob Dylan.” At six minutes, his tune ambles along amicably, but there’s an emptiness at its center; it never manages to create anything more powerful from the deeper political and cultural ideas underpinning it than a vague sense of positivity. The people who voted “Freedom” into the chart, after all, would have been the young, largely left-of-center Triple J listeners who were captured by the song’s veneer of positivity. It’s a surface sheen that didn’t broach any of the more protracted problems facing Aboriginal Australia.

Carmody and the Triple J voters turned out to be on the wrong side of history. What came was not freedom, justice, or equality, whatever that might have looked like. Three years later, the country voted in John Howard as Prime Minister. He led a conservative government suspicious of the new multiculturalism Australia had been striving toward in the early years of the decade. They represented people who weren’t so sure reconciliation and land rights were the most pressing issues facing the country. And quick on their heels came the odious far-right politics of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, who substituted John Howard’s mistrust of left wing hope for a vehement disgust. The national climate that allowed works of unbridled optimism over race-relations, even a largely platitudinous one such as this, to become a part of popular culture had degenerated into rancour. Today, the genres of protest music and Aboriginal music, as represented on Triple J, have parted ways. The latter, when it is evident at all, is represented by the mumbling tokenism of Wilcannia Mob’s “Downriver,” and the former is headed by the pungent didacticism of the John Butler Trio, which approaches music with all the sincerity and intelligence of a first year uni student approaching the campus branch of the Socialist Alliance.

In light of what came, Kev Carmody’s simple idealism, like that of early ’90s Australia, is something to be missed. Even if history has proved that neither produced much in the way of enduring results.

Listen: Kev Carmody – Freedom

How Hot: 48/100

1993 #99: The Shamen – Ebeneezer Goode

It’s strange returning to this song 18 years after its 1992 release. Not because it’s dated, though it’s definitely of its time. The biggest change “Ebeneezer Goode” has undergone is how affable it now sounds.

It’s me who’s changed, of course. I was nine years old when the video started appearing on TV, and the drug references that prompted the BBC to ban it went right over my head. That’s why I find claims that pop songs dangerously influence children to be so dubious; I couldn’t even work out that this chorus was a sophomoric pun on “E’s are good,” and not actually a story about a psychotic Victorian gentleman. (I probably didn’t think about ecstasy until Anna Wood died in 1995.)

Back then, this double entendre dance hit sounded actually evil. The video was discolored and unstable, and soundtracked by a tune constructed out of clanging beats, a wonky carnival theme and interspersed with contextless vocal samples (“A great philosopher once wrote…”?) and eerie cackling. The British-accented rapping, many years pre-dating Mike Skinner, sounds amateurish and a little comical now but was stylistically unfamiliar enough to me that it added to the disorientation; as if it were the fevered ramblings of a madman. I wasn’t actually scared of the song, but I definitely thought it was some bad shit.

So it was a bit disappointing to return to it and discover how conventional it sounds. Elements once strange and exciting like the blocky synth riff and energetic dance beat are now recognizable as touchstones of early ’90s rave. The most exceptional thing about the song’s building blocks is that they were constructed by a band that apparently began life as a dreamy indie pop band. (Here’s “I Don’t Like,” from their 1987 debut Drop, for instance.)

But “Ebeneezer Goode” is a quite excellent example of early ’90s rave, even if it’s not actually the otherworldly incantation I’d remembered it to be. The ringtone-ready riff lays the foundation for the tune’s latent energy, but it’s the club-ready chant of “E’s are good! E’s are good, ‘E’s Ebeneezer Goode” that buzzes around in your head after the DJ’s moved on to the next tune; a content-free hook line as good for shouting along with as it is for snickering to.

Get it? They’re talking about drugs.

Listen: The Shamen – Ebeneezer Goode (Beat Edit)

How Hot: 81/100

1993 #100: Van Morrison ft. John Lee Hooker – Gloria

It’s an inauspicious start for a poll that would become a national icon — for what it represents more than its actual worth as a song. Triple J has always held itself as a cultural vanguard, from the day it first went on air with “You Just Like Me Cos I’m Good in Bed,” a Skyhooks song more risqué than inspired. That 2JJ was willing to launch itself with a tune then banned on commercial radio is still a point of pride for the station today; the track that inaugurated its yearly musical purview, however, is less auspicious.

The placing in the poll of “Gloria,” from Van Morrison’s 1993 Too Long in Exile album, is symptomatic of a periodic resurgence in interest that has benefited many boomer favourites over the years, usually coinciding with a re-release of old material. The listeners who were around at the time will enjoy hearing again the music of their youth, and the kids of the day will find relevance and t-shirts in a sound that had, until then, been hidden in history. I remember a brief Doors fascination around the mid-’90s when I first started high school, for instance, and that was a few years after Pearl Jam re-ignited an interest in Neil Young, who would be retconned as the “Godfather of Grunge.” Led Zeppelin had the treatment a few years back, and I’ve lost count of the number of times Pink Floyd has come briefly back into vogue.

Van Morrison had a fairly major revival of fortunes in the early ’90s, particularly with his 1990 retrospective The Best of Van Morrison. (A copy of this made its way into our household, and I had quite a fondness for “Cleaning Windows” as a small child.) The wave must have continued on to 1993, when Morrison revisited “Gloria,” a hit by his old band Them. He added John Lee Hooker, and with an enduring public fascination with old black music that had been a part of the pop landscape since the release of The Big Chill in 1983, his old favourite found a new life.

“Gloria,” with its rock/blues nostalgia treatment, is rather reminiscent of another collaboration between an Irish singer and an old bluesman: U2′s 1988 B.B. King-assisted single “When Love Comes to Town.” (Morrison’s exhortation to Hooker, “Play guitar, Johnny, play guitar” echoes Bono’s infamous ad-lib on “Silver and Gold,” another Rattle and Hum song, of “Edge, play the blues.”) But re-listening to it today, “Gloria” holds up surprisingly well. Morrison and Hooker are consummate professionals, and the song’s laid back boogie is as smoothly enjoyable as it is inessential. In these days of niche markets and iTunes, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time something as simple as a re-recording would be enough to give an old classic a new life on the pop charts; for that to happen today, a song actually needs to be featured on an episode of “Glee”!

Nothing about this new version of a then 29 year old song suggests it was worth being voted in to a year’s best poll in 1993. But given the pedigree of the performers and the tune’s surely frequent airplay, it’s not that surprising listeners took to it enough to give it a place in the countdown.

Listen: The only stream I can find of the tune is at ReverbNation.com. Either EMI jealously guards Morrison’s copyright, or no one can be bothered uploading it to YouTube.

How Hot: 44/100