Matthew Lawrence

Writings

Mary J. Blige, Real Love

Reader,

Since you are reading this on a computer screen I assume you’re already sitting down. But if you’re at a library or somewhere that requires you to stand up to look at the internet, then I suggest you find a chair or maybe a fainting sofa, because I have something very serious and important to tell you:

Smells Like Teen Spirit is not the greatest song of the nineties.

Yes, it’s a great song, and yes, it was a big hit and, most importantly, it did come out in the nineties. But the greatest hit song of the nineties? Sorry, but I’m not buying it.

To explain why, let’s consider a much older song, a #3 hit by Freda Payne called Band of Gold. I don’t think many people would argue that Band of Gold, a sad tale of a wedding night gone horribly awry, is one of the greatest hits of the girl group era. If you caught me on the right day, I might even try to convince you that it was the best, period. And when did this sixties R&B smash hit airwaves?

September 1970, that’s when. After Sgt. Pepper, after Woodstock, and after the Manson family went to trial.

I’m not sure what how Band of Gold sounded in 1970, whether folks thought it sounded dated or loved the Holland-Dozier-Holland production, the kicky drums, and Payne’s vocals, which manage to sound divalike and forlorn at the same time. The song is great. A lot better, I think, than many girl-group hits that came before it, like Chapel of Love or My Boyfriend’s Back or Heat Wave, say. Because no matter what the critical or cultural impact was at the time, whether it sounded like a breath of fresh air or a Supremes knockoff, we are not living in 1970. And over time things change, take on new meanings and lose some of the old ones.

Another example of this is a song that barely missed this countdown, Collage’s I’ll Be Loving You, a very eighties jam that today is one of the crowning moments of freestyle but which must have sounded hopelessly five minutes ago when it came out in 1994. Just because something comes first doesn’t mean it’s the best.

So saying that Smells Like Teen Spirit changed the world doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. (And neither is saying that Kurt Cobain is a genius that died too young, so don’t even go there.) We’ve all heard this song day in and day out for the last sixteen years, and there’s a lot to be said for its enduring qualities. However, there’s some other things that can be argued about it, too:

1) It’s not the best song on Nevermind. Drain You, Breed, and Lounge Act are way better.

2) It’s not even the best single from Nevermind. Lithium, In Bloom, and Come As You Are are all more interesting.

3) The popularity of this song has had a major influence on modern rock and also pop radio since its release. That influence has, among other things, included terrible nonsense like Alice In Chains, Silverchair, and more recently Nickelback and Daughtry. Thanks, Nirvana!

4) Nirvana sure are white and male, huh?

So, that said, let’s get on to my choice for the best pop hit of the nineties.

1. Mary J Blige, Real Love (1992, #7)

According to Rolling Stone, women in rock died around 1990 or so. About 10% of their 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time is by solo women or girl groups*, and the most recent of them in Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, a Prince cover from 1990.

I don’t care much of Rolling Stone’s rich hippie reverance for dead and/or almost totally irrelevant male musicians, but the fact is they sell shitloads of magazines and a lot of people accept their word as truth, which is why mainstream media only takes music seriously when it’s made by white guys who write their own songs.** Sometimes a lady like Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell or PJ Harvey can sneak into their good graces, because they’re white and write their own songs, and two out of three is good enough, I guess. But nobody in the mainsteam press can ever seriously praise songs by people that aren’t white, aren’t male, and don’t write their own songs. Sure, they might like a song when it comes out, or even put it on their year-end best-of list, but when it comes to those big epic lists with titles like the 500 Greatest Rock Songs Ever, pop songs by women are nowhere to be found. Wait until the next time a list like that comes out and see if they put Umbrella on it, for instance.

There are one or two notable exceptions to the never-directly-stated rule that great music can only come from white men. There’s Aretha Franklin, who made some genuinely fantastic records in the sixties and whose music is probably associated in Rolling Stone editors’ minds with that time they all went to a civil rights march. Or maybe the time they all burned their draft cards and then engaged in free love with loose hippie women. Who can say? It’s all such a trippy blur…***

But people should remember that the Rolling Stone story is not the whole story. Listening to American Top 40 every Sunday morning, Casey Kasem taught me that the greatest hits didn’t come from groups of white guys who sang songs about despair that they wrote themselves–sometimes, sure, but not always. And for every mopey With Or Without You that got to number one, there was a Kim Wilde cover of You Keep Me Hangin’ On to replace it.

Which brings me, finally, to Real Love.

The second single from Blige’s debut album, Real Love came out in August 1992 and eventually got to #1 on the R&B chart and #7 on the Billboard Hot 100. Written and produced by Mark C Rooney and Mark Morales (aka Prince Markie Dee from the Fat Boys), the song starts with an Audio Two sample, adds a piano, and tops the whole thing off with Blige’s impassioned vocals.

One of the great things about Real Love is the point of view: Woman falls in love with man, man says he’s not as serious about her as she is about him, woman realizes she’s made kind of a shitty investment and realizes she can do better, but also realizes she can only do it if she stays strong. Sung at that moment, Blige can capture the feeling of falling in love, falling out of love, feeling happy and feeling hopeless, all within the course of four minutes or so. And staying strong is hard for our heroine, so she goes back and forth a lot. She asks him to be her inspiration, but only after she’s slowly come to see what he’s made of. She prays to God for someone better, but then tells the guy that she’ll love him through all four seasons anyway.

Poor Mary is desperate as desperate can be, wailing over the chorus in a way that would become standard for her throughout the next fifteen years but which this time sounds like it really means something.

Creatively, Blige’s albums got progressively better through the nineties, peaking with 1999’s Mary. 2001’s No More Drama is also excellent, but things have gone steadily downhill since then, bottoming out with the incredibly stupid (and Grammy-winning!) song Be Without You from two years ago. She put out a new album last month; I haven’t heard it and don’t particularly want to. The single Just Fine is, well, just fine, but it also sounds like what Janet Jackson was doing ten years ago.

Today’s Mary J is, if we’re to believe the hype, a living legend, a diva with an armful of Grammys and millions of adoring fans who have loved her for generations. She is also, lest we forget, thirty-six years old, despite all evidence to the contrary.**** But back in 1992, she was young and unknown. And in the sixteen years hence, she’s yet to make a single as good as this one.

Right now, I don’t think anyone else has, either. Ask me next week, and I might say that Your Woman is better, or A Girl Like You, or any other song in the top 10 or 12 on this countdown. The fact is that things change, feelings change, people change, and songs change. Maybe an appearance in a TV commercial will kill a song for you, or a placement in a movie scene might make it better. Maybe you’ll hear it one too many times on the radio, or it’ll be playing when something really awesome happens to you. That’s fine. It’s all subjective, and there’s nothing to say that things can’t change, Rolling Stone be damned. After all, if you don’t like the song at the top of the charts, there’ll always be another one to replace it.

(*Not including ABBA, The Mamas and the Papas, Fleetwood Mac, Ike and Tina Turner, or any other Behind The Music-ready groups with both men and women in them.)

(**It’s worse in England, judging from the covers of Uncut, Mojo and Q, who won’t talk about anything newer than the Happy Mondays. And if they do, it’s only in terms of how it’s the new best thing ever. But that’s another essay, one that someone else has surely already written.)

(**The other exception is Martha and the Vandellas. If you like, you can reread that last paragraph again but replace the words “Aretha Franklin” with the words “Martha and the Vandellas.”)

(****Not to sound mean, but damn is the woman aging poorly.)