One Minute of Rock

The single greatest minute of rock and roll starts two minutes and thirty five seconds into Add It Up by the Violent Femmes. Before we get to 2:35, we hear Gordon Gano wail away with his jittery croon, the band kick in the help him beg for just one screw, allusions to performance, and his uncertain threat to take his last bow. That's a lot of stuff, add it up I guess. Well, I'm not sure what we get when we add it up.

We find Gano begging his mother to recognize his confusion and bail him out, and just as soon as that happens he's going downtown to get a gun. This is when it gets fun. At 2:35 the guitar solo kicks in. It sounds like rockabilly gone sour. The guitar sounds like guitar, but it's in a new climate. The solo launches Gano into his story.

Down to the kitchen at the top of the stairs
Can I mix in with your affairs
Share a smoke, make a joke
Grasp and reach for a leg of hope

This is not exactly Shakespeare, but then again, neither is rock and roll. In the background, the bass thumps away with a really basic line, walking him through the story, keeping it simple, letting us know that his confusion follows a common undercurrent.

Words to memorize, words hypnotize
Words make my mouth exercise
Words all fail the magic prize
Nothing I can say when I'm in your thighs

Back to his performance allusions, not knowing why he's saying what he's saying, except that there's one thing that would pacify him.

Oh my my my my my oh my mother
I would love to love you lover
The city is restless, it's ready to pounce
Here in your bedroom ounce for ounce

Does he want to fuck his mom? Good god. When a thought crosses your mind, does that count as thinking about it? I'm not sure this needs explanation, but it has occurred to everyone that the words "fuck" and "mom" could go together. I don't know if that counts. I'm not sure he does either. He takes himself out of the story and attributes the action to the city, his climate, to anything but him.

I've given you, decision to make
Things to lose, things to take
Just as she's bout ready to cut it up
She says 'Wait a minute honey'
I'm gonna add it up

He's still out of the story, and the power isn't his anymore, if it ever was. The most potent he feels is as a performer, the rest of the time he's desperate to be absorbed and led. She's the one who's going to add it up, because he can't. I don't think that she can either, but he hopes she can. There's no quantifying this level of confusion, but this single minute helps spell it out.

My music obsessions typically work like this: find a CD I like (London Calling, Give Up, The Moon and Antartica have all been through it), listen to it on repeat in my car and at work, eventually find a handful of songs that are the best, and then if the album is really in my system, it comes down to one song. This is the first time it has come down to one minute. This obsession has lasted only about a week, which isn't that long. London Calling went six months and Give Up went for three months. Still though, it's down to one minute.

By pure happenstance, I stumbled on this article yesterday: http://www.slate.com/id/2143410. In it, the authors wind their way through Buenos Aires, the city and the culture. They find themselves in the Argentine film scene. Here's where they get into Glue.

The best Argentine film we saw at the festival, for instance, was Alexis dos Santos' Glue: Historia Adolescente en Medio de la Nada, a coming-of-age story centered on a sexually ambiguous teenage boy in a dusty industrial wasteland, told in fractured, impressionistic snapshots. The main protagonist and his older sister live aimlessly, wandering through a blasted-out landscape, lusting after their peers or after American culture, falling painfully in love, and idly hoping their adulterous father might return home. The Violent Femmes' "Add It Up"—the song the hero listens to over and over on his Walkman—is nearly as vivid a character here as his mother.

So here it is. Add It Up making its way. This movie isn't out in San Francisco right now, but when it comes out, I'm going to see it.

Add It Up finishes with the same old steady bass, staying in stride without acknowledging variation. Gano's guitar, meanwhile, frantically abandons any of the rockabilly twang from earlier in the song, moving his hands fast and making noise.