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Thursday, October 04, 2007
I'M THE ONE
Descendents
Everything Sucks
Epitaph : 1991
[Buy It]
YOU'RE THE ONE
Paul Simon
You're the One
Warner Bros. : 2000
[Buy It]
I'M THE ONE
Van Halen
Van Halen
Warner Bros. : 1978
[Buy It]
YOU'RE THE ONE, PTS. 1 & 2
Little Sister
Stone Flower : 1970
[Out of Print]
I'M ONE
The Who
Quadrophenia
MCA : 1973
[Buy It]
Years ago, in a little place called The United States of America, I befriended a painter. I saw some paintings at a show, liked them, and said so to a woman nearby. "Made 'em," she said. Some were abstracts and some were portraits painted from photographs she had clipped from the newspaper. She had one of the clipped photographs with her. On the back there was an ad for a restaurant. I took her to dinner there on what I thought was a date; she politely disagreed after dessert and a drink by removing my hand from her shirt. We became friends. We became close. I hung out in her apartment, which doubled as her studio, and talked about everything: parents, politics, books, songs, sex. Then one afternoon she went out to get coffee and I was left alone with her paintings. They were the canvases I had thought of as abstract, but I realized with horror that they were no such thing. They were portraits of men, mostly nude, viewed at extremely close range. Once you saw them in that light you could make out a stubbled cheek or a muscular leg or worse.
I didn't say anything to her, but I did say something to another friend of mine. "It's creepy," I said. "I guess I'm competing for her attention, but there are so many of them and only one of me."
"On the other hand," she said, "there's only one of you, and the rest of them are nowhere to be found. That's how you know you're winning."
It was an interesting idea. Like most interesting ideas, it was at least half wrong. I wasn't winning anything. I was offering regular counsel to a pretty girl who was my friend. The first fact made the second fact weak in the knees. She was too pretty to be my friend. But I was too much her friend to be anything other than that. I was a young man then, and I felt the situation as profoundly unfair. One of the two songs I listened to as painkiller was the Descendents' "I'm the One." It had punch, in the sense that it had both power and aim, and it neatly summed up the situation:I'm the one
I've been here for you all along
I'm the one
Whose shoulder you've been cryin' on
Nice guys finish last
No one knows as good as me
We're just good friends
And you come to me for sympathy
You tell me that I'm not your type
Still you call me late at night
Every time he picks a fight
After all he's said and all he's done
I'm the one I have complained about this over the years, usually about as eloquently as Milo Aukerman. When he rejoined Descendents after years away, having earned a doctorate in biochemistry, he said in an interview that the band had a "different chemistry," and I'm pretty sure he wasn't making a joke. Still, it doesn't take a Paul Boyer to understand why it hurts (or at least confounds) when the girl you're closest to turns away from you when further intimacy threatens. My theory back then was that the system was set up to benefit losers, and that she was most likely to end up with one of the guys who didn't listen to her and didn't really care. That soured me on the process. I withdrew. And, a few weeks later, we started dating. I was the one, suddenly. In my arrogance I retired the Descendents and I haven't returned to the band much since.
The relationship lasted a little while. It shifted from a mist in which I was happy to get lost to something solid I could lean against. Then it ended. I went morosely to the friend who had told me not to worry about the paintings of ex-boyfriends. "It's not like you were the one and now you're a zero," she said. "You're still the one. You're just the one who made her unhappy instead of the one who made her happy." I was beginning to sense that my friend was a disordered optimist. Still, her insight wasn't hers along. Paul Simon struck the same note a few years later in "You're the One," the title track to an underwhelming but occasionally lovely album:You're the one
You broke my heart
You made me cry
You're the one
You broke my heart
You made me cry Later, because he's Paul Simon and intelligent analysis of his emotional state is one of his principal traits, he sets down his guitar and takes a short walk around the lyric so that he can see things from the reverse view.When I hear it from the other side
It's a completely different song
I'm the one who made you cry
And I'm the one who's wrong The song fades out with the two parties taking turns being the one, both for painful and pleasurable purposes. By the time I heard that song, I was no longer friends with the disordered optimist. We had dated, too, briefly, and she had seemed like the one, and then she seemed like the one who was wrong.
These are all distant memories now that I am older, married, and a father, but they are not so distant that I cannot identify them when they dart through the sky. I still believe that the world is set up to benefit losers, and I still see plenty of situations that involve one friend listening intently to and caring intensely about another friend despite the fact that the second friend has no intention of ever promoting that first friend into his or her arms or bed or mouth. As you get older, you're supposed to care less about the effect of that kind of rejection on your ego, and you're supposed to look for self-worth outside of the narrow confines of a single hoped-for romantic relationship. In other words, you may still need to be the one, but you don't need to be one specific desired person's one. If one thing doesn't work out, go to the next thing, or reformulate the process by which you feel special.
Here I will cite the work of the American poet David Lee Roth (b. 1953, Bloomington, Indiana). I should start by saying that people are saying very nice things about Van Halen's reunion tour, and there has never been any doubt that "Panama" is the best song ever written about a new car sung by a guy who sounds like he's trying to sell you a used car. That aside, "I'm the One" has always been one of my favorite Van Halen songs. It's a great piece of expressive comedy (how can you not laugh at Roth's cartoonish vocals, the preposterous guitar, and the even more preposterous doo-wop breakdown?) but it's also a kind of boast/plea from the band to its wide sea of fans. It takes the idea of being the one and diffuses it -- he's not the one to another known one, but rather to thousands of potential ones:Look at all these little kids
Takin' care of the music biz
Don't their business take good care of me?
Honey! I'm the one, the one you love
Come on baby show your love
Hey! Give it to me The song that sits on the other side of the seesaw here is Little Sister's "You're the One." Produced by Sly Stone, with a Sly Stone bassline, a Sly Stone guitar part, Sly Stone horns, and a brilliant but infuriating Sly Stone lyric, "You're the One" stretches out the notion of ego even further. In it, not only do you not need another person to feel good, but you don't need another person to feel bad:I'm the one my life has taught to fight
To turn around would never make it right
Inside out or outside in
The way you go depends on where you've been
I think I'm making it, I think I'm near
Then I realize I'm in the rear The lyric doesn't exactly make sense, which makes me suspect that it's deeply and irrefutably true. Message to Sly: You can throw rocks or you can throw rice, 'cause paradox is paradise.
Has the problem been solved? What should the youth of today (or yesterday, or tomorrow) do when they are friends with other youth and affection flowers but they still don't have intimate access? Earlier, I mentioned that when the problem broadsided me, back in the past, I listened to two songs, one of which was the Descendents' "I'm the One." The other song, I have never stopped listening to -- why would I? It's the Who's "I'm One," from Quadrophenia, and it's one of rock-and-roll's most eloquent and moving statements on adolescent alienation, as complete as a novel, but compressed into two and a half minutes:Every year is the same
And I feel it again,
I'm a loser--no chance to win.
Leaves start falling,
Come down is calling,
Loneliness starts sinking in.
But I'm one.
I am one.
And I can see
That this is me,
And I will be,
You'll all see
I'm the one Within the last year, I've seen Pete Townshend perform "I'm One" as a sing-along. You'd think this would dull the song's message of defiant solitude by universalizing it in full view of everyone, but it just seemed to polish it up. Truly great songs are invulnerable. And this is one.
*
ALSO: SPECIAL MOISTWORKS ANNOUNCEMENT: TAKE NOTE: HEY YOU:
Young @ Heart, a unique singing group consisting of roughly two dozen singers ranging in age from 72 to 88 and performing songs originally recorded by bands such as Radiohead and Talking Heads, will be appearing at Paris Bar (15 Gramercy Park South) on Sunday, Oct. 7 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available through Brown Paper Tickets. The performance may include an appearance by a once-in-a-lifetime special guest.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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