Blur's " Song 2"

One, two, three, four. Oh, yeah, that sounds right, man. One song. Luxury on his fiddle. One song. And I'm the all-or-it-all. One song. We're talking about them in Auburn. All of his time as the frontman of Per and Gorillas. We will teach ya. Damon! Pat one! Luxury. Today, we're diving into a song that turned two minutes, a scream, and a wall of distortion into one of the most recognizable rock records of the 1990s. A song that somehow became Blur's biggest doorway into America, even though it was never really supposed to be the full picture of who Blur was. That's right, Diallo, and we could not talk about this song without talking about where it lands in Damon Auburn's career. So today's episode is part one of a two-part story where we start with Blur and a pivotal moment in Damon Auburn's career before following him into the world of Gorillas. Today, we're talking Damon Auburn, Blur, and the accidental anthem that became one of the defining rock singles of the decade. This is one song, and today, that song is Song 2 by Blur. Woo-hoo! I've got my head checked. So much restraint. So much restraint, but we finally got there. This is the Damon Auburn episode we've been waiting to make from day one, so we can't wait to launch into the Damon and the Blur of it all with you guys. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, and songwriter and musicologist luxury, a.k.a. the guy who whispers interpolation. And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres to tell you why they deserve one more deeper listen. You will hear these songs like you've never heard them before, and you can watch one song on YouTube and Spotify. While you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, let's get started. Diallo, when did you first hear Blur? Fun story. I was actually, Bashir, my writing partner, we were getting kicked out of Amagi's, which was a bar restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. What'd you do? We were just having too much fun, man. You know, like at one point, the songs got ridiculously good, and I think that we might have hopped up onto the bar and thought, oh, we're going to do this. We could dance with the girls, and the establishment didn't want that kind of entertainment. I see, I see. This wasn't Coyote Ugly. No, it wasn't. So they actually tossed us out, but the fun fact is we were getting tossed out. We had just graduated from Harvard not that long ago. We were just getting kicked out, and one of our friends was just like, oh, man, what a great night. Didn't you love it when they played that song by Blur? And I was like, which song was that? He was like, it was the one with the lyrics that don't make any sense. I can see his face to this day. He was just like, it's the one where he says, I got my head checked by a jumbo jet. And the lyric made me laugh. I was like, yeah, that's wonderful. It's very funny. It does not make any sense. And so I went out, and I sought that song. I might have bought the single. Maybe I bought the album. But either way, I went out, and I was like, holy shit, I like all these songs. And so then, as one would do back then, I went back, and I bought all their albums. And some of them I liked more than others. That was your doorway into the band. That was my doorway into the band, was just one crazy night on Sunset Strip. That song was played. The crowd went nuts. Can we just point out that it's, to me, unusual that he would have, alluded to the song not by that part where it goes woo-hoo. That would seem to be the easier way to refer to something that you didn't know what it was when it was happening. He went straight for the jumbo jet, though. He thought jumbo jet was so funny, and I thought it was funny, too. And Bashir and I were just like, yeah, that seems like a really cool band. Because they just seemed cool at the time, this band Blur. But it's one of those things where it accomplished the mission it was supposed to accomplish, which was it caught my ear. And then, all of a sudden, I'm deep diving through, all their stuff. And I might have heard There's No Other Way, which is another great Blur song. I might have heard that maybe on rock radio back in Atlanta, back when it first came out. And to this day, There's No Other Way is still one of my favorite songs by them. There's no other way. All that you can do is watch them. That song is so great, but it's so interesting to hear it now contrasting with song two. They're very different songs. Oh, it's almost like very different bands. They're like different bands. I will say that. It's more of a Madchester kind of late 80s, early 90s thing. You can imagine Liam Gallagher coming in on There's No Other Way, or She's So High in particular. Right. Or may I say Soup Dragons, because my friend Sean from that band was mad at me last time when I mentioned the Soup Dragons in passing. Sean, love your band. Love. High five, Sean. Love me, hold me, cause I'm free to do what I want. And Soup Dragons, great band. It could have been a Soup Dragons song. I think that's more of a reasonable connection there. And I'm also trying to make nice. Don't hate me, Sean. Given the very different paths that Oasis and Blur went down, can I just say, I am a fan of both. It's the same way I like Tupac and Biggie. You know what I mean? Like, I loved Blur. I loved Oasis at the same time. But the band that recorded She's So High could have easily gone into the Oasis. In fact, it sounds like a song that you can imagine Liam coming in and singing over. But by the time, even as early as the Parklife album, which I think is one of the best albums of the 90s, Blur has staked out a distinctly quirky, nerdy, sort of like British sound. It's a very quirky time, I think, in the UK. Like, the whole Britpop movement, it's sort of a celebration of the UK. And I feel like Blur attacks it from a very different point than their Mancunian rivals. That's a perfect opportunity. We do have to talk about two things. First, Britpop, the musical movement, the genre, created by NME and Melody Maker and Sounds, but also a real phenomenon where there are a bunch of bands. Elastica would be one, maybe Supergrass. If you've ever heard of Pulp's Common People, what a great song, what a great album that that one comes off of. And I just feel like that was when they were really, like, establishing a sound distinct from the new wave of the 80s. Even the jangly guitars that we would call Manchester. Yeah, but it was hearkening back to kind of a 60s, Britannica, like, kind of a love for the Kinks. London was alive. Waterloo Sunset era Kinks and Beatles and the Stones and The Who. There was just sort of a resurgence of love and admiration for those bands. And specifically London, because I think this is the London of David Beckham. This is the London, ironically, of an American movie, Austin Powers, that celebrates this period. Right, but you got it kind of right. The Beatles are releasing their anthology. And then you've got one band, you know, Oasis, that sounds very Beatle-y in one way, but I would argue that Damon, without sounding Beatle-y, also sounds like, you said, like a band that could have existed. Sort of a modernization of that 60s London sound. And it's interesting to make the parallel, too, because as much as Oasis very much stays within the lane, I would argue, like, they're a Beatles-loving band. And every now and then, they're kind of a Stones-y loving band. And there's a little T-Rex that gets thrown in now and then, a little Gary Glitter. For the most part, they stay in that lane throughout their whole career. Well, they've always said, the first track on this, the track before song two on this album is called Beatlebum for a Purpose. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, I never made that connection. Oh, Beatlebum is great. Let's listen to a little bit of Beatlebum. It's funny, because you hear the Beatles, but it's also not the Beatles. It's also not. No, it's a song singing in celebration of the Beatles, but it doesn't sound like, hey, I'm going to do what the Beatles have done. Just real quick, he said it right, and I'm just going to stand for the record. This is one of those groups, I know almost their entire catalog, to the extent which this episode, when I inevitably go back and listen to it, will disappoint me. Because I'll be like, why didn't I bring up Sing? I know that feeling, man. Which was that song on the Trainspotting soundtrack, which was incredible, but was originally recorded as the song Sing to Me by their previous group. Before they were Blur, they were called Seymour, named after the J.D. Salinger. There are going to be crumbs that you leave on the table. It's part of the tragedy. I don't want to leave no crumbs. It's part of the agony of doing this show. I don't want any crumbs. It's only an hour long, and it's only one song, but it's still, we understand. I understand you perfectly, man. Listen, real quick. Listen to a little bit of Sing from the Trainspotting soundtrack. Have we talked about this on an episode, that this soundtrack we both maybe love as our favorite ever soundtrack? It's one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. I think we share this. I think we were guests on a podcast. I think that's what it was. We'll do a special one-off called One Album. Oh, for sure. Or One Soundtrack. There you go. And we'll talk about it. But that was Sing. Here's the original. This is the original 1989 version, back when they were called Seymour, once again named after a J.D. Salinger book. Nerds, check this out. That piano almost sounds like out of tone. Yeah, out of tune. He's throwing a couple notes in there that are not in the chord, but like, you know, they're spicy notes, but it sounds cool and messy, which, by the way, is a connection to both of the songs on both of the episodes we're talking about today. And what a great reminder, too, of where they were coming from, because that's such an era, that sound and that the Britpop thing. We are we're done with that. In song two, that's not there anymore. And this song is kind of an erasure. Song two, in some ways, is there's a song on this Blur album called Death of the Party. Yeah. And I do feel like to a certain extent, in a very short period of time, London might have partied itself out and the rock bands of the Britpop era were sort of seeing themselves replaced by more of the poppy Spice Girls. Just to put dates on this chronology. So if in 1994, it starts to be used, technically, I've read that in 1992, Damon himself thinks that Blur began to use the word Britpop. By 94, it's definitely in the common parlance. And that means that the British papers are using it constantly to sell copies of Ed Emey, Melody Maker and Sounds. 1995 is the famous Blur versus Oasis showdown. Absolutely. Right. Where they both come out with their singles at the same time. It's a rivalry. I think Oasis is thought to have won that particular rivalry because in terms of sales, in terms of sales and the fact that they were able to break into the American market, which, yeah, no, I mean, like, oh, you know, never celebrated Suede or Pulp or any of these bands. Or Suede got lumped into that whole like Suede UK thing that some bands, they come over the charlatans. Right. They have to add the UK at the end. Wham UK. Wham UK? I didn't know about Wham UK. There was a Wham UK thing too. So that means there was a U.S. Wham? There was a Wham already. Yeah. I didn't know that there was a Wham U.S. Listen. Suede are great though. Or I think they might've been called the UK Suede, even worse. That was a great band. Something to stick in your pocket for now. Yeah. I don't know something to put in your back pocket for now. Remember I said that they did sing to me and it was kind of faster and peppy. By the time we get to 96, they slow it way down. The heroin is in this from Trainspotting. Sing is much slower. Remember that because tempos are going to play a role in the conjuring, if you will, of song two. That's absolutely right. And just to finish the chronology by 1997, when this song comes out, we're, we're post Britpop. It's all over at this point, you know, not for all of us. I was just discovering it, but I get the sense that I was coming in on the party late and that people were leaving. Oasis' Be Here Now was considered kind of a flop at this moment. There was a sense that the party was over to your point of the song on this record. You know, we've got The Verve, Bittersweet Symphony is coming out in the same year. They're going to play a part in the Damon Albarn story. We've got Radiohead, OK Computer and Coldplay. There's sort of a new rising post Britpop sound that's coming out at this point. Absolutely. I, uh, I don't mean to take up all the blur air. So I do want to ask you, how did you first hear a song? Well, this is an MTV story. You know, I grew up watching 120 Minutes every Sunday night and then The Young Ones. That was like. Alternative rock music curated for the curious. 100%. And this is where I first was exposed to, or one of the ways, because I was also listening to Live 105 in the Bay Area, but like The Smiths, The Cured, The Depeche Mode, all of these English bands really mattered to me because first of all, music was great, but they also felt like an alternative and better source than just what the kids at my school were listening to, an American radio. There was a sort of vibe that these were the things to listen to that were cooler, frankly. Like, like I don't have a better word than that. It felt cooler. It felt a little more mysterious. And of course, genuinely, I loved the music itself. So this is a few years after that. This is the next generation into the 90s. But all of the bands we've been talking about, I wasn't getting from Top 40 Radio. In America, I'm getting them from, I am reading these magazines. You're reading NME. I'm reading NME. I am watching whatever The Remnants of 120 Minutes was. So there was this idea that they were cool and I needed to pay attention to what this, what this battle was, you know, between Blur and Oasis, for example. And what's wild is this is the same self-titled Blur album that not only gives you song two, but it also has a song that I never thought I'd have a chance to talk about, On Your Own, one of my favorite songs. It's been described by Damon himself as one of the early guerrilla song. Let's check out a little bit of On Your Own. ♪ We'll all be the same in the end ♪ To say you're wrong, you're wrong! All right. It's so laddish. It sounds like a drunken pub sing-along. It's a pub song, whose lyrics are totally garbled by the drunkenness of the singers. We'll all be the same in the end. In other words, we'll all be dead, we'll all be dead, till then you're on your own. Is that the lyric you were pointing out to me? No, the line that I thought was interesting, because I didn't know that until we started researching this episode, when he said that he considers this an early guerrilla song, the chorus starts, "So take me home, don't leave me alone, I'm not that good, but I'm not that bad, no psycho killer, hooligan gorilla." So the word "guerrilla" is actually in the chorus of the song, and the second I read, "Oh, one of the early guerrilla songs?" He actually says "guerrilla" in the chorus! A seed was laid. Hooligan gorilla. A seed was laid. Soccer hooligan? Maybe so. Shout out to the World Cup. It was very hooligan-ish. They really need that shout out from me. That was a very hooligan-ish sounding song in chorus, yeah. It's a little hooligan, but it's a fun, you know, it's a fun, what's ironic is that Blur fans thought this album was so dark. I had been listening to hip-hop pretty much exclusively since '91, by the time this album came out. And just like you were saying, you were looking for an alternative from some of the rock bands, I was looking for an alternative. You've got to remember, '97, Tupac's dead, Biggie's dead, Puffy has taken over all of hip-hop. That's right. So '97, '98 is when I decided, you know what, I've got to listen to more than hip-hop for the first time in like six years. What am I going to really listen to? And Britpop just came, there was a night here in. Here in L.A. called Bang, and I feel like some of the party throwers, some of the founders of that night might listen to the show. Shout out to Bang, because it was a place that I could go once a week and hear all this stuff played loud. It's one thing when you're driving around town and you're just streaming your own music and you're in your own little bubble, but it's something else to go someplace and hear music that you think is kind of obscure, but suddenly it's being played loud among a bunch of like-minded individuals. Yeah, that's exciting. It's community. Yeah. And I didn't know that I had a community of a whole bunch of people who are obsessed over lyrics like I did, so that was a lot of fun. You know what you're making me realize, too? There's a third source of music that I would have had in this moment, too, because we're both post-teenage years, so we're not listening to the radio anymore. But this is before the era of like maybe Napster and Blogs and Spotify where everything is ubiquitous. And in that moment, because as I was saying it, I was like, you know what? MTV was starting to phase out at this time. I just realized what it was. It was starting to become TRL MTV. That's right. I just realized what would have been my music source, because you just made me think of it based on yours. It was probably just like the record stores in New York City. Other Music. Where'd you go? Kim's Video and Other Music. Other Music. I used to love Other Music. 100 percent. Other Music and Kim's Video. I'd walk in and I would hear something, and that was my radio station. Whatever the cool record store guys at those places were playing. I thought they were cool. I bought so many of those records. They were the art that was cool for me. I bought so many records based on it being played in the store. I probably bought Blur. I definitely bought Air. I definitely bought some Lee Scratch Perry records. So you're just kind of helping me fill in that gap in my own musical chronology. That's so interesting. Before John Cusack and Jack Black made the album, they made them seem really like jerks in high-fidelity. I thought the guys in the record store were the coolest. Well, they were a little bit jerks, too. "Song 2" was always just a working title for what they felt they needed for the second song on the album. Literally just the track listing. They always knew it was going to be "Song 2." Eventually, they were like, "Okay, 'Beetlebum' will go first, but then we'll do 'Song 2.'" And we'll come up with a name for it, but they just kept calling it "Song 2." We are going to mangle the English accents throughout this episode. British listeners, we are sorry in advance, but we're also not sorry. We're Americans. We do this. We're not sorry. It's our 250th anniversary here in this country. Suck on it, England. Get in the ring in front of the White House. We don't feel that way. Get in the UFC cage. Come for the music. Stay for the MAGA talking point. It's fine. No, seriously, it's a confluence of so many things. They knew they wanted it to be the second song on the album, so it's called "Song 2." It's also two minutes and, I think, two seconds. Right. Like, for a reason. Right. Yes. And, by the way, when this song came out, we used to laugh that it was only two minutes long. Yeah. Because it's like, who records and releases a two-minute single? And now that's normal. And now that is so normal. Nowadays, they'd be like, "Damn, why'd you give us a day in the life by the Beatles? Two minutes?" Hey, come back with a minute 39 second version of the song. Right. Edit the edit. Jesus Christ. This story really blows my mind. It relates back to how they changed that one song "Sing" into a slower song for "Trainspotting." The story behind "Song 2" kind of mixes almost better. So, according to Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, can we call Coxon maybe one of our unsung heroes? Because I don't think many people know the other members of Blur. I think that's hard to say, yeah. And the contributions they bring in. Coxon plays a big role here. The song did not start off as the version that we all know. Damon had the slower acoustic demo of the song. And even the woohoo part was different. It was more like a whistle, which to me sounds so sad. It was like. He's very cynical. I love Damon for that. It sounded like this unplugged version that you were able to find. Yeah. I wasn't able to find the actual demo, but we did find this sort of, like, unplugged-ish version, Latin G version. And we believe that it would have sounded similar to this. Wow, that's crazy. I know, right? And again, to be clear, that wasn't the demo, but we think the vibe was a little similar. Listen, that is Get Skilberto's version of "Song 2." Yes, Gary Bossa. But by the way, it also sounds a little bit like Blur. This is for the Real Blair fans, am I crazy? does it sound a little bit more like modern life is rubbish era blur i don't i you know like they did songs that sort of sound like yeah he's always played around with genre stuff yes yeah and so they record this raucous version yeah it's almost like a joke it's like it's 1997 grunge has been dead for a while like in their mind i think the idea was we're gonna do something just to piss the label off and tell them it's our new single this is gonna be a joke they did they were like hey this is the single we're gonna release this in their brains they're like we're being funny like we're doing the kind of typical pixies quiet loud crunchy nirvana thing and by the way like quiet loud is not completely gone because okay they may not call it necessarily grunge but like you can kind of imagine billy corgan smashing pumpkins recording song it becomes part of the rock vernacular for lack of a better word but at the time it's also a little bit in 1997 a little bit of like hey remember this from two or three years ago when everyone used to do this and it was kind of newish so it was a bit silly it was clearly done as a goof but like it's the kind of goof that as you're doing it you're like oh my god i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm like hey this is kind of good right so that's what they do and they presented to the label and the label was like not getting the joke they're just like they were expecting them to reject they loved it they're like this is great the record label loved it and i want to point out this has happened a couple times on the show that somebody's recorded a track just to piss off the label piss off the label it often backfires i was recently and i screwed it with suits yeah we're flipping off the record labels no um just this week ironically it came out that a gang star and we were producing mass appeal he said we came up with the title first yeah because he was like literally rappers are going to do a corny thing so i'm gonna do what i think is a mass appeal hip hop song and i'm just gonna do the laziest bass loop right and and guru you just talk about people selling out to have mass only an idiot would like this song only and then he gave it to the label and the label's like gangstar listen we love mass appeal and to this day that is a lot of people's favorite gangstar song but they were it's the title of a magazine to make a commentary yeah yeah about something and here these guys were like hey let's make fun of the american market they blur i mean like it's a little bit like blur being a little bit salty that oasis blew up so big yeah in the united states i'm sure we would blow up if we did some stupid stuff like i got my head checked oh they're just like big dumb guitars over there let's see what happens if we do big dumb guitars crunchy guitars i bet you start off with the world is a vampire you know they're just like kind of clowning us but of course the song takes off we've actually got a recording of the first ever time the song was performed they still haven't got a title for it yet nor have they settled on the absence of a title being the title so let's listen to blur performing the song june 15th 1996 in sweden the first ever performance but this is the other new song we're doing i don't know what it's called and i don't even know what it's about but you might get you might get because i haven't really written it yet but we're gonna do it anyway at the moment it's called song number two and just a couple of like interesting foreshadowings for this episode of one song one is the whole fact of the lyrics in the moment he's like i don't have lyrics yet foreshadowing put a pin in that we'll come back to that in a minute the other thing i'll say is that until we were preparing for this episode i could have sworn the song was called song number two it's just a song number two it's just a song number two just called song two but there's damon calling it song number two we're also going to talk about feel good ink right and i think you were calling that feels good ink i thought it was feels good comma ink with a dot well i have a confession okay i always thought the name of the song was uh massive attack unfinished symphony i've thought that my entire life right and i just was like sympathy unfinished sympathy there's a typo here and i looked it up and i was like oh little mondegreens punctuation mondegreens yeah you just see you one time wrong and it follows you all right so we've learned that song two lives up to its name quite literally and the question that remains that we'll be maybe answering when we get to the stems next maybe not we're going to investigate together is this a grunge song is it a brit pop song is it a sarcastic grunge song and if it is is that still grunge can i posit a possible answer i think that they are a brit pop band but i think that they play in so many genres because i think that it'd be silly to say this song too sounds like the rest of the brit pop canon it does not yeah i was thinking about the song two but i think that they play in so many genres because i think that it's it'd be silly to say that it's a brit pop song girls and boys that doesn't sound like a brit pop song either that sounds like their attempt to do sort of like a paul oakenfold era dance song you know what i mean i think sort of like how blondie is hard to classify by pure genre because they dabble in so much i would argue blur is sort of similar in that sense i think their their song actually determines genre but the band is that's really well said and i would even take that a step further and say you're helping me realize what damon albarn likes to do is play with genre that's kind of like he's thinking about chords melodies lyrics and genre those like going into the next song he's like what that's what he's in that's his recipe sometimes they sound like stone roses yeah sometimes they sound like bill the funky homo sapien we'll talk about it and very distinct from oasis just going back to that because it stays in their lane oasis is always kind of in the beatles in the 60s lane or the the pubby lane yeah or the pubby pubby lane sorry a lot of a lot of tortured english accents today well let's take a quick break but when we get back we're going to get into the stems and we're going to figure out how song two pulls all of this together stick around and we'll break it down propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes all right welcome back to one song luxury i'd love to get into the stems uh where do you want to start let's start with the drums we all know this so satisfying so satisfying totally so good right simple simple simple simple so simple and so basic but so cool and like the low finest of it all we're going to get into that first of all what you just heard was actually not one but two drummers i was going to say there's like a sound in the background yes doing something i was going to ask you what that was i will now tell you so let's talk for a second about unsung hero of this episode stephen street oh yeah the producer the producer of this record uh who was the in-house engineer at island before he started working with the smiths and the cranberries and became a producer very well-known producer at this point a very in-demand dude exactly right uh went on to work with a lot of britpop producers in fact i read somewhere he was called quote the producer behind britpop from his work with blur sleeper catatonia shed seven baby shambles i love all these sort of lesser known because i knew about sounds like you're making some up i remember that because i remember at the time i was that i was still reading these british magazines where you would only ever hear about shed seven and i was like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know from like you know page 50 of the like nme that week or something like i will i'm gonna admit i feel like shed seven is a group that i've always heard about yeah never heard them i think i've never heard them either menswear was that another britpop band yeah yeah menswear uh gosh you know there's a gomez yeah gomez was a group we never we rarely bring up supergrass but supergrass was in the mix supergrass would have been my number one really they were my favorite britpop band absolutely so mr street by the way nickname is streety that's how they referred him that's so british it's like hooky totally streety so streety set up two drum kits in the room we think that one of them might have been like an ointment like a u87 but the other one the others were these cheap pzm mics that he put on the wall these really cheap microphones or contact microphones which is part of why you get this really lo-fi sound this really crappy sound and to both dave roundtree the regular drummer for blue i thought that was going to be our song here i feel like roundtree does not give the love that he deserves shout out to roundtree roundtree was one of the two drummers and grant coxon the guitar player was the other one specifically he's playing that clicking sound on the side of a tom a floor tom but then he does the and of four on the tom so he's going can you play it again just listen out for that because i was wondering what that was that's a great idea here we go okay it's every other one here's the tom but watch watch watch oh what what you're right you're right i had never noticed that before so it's more of a four bar loop i'm just gonna listen again oh there it is i never noticed that i just wanted to watch you because that was a joy for me i was looking at the wrong thing there's actually four notes in there i'm gonna watch you okay all right here we go that last one is so dainty it's very kind it's very loving it's very loving very posh so the other thing to bring into this conversation in 1996 it's still relatively early especially especially importantly especially in rock music for there to be digital and the idea of using samplers and loops etc relatively new there are some bands that have been doing it for a while more so than others new order being a perfect example we just alluded to them but in this case In this moment, Stephen Street is just starting to experiment with digital technology. so he's got this otari radar which is this early hard drive recording thing it's less screeny and mousy than pro tools in other words that's one of the reasons people don't want to move from tape because like you're just especially back then you're locked in this tiny screen with a little mouse trying to make music it's very unmusical sounding so he finds kind of this middle ground and that's how he gets the two bars that you identified and that's how we're getting a loop out of that drum beat he finds the two bars that you've been noticing all these years are the same throughout the song and in 1996 that's how you do it he doesn't have an mpc he's using this like crazy otari kind of like lesser known piece of technology so the band goes in and plays on top of that loop including roundtree who plays the the chorus which is the bigger drum set right and uh damon is just jumping around with his sm57 singing the song but he's singing guide vocals he doesn't have lyrics yet wow keep that in mind as we go through the song because that's how all the music that you hear short a handful of overdubs came together they made that first beat they band played on top of it and damon was just kind of like joking around with his sm57 with like didn't have lyrics he just kind of had like little placeholder words right so you've got a british band using sampling techniques you know what it is i know what it is it's the self-looping it's the self-looping yeah and we've self-looping like when you like push a pedal that's right you go we've been to be clear we've been hearing this for a while portishead's dummy a lot of that record is the band playing and then not only did they take loops from that record they put them on vinyl and then sampled the vinyl of their own performances yeah and that became the portishead song was a loop of a sample of the band playing so again to be clear this isn't a new idea altogether but for blur this is starting to lay the groundwork i think for what we're going to start seeing in damon auburn's later work i was going to say it's like primitive radio god standing outside a broken phone oh my god booth with money in my hand remember that song that's rings a bell playing for me that's an example of sampling let's check that out okay i'll play it off my lap i mean that's not obviously primitive radio gods sampling themselves but it is like at the time sort of revolutionary that a rock band would sample anything but i appreciate that really helps make the people are still saying sampling stealing right and that that helps make the distinction of what's unique about this is the band sampling themselves as opposed to like a recording and if they had really committed to it they should have sued themselves they should have sued his band blur and said how dare you sample thieves can i just say that crash energy amazing like it's because the drums don't change drastically at the chorus but that that constant cymbal does oh i can't i can't you lay in lift i can't listen to the song and not like air drum it i mean you saw me in the intro you saw me just now let's listen again you but you're in charge of the tom all right where are the two drummers hold up where are the two drummers ready here we go one two three i want the fourth i can't i can't hear them anymore here i'll give it to you with the i can't i can't hear them this is so unimportant that it's going to be cold in the mix okay here we go okay find it there so i can't hear it oh man it's like it's like when you ask somebody to like sing a song but you're playing another song in their head i can't hear it when someone sees you on the street who's a fan of some of your work your comedy work tell me a joke be funny funny man only real assholes that's never a fan of your work i'm a huge fan albert brooks tell me something funny i was hoping to see that dainty tom i can't do the dainty time you know this is why i work alone this is why i work alone in the studio i'm like hey everybody turn down the lights like marvin gaye and burn some incense uh let's talk about the bass alex james i don't think he gets a whole lot of love uh outside of us blur fans but uh he's laid down some of the best bass lines in in in history and i think it's safe to say in history this is not necessarily a song where i feel like the bass has much to do so what is alex doing on this song the notes are few yeah the rhythms are simple but the sound enormous uh-huh let's listen eight notes eight notes wow that is so nirvana can i just say yeah yes it is who's uh crystal what's his name chris another solid yeah i feel like that is uh that is right off of in bloom you know yeah big wall of distorted distorted bass sounds so what's funny is i had actually just heard that my untrained here from 1997 i just heard that as a guitar it never occurred to me that's actually a bass like you got to remember as a blur fan like alex is laying down as far as i know you know songs like london loves which has a crunchy bass line yeah so like he's usually like kind of prominent sure this was not a song where i like even knew that he was even on it but he's on it the tone quality overlaps a crunchy guitar a crunchy bass it's just a register thing it's just lower in frequency right just a quick note about the structure of this song the arrangement we start with the intro which is basically the first chorus yes then we go into the first verse a second chorus the second time around yeah we have kind of a post chorus you know you might call it a bridge but there's like a new chord is introduced basically so exactly right we're going to listen to that and i'll tell you what it is after we listen to it let's listen again because it's so funny it's like very funny it almost sounds word like based so what he does is he transitions from the chord changes into uh this kind of extended post chorus it's so funny that's great yeah and apparently that's a second bass it's it's actually just a bass guitar but being played through a tiny battery-powered marshall not a marshall stack not the giant amplifiers not when you go see acdc or weezer or whoever or judas priest and like it's a wall of amplifiers it's a tiny little battery-powered marshall amplifier i love it and it just sounds like this little funny way oh no it sounds like it's like almost like 8-bit yeah i love that really cheap by the way i was trying to figure out why sounds like the 60s to me and i figured it out oh it sounds like beck new pollution which i would have heard around the same time yes you know like it's that sort of like or going back to our 60s sitar i was gonna say like like our painted black episode yes there's a sort of nasal uh connecting of the notes it's not a distinct one note to the next portamento where it's like it sounds like you're in a really cool party in the 1960s either on the sunset strip and swing in london and someone's either got a sitar which is legit or somebody's just doing something really trippy with their bass guitar yeah but like it's a sound it's a vibe and it's not the kind of thing you play and you're like man i just played a really cool riff that's like sexy and cool it's like this is funny i think it's more this is up and i'm up but this is great uh i guess it could also be hey this is the latest i have no idea it feels silly and just in the tone of the song yeah definitely sounds like a good time can i also say it doesn't surprise me that they had a small battery battery it doesn't surprise me that they had a small battery battery-powered marshall yeah uh because you know there's something about like before all of our cars had these amazing sound systems that any one of us would have died to have back in 1991 you had to get all you had to get tens of thousands of dollars of speakers and amps into your car back then to equate what is factory now but like this is a song that like because it's not relying on like thick and heavy bass yeah it sounds good on speakers both big and small through on an am radio or whatever yeah like no matter where you hear this song it kind of works yeah i think that's probably one of the reasons why it works well in car commercials you know selling stuff because like no matter what kind of speakers you have at home you're like oh man my life's pretty good my my tv's got good speakers i should probably buy these steaks the song that makes you feel good about having cheap cheap speakers a song so good you forget about how how your station in life is see blur is just they're part of the establishment they're industry plants so that we will not hold the revolution i'm kidding damon is like one of the uh most revolutionary forces out there i might my two cents not necessarily luxuries i think he's chilling here this whole time let's talk about what the guitar is doing in this because this is a very guitar driven drivey let's take over america type song this is a riffy riffy song let's talk about the riffiness of this riffy song yeah as played by graham coxson and let's listen to the top for those five chords you're gonna hear hawaiian ukulele style you know yeah it's a little it's a little out of tune too it's i've heard him in an interview i can see that yeah yeah in an interview um i want to give credit to it's produced like a pro another great channel i would recommend he talks about how he thinks in his memory that that was probably a telecaster and maybe in the next part we're about to hear when he crunches it up he's probably going through a rap pedal but the goal was to be cheap sounding the goal was to be dinky in his own words quote i wanted a clangy clean crap sound not not played particularly well he also said that he was quote tired of doing complicated parts he wanted to do something horrible and noisy i love it mission statement this song is quote horrible and noisy but like horrible and the best possible use of that you have to be really good at something artistically to do the bad version of it that's like to see the best bad acting you need so i'm gonna give a shout out to fred armis in front of the show like he's really good at bad acting because he's a good actor yeah you know and i feel like this is an example of like it's like premiere producing what he thought was going to be a hacky hip-hop hit but it's actually massive trying to be crappy is is legendary yeah and here graham cox and kind of trying to sound crappy sounds amazing that's exactly right so when he stomps on those stomp boxes whatever they didn't turn out to have been yeah we've got two different guitars in the chorus i'll isolate them here's the first one by the way there's about i don't know a dozen that's right let's isolate that and i can play that for you oh really and to be clear i mean i they've layered it and i'm not going to play it for you but i'm going to play it for you that guitar six seven twelve times it's not just a single guitar or two guitars here is that thing that you heard this like one note kind of crescendo-y thing this insistent thing and listen how dissonant it is this is sonic youth man i can see that and it's getting louder crescendo so we suck so it's this everybody out insistent back to the ukulele just ukulele it's so like it's it starts out sounding a little dissonant like a little bit sonic youthy almost and we're just hearing this one note and it gets crescendo it gets louder and louder and louder and it gets more and more like stress inducing right your brain is telling you it's getting louder but that's like danger but you can't necessarily i know it's it's spawning fight or flight right let's listen together here's all the guitars in the chorus together so sweet relief at the very end when we go back to just uh you know crappy sound because you were just you were just raging and pogo dancing on the dance floor so when it goes back to like i'm gonna it's not a ukulele guys we know that but i call it the ukulele part because it's like so small and dainty like you know that's when you're like and you got like one more to save up your energy before we go into that last i always like this song because it's called song two it's two minutes and two seconds it has two verses yeah yeah yeah uh it's got technically you would already it's got three choruses but if we weren't counting that intro i'm only saying the intro is the chorus it's the thing that happens but but lyrically it doesn't have this but we go to the chorus twice i would say in the in the core of the song so but yeah yeah maybe it should have been called two song two and a half song two and a half for that extra chorus at the top there yeah exactly and at the very end we have that same insistent thing but but another note gets added let's listen i'll isolate that so we had it was a minor third and then we added a fifth on top so it's basically a chord it's a triad and it just sort of fills it out a little bit more but it also makes it more urgent insistent and like i can't wait for this to end it's a little bit tense it's always tension resolution tension tension resolution before in the earlier choruses the resolution to the tension was the next verse right here it's just the song ending which is kind of sweet relief when it happens so let's listen to the very end that abrupt ending is just like phew we made it we didn't get killed by this third and this fifth that's trying to stab me it feels like a stabbing motion it's very psycho oh wait wait keep that note and i'll do the one underneath it if you're still listening thank you thank you for indulging with us one of the graham cox and stabbing notes but graham's the man graham's the man there's something about this riff that's very old and yet new like it's recognizable to have a riff that's which is one seven three four five we've heard a lot of that before it certainly evokes a lot of the grunge era it's not literally the same chords as you know smells like teen spirit but it's got a little bit of that vibe it also kind of evokes this one to my ears now we're getting some some more chords there one seven three one and of course it being a riff oriented song is also part of the character that binds it to this song in the lineage yeah of crunchy riff driven you know distorted guitar songs the kinks practically invented that as a genre as a thing to do so we're kind of getting a little that a bit of that lineage there and for me another song that evokes it after the fact i always think of this song that i'm about to play as hearkening back to and maybe not existing were it not for song two that's the hives hate to say i told you so the first three chords are the same in all three of the songs but they're not the same in all three of the songs the first three chords are the same in all three of the songs but they're not the same in all three of the songs that we've just heard and they just share a lineage of being like riff driven rock songs that start with the riff yeah happen to share these chord changes that are very evocative of each other while we're talking about the hives i want to give a shout out to the international noise conspiracy another great swedish garage i thought that group was the freaking truth when they came out totally i loved inc yeah uh and also the vines you know people forget inc international noise conspiracy the hives the vines started off that way and the hives the vines started off that way and the i would argue that blur song too in 1997 kind of leads the way into this moment where we've got the hives the white stripes white stripes that low-fi sound yes it's a garage rock riff driven crunchy guitar where the hook starts with the the guitar riff is the hook of the song at the beginning of yes uh like the strokes you know um it's part of like the bbc and radio one they did a lot to champion those lo-fi groups early on probably in part because it was easy to begin with go from being a blur fan which i was into a fan of all those groups which i was it was a gateway drug yeah blur was the gateway drug absolutely and then one last thing just for fun so those three songs all have the same first three chords but here's one song with all the same chords this is 21 pilots stressed out now listen to this and sing song two on top of it ready here we go wow i don't know if i hear that one no it's literally the same usually i could be like ah this one i'm like no it's just fun to think about how if you wanted to kind of cover the blur song or right sideways right or right sideways way way way down just grab those but by slowing it down so what's interesting about that is by i don't think it's all about stressed out is going to sell products that way fun though to think about this connection with chord changes especially as being yeah when you change the tempo when you slow it down when you change the instrumentation and the melody is very different it is hard to hear the similarity but they are built on the exact same chord progression the same harmonic progression now earlier you had brought up the fact that he had placeholder lyrics in this song yes i want to talk about the vocals on song two because i just love damon love his love his voice uh and love his lyrical choices like i do hear the humor maybe not always in the distorted bass but i always hear the humor in a good blur line yes he seems sardonic all the time by the way that sounds like the worst party you could have sardonic all the time my girl is sardonic all the time anyway listen eddie murphy made the right choice man come on the show eddie we will definitely talk about we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about i want to talk about these lyrics so what tell you the story of the lyrics behind song two basically there weren't lyrics written so when they were written they were recorded it as i was mentioning before in the control room yeah with the band playing and and damon had his sm57 and he's just like that was a guide vocal and then they recorded it and then he wrote new lyrics and they tried to record the new lyrics and they listened to it and they're like it was better before with a guide vocal and that's what we hear to this day the guide vocal what we're hearing to this day is what damon auburn was shouting in the control room on an sm57 while the band played it for the first time one thing we want to point out about the song is that it's about song two is that the woohoo is not actually a lyric in the traditional sense it's a sound it's a hook it's a crowd cue it's almost like a drum fill that everybody in the stadium can sing along with that's the evil genius of having a hook be non-lyrical it's international oh yeah you can go to the deepest you know outbacks of whatever continent and greenland say maybe maybe australia yeah let's hear a little bit of isolated woohoo hear the bleed totally lots of bleed woohoo that's because the band is playing it while he's singing it that's just it four times here we go and of course like damon did not invent woohoo it did not start there you can go all the way back to the rocketeens uh from 1959 this is woohoo you you you you you that was fantastic that sounds familiar but you didn't know the rocketeens right right that's probably because it got famously covered let's hear a little bit of the five six seven eight and their version from When, 1996, a year before song two. So maybe the title was on his mind when he went into the recording booth that day. I mean, maybe. I'm always going to associate that song with Quentin Tarantino and Kill Bill because that was the first time that I had heard it. But we also like to say on the show that who knows who invented woo-hoo? We can't really know. Woo-hoo sounds very like the caveman invented woo-hoo. Like some very early human being made the sound woo, and then the sound hoo came right after it, naturally. Maybe someone's like, hey, woo! They're like, hoo? We don't know. I often say that. We're doing Dr. Seuss jokes now. I often say that there could have been a race record that has sort of lost the time that could have been the first use of woo-hoo on a recorded thing. So. Like we sometimes say on this show, all recorded history ain't recorded. And so we'll never go out of our way to say this was the absolute first. But we can trace some of these lines back to earlier music. I'm curious about the verses on this song. Like who, were these like, were they intentionally weird and cryptic expressions? We don't know. You know what's fun about this episode is how much research we've all done. And there's a lot of stuff that I love that Albarn has sort of left unanswered. Yeah. And I think that's all right. I think whatever popped in his head that day is what we're hearing. Where it comes from, it's unclear, but it's sort of wonderfully poetic as a result. And the fact that your friend, as you said in the anecdote at the beginning of this episode, didn't refer to this song as the woo-hoo song. No. But as the jumbo jet song. Let's listen to that line. I got my head checked by a jumbo jet. It wasn't easy. But nothing is. No. Woo-hoo. When I feel heavy metal. Woo-hoo. And I'm pissed that I need a woo-hoo. When I lie and I'm lazy. All of the time. But I'm never sure why I need you. Peace out, bitch. Yeah. And you can hear in the bleed the entirety of the track. I heard the insistent guitar line. So they'd obviously laid down the entire thing. Or maybe he was playing that live in the room. That's true. But yeah, it's interesting. Like, you can hear the evidence of the kind of chronology of how the song got made in the bleed. Can we hear a little bit of the second verse? I got my head down. When? When I was young. Ah. Call and response. It's not my problem. Is it your problem? It's not my problem. Woo-hoo. Woo-hoo. Woo-hoo. And I'm busy and I need a woo-hoo. I'll just play it through. Why not? All of the time. Peace out, bitch. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just going to listen to the end for kicks. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. One more. That's right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I counted. There's about, if you don't include repetition, there's like 50 words total in this entire song. There's not a lot of words. Not a lot of words. This might be the longest episode of one song ever. It's about a two-minute song. I just want to point that out. Heaven forbid he had done two and a half minutes, this would just be a five-hour episode. And by the way, the verse melody is, I think, three notes. I think he's little variations every now and then. And he's like, da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's a three-note melody, two non-verbal words. Woo-hoo. What a lesson in simplicity. And two minutes long. And not overthinking it. I think that in my own work, we've talked about sometimes when you've been working on music, there's so many times I feel like, as an artist, it's very easy to just overthink it. Yeah. And yet, when I see things that I really like, they're usually, with the exception of Chinatown, that is an insane plot that does not work. The protagonist has almost no effect on the story. It breaks so many rules. With the exception of Chinatown, most things I watch, I'm like, they kept it simple and clean, and it was enjoyable. And I think this is an example. I know. I found this really great quote from Albarn. He explains about his own process. He says, quote, As soon as I hear myself doing anything I've done before, I just do something else. I go the other way, or I just go above or below. I can't bear repeating myself. As soon as I've finished something, I think that's terrible. Right. I better start again. I totally get it. I love that about Damon. Sometimes I do wish he'd go back, because sometimes there's some undiscovered gold, some of those early ideas or whatever. But that perfectly fits with the man who I've never met, but I think I know through his art. I totally get it, too. It's just like you can't repeat yourself the same way. See, my first job was at Jimmy Fallon, which is technically a part of the Saturday Night Live. It's like, if it works, you do it five more times. That's right. That's actually interesting. You're right. So if Hans and Franz wins, or Penelope, you know, Kristen. Making copies. Doing this and making copies. Run it to the ground. Absolutely. A good idea is run to the ground on that show. Domingo, the song that they use. With Espresso. Do it a couple of times, and then when the audience stops laughing, then you move. Honestly, for my own interpolation thing, there's part of my brain that's like, I should really push that more, but it's really hard for me to be like. You can't be so cynical and crass. Yeah, I feel cynical and crass. If you printed up shirts that said interpolation, you'd probably make a lot of money. I might. But every time somebody passed you, they're like, hey, it's you on my shirt. Be funny. Tell a joke. Then you'd be like, oh, man, I shouldn't have sold out. Or I should have sold out for more. I should have held back. All right, we've heard the song, Luxury of a Man. How did the splits break down? Please don't let me down, Blair. Do you want to take a guess first before I tell you the real numbers behind the scenes? Well, gosh, by this point, I don't know. Let's recap. Okay. I do know. Yeah, go for it. I'm going to make an educated guess. The band did kind of break up, you know, not on this album, but after the next one, sort of. Do you think the groundwork might have been lean? Yeah, I feel like they put out their last single in 2003, maybe. I think that was the Think Tank album. So I'm going to go with Damon making like 37, 40%, and then the other members splitting the 60. That's a pretty good guess. Damon Albarn, 45%. I know this man. I've listened to too many hours of his voice to not know his business negotiations. You're dead on. In fact, you did him a solid by guessing, by under-guessing his underestimating. I was hoping it was 37%. Damon Albarn is 45% of the publishing splits on song two. Graham Leslie Coxon is next with 25%. Stephen Alexander James. Yeah. Who is that? Oh, Alex James. I was like, who's Stephen James? Oh, Alex James. His first name is Stephen, and he gets 17.5%. And Mr. Roundtree in the drummer chair is left with the remaining 12.5%. Oof, oof. 12%. For the drummer. And those drums came in strong, you guys. Come on, guys. Damon made four times as much as the drummer. And let me just say this. This is no shade on Damon, but knowing now that like Damon had, you know, on a slower song, and it was Graham who suggested this stuff, assuming that that's correct, I think that even his percentage sounds slow. I really am an egalitarian when it comes to splitting the money. Well, for the sake of a band staying together, certainly. To your point, it's not super shocking they didn't last much longer. And if you don't, if it's not always equal, equal, equal, at least if you know what the guy contributed to the song, hey, speed it up, slow it down. Or this other guy is playing some raucous drums here. Like, you know, I don't know, man. I don't know. But you know what? When I meet Damon, he might be like, you know, Graham's overstating it or they get along now. They get along now. That's good. Well, as we come to the end of our part one, I guess you could say of our Damon Alberton series. Uh, you know, I think the thing about song two is that it took all the years of Damon and the guys meeting and then, you know, forming a group called circus and then changing the name to see more and then changing it to blur. It took all the albums, uh, all the way through park life and self-titled blur album. Um, to get to this point, to release this song, to get, as I said earlier, good enough where they could record a song that was kind of bad. Uh, but that also broke them wide. And I will say as a fan of blur, uh, if you go to blur fan, you're like, ah, I love song two. It's a little bit like going to a radio head fan and say, I love creep. Right. You know, like it's gotta be careful. Yeah. I mean like it's, it's not going to impress us right away. We'd much rather hear, oh, you know, I really like a to the end or, you know, one of these other songs. Yeah. All right. I like the deep cuts. And after song two, nothing was ever the same for the group. In fact, uh, there was so much pressure on their next album 13 to have a song to like success. Uh, and I would point out that one of my favorite songs by them is the second song on 13, which you can almost imagine being all choppy and distorted. Maybe the, maybe the label thought it was going to be the next song too. It's a great song called bug man. That is a fucking great song, but the group was never the same after after a song too. And I think like so many people, you know, the band mates get older and people want to do different things with their life. You know, it's been almost 30 years since song two came out and this is still that one song that my kids know. And I know that, I know that the band was very frustrated when they play Coachella just last year because America, temporarily warmed to this band and then the name of the band went away even as the song a little bit and he was very frustrated that that crowd didn't know blur as well as like a british crowd you know even of young people meanwhile you know famously is with their comeback tour making billions of dollars in america no less very interesting in that way but i just want to say on the behalf of blur fans specifically in america damon mission accomplished those of us who heard it and really heard it we really appreciate you we might even be too old to be a koachella i know that i i feel very comfortable sometimes watching koachella from the comfort of my house on one of those five feeds but we're still here the the american blur fans are still here and we hope that you've appreciated this episode because this is a love letter to your blur years and now i want to say a little bit about your gorillas years well we're going to get into that in part two of this two-part episode when we talk about the gorillas uh and we're going to start with a song not off their first album but off their second album feel good ink but trust me as we always do on one song we're going to talk about the group we're going to talk about the group about their albums and songs before that song feel good ink and then we're going to talk about the legacy of damon that continues to this day both with blur and outside of blur so i hope you'll listen to that uh check out next week's one song until then be safe all right as always you can find us on socials you can find me on instagram at diallo dia lol and on instagram at diallo riddle and you can find me on instagram at l u x x u r y and on tiktok at luxury xx you can also watch full episodes of one song on youtube and spotify just search one song podcast we'd love it if you'd like and subscribe also be sure to check out the one song spotify playlist for all the songs we discuss in our episodes you can find that link in our episode description i don't know why i said it like that but that's where i'm going to leave it because we also have a patreon now that's right patreon.com slash diallo luxury that's right and if you've made this far you're officially part of the one song nation show us some love give us five star review if you can and we'll see you next week and uh send this episode out to a fellow music nerd it really helps us keep the show going all right luxury help me on this thing i'm producer dj songwriter musicologist and every friday night from 10 p.m till midnight kcrw dj luxury and i'm actor writer director and sometimes dj diallo riddle and this is one song we'll see you next time this episode was recorded at kcrw headquarters engineered by katie gilchrist produced edited and mixed by the one and only eric hicks