“Or,” I admit, is a meaningless equivocation.
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In other words, Nowell’s PR sense tells him he should recoil or help Annie but, as he points out with a shrug that the arrangement reinforces, he’s “only a man.” After he persuades Annie to run away with him, she eventually “takes a hike” and while “it don’t matter” whether he likes it or not “it’s the wrong way.” Annie was safer with the Nowell character than with “the seven horny brothers and a drunk-ass dad,” despite every piece of evidence that Nowell in his own right was the drunk-ass dad or one of the seven horny brothers (I’m surprised he didn’t crack a Snow White joke). In this fast-moving tale, the singer can’t decide whether he’s drunk on the tequila stink of his own melody or if the story of twelve-year-old prostitute Annie and the family who depends on “the quickness you get paid” is just bully. Jaunty about its cretinism, “Wrong Way” is what film critics used to call a shaggy dog story before our culture realized it made better sense and - not to mention, was the most basic of empathetic gestures - to care about the dog in the story, never mind whether the dog was shaggy. Most ominously, I’ve heard men and women shout the line “I’ve been staring at her tits” with the fervid enthusiasm that Donald Trump fans shouted LOCK HER UP or Starbucks patrons yell VENTE CARAMEL FRAPP. I hesitated before settling on “Wrong Way.” The hook is strong. Because 1996-1997 was the strange era when record companies, seeing dollar signs in CD sales, refused to issue cassette or CD singles, it’s impossible to know except from airplay charts how well any of these singles would have performed had charting methods better reflected consumer tastes. “What I Got,” Nowell’s J immy Buffett-simple ode to being temporarily alive, peaked at #1 on the modern rock chart in October. It never got higher than #13, but it didn’t matter: for the rest of the decade, Sublime joined Californiation, Nevermind, Purple, and Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits as jukebox stalwarts. Then Nowell died of an overdose in May 1996, a couple months before the eponymous album charted on Billboard and climbed. The singer-songwriter-guitarist for Sublime had led this Long Beach trio through a pair of pedestrian ska punk albums. Although in 1996 heterosexuals didn’t have much to fear from the ginned-up straight AIDS epidemic, the small percentage of heroin users did.
I know this because I’ve known a couple of no-name bands on the road.īy the time the pop century had cast its light on Sublime’s “Wrong Way” the context for these ditties had shriveled. Kindnesses are easier exchanged behind the veil of anonymity men came up with the “heart of gold” cliche, after all. To these dudes it’s as simple as ordering takeout. When they’re lonely, they ask roadies for the best place to get girls to come over. It’s easy! For the male rocker, whether you’re Mick Jagger or a bar band in a van on I-10, all you see are roads and bad hotels and worse food. Male songwriters love songs about prostitutes because of their fealty to the adage, Write about what you know. Male editions exist: Blondie’s “Call Me” (about Richard Gere’s rent boy in American Gigolo, sheathed in Armani) and the Kinks’ “Lola” and Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore.” An obscure one for American listeners is Bananarama’s fluorescent, thin “A Trick of the Night,” about a boy with big city dreams who finds that the wind cuts through him as he sells his soul. Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade” and Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer.” Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” and David Johansen’s “Frenchette” and every hair metal song. Pop music boasts plenty of songs commemorating prostitutes and experiences with prostitutes. PEAK CHART POSITION: #4 on Modern Rock Chart in November 1997
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Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.
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