The Friday Canon: NO DOUBT & GWEN

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The runaway winner of the last week's Canon Selecta was Gwen & No Doubt, whose first eponymous album has been priced at £3 in HMV for the last ten years! 18 hits overall, SIX ticks to dish out for our yodelling princess & her ska-punk chums.

[Poll #1097759]
Stevie Wonder: (link)

1. Superstition
2. Living For The City
3. Uptight (Everything's Alright)
4. Signed Sealed Delivered I'm Yours
=5. For Once In My Life
=5. Higher Ground
=5. Sir Duke
8. He's Misstra Know It All
9. I Was Made To Love Her
10. You Are The Sunshine Of My Life

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Despite hearting Tragic Kingdom loads and loads I RLY didn't like Don't Speak. I hated it! And still kinda do! Just A Girl was so completely different that I mentally removed Don't Speak from No Doubt history.

I think my dislike was a combination of the following factors:
- difficult to play on the guitar, esp if the only bar chord you can do is F
- AWFUL video w/ Gwen sticking her chin out even more than usual
- TOTP playing the same 'live' performance every week for 10 weeks, with the ivy wrapped round the microphone and Gwen in a terrible flowery dress. I would CRINGE when those opening notes sounded and run away.

I couldn't believe it when Just A Girl was completely amazing after that! And the album was full of reggae! And fairground noises! I totally wanted to move to California and jump up & down a lot.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Don't spk is aces though.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I've mellowed towards it in recent years (well now I'm not seeing that awful TOTP performance every week for a start!) but the rest of TK is 10000x awesomer.

[cis.livejournal.com]

same for me -- and I'd heard 'just a girl' first (was orig the first single off trag king), so 'don't speak' was this absolute LETDOWN because it was so GIRLY and totally went against everything 'just a girl' was saying, omg. also all ballads suxxored. I like it now, a would-sing-at-karaoke amount.

[mostlyconnect.livejournal.com]

I think listening to Don't Speak on repeat aged 13, playing Premier Manager 3 with a friend all a long saturday afternoon, is the moment of pop music I'll take to heaven.

Nothing else they've ever done came close to touching it, for me? The new stuff leaves me utterly cold.

[cis.livejournal.com]

For me, I think the key with the first Stefani album was imagining it as the radio in mythical America in the late eighties/early nineties -- or rather, imagining that this was the thing Stefani had in mind, the thing she was working really hard to conjure up. That she'd sat down and thought "this album will be a love letter to the pop that I loved before I joined ND even", and that was the album she'd made. It works better with some songs than others. 'Cool' is the track that gave me the idea because it's such brilliant drivetime pop, it makes me feel as if I've been swept into someone else's life, the summer sun on an open-topped car, afternoon drive home, radio up, this is the song playing. And then the salt'n'pepa'isms of 'crash' and a few other tracks beside; 'the real thing' is a good example of the way tracks are so so strongly reminiscent even of specific songs of that period. Definitely the late eighties, the early nineties, an Alicia-Silverstone-Aerosmith-videos kind of time.
(I like to believe that that sort of theming/planning goes into my pop: I don't know if you do, if it's important to you at all.)

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

Don't Speak is far from great, I was in high school when it came out and it was the song that everyone seemed to be applying to their teenage tragedies, all looking sad and saying "I feel like this song is about when [name] [performed action]".

Also on TOTP, Gwen looking super-sad and frowny, just to show that she was having SO MANY EMOTIONS YOU GUYS.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

"I feel like this song is about when [name] [performed action]"

bwahahahahahaha :)

[credoimprobus]

Yay I am not alone re: Don't Speak! (I kinda really thought I might be haha.) Conversely to you, my dislike of it's only grown with time, because it's the one that still bloody gets played on the radio a decade later. Dislike + unavoidability = BURNING HATE in my world, and all that.