Dammit if Gavin Rossdale wasn't holding the key to life all along:
"Breathe in, breathe out
breathe in, breathe out
breathe in.."
So damn simple and it was right there in front of us the whole damn time. Wait, there's more...
"Deaf dumb and thirty
Starting to deserve this"
Not bad. If Cobain had written that, let's face it, every drop dead sexy hipster chick with daddy issues would have it tattooed on her ass -- "Take THAT, Daddy, send money! Mwah!" But because some pretty boy in a British grunge band with ZERO Sub Pop connection said it...it's no less brilliant?
"Leaning on my conscience wall
Blood is like wine
Unconscious all the time
If i had it all again
I'd change it all."
It could just be the two bottles of Argentinian wine talking, but two things have dawned on me:
1. Bush and Pearl Jam really aren't that different. Forced to choose, I'd rather hang with Rossdale and the boys. Vedder's never spoken to me. I don't buy his schtick. I think Rossdale's good looks and the band's melodic immediacy made them an easy target for misplaced self-loathing.
2. Instead, they were relegated to being The Outfield of the '90s: A vaguely derivative British band hits it big in America while remaining completely unknown in their homeland. U.S. radio plays the crap out of their first album while the media openly mocks their success. Second album doesn't do so well. Third is a commercial dud.
Their next one - the comeback attempt - prompts rock nerds for decades to come to openly retort, "Wait, they made a fourth studio album?!"
There are a helluva lot worse things to be than The Outfield, if you ask me. I've yet to meet the lovely lady whose knees don't getw eak the first time I play her "Everytime You Cry", but I digress.
Based on the songs I've heard over the years - "Glycerine", "Little Things", "Comedown", the previously-quoted "Machinehead", Bush deserves a lot more respect than they've gotten. I mean, Rossdale wrote that whole first album so you can imagine the royalty checks he must be pulling in from all that airplay. Plus, he's wrecked Gwen Stefani for the rest of us, dammit.
Come to think of it, fuck that guy.
Seriously though, I've always believed that the best bands are those that do their one song really well, over and over. Some bands, like the Ramones and the Police, find that song early on and pound the living shit out of it before eventually breaking up in disgust. Others, like Bush, will chase that song they hear in their heads relentlessly - each attempt a vague variation on the one previous - that will later be diagnosed as tinnitus - only to realize too late that they'd nailed it on the very first try:
"Everything zen,
everything zen,
everything zen,
I don't believe it."