Do you know what song I was listening to last weekend? I suppose you don't (and if somehow you do, shouting the correct answer in the general direction of this magazine will do you no good whatsoever, unless you happen to be a psychotic drifter, in which case this act will seem consistent with your day-to-day behavior). Well, the song I was listening to last weekend was "Layla," by Derek and the Dominos, which is surprising, because I generally like listening to Eric Clapton about as much as I like getting kicked in the throat by Jet Li. However, something struck me about "Layla" that made me consider the state of contemporary pop music, particularly a certain artistic quality that--for whatever reason--seems to be on the decline.
"Layla" is fucking long.
"Layla" is twice as long as logic would dictate; this is because it's a two-part rock song. In fact, that was the reason I was compulsively playing it last weekend: Someone told me that the second half of "Layla" (the evocative piano coda, best employed by Martin Scorsese in GoodFellas) was written by the Dominos' drummer, a guy named Jim Gordon. In 1983, Gordon gave in to his schizophrenic urges and murdered his mother with a hammer and a butcher knife. I was relistening to the song because I wanted to figure out what kind of music a crazy person would write. I'm a big fan of Crazy Dude Rock. However, the main thing I found myself thinking was, "You know, nobody constructs songs like this anymore--or at least nobody famous." There just aren't stellar two-part songs these days. As a result, rock music is hindered from realizing its full potential.
Now, I will concede that there are obvious downsides to two-part rock anthems, the biggest being that not many normal people seem to like them. It is rare to walk into someone's apartment and hear the dulcet strains of Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" or Black Sabbath's "Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener" or the Rolling Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'," unless you happen to be entering the home of a melodramatic hash dealer unhealthily obsessed with the opening scene from Johnny Depp's Blow. The last major band to record "binary-form" rock tracks was Guns N' Roses, who did so with surprising consistency (the clearest example: "Rocket Queen," a song whose coda is--almost without question--the best two minutes and 47 seconds of music from the entire 1980s). You'd think this is the kind of song Radiohead would write all the time, but they don't; the closest they come is "My Iron Lung," which is two songs intermittently spliced together. Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" is in the two-part vein, but I suspect that was an accident. At the moment, Wilco might be the only group remotely interested in this concept, illustrated by the excellent "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," a Kraftwerk song that becomes a Bob Seger song.
Still, "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" is not "Layla": It's not like a fully developed radio ballad welded to a fully developed midtempo AOR cut. It's more akin to The Grey Album (Jay-Z + the Beatles), Jay-Zeezer (Jay-Z + Weezer), and The Slack Album (Jay-Z + Pavement), where the idea is to turn two unlike songs into one. I'd love to argue that this trend is culturally significant, since mash-ups imply a doubled pace of cultural consumption (so much media, so little time). However, I have a feeling artists are producing these albums simply because they're (for lack of a better word) neat, and people are listening to them simply because they're available on the Internet. The individual songs on Danger Mouse's The Grey Album don't seem important at all. When John Lennon laid multiple tracks on top of one another and made "Strawberry Fields Forever," the whole became greater than the sum of its parts; whenever I play The Grey Album's version of "Dirt off Your Shoulder," I find myself wishing I was listening to "Julia." Ideas that are cool aren't necessarily good. "Layla" is the opposite: It's not cool, but it is good. It has a largeness that has disappeared from the pop landscape. I want it back. I want bands that dream of being late-period Zeppelin. I want "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" (which technically has three parts) and "Bohemian Rhapsody" (which actually has something like six or seven parts, but you get the idea). I want another "Layla," only longer and more self-indulgent.
Somebody get the Darkness on this.
