my power pop addiction, no. 64 (136)

In spite of the oceans of critical jizz spilled over the dB’s back in the day, I always felt their supposed greatness was an illusion, the result of groupthink amongst an insular group of pencil necked music writers. I see the band as a bit of a lost opportunity. This may sound like harsh judgment, and it’s largely a matter of taste and my resistance to arty pop, but I think I like the idea of Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey much more than the reality. There’s no question that the two of them had a great feel for the craft of writing sharp, tight and nicely self-contained pop songs. The trouble for me is that the melodic hooks, with some scattered exceptions, just never really materialized with any consistency. The dB’s might’ve been as big and as good as REM if they had only made their music a little more accessible. After Stamey left, Holsapple and Co. released Like This, which, again, critics said they loved. The album has nice moments but to this day I still find listening to it to be an exercise in frustration. I keep hoping that it’s a grower and that I’ll eventually have that magic moment of recognition, but I’ve yet to break through with it, having tried multiple times over the course of almost three decades... Tonight’s song, the opener on the dB’s debut record, Stands for Decibels, is the best thing the band ever did. It shows me what they could have been if only they’d opted for an approach that was a little sweeter, a little less tart. The song holds a special place in my heart because it was the first song I heard, back in the early 80s, on that life changing day when I moved the radio dial on my Technics stereo from WNEW, 102.7 FM, a hesher rock station in the midst of an identity crisis, to WNYU, 89.1 FM, an excellent college station that introduced me to so many new bands at the time and was such a refreshing change from the relentless repetition of Layla, Pinball Wizard, and Sympathy for the Devil. I love lines like, ‘we are finished, as of a long time ago’, and the chorus, ‘I don’t enjoy you anymore.’ I also dig the interesting percussion and – duh! - the jangle of the band’s Byrdsy guitars. The most interesting aspect of the song to me now is that it’s the dB’s at their best and most accessible, but even so you can still detect some arty pretension creeping in if you pay close enough attention. I suppose some of this is an artifact of the music’s time and place. It was the 80s and some of the new generation of bands, like the dB’s, were trying to distinguish themselves by breaking free from what they perceived to be a tired way of doing things. But the thing about melody and tuneful hooks is that, in formal terms, their elemental significance to the art of the pop song transcends time. I would have rolled my eyes if I heard a dinosaur like myself say this back when I was in my 20s. But I was so much older then, and I’ve since come to recognize the metaphysical component to pop purity. You can only fuck with it along the perimeter. You can’t alter or elide the fundamental essence that gives the music its heartbeat…