I have finally, finally, finally begun reading John Crowley's Aegypt quartet; to balance that choice out, maturity/intensity-wise, I'm going to spend the next two months listening solely to the early-90's college-rock semi-classic 'Hooch,' by Virginian jam band Everything.
If you haven't listened to the song lately, you should. It's a particularly pure example of late-20C hedo-moron stoner pop, one of the best (stupidest, simplest, emptiest, most embarrassing, most nakedly pleasurable) pop tunes of recent vintage. The lowest-common-musical-denominator saxophone solo in the middle is archetypal 'jam band' stuff in the Dave Matthews Band vein (though without Leroi Moore's obvious chops); that acoustic-guitar earworm is so addictive that it's easy to miss the actually tasteful electric-wah chords; the vocals couldn't possibly be more bland or pointless, yet the campfire singalong chorus manages to transcend every possible barrier to enjoyment: aesthetic, national, historical, sexual, perceptual, ontological. Oh my god, when the crash cymbal hits at the beginning of the final 'Let's get real' line I start to lose my brains a little bit and become Pure Relaxation.
Songs like 'Hooch' defy all aesthetic laws; they manage to perfectly capture a particular (lazy, debauched, lame) mood, an age (the Golden Age of psychedelia, i.e. age 19), a place (wherever you were when you first realized that girls with unshaven legs were rad; possibly 'the levee,' per the lyrics). 'Hooch' makes me think there's not a hell of a lot of point to having such endlessly worked-out opinions about Art. It's so, so bad. I enjoy it so, so much. Heaven save me from myself.
