Note: This is a pre-production script and may deviate from the finished show.
Hey there, Cousiiiin! Welcome to the next episode of How Good It Is, and today we’re serving up some musical beef. Do it to it, Jenna!
[♫HGII♫]
I’m Claude Call, and I’m proud to be amongst you. And as usual, I do have some trivia for ye. There is a pop era artist whose name is a palindrome, who had a Top Twenty hit in 1975 that was also a palindrome. Was that too easy? I feel like that’s too easy.
Anyway, I’ll have the answer for ye near the end of the show.
For those of you not in the know, a diss track is a song that verbally attacks someone. The phrase derives from the word disrespect, and the word “diss” first sprung up in the hip-hop world.
I think I need to confess here that back in my radio days, I assisted with a hip-hop radio show on the technical side. The host, a really cool fellow who is no longer with us named Rusty Jay, needed my help with taking phone calls on the air. Most of the listeners were pretty cool and had a good sense of humor, and we got into a number of running gags on the show, which meant sometimes we’d say something to them, or play some kind of fun sound effect prior to disconnecting them and moving on to the next caller. Now, if a caller sensed that his time was coming to an end, they’d often protest, “Don’t diss me! Don’t diss me!” which I took to mean as “don’t disconnect me.” It took an embarrassingly long time to realize that they meant we were disrespecting them by cutting them off.
Now, while the phrase “diss track,” as I said, comes from the rise of hip-hop, diss tracks go way back. Here in America, we can go back to 1755 and a song written by Dr. Richard Shuckburgh, designed to make fun of American soldiers in the French and Indian War. The melody was probably lifted from an old Irish tune. Unfortunately for the British, the Americans embraced the song and made up new lyrics targeting the British people and the King. That song was “Yankee Doodle,” and it’s the state song of Connecticut.
Now, diss tracks are plentiful in number, and I’m going to concentrate on just a few of them. So let’s jump to the modern music era, where I guess you’d start with Kitty Wells and her song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.” The song was a response to Hank Thompson and his 1952 song “The Wild Side of Life,” Thompson’s song was aimed at a fictional woman who the narrator met in a bar and apparently led him on, then broke his heart. And that song contains the line, “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels” apparently defined as pretty women who are just in the bars for a good time. So that same year Kitty Wells recorded her track, which blamed unfaithful men for creating unfaithful women. In those days a song that responded lyrically to another song was called an “answer song,” largely because it wasn’t always aimed at knocking someone down. An example of a benign answer song would be Shep and the Limelites’ “Daddy’s Home,” which was more or less a sequel to the Heartbeats song “A Thousand Miles Away.” Actually, this is kind of a poor example because both songs were written by the same person. But you get the idea.
In 1965, Bob Dylan released the single “Positively Fourth Street”, in between his albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. As was common in those days, it was released only as a single and appears on neither of those two albums. It’s an unusual song in that it’s got a very repetitive melody and no real chorus to it. And, of course, the title doesn’t appear anywhere in the lyrics.
Also of course for Bob Dylan, most of the song is a mystery, in that nobody is entirely sure who the song is about, or even where the 4th Street cited in the title is located. There is a 4th Street in Greenwich Village, which is where Dylan came up as a folk singer, but there’s also a 4th Street in Minneapolis, which passes through the University of Minnesota, and Dylan lived and performed around there as well when he was attending.
But many people think it’s more of a Greenwich Village thing, since many people around there criticized Dylan for his move toward electric guitars and a more rock-oriented sound. So when the song came out, a lot of those people decided that the song was about them. There’s also some speculation, however, that it’s not about anyone at all but rather about Dylan’s experiences with LSD. The book Dylan: Visions, Portraits and Back Pages , which is a collection of essays about Bob Dylan, the singer thought that LSD is for “mad, hateful people who want revenge.” And that’s kind of underlined by the overall sound of the Bringing It All Back Home album.
For all that, “Positively 4th Street” is a very straightforward song, as far as Dylan is concerned, in that it takes a direct shot at its target but isn’t especially poetic, as he was likely to do then. Journalist Andy Gill said in his review that it felt like a continuation of “Like A Rolling Stone.” And I can’t help but admire the poison that Dylan is bleeding out on this track, especially that last verse.
[POSITIVELY CLIP]
And that’s it. He says his piece, he’s dropped the mic, and the music keeps going for a little while.
As The Beatles started to come unraveled at the end of the 60s, they composed a few songs aimed at each other. George Harrison wrote the song “Wah Wah”, which was a reflection of his frustration with the overall atmosphere going on within the band. He wrote it in January 1969 during his brief departure from the band. After the Beatles broke up, it was the first track he recorded for the All Things Must Pass album. Oddly, one of the things I like most about it is the thing that Harrison kind of hated about it, and that’s the overall density of the recording. Listen to a quick clip and you’ll probably agree it’s got Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” fingerprints all over it.
[WAH WAH]
Paul McCartney, meanwhile, was writing and recording “Too Many People,” which was aimed at John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as a criticism of what he felt was them telling people what to do. The song, which appeared on the Ram album, is largely a veiled criticism, though the lyric “You took a lucky break and broke it in two” was originally “Yoko took a lucky break and broke it in two,” but he backed off at the last minute and changed it.
But among the Beatles, the masterpiece of poison pen letters is John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?”, from the Imagine album.
[HOW DO YOU SLEEP clip]
Lennon wrote the song in the immediate aftermath of McCartney’s lawsuit in the London High Court moving to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership. Between that and the song “Too Many People,” Lennon saw attacks on him in other tracks on the album, though McCartney has denied that while simultaneously taking the heat for “Too Many People.” The song makes references to Sgt. Pepper—which you just heard—to the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory, and to the songs “Yesterday” and “Another Day,” with the lyric “The only thing you done was Yesterday, and since you’ve gone you’re just another day.” Lennon also took the time to back off a little bit, in that that line was originally “The only thing you done was Yesterday, you probably pinched that bitch anyway,” a reference to the fact that McCartney originally wondered whether he’d heard the melody for “Yesterday” somewhere else. It’s a great track musically, but it’s a devastating slash at his former partner. Only after a few months after the Imagine album was released, Lennon described it as an answer to Ram but also insisted that it was all in good fun and there’d no doubt be a response song to “How Do You Sleep” on McCartney’s next album, but he didn’t feel any real animosity to him.
And he was right, in that McCartney’s response was the more conciliatory track “Dear Friend,” probably one of the better songs on the Wild Life album.
In 1974, Lynyrd Skynyrd released the song “Sweet Home Alabama,” which obviously calls out Neil Young by name. Also obvious is that they’re looking at his song “Southern Man”, given the lyric “A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” But it’s also a shot at Neil Young’s song “Alabama,” which is pretty much a rehash of “Southern Man” anyway. The songs both address racism and blames the south specifically for the institution of slavery and the subsequent issues created. For his part, Neil Young has only positive things to say about Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song and in retrospect considers some of his lyrics to be rather heavy-handed.
Here’s another weird story, and it’s related to the song. I’ve only been to Alabama one time. I was visiting family in Florida and was driving up the Gulf Coast toward home when I thought I’d make a side trip to Birmingham to see the Civil Rights monument there that was designed by Maya Lin. So instead of jumping off Interstate 75 at my usual place to follow the east coast, I kept heading north to cross into Alabama. But here’s the cool coincidence part: I had the radio on to the local classic rock station, and I swear just as I crossed the state line into Alabama, I heard a familiar guitar lick and Ronnie Van Zant saying, “Turn it up.” What an awesome welcome to the state!
Incidentally, this is one of those trivia things that nearly everyone knows by now, but Van Zant saying “turn it up” wasn’t him telling us to make the radio louder, it was him telling the board operator that his headphones weren’t loud enough. It was one of those things that sounded good in the finished mix, so they left it in.
Okay, I think I want to do two more before wrapping this up. In 2005 Gwen Stefani, who up until then had been known as the lead singer for No Doubt, released a solo album called Love, Angel, Music, Baby. The third single off that album turned out to be one of the biggest hits of the entire year, a track called “Hollaback Girl.” It was a Number One hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for four solid weeks and Number Two for that year. It came about when the album was just about finished, but Stefani thought it needed something else, a song with some attitude to it. Then she remembered a comment that Courtney Love had made about her in an interview with Seventeen Magazine. In the interview, Love said that [quote] “Being famous is just like being in high school. But I’m not interested in being the cheerleader. I’m not interested in being Gwen Stefani. She’s the cheerleader, and I’m out in the smoker shed.” Stefani used that comment as her inspiration to write the song. Now, the most common definition of a “Hollaback girl” is a woman who responds positively to men’s catcalls, or hollers. Pharrell Williams, who co-wrote the song with Stefani, had heard supermodel Naomi Campbell say to someone “I ain’t no Holla Back girl” and wrote it into the song, which eventually became the title.
In addition to topping the charts in the US, it was a Number One song in Australia and Canada, and a Top Ten song in most of Europe.
Okay, last one and for this one, I’m going to be cagey for just a little bit. There’s a protest song out there which contains the lyrics:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
I know what you’re probably thinking, and No, it’s not about Donald Trump. The song was written by Woody Guthrie in 1954, and the song was about…Fred Trump, Donald’s father. There are no recordings known of Woody Guthrie singing the song, but in 2012 Woody’s granddaughter, Sara Lee Guthrie, along with her musical partner and her husband at the time Johnny Irion, recorded the song for an album celebrating the centennial of Woody’s birth, titled New Multitudes.
[BUMPER]
And now it’s time to answer that trivia question. Back on Page Two I asked you about a musical act whose name is a palindrome, which had a Top Twenty hit in 1975 that was also a palindrome.
If you’re not in the know, a palindrome is a word that’s spelled the same way backwards and forwards, like the words racecar, or radar. Did that make it easier? The act I’m thinking of would be ABBA, which naturally is spelled A-B-B-A both ways, and if you didn’t realize that, then it’s probably only now that the name of their 1975 hit is coming to you. That song, of course, was S.O.S. I’ll leave it to you to spell that one backwards. S.O.S. was a Number 15 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, but it charted much higher in Europe, even hitting Number One in several countries.
[OUTRO]
And that, Cousin, is a full lid on yet another edition of How Good It Is. This one was kind of fun and I’ve barely scratched the surface; I may have to come back to it sometime. Hey, If you’re enjoying the show, please leave a rating somewhere or better yet, share it with a friend. Get really creative and see if you can add a note to your friend that’s all palindromes. You can find me on the socials as How Good It Is Pod. That would be your Twixter, your Insta and your Blue Sky, and we’re always lurking about at Facebook dot com, slash (ow) How Good It Is Pod. And if you’re doing the email thing it’s HowGoodPodcast@gmail.com. The theme music for the show is by Jenna Getty, and everything else you can blame on me. Next time around Mike is going to tell How Good It Is to take the Highway to Hell. Thank you so much for listening, I’ll talk to you soon.