Prompt: "A song whose title is the name of the artist who performs it"
Selected by Joe
"Icehouse"
Icehouse
Icehouse, 1980
Shit, man, one week left, let's see what else we got in this bag of tricks. Alright, here's one: I want to choose a song that I've never heard, by a band I've literally never heard of.
How I did this was I found a list that Stereogum put together in 2012 (sorry, everybody on this blog besides Gilson, the list has since been retroactively paywalled as members only) of 20 songs named after the band that made them. There were some I knew about—"Titus Andronicus," "Green Day," "Bad Company," "Black Sabbath," "Minor Threat"—and a few I didn't—of fucking course They Might Be Giants have a song called "They Might Be Giants." And then there were a few bands, maybe three or four, that I had never heard of. I chose out of those, semi-randomly. More because the word "Icehouse" sounded cool. There were no blurbs under the embedded videos (uncharacteristic of Stereogum's Tom Breihan, to be honest), so I really had no idea. I am writing these words before I listen to the song.
And now I am going to listen to the song at least three times, closely, before keeping it on repeat and letting it play out as many times as necessary while I finish this blog post. During that time, I'll write at least 1,000 words about "Icehouse" and Icehouse (and Icehouse), before the clock strikes midnight and this blog turns back into a pumpkin. Sound good?
I will now type an ellipsis to represent the time it takes me to thrice listen to "Icehouse" in preparation: ...
How I did this was I found a list that Stereogum put together in 2012 (sorry, everybody on this blog besides Gilson, the list has since been retroactively paywalled as members only) of 20 songs named after the band that made them. There were some I knew about—"Titus Andronicus," "Green Day," "Bad Company," "Black Sabbath," "Minor Threat"—and a few I didn't—of fucking course They Might Be Giants have a song called "They Might Be Giants." And then there were a few bands, maybe three or four, that I had never heard of. I chose out of those, semi-randomly. More because the word "Icehouse" sounded cool. There were no blurbs under the embedded videos (uncharacteristic of Stereogum's Tom Breihan, to be honest), so I really had no idea. I am writing these words before I listen to the song.
And now I am going to listen to the song at least three times, closely, before keeping it on repeat and letting it play out as many times as necessary while I finish this blog post. During that time, I'll write at least 1,000 words about "Icehouse" and Icehouse (and Icehouse), before the clock strikes midnight and this blog turns back into a pumpkin. Sound good?
I will now type an ellipsis to represent the time it takes me to thrice listen to "Icehouse" in preparation: ...
Okay, I'm back. Took me a little longer than expected, as listen #2 was interrupted by a work call (mom isn't letting child wear clothes that stepmom bought her...?). But I have heard it a few times now and I have a decent handle on it. The most important point to make right here at the start is that "Icehouse" is a great name for the song, since—according to the made up language of music criticism—I would definitely describe these synths as "icy." There's a fat bass note throughout, but then the high synthesizer notes noodle around on top of that, first quiet during the verses, then loud during the chorus. This is David Bowie trying to do a Chvrches song, if I had to use the "___ does ___" format of music comparison.
The lyrics aren't very specific. They speak vaguely about a girl waiting for her true love to return. Maybe the "icehouse" is a metaphor for despair? Like, feeling "cold" in the icehouse means giving up on love. It is explicitly said: "There is no love inside the icehouse." It's probably not meant to be taken as anything other then vivid imagery. Frontman Iva Davies wrote the song based on the cold apartment that he resided in at the time, and a mysterious house across the street where someone would be standing outside at weird hours of the night.
The video certainly adds some weight to the "this is just beautiful/strange imagery as opposed to being a story with a plot and characters" theory. We see corpses piled in wagons after a plague, maybe? And then some dead dude is suspended by a rope from a ceiling, and a woman crawls under him and curls up and goes to sleep? Or dies herself? Not sure, and I'm not sure I'm meant to know for sure.
You should know that when Icehouse was released, the band was known by the name "Flowers." Icehouse only changed their name after the song "Icehouse" came into existence. So you might see this listed as "the song 'Icehouse' by Flowers" occasionally, but that's wrong. That, in my opinion, is deadnaming the band. Look, it's not that big of a deal when it comes to bands, but I care about this kind of nuance when it comes to music categorization and tagging, and I say that the same rules apply here and they would for a transgender person. You change your name, and any reference to you and the things that you did, even if it occurred prior to the name change, still takes the name change into consideration. The new name is your real name, because you are choosing that name, instead of it being forced upon you. "Icehouse" is by Icehouse in the same way Fly is by the Chicks (excising the racist "Dixie"), "We R Who We R" is by Kesha (not Ke$ha), and "3AM" is by Matchbox Twenty (not Matchbook 20). Do I think Yusuf Islam is going to be offended if I call him Cat Stevens? No (his official website is catstevens.com, anyway). But it's just good practice as a music aficionado to retroactively adjust all music to whatever the artist wants to be called.
But what Davies didn't know was that the strange house across the street was actually a a half-way house for psychiatric and drug rehab patients. (For my IJ crew: picture Icehouse's Iva Davies hearing a lady yell "Help! Help!" all night long.) Which means that lines like "the devil lives inside the icehouse" had aged poorly almost immediately. But that's okay. Simple mistake borne out of creative license. If anything, this should teach Iva Davies a valuable lesson in letting the listener extract their own personal meaning from the song instead of imposing the "real meaning" on them.
That's probably the biggest lesson we've learned this summer throughout the entirety of the SSC project, no? That a song will bend to your will if you make it. We started with a list of prompts, and each prompt asked you to come up with a song that fit the description. Sometimes the fit was snug, or wonky, or akin to a square peg in a round hole, and so we took the proverbial hammer and bashed that motherfucking peg until it mashed into that motherfucking hole. Music is what you, the listener, make of it. Taken as a collective whole, we fucking made something of music this summer.
But and so usually these songs that are named after the band exist as some type of mission statement for the band. Think "Titus Andronicus" by Titus Andronicus: "Your life is over! Your life is over!" repeated ad nauseam. Think "Green Day" by Green Day: "Looks like I found something new." Think "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath: "Is it the end, my friend? / Satan's comin' 'round the bend." Think "Bad Company" by Black Company: umm...... "Bad company / and I can't deny / bad company"...? So I ask this now: what about "Icehouse" gives us an overarching view of Icehouse's purpose on this earth as the 87th best band in Australian history?
"There's no love inside the icehouse" is a brutal mission statement, the more you think about it. I mean, it makes sense musically, since there is absolutely no love, and no warmth, and no brightness or happiness or fun contained in any second of this song. It is sharp like a knife and it cuts you in a dark alleyway and then runs away as you lay there and the last thing you see is your frozen breath hanging over your face like a ghost. But that can't be what we think about the band itself, or else no one is going to want to listen to it.
"But Joe," you are yelling at your computer screen or more accurately your phone screen as you sit on a public toilet seat or park bench or municipal bus, "you're being obtuse if you think that this isn't just a character that the band is playing!" and I yell back through my own screen "You're right! Being icy cold was and is the hip thing to do! Hence the origins of the word 'cool'! Icehouse is literally and figuratively cool!" And once I calm down, I start to realize that maybe this is the mission statement.
I'd probably need to listen to more of Icehouse than just "Icehouse" twenty more times to know for sure. And once this summer is over, I'll have the time for it.
The lyrics aren't very specific. They speak vaguely about a girl waiting for her true love to return. Maybe the "icehouse" is a metaphor for despair? Like, feeling "cold" in the icehouse means giving up on love. It is explicitly said: "There is no love inside the icehouse." It's probably not meant to be taken as anything other then vivid imagery. Frontman Iva Davies wrote the song based on the cold apartment that he resided in at the time, and a mysterious house across the street where someone would be standing outside at weird hours of the night.
The video certainly adds some weight to the "this is just beautiful/strange imagery as opposed to being a story with a plot and characters" theory. We see corpses piled in wagons after a plague, maybe? And then some dead dude is suspended by a rope from a ceiling, and a woman crawls under him and curls up and goes to sleep? Or dies herself? Not sure, and I'm not sure I'm meant to know for sure.
You should know that when Icehouse was released, the band was known by the name "Flowers." Icehouse only changed their name after the song "Icehouse" came into existence. So you might see this listed as "the song 'Icehouse' by Flowers" occasionally, but that's wrong. That, in my opinion, is deadnaming the band. Look, it's not that big of a deal when it comes to bands, but I care about this kind of nuance when it comes to music categorization and tagging, and I say that the same rules apply here and they would for a transgender person. You change your name, and any reference to you and the things that you did, even if it occurred prior to the name change, still takes the name change into consideration. The new name is your real name, because you are choosing that name, instead of it being forced upon you. "Icehouse" is by Icehouse in the same way Fly is by the Chicks (excising the racist "Dixie"), "We R Who We R" is by Kesha (not Ke$ha), and "3AM" is by Matchbox Twenty (not Matchbook 20). Do I think Yusuf Islam is going to be offended if I call him Cat Stevens? No (his official website is catstevens.com, anyway). But it's just good practice as a music aficionado to retroactively adjust all music to whatever the artist wants to be called.
But what Davies didn't know was that the strange house across the street was actually a a half-way house for psychiatric and drug rehab patients. (For my IJ crew: picture Icehouse's Iva Davies hearing a lady yell "Help! Help!" all night long.) Which means that lines like "the devil lives inside the icehouse" had aged poorly almost immediately. But that's okay. Simple mistake borne out of creative license. If anything, this should teach Iva Davies a valuable lesson in letting the listener extract their own personal meaning from the song instead of imposing the "real meaning" on them.
That's probably the biggest lesson we've learned this summer throughout the entirety of the SSC project, no? That a song will bend to your will if you make it. We started with a list of prompts, and each prompt asked you to come up with a song that fit the description. Sometimes the fit was snug, or wonky, or akin to a square peg in a round hole, and so we took the proverbial hammer and bashed that motherfucking peg until it mashed into that motherfucking hole. Music is what you, the listener, make of it. Taken as a collective whole, we fucking made something of music this summer.
But and so usually these songs that are named after the band exist as some type of mission statement for the band. Think "Titus Andronicus" by Titus Andronicus: "Your life is over! Your life is over!" repeated ad nauseam. Think "Green Day" by Green Day: "Looks like I found something new." Think "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath: "Is it the end, my friend? / Satan's comin' 'round the bend." Think "Bad Company" by Black Company: umm...... "Bad company / and I can't deny / bad company"...? So I ask this now: what about "Icehouse" gives us an overarching view of Icehouse's purpose on this earth as the 87th best band in Australian history?
"There's no love inside the icehouse" is a brutal mission statement, the more you think about it. I mean, it makes sense musically, since there is absolutely no love, and no warmth, and no brightness or happiness or fun contained in any second of this song. It is sharp like a knife and it cuts you in a dark alleyway and then runs away as you lay there and the last thing you see is your frozen breath hanging over your face like a ghost. But that can't be what we think about the band itself, or else no one is going to want to listen to it.
"But Joe," you are yelling at your computer screen or more accurately your phone screen as you sit on a public toilet seat or park bench or municipal bus, "you're being obtuse if you think that this isn't just a character that the band is playing!" and I yell back through my own screen "You're right! Being icy cold was and is the hip thing to do! Hence the origins of the word 'cool'! Icehouse is literally and figuratively cool!" And once I calm down, I start to realize that maybe this is the mission statement.
I'd probably need to listen to more of Icehouse than just "Icehouse" twenty more times to know for sure. And once this summer is over, I'll have the time for it.
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