Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 163: Nate

Prompt: "A song that reminds you of your favorite recipe"

Selected by Nate

"Grind"

The Jesus Lizard

Rack, 2024

Here is an interesting article about the author Kazuo Ishiguro, which basically says that he is a) brilliant and b) writes the same novel over and over again. The whole thing is a good read, but here's the part for today:

"I think it is perfectly justified [for a literary novelist to repeat themself]," Ishiguro told The Guardian. "You keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time."

You keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time. Beautifully stated, beautiful defense of stylistic repetition. This practice—you keep biting at the apple until you hit it—is also in play for the collected works of Greg Dulli. Afghan Whigs in the '80s and '90s, Twilight Singers / the Gutter Twins in the 2000s, the Whigs again in the 2020s, a solo album tossed in there for good measure. Dulli's trick is reductive on paper: he takes a love of Motown and soul and turns what is subtle in those songs—the agony and heartbreak so often masked by uptempo dance music—and pushes it to the forefront. He basically does what all white artists have done since the theft of rock and roll, though with much more deference and respect to the culture that has inspired him for whatever that's worth. He's filtered this perspective through grunge albums, through gothica, through noir, through more maximal textures, but at the core is a guy with a massive pen who makes every ache and every pain feel real and reflective. He sings your life, if you let him.

It's hard to find a modern analog to Dulli. His writing is as sharp as anyone's, but his performance of his material is what ultimately sets him afield and apart from other would-be champions; the full-throated, chest-forward, almost embarrassing way he embodies his version of love-hate and hate-love. The era in which he came up was allergic to engaging, and the era in which he continued wasn't really looking for white rock artists (especially ones stealing—openly and lovingly, but stealing all the same—from non-white source material). He is a bit like indie-rock Meatloaf, so committed is he to his stories of drugs, fucking, betrayal, and crime. Put simply: who in the modern day can mean it this much while writing this well? It'd be nice to think that more people tried to swim in his wake, that someone like Chappell Roan or Dana Margolin or even Christian Holden, thinks of Dulli when they put pen to paper, when the red light comes on in the studio. The citizens of Puke listen to more music than anyone, so if this prescription can be filled, step into the light. In the meantime, there's a vast catalog of the real shit to be found. Now you know.

An unordered list of Dulli essential tracks to listen to while making this deep dish recipe. They all sound the same, they all sound incredible:

• Twilight Singers — "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" (Nina Simone cover).
• Afghan Whigs — "Kiss the Floor" (grunge era)
• Afghan Whigs — "My Curse" (complete mental breakdown era)
• Afghan Whigs — "Crime Scene Part One" (U2-as-Raymond Chandler era)
• Afghan Whigs — "66" (rockin' soul revival era)
• Afghan Whigs — "Algiers" (cowboy era)
• Afghan Whigs — "Toy Automatic" (aging gracefully era)
• Afghan Whigs — "A Line of Shots" (ascending to Heaven era)
• Twilight Singers — "The Killer" (movie soundtrack era)
• Twilight Singers — "The Lure Would Prove Too Much" (slow dance era)
• The Gutter Twins — "God's Children" (legends never die era)