Slow Down (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

TV en Français, our 2014 masterstroke, had ten tracks, which Sherlock Holmes would assure you must mean there is a track eight. That Holmes! That Sherlock Holmes! He’d say it in a way that seemed casual, but something in his tone would let you know he thinks you’re an idiot.

The problem is, with Sherlock Holmes, if you were then to say, “No, dude, I know it has a track eight. That’s not hard to figure out,” he’d do his little snort and raise his little eyebrows at you and go, “Ah,” in a way that clearly means, “Yes, now you know it has eight tracks, because I just told you so.” Fuckin’ Sherlock Holmes. Fuck that guy. His whole game is basically going around saying super-obvious shit, then when people say “No duh!,” saying, “Right, well now you know, because you listened to what I just said.”

How about this, Sherlock Holmes: if you’re so smart, answer this one question. (Shh! Nobody tell him!) Here it is, dude: What is *the name* of track eight on TV en Français? Huh? Eh, Holmes?

Asshole. He’s got nothin’.

Alright, everyone together — let’s tell this jabroni the name of the song. On three. One, two, three,

SLOOWWWW DOWWWWWN

It’s “Slow Down,” Holmes, ya stupid idiot. Here’s an early demo version…

Taking a little nap after recording that demo. Brooklyn, ca. 2011.

KEITH: Every We Are Scientists record has got to have one big dumb rock song on it, a song that focuses way more on big riffs and thumping drums and lots of distortion than on, say, a catchy chorus. I’m generally a guy who places the greatest importance on big hooks, probably to a fault, and so we only write one or two songs per album, maximum, that exist solely because they’re delightful to rock out to. The relatively trifling hooks are outweighed by how much goddamn fun they are to play.

With Love and Squalor had “Callbacks.” Brain Thrust Mastery had “Dinosaurs.” Barbara had… I don’t know, maybe “Central AC?” And TV En Français has good old “Slow Down.” Just a nasty old rock song with no aspirations, really, beyond wilding out.

Does this categorization of “Slow Down” give you pause, Chris? Does the fact that it was the only song in my listed pantheon of “dumb WAS rock tunes” to have a video made for it (Callbacks doesn’t count; we made a video for every song on WL&S) mean it transcends this category? Is this category even something that must be transcended??

CHRIS: Keith, you’ve incisively described a cohort of songs that yes, does exist; that yes, we are very good at (not sure you claimed this); and of which “Slow Down” is perhaps the apotheotic exemplar. And why does “Slow Down” get the crown? I believe you’re right to suggest that our giving it a video meant something. I bet it won’t surprise you if I say that for me “Dinosaurs” is the greater song, and yet even I am willing to let “Slow Down” take top prize in this bracket. Why? Because “Dinosaurs” is simply too damn catchy to really qualify! 🔥

But yes, this is a huge category — not because its membership is numerous, rather because it is momentous — and it deserves a name. I suggest Janor Swabwos. That’s an acronym for “Just a nasty old rock song, without aspirations beyond wilding out.” (I predict this term finds immediate purchase in the vernacular; it will be used in The Guardian before Dec. 31st of this year.) 

Here’s a question, if we can take a quick detour before returning to the matter immediately at hand: What are some of the great janor swabwos in rock music? 1b: Can a janor swabwo exist outside of “rock”? 

[NB: We did not make a video for “Slow Down.” These two guys are either experiencing a swoon of wishful thinking, a bout of mass hallucination, or early-onset, alcohol-induced dementia. Probably a healthy blend of all three. –Ed.]

KEITH: Huh, you know, I’ve spent so much of my life musing over our janor swabwos, that I’ve had precious little time to ponder everyone else’s. The first song that popped into my head was The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” which is big and dumb and fun as hell and just about as lunkheaded ad the Beatles were apt to get. For anyone else, though, “Helter Skelter” is the apotheosis of pop songwriting.  Incidentally, I’d say that the janor swabwo on our title-referencing album Helter Seltzer is “Headlights”(?). There are probably better examples of janor swabwos on The White Album -  I’m thinking of “Wild Honey Pie” or “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey,” although, again, the latter has got a big old vocal hook plus a rad guitar stinger, to boot. So…huh.

Arctic Monkeys are pretty big practitioners of the janor swabwo, especially in their middle, Queens Of The Stone Age-influenced era. Songs like “Library Pictures” are just big ol’ riffs with impressionistic lyrics that kinda seem designed largely to get pint glasses flinging around the arena. A sizable chunk of Humbug and many many of their b-sides are devoted to muscular little janor swabwos, I’d wage.

Speaking of janor swabwo gluts, I’m gonna go ahead and say that most of Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy is made up of janor swabwos, but in this instance I mean that in a pointedly derogatory way.  Kinda seems like the boys were out of song ideas but knew that the fantastic “Corduroy” and the execrable "Better Man” would keep them afloat until they could write another good album. Spoiler: they never did. 

Gotcha, Pearl Jam.

Other great janor swabwos, though, include: 

“Bugman,” by Blur
“Yuk Foo” by Wolf Alice
Pretty much every song on the first three Liars albums
maybe “Oh No” by Wet Leg?
“Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen

These are just off the top of my head.  You — and, of course, the readers — are encouraged to weigh in with your own candidates.

CHRIS: Yes yes! You’ve run down some excellent examples. I agree with you about Vitalogy, though I loved that album at the time, and revisiting it now I gotta say that bona fide janor swabwos like “Spin the Black Circle” and “Whipping” are sounding pretty good — they may have aged better than the singles. Indeed, janor swabwos could as a rule have healthier shelf lives than their more clever companions, precisely because their guilelessness is eternally appealing. Pop songs that seem fresh and ingenious on release day will almost always feel obvious in the unjust glare of hindsight, after the trick is exposed, though they may remain beloved for other reasons — remarkable songcraft or playing or singing, piercing lyrics, nostalgia, etc. 

IT’S A THEORY! 

Now let me add to the list. Some classics jump right out — “Search and Destroy,” “Ace of Spades,” “Anarchy in the U.K.,” and all Ramones songs are the sound of a band fucking around and having fun, exulting in the performance’s flaws. Bands like White Stripes, The Hives, and (early) QOTSA appear to be explicit attempts to revive that earlier sound, and I would count “Fell In Love With a Girl,” “Tick Tick Boom,” and “Sick, Sick, Sick” as successes. 

Violent Femmes memorably brought the fun-over-fastidiousness approach to folk music, or applied folk arrangements to garage rock compositions, or whatever it is they did. “Add It Up” is a janor swabwo. 

We’re focusing on this as a rock’n’roll thing — and I believe that the ethos is more central to Rock than elsewhere — but you do see people take the janor swabwo approach in other genres. What do you think about these:

“Get Up Offa That Thing,” James Brown
“Firestarter,” The Prodigy
“It’s Tricky,” Run DMC
“Sabotage,” Beastie Boys (okay, this is a rock song)
“The Rite of Spring,” your man Igor

I think it would be easy to name a bunch of jazz music and also ska music, but I decline to do so. 

KEITH: Oh, yeah, you’ve got some damn good ones in there!  “Sabotage” may be the zenith of all janor swabwos. I do feel, though, that your citing the Ramones and Violent Femmes demonstrates a slight divergence in our definition of the genre. Those two bands write big ol’ HOOKS, I say. “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” and “The KKK Took My Baby Away” have choruses to make Brian Wilson blush. The “day after day, I get angry…” bit in “Add It Up” is a proper hook, to me, worthy of a hit Nirvana single (Nirvana, also a band not afraid of the janor swabwo — “Very Ape” kind of invented QOTSA’s approach to the mode).

In my mind, a proper janor swabwo has no real chorus to speak of; no vocal hook that you’d hang your pop critic’s hat on (pop critics, as a rule, are always wearing doofy hats). They’re *just* riffs, *just* groove, *just* raucous vibe. I’m thinking now of a notion that maybe I’m misattributing to Noel Gallagher, who himself has (inadvertently?) written his fair share of janor swabwos. It’s the idea that a “real” song (whatever that means to a guy whose lyrics routinely suggest that they were hastily written over the five-minute cab ride to the studio) is one that can be effectively communicated with vocals and an acoustic guitar. 

Now, obviously that’s a wildly myopic view of songwriting, and one to which I don’t subscribe in the slightest. But it DOES help me edge closer to my personal definition of a janor swabwo (yeah, I’ve got a personal definition for a term you invented like ten paragraphs ago), as a song that just doesn’t really have a lot of meat in a solo acoustic version. Again, this isn’t a slight! Like, are we really gonna listen to a solo acoustic version of our magnificent song “Dinosaurs”? Can you stroll down the street whistling the tune to 75% of QOTSTA’s stuff? Does “Ace Of Spades,” one of the coolest songs ever written,  mean anything at all when delivered by Lemmy and, like, a ukulele? Can I please hear that and find out?

Shit, I don’t know!

CHRIS: The Noel Gallagher Acoustic Test of Song Quality is an interesting litmus here, and while I don’t think it’s unrelated, I agree with you that we’re looking at this a bit differently, you and I. I know that — to hearken waaaayayyyyyy back to your initial entry in this conversation — we’re supposed to be talking about songs with “relatively trifling hooks,” which focus "way more on big riffs and thumping drums and lots of distortion than on, say, a catchy chorus.” And I agree with that, as far as it goes. I think the place where you and I are diverging is: to me it’s okay if a janor swabwo happens to have a catchy chorus, it’s just that that can’t be the primary appeal. The appeal has to be the exuberance and visceral energy of the performance, rather than technical complexity or pop sensibilities. 

For you, I believe, hooks are disqualifiers, but I want to suggest that’s dangerous, because melodic hookiness is a plastic concept — at least as subjective as physical attractiveness is in people, say. Now, most would agree that Brad Pitt is a hotboi, and that Rihanna is a hotboi, and that Putin is a dirtpug, but certainly not everyone! And yes, right-thinking, tasteful listeners do backflips when they hear Weezer’s green album, but not everyone! Wildly, not everyone!! What I’m thinking is that we may be able to carve out a fairly objective definition for the janor swabwo that goes something like this… 

1) What they sound like: a performance that prioritizes energy and attitude over technical proficiency. Raw > Polished. Intense > Laid back. 

2) Their purpose: cathartic for both the performers and the listeners who like them; can provide a change of pace in live performances or on albums; may also allow musicians to experiment and push boundaries without worrying about commercial appeal. 

I may be getting out over my skis a little with that last bit. I certainly don’t think experimentation is fundamental to janor swabwos, but it occurs to me that it may be what’s going on sometimes. In any case, I think I’m backing off my claim that The Ramones practice this art, not so much because I agree with you that their stuff is too hooky, but because I don’t think a band can play janors exclusively — to me, if that’s all you play, they aren’t really janor swabwos for you. (I’m not 100% sure this coheres, but it feels correct.)

Potentially provocative statement: Stone Temple Pilots were incapable of recording a janor swabwo, despite having numerous candidates-on-paper, because the DeLeo brothers were too proficient/had sticks too far up their asses. 

KEITH: I’m happy to shake hands in front of the U.N. photographers over this framework for the JS. Were we having this conversation over five or six frozen Long Island Iced Teas at Tempkins, I almost certainly would start to puff up like a beta alley cat and claim that even if people can’t agree that a particular hook is actually hooky, you can (and here, I would be very drunk and convinced of this objective truth about subjective art) pretty much always tell when someone wants to write a hook. So, my only amendment — which I think dances nicely with your proposal that an artist who traffics exclusively in the janor swabwo is paradoxically not making janor swabwos at all, they’re just making “their songs” — is if an artist *generally* writes hooks but in this particular case has seemed to willfully forgo that element, that makes a janor swabwo? 

You’re probably right that that’s still too subjective, though. Eddie Vedder probably thinks that the “chorus(?)” of “Whipping” could have slotted right onto Please Please Me, the poor guy.

I like your example of the DeLeos. With Stone Temple Pilots, they exclusively deliver songs with hooks, as far as I can recall without bothering to rifle through their catalogue. Some would say the hooks catch, some dummies would say they’re trite and limp, but almost nobody would argue that they were attempted. Then, check out their side project Talk Show with STP drummer Eric Kretz and some random, vaguely Weiland-sounding singer. While you can’t HEAR a single sensible hook, you know they’re supposed to be there. The songs have changes that suggest there ought to be hooks, but they suck. They just are awful. But these songs aren’t janor swabos. They’re just bad. Bad bad songs. RIP Scott Weiland, legit genius.

CHRIS: I can sleep at night with this consensus. In the spirit of agreeing and then offering another little pushback, though, I’m not sure you can always tell when someone is trying to write a hook. I agree with you that it’s usually pretty apparent when a hook is attempted and whiffs — somehow that’s more clear — but it’s a problem when something just ends up being catchy, without any real machinations on the performers part. Julian Casablancas seems like a good example of someone whose choruses frequently end up being very sticky, but were maybe not carefully designed to be — they’re often melodically very uncomplex, is the problem. “New York City Cops,” let’s say — or think of the chorus of “Lump,” by Presidents of USA — is hard to describe as hooky on paper, but it ended up hooky. And of course excessive melodic complexity can easily be the enemy of hookiness; I guess my point would just be that it’s impossible to accurately define even a range of melodic complexity within which “hookiness” lives. Other elements are always at play, some of them mysterious. 

Final question: Did Scott Weiland manage to stumble onto janor swabwo territory with Velvet Revolver? Surely those G’n’R dudes knew how to walk that walk…?

KEITH: Well, I’m not going to lie: in the hours since our last correspondence, I DID go to Tempkins. I didn’t have the frozen Long Island Iced Tea, (which I now regard as a mistake) but I did get drunk, and so you and I are going have to fistfight outside of Tempkins later over this claim that both “NYC Cops” and “Lump” don’t both have explicit, pointed stabs at big chorus hooks (successfully, in both cases, I’d say). 

Perhaps, though, this just proves your earlier claim that we as third-party critics can’t claim to gauge a songwriter’s hook-intention (I’ve personally always thought that Casablancas, in his Strokes work, does nothing but angle hard for sweet hooks). Maybe this basic lack of hook-consensus obviates our entire idea of the janor swabwo? Maybe Eddie Vedder thinks “Slow Down” has our biggest chorus?!?? 

CHRIS: “NYC Cops”’ chorus is just the chorus of “Helter Skelter” with the little “they ain’t too smaaaaart” tagged onto the end. 

What a mess. I need a frozen Negroni!

KEITH: And, in fact, “Slow Down,” the song that started this whole theory, features the same structure as both of those (the triple repetition, with the “NYC Cops”-style tag at the end) but the vocal melody is more melodically complex, which according to my theory should suggest hook-intent. My entire philosophy was a house of cards that has tumbled around me. Once a king, I’m now a jester sitting in the ruins of my castle of lies. 

Frozen Negronis are on me, friend. Frozen Negronis are on me.

TV en Français producer Chris Coady mans the red Record button while Keith lays down lead guitar. The Magic Shop, NYC, 2012.

Knee Jerks

Where we offer thoughts on a few recent releases.

Claims Keith: “All The Same,” Fat Dog: This is mainly one for our non-UK readership, as sources tell me that Fat Dog’s more recent single, “Running,” has been getting pretty heavy support on BBC, which is wild. Can you imagine this stuff being played on American radio, instead of more Nickleback? We need state-sponsored radio over here, so our DJs can also not give a fuck.

A lot of Sarah Kinsley’s previous stuff hasn’t really rung my bell. It’s all been nice, but that’s kinda been the problem — she’s often been a little too prim, too pretty, too safe. Her new song “Realms” represents a very small step in an appealing direction, to me. Granted, it ain’t exactly a janor swabwo (WHATEVER THAT IS!), but it’s at least a little vibier, has some jauntier rhythms and squigglier bass work. Somebody give this lady a Tori Amos record and let’s see her get really weird on her next LP.

Cries Chris: Gem County’s latest single, “Thought So,” might be my favorite they’ve released from the fast approaching debut album. It’s no secret that we know these fools — all you have to do is look at one of their press photos to see that Paul Rudd is in the band, and then, a few seconds later, realize that can’t be Paul Rudd — this guy’s too tall — it must be Keith Carne, our drummer. Don’t let that color my praise. Carne, Brian, and Bestamo are doing great work right now, and their psychedelic jazzy soft rock slots right in with The Current Sound. If you can’t listen to this while you drive up the canyon, that canyon doesn’t deserve to be drove. (I know: “driven.” Drove sounds better.)

I wasn’t hip to BADBADNOTGOOD until earlier this year, about a decade after they established themselves as a crew every right-living music lover should know. My — get this — bad.(!) Well, they seem to be in full flower. They’ve released five EPs this year, and just dropped a new full-length called Mid Spiral. It rocks. I mean, don’t get the wrong idea: it’s jazz. But I love it. Like all of this year’s EPs (and probably all the rest of their bounteous catalog), you can really throw this stuff on the speaker and just hang out. Tell me I’m wrong!

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) came out digitally June 28th. The physical editions, held long past their original delivery date by a bung-up at the vinyl pressing plant, are at long last shipping *this week.* To order TVeF on double-vinyl, or get the zine, the keychain, the other stuff — simply click here.