Here Comes the Rain Again

It's raining this morning in San Diego, something which doesn't happen a whole lot. I don't believe in omens or portents...and yet given how dark this day is, it's hard not to lend it a certain amount of credence.

This is not the darkest time our great nation has ever seen.

Just the darkest in well over a century.

Things will get better. It's just going to suck until they do.

Girls

So my six-year-old comes up to me as I'm watching the new David Bowie video.

"Why can't girls be in bands?" she asks.

I'm not thrown by this. A few of her three older sisters have asked this when they were about her age, so I'm feeling fairly confident I know how to answer.

"Of course girls can be in bands," I say. "You want to see some examples?"

"Yes, please," she replies eagerly, the unprompted politeness indicating she really means it.

So we pull up the YouTube and start taking a tour. We view some Kim Gordon fronting Sonic Youth, then watch Tina Weymouth driving Talking Heads, which leads to my viewing this utterly charming video for the first time ever and how have I never seen it before and doesn't it just make it all the sadder that Byrne left a band this great?



We check out Chrissie Hynde leading the Pretenders and then I go back and we watch some Janis and some Joni and the Wilson sisters from Heart and then first Stevie followed by Christine with Fleetwood Mac. By now YouTube seems to have caught on to what we're doing because the recommended videos in the sidebar are tending to be conveniently on point.

She enjoys seeing artists she's heard many times but never actually seen, such as Cyndi Lauper, Aretha Franklin and Kathleen Edwards.



Perhaps showing she's really her father's daughter—and, just as crucially, her mother's—she loves Shirley Manson with Garbage.



We've spent a very pleasant hour this way and it's about time to set the table for dinner, so I agree to click on one more video. She points to the one she wants. Barely thinking—clearly—just remembering that I always loved the song and haven't heard it in years, I click on it. Her eyes light up. Naturally, it's her favorite of them all. Long blonde hair, glamorous dresses and a pink guitar: what's not to like, right?



I am in so much trouble in a few years.

Thirteen

For a long time I was embarrassed to admit I didn't love "Thirteen."



I thought it was fine, but I'd heard so much about how incredibly wonderful it was and knew that an appreciation of Big Star was an absolute necessity when it came to proving your cred that when I finally heard it I thought, well...okay. It's nice, but...

But then I heard Elliott Smith's cover



and then Garbage's



and those won me over and allowed me to better appreciate the original.

Except. I still found the song inherently creepy and just didn't get how that wasn't the focus of every discussion about the song.

And it was only today I learned that apparently Alex Chilton wrote the song...when he was thirteen years old. And that the song that I always assumed was a grown man singing to a barely teenaged girl was, in fact, from the point of view of a barely teenaged boy singing to a barely teenaged girl, despite the fact that the singer I heard singing the song was obviously a grown man.

In which case...yeah. Not creepy at all. Just lovely and forlorn and wistful and sublimely painful.

(Of course, that makes Garbage's wonderful cover kinda weird, since Shirley Manson can convey many things, but naïve and confused and wistful barely teenaged is not one of them. For all Manson has admitted to more than her share of personal problems in interviews, her singing persona tends more towards the "don't even think about messing with me, 'cuz I'm stronger and I will beat you like a rented mule." I suspect she wasn't even able to convey naïve and confused and wistful back when she was thirteen. If she ever was.)