Tag Archives: stuck

#1300: Green Day – Stuck with Me

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Green Day’s Insomniac will be out for 30 years this coming October. Not like I can say its initial release was something I was aware of at the time, being that I would have only been six months old. But having been a fan of the band since 2005 and followed their work up until the Uno! Dos! Tré days, becoming familiar with the majority of their discography in the process, I can firmly state that Insomniac is my favourite album. I don’t think this should be any kind of breaking news to anyone reading, ’cause I’m fairly sure I’ve said the same thing in a previous Green Day-Insomniac post. But if you are a first-time reader, then, hey, my favourite album of Green Day’s is Insomniac. It’s still their most in-your-face straight-out punk record they’ve done, filled with self-deprecation. That attitude strikes a chord with me. And ‘Stuck with Me’ is a highlight from there.

Me and ‘Stuck with Me’ go way, way back. Most likely back to those days of ’05 when I was really getting into Green Day at the time. Their official website allowed you to watch all of the music videos for their singles through Windows Media Player. The track, being a single from Insomniac – second after ‘Geek Stink Breath’ – got a music video of its own. One that I can only describe as the artwork for Insomniac come to life contrasted with a monochrome performance of the band playing the track in a small room. I didn’t have the greatest of Internet connections back in those days. When it came to watching music videos on Windows Media Player, a lot of the time was spent waiting on buffering so maybe an additional few seconds could play before it would stop again. I want to say ‘Stuck with Me’ was one of the rare, rare moments when the video played the whole way through without stopping. But that might be my mind playing tricks on me. But simple and plain, it was those repeated views/listens that got me into the track, and it’s stuck around in the mental plane ever since.

All this time, I’ve never sat down and pondered on what this song could be about. A quick skim through the lyrics, I get a sense of someone who feels comfort in being something of an outsider. Or someone who spits in the faces of the upper classes or phonies and takes great pride in it. They’re all right being the “scrub” they might be perceived to be. But at the same time, they’re also not all right. Perhaps mentally, physically, it’s not really stated. Most likely the former, when considering the subject matter of other songs on the record. Whatever lyrically is going on, it goes hand in hand with the constant rush of energy the music provides. The opening downward riff is an instant hook. And if you’re looking for some good bass guitar work, it just so happens that Insomniac is arguably the record on which bassist Mike Dirnt played a lot of his best lines. Before the last chorus on ‘Stuck with Me’, Dirnt gets his own almost-solo on his instrument accompanied by an appropriate thrashing on the drums by Tré Cool. Like a lot of good punk songs, it’s over before you probably want to get a little more into it. I think it gives more than enough in the time it lasts for. I could listen to it all the time.

#1299: The Darkness – Stuck in a Rut

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And with this track right here, the end of The Darkness appearing on this blog is marked. We had a good run. There’s a small chance you’d have realised that all the songs by the band I’ve given my thoughts about are all from their 2003 debut album Permission to Land. That’s because I, at least, still have an amazing time listening through it. Plus, I’ve had it since I was eight or nine and the sentimental value’s very high. I’ve said in passing that The Darkness got me into rock music, and it’s the truth. That whole Permission to Land era… Songs like ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’, ‘Love Is Only a Feeling’, ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)’. If it weren’t for them, I’d probably be casually listening to the UK Top 40. So thank God for The Darkness, honestly.

‘Stuck in a Rut’ is the seventh song on Permission to Land, starting on-beat straight after the song before it finishes. I have a good memory of listening to this one on my Playstation 2 a long, long time ago. Years later, I returned to it and found that the melody of the chorus had never left my head. The track is about a burning desire to get in a car of any kind and leave your hometown without looking back. Three of the original members of the band are from Lowestoft, a coastal town in the Southeast of England. I’ve never been there myself, but as Justin Hawkins refers to it as a ‘shithole’ and a ‘sty’, the negative reception doesn’t provide an incentive to go and visit. “Oh, kiss my arse, kiss my arse goodbye” is still a hilarious opening line to me, even though it’s meant in all seriousness. Hawkins uses the American pronunciation of “aluminium” in it too, which confused me when I was younger, but I can understand now because of the syllable numbers. And like all the other songs on the LP, he delivers his vocals with that trademark falsetto and high pitch that you could only imitate and never replicate.

Something I’ve noticed about this song is how much rawer in terms of production it sounds in comparison to the rest of the songs on Permission… While tracks like ‘Growing on Me’ or ‘Friday Night’ have these “big”, layered guitar elements to them. ‘…Rut’, on the other hand, sounds like it was a one-take performance captured live in the studio. The mix overall sounds a lot more closed in than usual, almost as if they’re playing in a small room. If that’s the case, I think it makes the track all that more impressive, especially when considering Hawkins’s vocal performance. Of course, there’s the high pitches and everything. But then there’s the insanity he captures in that adlibbed bridge where he begs his master to kill him, and the last “Yeah” in the song that faultlessly breaks into a whistle tone. It’s awesome, awesome stuff. A deep cut that’s always worth a listen. To me. But it could be to you as well.

#1298: U2 – Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

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1,298 songs in, and we reach the first U2 song. It’ll be the only one, though, sorry. There are people out there who despise the band, mostly because they don’t like Bono. Me? I don’t have anything massive against them. I’m neither here nor there. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan. But they do have some fine, fine songs. When I really started getting into alternative/rock music in about 2004, it was during a time when the video for ‘Vertigo’ was playing almost every day on MTV2. The How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb era. And nine-year-old me thought it was a cool song. So I can sort of thank U2 for getting me into the genre a little more. But today’s song isn’t from that era of the band. It’s from the one that preceded it a good four years earlier. In 2000, U2 returned from an experimental phase during the ’90s with a back-to-basics rock album in All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ – the second song on there – was released as its second single in 2001.

And this is one of those occasions where I have a clear, clear memory of seeing its music video on TV during that time, even though I would have only been five years old. It was playing on The Box, which was kinda the mainstream UK pop music video channel of the time, and there was Bono on the TV screen rolling around on the floor over and over again. And because I was a child and still had years until my voice dropped, whenever I tried to sing, “Stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it,” that “can’t get out of it” part was too low for my register. I didn’t have the diaphragm for it yet. For the longest time, in the back of my mind, I thought that if I was able to sing that phrase, it must have meant that the process of puberty had finally happened. I can gladly say at the age of 30, I can sing along to the track just fine. It wasn’t until a few years back that I revisited the song, gave it a few more listens with that core memory flashing in the brain and realized that I liked it a bunch.

Think it’s common knowledge that the track was written as a tribute to Michael Hutchence, a good friend of Bono’s, who was famously known for being the original lead singer for the rock band INXS. Hutchence passed away in 1997 through suicide, the action of which is kind of alluded to by Bono in the song’s bridge (“I was unconscious, half asleep” / “I wasn’t jumping, for me it was a fall” / “It’s a long way down to nothing at all”). Bono, saddened by what happened, wrote ‘Stuck in a Moment…’ as a things-he-wished-he-could-have-said song. He expresses his admiration for Hutchence and is still effected by him even with absence, but wishes he could have told him that whatever tough times he was going through, they would eventually pass and there was no need to feel so down. Guitarist The Edge also gets a moment on the lead vocal near the song’s end with the falsetto on the “And if the night runs over…” section. Though funnily, it gets pushed back into the mix to make way for Bono’s adlibbing. I like this one a lot. A track that reminds you to reach out to your friends in times of trouble. Or just on a frequent basis. ‘Cause you never know what could be happening.