H�sker D� - Makes No Sense At All

In the mid-1980s there was one very special kind of sound that ruled my soul. It was the sonic equivalent of a buzzsaw and went by various names: feedback, distortion, Psychocandy, and this one by Minneapolis’ favorite sons. It is the sonic template which leads ultimately to My Bloody Valentine, but we get ahead of ourselves. Famed sociologist and rock critic Simon Frith described the phenomenon thusly in Music for Pleasure:

From the start American hard-core musicians were formalists, less concerned than British bands with social and media gestures, more enraged by the constrictions of pop music itself. H�sker D�’s cover versions�”Ticket to Ride” and “Eight Miles High”�reinterpret psychedelic pop as music in the throes of collapse. The tunes are deconstructed, turned into grinding noise�which is how this music was originally heard live anyway. To get the argument, play The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl (the screaming never stops) against H�sker D�’s Flip Your Wig or The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy.

You can extend this argument to listening to classic pop on the am dial where basic road features like highway overpasses cause massive distortion and interference due t amplitude disruption. In eulogizing the late John Peel in The Guardian, My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields’ backs up my assertion: “When I first listened to him, in Ireland�and I’ve still got loads of tapes of that music�the reception wasn’t very good and there was all this phasing, it made music sound much weirder than it was. Did that have an effect on me? That I heard all this great British music through distortion and phase? Very possibly.” So what about this glorious noise?

In the case of “Makes No Sense At All,” even Grant Hart’s opening drum salvo seems masked in a haze. And then there’s the guitar and bass work, much of which seems to be so buried in the mix it literally sound like its behind the singers in another dimension of sight and sound. And its all in the service of 2:46 of perfectly crafted pop sugar melodies and sentiments. If ever there were a song to insistently pogo around a room or at least bob your head to or at least. This is the one that should have been their first major label single if only �

A story of dysfunctional love, Bob Mould’s lyrics crisply discuss the control issues of an anonymous significant other. It’s perhaps appropriate that the 7 inch release of this record had as its flip a brazen cover of Minneapolis’ favorite daughter’s theme song, “Love is All Around,” yup the one being played when Mary Richards expresses her independence by flinging that hat into the air and spinning around deliriously. Flip your wig indeed!

[buy stuff here]