The Hydrogen Jukebox: "Boys on the Radio"
Heavily borrowing a conceit from the Sound Opinions podcast, I start creating a jukebox with some of my favorite tracks starting with a power pop-y cut off of Hole's 1998 album Celebrity Skin.
While my countdowns have become a staple of this newsletter (we’ve had ones on the Grateful Dead, Steely Dan, Bruce Springsteen, and we’re currently in the midst of a U2 countdown), I want to also have a space to discuss some of my favorite songs not in the contest of an artist’s entire discography.
Now, I admit I’m borrowing pretty freely here from Sound Opinions Desert Island Jukebox conceit in which the two hosts, Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, pick songs they would put on their “desert island jukebox” aka the songs they would want to hear if they were stuck on a desert island.
I’ll at least have the dignity to call mine something different; consequently, my jukebox will be the Hydrogen Jukebox, which takes it’s name from a line in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox
But this is just a chance for me to go through and highlight some of my many favorite songs in the annals of popular music. These are the songs that I would include if I was constructing my own jukebox and putting on my favorite tracks.
The first song I’m putting on there is a track by Courtney Love’s band Hole. Perhaps another by-product of Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explain the 90’s podcast and reading Charles Cross’ Kurt Cobain biography is that I’ve started digging into those 90s grunge/alternative bands I didn’t really spend that much time with on the first go-round. I think I even had this song pointed out to me for the first time on the episode of 60 Songs that focused on Hole’s “Doll Parts.”
That song is “Boys on the Radio.”
“Boys on the Radio” feels like a shift and progression in Hole’s sound, yet it does not feel out of step. From an article on Celebrity Skin at Grammy.com:
In an era when pop was still very much considered a dirty word, Hole brazenly refused to be shackled by the music industry's self-appointed tastemakers. They pursued a sound which owed just as much to the harmony-laden soft rock of Rumors-era Fleetwood Mac as the caustic grunge of 1994 predecessor Live Through This.
“Boys on the Radio” is an example of this, a positively power pop-y tune dressed up in the trappings of grunge (though you don’t need to go far to get from power pop to grunge; I mean, Kurt Cobain loved Get the Knack).
The pre-chorus and chorus are so hooky and highlight Love’s pop melodic sensibilities.
All the boys on the radio
They crash and burn
They fold and fade so slow
In your endless summer night
I'll be on the other side
When you're beautiful and dying
All the world that you've denied
When the water is too deep
You can close your eyes and really sleep tonight
Tonight
While Live Through This feels like a companion to In Utero, Celebrity Skin feels closer to Nevermind with its big choruses and hooks covered up in distortion. There’s also so much poignancy with Love singing about “boys on the radio” who “crash and burn” given what happened to her husband, Cobain.
Describing the song, Love said:
It became about a girl who sits alone in her room and listens to the radio. The boys on the radio sing to her and promise her that, you know – when she gets to Heaven, they’ll be there. […] She thinks all the songs are about her.
Love also claims the song was written about Evan Dando, frontman of the 90s power pop group The Lemonheads.
For many reasons, grunge died too quick a death—the commodification, the tragedies that surrounded many of the most prominent members of that scene.
I wonder if it was allowed to grow and develop and embrace those more melodic elements (that Beatles/Knack influence on Cobain for example) if it would’ve led to this super power pop (a little bit less sweet but with all the melodic punch). We might have had even more songs like “Boys on the Radio.” But getting at least one is more than enough.