Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #191

#191: "Stutter" (2000) - Joe

As Hank Williams once opined, "Your cheating heart/Will tell on you." Cheating has been the subject of songs longer than the automobile has been (of course, cheating has been around far longer than the automobile, though I'm sure the latter has surely helped proliferate the former). This is the new millennium, though, and you'd think that by this time we'd either have learned from the free-love propigators of our forefathers (figuratively and literally) to be accepting enough to allow our partners to partner with other partners, or we'd have learned from our esteemed biologists to be knowlegeable enough to understand that most mammalian species aren't hardwired to remain with one mate for the course of a lifetime, or--lastly--we'd have learned from our moral, ethical, and religious leaders to be loyal enough (for fear of some type of punishment) not to cheat at all. Doesn't work like that, though. People still cheat, and much more often than not, those cheaters get caught.

In this song, though, our narrator hasn't caught his woman cheating, but he suspects, and he's got grong reason to do so: her hair is a mess, she smells strongly of a cologne not his own, and she's stuttering...and so does the music. Whether it's the lead singer, the background singers, the bass guitar, or the turntables, some musical aspect of the song stutters. This marriage of form and function is well enough, but what makes this record particularly fascinating is the thought that maybe the accuser has been cheating, too. After all, it's he that's stuttering.

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