The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #285

#285: "Where's Your Head At?" (2001) - Basement Jaxx

Electronic music has been the popular music form that I've had the hardest time trying to appreciate. Ironically so, because as I'm an admirer of musical experimentation and avant-garde (fine) art, and I'm also a DJ--and a drummer--and I love to dance; yet, the one subgenre of pop music that best encapsulates all the aformentioned tastes and traits, I find difficult to admire. I think I know why I'm so loathe to listen to electronica/house/club music: I associate the music's culture too closely with the music.

In my second year of college, I made a close friend (KB) of someone who loved synthpop, Britpop, and electronic music--all styles which I'd hated (from what little I'd heard). Wherever we rode together, she controlled the tape player, and she introduced me to the finer aspects of the Smiths, Depeche Mode, the Cure, New Order, and other artists who played a more fey type of pop. It took me till the end of that school year before I started to like most of the music she played, but by that time, I transferred to a different college, and KB stayed put.

Over the next two years, we stayed in touch, but distance caused us to talk less and less, and the next thing I know, she calls me late one night to come visit her at a house she and her new friend (G) had been renting in Meridian for a couple of months. The house--and I know I'm not a one to talk--was filthy: dishes stacked in a corner; clothes (including underwear) thrown in another; a dozen ash trays placed in convenient locations around the den, dining room, and kitchen; pillows substituting for furniture; and in the dining room, a six-foot picnic table with expensive DJ equipment, racks of records to the sides, and a black light hanging overhead. All-instrumental techno music was blasting.

She was very glad to see me, all smiles and hugs (I should have known something was up right ten); she introduced me to her friend G, and he was all smiles and hugs, too. KB looked as if she had dropped to something under eighty pounds, and her friend G didn't look much heavier. They even sported matching red eyes. She offered me to have some of what she and G were having, but I declined. She, G, and I talked for awhile, as she told me that she was leaving the state next month to go to Chicago to be a model (and she wasn't lying, either; I saw her portfolio), but she wanted to have me over so we could all go out dancing and have one last great time together. She said first she'd have to stop by another friend's house to get something from him first, but she wouldn't be long. I went with her and G, and she was true to her word; she and G went in her friend's house and was back in an instant--if an instant is twenty minutes later. The two then came back ready to dance, but by that time I was ready to go back to Starkville. I feigned several yawns and a headache, and I left. I'm glad I did, as I found out later that KB and G were arrested that night. I never even asked why.

Fast-forward several more years, and I'm back in Meridian, and I've got a girlfriend (LP), and she and KB (who, as far as I'm aware, have never met) have a couple of things in common: a love for electronic dance music, and an even deeper love for its culture. When I first met LP (at a club), she told me--and later swore--that she was getting out of that culture for good. She cried. I believed her. Stupid, huh? Yeah. When we went out, it almost invariably involved a trip to a club where her friends were. She told me that she just didn't feel comfortable in other places for very long, that she quickly grew claustrophobic and paranoid, causing her to have panic attacks and to even hallucinate. This was true. I witnessed a couple of these episodes. They weren't pretty.

Neither was the club scene: college (or, more likely, college-dropout) kids dancing to an insistant and incessant beat for hours on end, only stopping long enough to go to the bathroom, coming out more stoked for action than ever, their bodies refusing to stop moving or shaking, eyes burned and glazed over. I encountered a few folks from my hometown I had not seen in years that immediately--after a brief initial greeting--made me business offers (which I--always politely--declined). After clubbing, sometimes we'd go to her friends' apartments, and they all looked inside almost identical to KB's rental house. One time, I made the mistake of asking one of LP's friends what happened to the furniture. She rubbed her red nose and broke down crying. I felt terrible.

A couple of years later, and I'd had enough--enough of the late-night clubbing, enough of the ratty apartments, enough of her broken-down friends, enough of her flashbacks, enough of her neediness, enough of all the drugs on top of drugs on top of drugs that her friends popped, smoked, swallowed, and injected, enough of the lying and stealing that came with the drugs, and enough of electronica, that damned beat pulling the ecstasy-and-meth-and-speed-and-LSD filled bodies back onto the dance floor of a subculture intent on dooming themselves.

That scene is over ten years old for me, and still--every time I hear electronica/techno/house music--I flashback (not tab triggered) to all that aforementioned imagery, and I just can't shake the ill feeling the music brings. The song here, "Where's Your Head At?" shares the same structure and sound to the songs played at those clubs from a decade ago: uptempo, double-time drum machine beat; spacey keyboard fills, oft-repeated chorus, snippets of this-and-that dumped together, and the dynamic dropping and subsequent raising of the volume about two-thirds of the way in. The music makes me feel uneasy, but the lyrics here....now I'm sure Felix Burton and Simon Ratcliffe weren't commenting about the dangers inherent in the drugged-out, hand-dancing, electronica culture, but, you know...that's what I hear. It's bracing and disturbing.