[Continuing my review of my 10 favorite pairs of songs from 2002.]
#8. No Doubt, Underneath It All and Pink, Just Like A Pill
2002 was New York’s year. Consciously or not, after 9/11 the world’s pop cultural attention turned back to the Big Apple in a it hadn’t in years, maybe decades. Wildly-hyped bands like the The Strokes and Interpol were praised for somehow capturing the (white, male, privileged) essence of their home city, and it truly seemed like the dawn of a new golden age for a city that so recently endured an appalling tragedy. And the big city love wasn’t just contained within the five buroughs; while Paper Magazine spent much of 2002 rapturing about the arrival of the city’s first Target, the Minnesota-based retail behemoth chose iconic New York designer Stephen Sprouse to put out its line of patriotic hoo-hah.* And though most music critics’ attention was on all the indie bands that year, some of the bigger names in pop were clearly paying homage to that most New York-ish of New Yorkers, Debbie Harry.
Orange County’s No Doubt and Philly-born Pink both bleached their hair, yes, but it went farther than that. Because like Blondie, No Doubt were a group. And like Blondie, the group as a whole were often neglected in favor of the lady singer. And with their third album, 2003′s Rock Steady, they borrowed from black culture in a way that nobody else–well, make that nobody else in the dancing-impaired white modern rock world–was willing to try since the days when Blondie, ostensibly a punk band, released pop singles like The Tide Is High and Rapture.
Despite their name, I had my doubts about No Doubt for a long time. Gwen Stefani’s whole tracksuit-with-a-bindhi thing got on my nerves, and the oversaturation of Just A Girl and Don’t Speak drove me bananas. But in retrospect the Matthew Wilder-produced Tragic Kingdom had some good songs on it, as did the follow-up, Return of Saturn, which spawned the less ubiquitous hits Ex-Girlfriend, Simple Kind of Life, and New. (Not to mention an even better single, the vampy non-hit Bathwater.) But when third-wave ska became passe and the group segued into a more recent era of Jamaican music, I was ready to embrace them. Because despite the homophobia, the misogyny, my aversion to marijuana and my inability to decipher a fairly sizable percentage of the lyrics, I really love dancehall.
Underneath It All is a slinky ballad, subtler than the more aggressive Hey Baby and Hella Good. Featuring guest vocals by Lady Saw, it’s about a girl in love with maybe the wrong guy, and for all its hilarious talk about coupons it’s maybe even a little sad. “And when it’s really bad I guess it’s not that bad?” Not the most romantic lyric ever, is it?
Pink’s Just Like A Pill, on the other hand, channels Debbie in different ways, and not just on the single’s very Debbie-ish cover. Though the singer wouldn’t truly discover her punk-pop side until her third (and most neglected, and best) album, she was already bringing a dark side to the mainstream, singing in about drugs and bad relationships under the intensely catchy veneer of an immaculately-produced pop-rock number. As Debbie did with songs like X-Offender and One Way Or Another, Pink took subjects that could have been preachy or annoying and turned them into pop gems.
(*I bought the skateboard.)
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