More music

I was doing some more poking around YouTube, looking for more videos by my favorite female Alternative musicians. While Sophie B. Hawkins doesn't quite count as Alternative, the Alternative Rock scene presented women in musical roles like nothing before or since (except, maybe, Country and/or Bluegrass.) So I went off on a jag searching for videos by these women. Some of the ones I viewed this evening:

Kate Bush - "Running Up That Hill":


Kate Bush, like REM and The Cure, really predates what became known as "Alternative Music"; her music might also be classified as "Art Rock", though its best classification is "Kate Bush." This can be thought of as the "dance" version of this video, because it features the Godlike Kate Bush dancing, dancing like she's made of water - which, in fact, she is, mostly. I couldn't find the "performance" version, which is the one I remember from 22 years ago, but this one is much better. To see more of Kate dancing, watch the video for "Sat In Your Lap" - but be prepared to lose your mind.

(On a personal note, this song is crosslinked in my memory to the Doctor Who serial "The Pleasure Hive", which was airing for the first time on my local PBS channel at the same time that this video came out. Coincidentally, some scenes from this version of the video strongly resemble scenes from the climax of that story.)

I bounced around to other videos. "Rid of Me" by P.J. (Polly Jean) Harvey - again, not the version I saw on MTV, but it gets the point across. "Bull In The Heather" by Sonic Youth - every version I could locate has atrocious sound, but, hell, Sonic Youth has a video collection out on DVD - I bought it for this video alone.

And then, of course, there is Hole.


This is Hole's dark, edgy cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman" from the movie The Crow II: City of Angels. This video helps us to remember that Courtney Love hasn't always been skanky and burned-out and scary-looking. Once she was skanky and talented and gorgeous.

And speaking of gorgeous, who is the beautiful woman dancing and singing and playing bass alongside Courtney Love? Hole aficionados will know that this song came out after bassist Kristen (or was it Kirsten? I've seen it both ways) Pfaff quit the band and died of a heroin overdose. The bassist role was picked up by the lovely Melissa Auf der Maur, who later went on to play bass for the Smashing Pumpkins after D'arcy Wretzky's departure.

(from A Billy Corgan Christmas, CMJ Magazine, December 2000)

Which led me to the final video of this entry: Smashing Pumpkins' "Stand Inside Your Love".

This is post-Pumpkins Pumpkins: D'arcy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain were both gone; James Iha was still there, and Melissa Auf der Maur (I love her name; it means "off the wall!") on bass and some guy whose name I've never looked up on drums*. Visually and musically, it is related to the post-Jimmy pre-Melissa album Adore, as can be seen by comparing it to the video for "Ava Adore", though SIYL features a less Nosferatuesque vibe.

This song is why I rail against the dollar-a-download no-more-albums paradigm that is emerging in music. Once I made myself an MP3 compilation CD by dumping a bunch of CDs onto my hard drive and then recording all of them as one disc containing hundreds of MP3s. And one day while coming back through the Poconos on Route 80 after visiting some friends in New Jersey, I heard "Stand Inside Your Love" for the first time. What the hell is that?, I asked, and played the song again, and again. That's the Smashing Pumpkins, I thought, but I've never heard this song before.

It took some digging to locate the song on one of the albums - either Machina or the Greatest Hits album. Even though this song was released as a single, I never heard it get any airplay. But because I had the entire album, with all its songs, I also had this one. The only way I actually heard it was by accidentally listening to the entire album. If I were the sort of person to be downloading music, I might not download something I had never heard before. Might I have foolishly considered this some random filler track and passed it by?

*According to the Wikipedia entry on this song, Jimmy Chamberlain was back with the band for this album, Machina/The Machines of God. But that doesn't look like him in the video. And while the drums are good, they're not Jimmy Chamberlain good. But what do I know? Besides, this is Wikipedia, so at least some part of the entry is guaranteed to be false.