Gen X: It's Time to Admit It, Bush Were Great

Recently, on his podcast “60 songs explain the 90s,” Rob Harvilla covered the Bush song “Glycerine.” Rob’s earnest and enthusiastic coverage and warm reflections about the music of our shared teen years gave me pause to think about this song, and I realized: it’s always there.

Imagine summer in the late ’90s: I’m laying in a pool on a floaty in the backyard of my childhood home and, from the wall-mounted intercom repeater, alternative radio station plays Bush’s “Glycerine.” In the home, upstairs, hours prior, I had seen the video play on MTV. In the home, hours later, I will see it again. And even later, after the sun goes down, when my friends and I are piled into a car and the radio plays “Glycerine,” we will not change the channel. We won’t hoot and turn it up, but it will be given its runtime.

Sometime in the aughts: I’m driving down the twisted backbone of Highway 101. It’s too late after a night of whatever in San Francisco. Alternative radio plays Bush’s “Glycerine.”

Sometime in the 2010s: the woman I will marry and I are driving through Austin. Maybe we’re tired of our iPods and we put on the local (101X!) radio station. “Glycerine.”

The test of time should always earn respect — even if it’s only grudging. I have to concede that I’ve been “look[ing] at this photograph” with Nickelback for a very long time; I’m not happy about it. It’s OK, I had to watch alternative dudes reckon with my fandom of Rush back in the day when I pointed out that “Tom Sawyer” was 16 years old.

“Glycerine” is double that.

It’s time to admit, then, that Bush have withstood the test of time. With nonsensical lyrics, phoneme gumbo elocution, and Gavin Rossdale’s himbo good looks, it would have been tempting to write Bush off. Many did. But you can’t square that circle against three decades of airplay. So I’m going to start from the other end of the argument: What’s great about this song and what has helped it exist in frequent-enough airplay through my entire adulthood?

Lyrics

Hear me out. Gavin Rossdale is playing the English language like an instrument. He’s liberating the phonemes (the sounds) of words into lengths and tones of sound. He’s working with those sounds like any Roman poet: the lengths and rhythms of tones come first and the words that do those sounds become the lyrics. Be it the emotional texture of the sounds or the associations from the words’ meanings, again and again the song heaves an emotional punch. Think about the lyrics.

You liar you do too have the “lyrics” to one memorized. Fine, I’ll pretend with you an do a quote

I’m never alone, I’m alone all the time
Are you at one?
Do you lie?
We live in a wheel, where everyone steals
But when we rise
It’s like strawberry fields
Treated you bad
You bruise my face
Couldn’t love you more, you’ve got a beautiful taste

Odds are there are moments where the actual words you’re singing, are not the words in the song. Check the lyrics. The way you sing along in your head (You liar, you do too.) is some sort of impressionistic melange of sounds that you think are the words.

Deep breath time to get vulnerable here.

I’m pretty sure, in my head, I’ve been singing along with the lyric:

Bad moon white again
Bad moon white again

as

Abu-Wayyah!
Abu-Wayyah!

since I first heard the song with no real harm done. Did I imagine a theatrical apostrophe to a Muslim caliph, Abu-Wayyah? Yes I did. Was that reasonable. No; I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It never did. Knowing the proper phrase, will I update my memories? Probably not. It wasn’t about the signification of the sounds of the words, it was about their feel.

In the pre-Genius era, with no means for checking the lyrics, I interpreted the sound as my own and left it at that. I believe this may be the engine for the genius of Bush¹: by having the lyrics be impressionistic and occasionally impenetrable, they’ve left us with a sludgey Seurat that is per se timeless.

Music

Life is unfair; here’s a thing that happened and happens. There are bands with the pretty one and the others. I love Blondie and every member in it. But we all know it: Debbie burns a few thousand megawatts brighter than any human. No Doubt is some dudes and Gwen. Bush is Gavin and some dudes. Well, they’re English, so “chaps.” Chaps: I’m sorry for what I just wrote. Please dab your tears with today’s royalty check’s tidings.

I was quite interested in guitar playing in the early- to mid-90s. But never did Bush’s guitar player ever land on my radar. Sorry, Nigel Pulsford. As comfort, I hope he can take that I can’t think of that time without thinking about his guitar work: the soaring vertigo opening into harsh distortion of “Everything Zen” and the minimalist, patient work of “Glycerine.”

That’s the glittery shiny diamond in Bush’s music. What about the backing? The drumming and the bass are pretty typical of most rock bands of the era. And I think that’s the secret: the music and arrangement sounds pretty much like every other arrangement of the era. Or perhaps, every band had a song that ran a tangent line to the Bush sonic territory and thus Bush sounds a little bit like every band. By doing so, Bush’s music doesn’t sound like a song, it sounds like an era.

Perhaps the magic of “Glycerine” or Bush in general is like Evelyn Wang in “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” — only by being so perfectly suitable for the background of any ’90s song (ça veut dire: average) did they become the paradigmatic ’90s song.

Conclusion

So, my friends, my era, my cohort-mates, this might not have been the great pop act that we thought we needed, but they are the one we deserved. They gave us impressionistic lyrics that let us see what we needed at every part of our lives. Their music: lovingly and quintessentially the ’90s sound. Bush and their magna opera wait, timelessly, ready to match your emotional condition, metamorphose, and become the song you need in that moment. In every season, Bush’s music waits like a semi-solid structure for bearing your heart and mind, like a jar of well…y’know. Fine, I’ll say it. Glycerine.

• gen_x
• music
• nostalgia

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