Rocketship-Hey
Hey Girl-The Bus Stop Label 7” single
A slice of pure tweecore pop. It sounds
like My Bloody Valentine with much more emphasis on the Valentine and less on
the Bloody. It’s the opposite of cranking things up to 11 in a rock style-it’s
MBV cranked down to somewhere between zero and one. Take out all the guitars
and bass from MBV and imagine Jonathan Richman in his most acoustic playing the
song and it would still be a lot more raw than this is. This should have been a
massive hit if there was any justice in the world. But there’s not, and I
suppose that coming from Sacramento, California and releasing your best song on
a tiny label-the tiniest label possible-wasn’t exactly going to propel you to
the top of the charts.
“Hey Hey Girl” sounds exactly like a
song should with a title like that. Coming from California in 1994 and being
issued on a tiny label as only a 7” single, I can understand why it wasn’t
picked up on-although that was wrong-but I can’t understand why it isn’t,
fifteen or so years down the line, being raved about as a cult classic. This is
the sort of song that you read about as being a massive influence on the latest
hip band. The sort of band that Kurt Cobain would have raved about the way he
did about stuff from K Records. I don’t really know exactly when “Hey Hey Girl
“ came out in 1994; but, as Kurt Cobain died in April 1994, I guess there was a
faint chance that he heard it, through a drug-induced haze.
However, I probably
wouldn’t have liked it as much if Kurt C or any such renowned tastemaker had
started to go on about it. I’ve reached that certain age and gained that
certain amount of cynicism that whenever I hear of an unknown song, band or
label being lauded to the skies by some “star” or some opinionated musical
idiot who loves to patronisingly drop names on us mere mortals, then I become
instantly sceptical, and automatically assume that it must be inherently crap.
I always wonder if there is some tenuous link between whoever is being hailed
as a “must hear classic” and whoever is dropping the name. I’m not actually
alleging that there is anything that could be construed as overly dodgy in a
legal sense, but it can be all a bit product-placement type thing.
So, I’m glad that I’ve not heard this
Rocketship song being touted around by the great and the good and that I stumbled
across it by chance. I did download their album that followed this single, “A
Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” and ripped it to a CD. It has a great
post-punk title and could have easily been used as a title of an album from
Factory, Postcard, Mute or some U.K. indie label ten years earlier. I’m sure
that it’s a great album, but I’ve never listened to it. Not really because I
don’t want to, but because there’s a distinct possibility that it wouldn’t be
as good as this single and I just want to remember Rocketship through this one
marvellous, magical song.
Get/ read/ see more Totally Shuffled here:
Kindle e book
UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Music-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA
US http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Music-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA
Paperback
UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-The/dp/149495687X
US http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-The/dp/149495687X
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