OK, so if the Buzzcocks on the AARP commercial weren't weird enough, now in the new
Entertainment Weekly, Jewel selects the five "gems" she's listening to: Loretta Lynn, OK. Joni Mitchell, no problem. Nina Simone. Jewel calls her "the first punk rocker." Uh ... yeah.... David Gray. Not entirely uninteresting, but not especially edgy, so not a shocking choice, I guess. And "Unsatisfied" by the Replacements.
Now there are a lot of songs that are near and dear to me, but none cut as close to the bone as this. Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds (yes, I know the running time by heart) of primal anger, sadness, rage, emptiness, loneliness, and, most of all, disappointment. I will never forget the first time I heard it, sitting in my friend's bedroom, twenty some-odd years ago. The 'mats (that's what the fans call 'em) became my favorite band then and there and remain that to this day. They were the quintessential beautiful losers, sabotaging every opportunity, shooting themselves in the foot so persistently that their logo should have had a shoe with a target painted on it.
"God, what a mess/On the ladder of success/Where you take one step/And miss the whole first rung" (from the essential "Bastards of Young")
The 'mats had more great songs than anyone this side of the Rolling Stones, and "Unsatisfied" is their epic, their "Gimme Shelter." Where "Gimme Shelter" charts the landscape of a culture that is about to explode in cataclysmic violence, "Unsatisfied" turns the lens inward, and is no less harrowing.
So kudos to Jewel for, surprisingly, having the taste to appreciate and promote something so relatively obscure. (And if it helps the 'mats sell a couple of records, that's wonderful. The recent best-of, "Don't You Know Who I Think I Was," is a fine place to start, BTW.) But please, God, please just don't let her cover it. ("Yeah, it's great the way it is, but you know what would make it even better? Yodeling.")
