TheBig3

Theres a coldness to music from the 90's, and while I think a good deal of it is ****, there are a few gems I still love. And I don't mean that I turn up the radio when they come on, I mean think they have given, to the overall musical canon, a great deal of advancement, or at least a sharpened guidence.

One of those songs that should have been dead and buried is the Wallflowers 1996 masterwork One Headlight. I say this in all sincerety, there should be a bigger deal made about these folks, and as Jakob Dylan releases a new album this month, I'm inspired to dig up everything he's touched.

But this is about the song. I think too much of the 90's was too concerned with being weird, showing that were exceptional in their strife and misery, and there wasn't so much a story as there was a laundry list of transgressions that had been leveled against the singer/narrator by a faceless "her" or an indescript "world."

While Dylan here doesn't sterr away from that he surrounds these plot points with a lush metaphorical landscape of a community, where the man is alone because of an enviornmental strife, not an emotional one. Emotion is important, but it was sullied in that decade because it was overused, to tag a line, the personal became political. To some degree One Headlight is a distant cousin to Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer"

And ultimatly, its married with a bit of Outlaw/frontier country that gives it the well-worn soul of old age, of someone who's suffered truely, and knows that like with shamble on. There is no death in heartbreak, and unlike his contemporaries who assumed there was, Dylan gives you the impression that the lack of death is the most terrible thing.

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