Following my short stint as a DJ and seeing the way some songs have a special effect on some people, I started thinking about iconographic songs, meaning tracks that are so typical and so central that they signify the focal point of a genre. Like “Paradise City” by Guns’n’Roses, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash or “Jump Around” by House of Pain, these songs by definition have to be widely known, because quantity enforces effect almost proportionally. (Notwithstanding the fact that there might be several layers of significance in different sublevels of society and genres.) And who couldn’t recognize these songs by their opening chords or fanfares, and they will fill dancefloors in the right spot almost every time. Everybody shouts “Who-hee” and steps on the floor to shake some ass, even if it 4:30 in the morning and the mood was more than modest about an hour ago. As an artist, if you are able to tap your finger onto such a hotspot and release a single that will flow from there into the cracks and gaps of the cultural mindscape, it can fill up the crowds and raise the heat to fire dripping from the roof. You need a certain quantum of popularity beforehand to overcome the barriers of the market distribution services, enough boldness (and maybe a big dose of cynicism) to pen down a hookline that is good enough to grab ears and dumb enough to not reach anyone around.[1], the will to go for it and play the big game with all its evilness, powerpoint-charts and sales-force-people[2]. The attraction is the same as a pension plan – security, quite important for 98 % of all people, even if they pretend to be ass-kicking rockers. It is royalties that puts the Hummer and the Viper in the garage, not wild stage antics.

  The above theory is far from being explored into all its details and consequences, and the concept of music as a landscape with influences, power arrows and force fields is quite old too, actually, and this essay is not at all about that, except for a starting point. To anyone interested in popular culture and / or music, trying to discover iconographic songs is more than a nice thing to do while drinking beer, though it is that also. Within a short time I hit upon a remarkable example, in all terms connected to the idea. A band, slightly over the nick of their creative potential but on the height of their sales-potential goes and does something unexpected that pays off in almost immoral figures. Of course. I am already talking about Faith No More, who at the end of 1992 recorded and released “I’m easy” – an original by Lionel Richie performed by the Commodores. As almost every band would, Faith No More had done a lot of cover versions until then also, from the obvious “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath done as a tribute or homage to the no pun intended super joke of playing “Barbie Girl” by Aqua as an addendum to “Epic” and ever so on. But this one was different, because it was as straight a re-recording as possible, with no hint of the power inherent within the band, a straight to radio-ballad-MOR-softrock-track. They left out the second verse from the original and of course the studio technics were different, but that’s about it. I still wonder, why I never heard anyone shout “sell outs” back then, but maybe with a band that wins Grammy for best Heavy Metal act, nobody really cares a lot.

  It would be easy to discard this release as a simple ploy by Mike Patton to boost up his income and secure nice living on old age, which it certainly has done, though it should be added that Patton has released a lot of great records on his own Ipecac, from Fantomas to Kaada to Melvins to Dalek, and a lot of weird avantgarde stuff in between, that would never have been possible without the commercial success of Faith No More, and who knows, maybe this little song pays a lot of that alone. But thinking about the kind of person Mike Patton is (judging from here) it is also obvious than more than just money was in focus[3]. First of all the fact that this song, the most laid-back, Sunday-morning song – actually the song becoming the reference point for a feeling in itself as well as a whole musical subgenre - ever done by FNM was paired with the most ostentatively direct and straight in your face banger they might also have done: “Be aggressive”[4]. The difference to their usual confrontational funk / heavy rock combining talent, darksides and humour both musically and in lyrics, is striking to say the least. The cultural clusterfuckfest of associations and insiderjokes is fired up some more by the fact that the song was also released on a four-track-EP called “songs to make love to” together with “Midnight Cowboy”, “Das Schützenfest” (with strange sex-lyrics in German) and “Let’s lynch the landlord” by the Dead Kennedys and the cover proudly showing a picture of two rhinos humping in the sundown.

  A more subtle effect came to be in the following months and years and still lingers on, because “I’m easy”, due to its softcore production and laidback atmosphere hit upon no barriers to listeners at all. This song seeped from the alternative crowd and the encompassing alternative charts and radio stations as fast as possible into new areas and spread all over the world and into all social stratas. Nowadays you can hear that song on mainstream radio between Robbie Williams and Jay-Z, on oldie-radios between the Bee Gees and Tom Jones and on alternative rock radio between Adam Green and Sage Fancis [5]. Hereby it is proven that a talented band can do anything at all, if it wants to. The single drove into a tectonic continental plane and spread over the whole globe of music and seeped up again like a giant leak of oil that seeps through the surface on top in swampy places. Even by giving up all connotations to what the band came from or was still about to do (from “Angel Dust” to “King for a day..”), just like Patton cutting his long hair shortly before Chris Cornell did, an important event back then to a lot of young men, they managed to encode the FNM gene set somewhere in the recording and anonymously conquered the world’s airwaves.

  I know no other song that was able to encompass such a wide area of listeners so easily[6] (with the fair exception of Christmas carols) and I feel it to be imaginable that Mike Patton planned all of this out ahead. A super-genius payback master plan. It also predated the Red Hot Chili Peppers stab at mainstream-radio-popsongs for almost five years, though theirs was a substantial change in the style of the band, not a one off. And Patton had shown interest in losing it with FNM some time before, with a long list of other bands (Mr. Bungle, Bruijera, Joe Pop-O-pie, Milk Cult, and ever so on, including his solo voice experiments on Tzadik, though I’m easy wouldn’t have been possible without Patton’s exceptional control of his own voice). The fact that all of this was done is just another revenge on mankind. I can hear the heartfelt chuckle of Mr. Patton up to here, whenever he thinks about how he tricked the world, without hurting it and he is making it up with good music on top. The lesson in pop-tectonics hidden within the doings and dont's around this little single are good example and lection for everyone trying to either judge or impose a hype. Good luck.

Georg Cracked (May of 2005)

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