5. Entertain

Sleater-Kinney: The Woods (Sub Pop, 2005);
composed by Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss

By the time I caught them live, I already liked them, but it had not been any kind of overnight conversion. The aspects that some (men mostly, damn it) find off-putting about them – Corin Tucker’s piercing warble and the absence of bass – are not just things to get used to. Either you fall in love with those things outright or the intensity of this music will be unreadable to you. You have to come to them. Since I am greedy and not having access to a catalogue of great music like theirs is intolerable to me, I buckled down. And when I saw them, I understood their two-guitar system, too. The trick is that Corin Tucker plays bass lines, but on a regular guitar. Accordingly, the entirety of their music happens in the same trebly register, out of which they derive a dizzying array of textural variations. This particular tune knocked me out both on record and live. The verse is Carrie Brownstein laying out their ambivalent cultural theory: “We're not here cause we want to entertain / You can go away, don't go away.” And the monster hook is the chorus consisting only Corin Tucker going “OH – OH – OH!!!!”

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).