round 1
(7) orgy, “blue monday”
tore down that
(10) ryan adams, “wonderwall”
205-195
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/22.
rose heredia on orgy’s “blue monday”
The first time I heard Blue Monday I was in high school, circa late nineties. This band, Orgy, had this song playing on TRL and VH1 non-stop. I always saw it on either MTV2 or the Alternative Sunday block of videos on MTV. I was listening to Korn at this point. I had discovered Korn’s early work and that shit was harder than Freak on a Leash (which I loved). The aesthetic of Blue Monday—with the drums and heavy guitar riffs at the beginning had me hooked. And the distortion on the track, giving an industrial vibe in the same vein as NIN, was a plus. The lyrics were simple enough and I had very emo vibes before goth went out of fashion (and then back in!). Before Spotify, Napster and LimeWire ate away many hours of downloading music. I learned Blue Monday was a cover from the band, New Order, a new wave/eighties band. Soon after, their original version has become my favorite of this song but I still love Orgy’s song.
Honestly, Orgy’s music video itself did not age well. The way it looks completely dates itself but serves as a time capsule when so many new artists had the same art production designer—with the shiny makeup, lighting, and alien aesthetic in every freaking musical genre shown in videos. Also, if you watch Orgy’s video now, I felt like aliens/UFOs were all the rage in pop culture during the nineties: The X-files, Roswell, Men in Black, Fire in the Sky, just to name a few. While I was unsure if this was the way Orgy and all creative producers on this shoot was going for, by the time the video premiered, it was all old hat, and I mostly cared about the song than the video (and back then, music relied so much on music videos too).
Ultimately, by the time I discovered Orgy’s cover of Blue Monday, I was into all the artists associated with them. Powerman 5000, Limp Bizkit, The Deftones, Rammstein, and even Methods of Mayhem for a second. The sound of these bands brought out my teen/early adult angst. Well after I graduated from college, I still listen to these bands on repeat. My love of Blue Monday, I believe, in addition to watching MTV/MTV2 when they aired basically all eighties/new wave countdowns/weekends/whatever reason all the time, awoke my love of this genre. I devoured each song by each band and in 2022, I’m still discovering new music of that time period! Another reason I also appreciated new wave was because to me, it was inverted angst: longing, sadness, vulnerable in a subdued way. While nu metal allowed me to scream and yell, get out all of my shit when I was feeling blue, new wave allowed me to cry, relate, and really feel seen in ways that nu metal couldn’t provide. I was never an introvert, but I absolutely see how introverts fuck with new wave music a lot; they were gotten and nu metal was so aggressive and, in your face, (HOW DOES IT FEEL?!).
Listening to both versions of Blue Monday are like sides of the same coin. When I’m ANGRY, I play Orgy’s version. When I’m in an introspective mood and I want to begin my day with “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (which until writing this essay I had no idea the members of Joy Division formed New Order!), I add New Order’s version on the playlist. This song will transcend all of us, years after we are gone. It’s so versatile and it never gets old, no matter who sings it.
Rose Heredia is Afro-Dominican from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she helps lawyers save the Earth. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program in Writing. She is a VONA and Las Dos Brujas alumna. She is a Culture writer and editor for Epifania Magazine, Assistant Non-fiction Editor for VIDA Review and has been published by the Dominican Writers Association and HeadFake.
The Sound of Wonderment: Emily Flouton on Ryan Adams’s “Wonderwall”
In the late nineties, I moved from Massachusetts to London’s East End, from a buttoned-up boarding school where smoking was grounds for expulsion to an urban university where lectures came with smoke breaks. The learning curve was steep: about clubbing, about “snogging,” about taking the teabag out of the mug before drinking the tea. And perhaps more than anything, about music. As soon as I heard Blur’s “Tender” playing over the speakers while deplaning my first Virgin Atlantic flight to London, my head was turned. Gone were the days of Steve Miller Band and Phish—new friends immersed me in Pulp, Suede, Supergrass, the Charlatans, Travis, Super Furry Animals. My favorite Britpop tracks were playful and sexy, full of easy guitars, wordplay, and longing. But Oasis? I couldn’t connect with the sound.
To be honest, while my instinct now is to temper the reaction of my eighteen-year-old self so as to sound measured and authoritative, I hated Oasis. “Wonderwall” in particular. Some of it was Liam Gallagher’s voice, which I found flat, whiny, and glib. Some of it was the numbing four-chord progression and nonsensical lyrics. And some of it was that one particular line we’ve all heard a million times: “I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now.” At the time, I didn’t have the language to call this line “toxic,” but I knew it rubbed me wrong. It felt manipulative and mildly insulting, like saying, “Nobody is every going to love you as much as I do,” the implication being that you’d better stay put, because who are you to think you can do better? On a recent episode of ABC’s The Bachelor—I know, sorry, but stay with me here—when the Bachelor rejected this season’s villain, she replied, in a whine, “You’re making a mistake. I don’t see anyone else here who is as excited about you as I am.” Same vibes.
The boys at my college who liked Oasis didn’t seem toxic. Notably, there was one everybody called Indie Phil, a sapling of a boy with spiky-shaggy hair and fathomless eyes. He was the kind of sad that made you want to put a blanket around his shoulders. I liked Indie Phil, and word was he liked me back, and there was this party at his house, and we were all loose on Bacardi Breezers and the terrible sticky brown hash that was always around, and everything was going great until he showed me his bedroom. Indie Phil owned the most amount of Oasis posters. Of course he did. I looked at his Oasis posters, and he looked at me looking at his Oasis posters. And then I did it, I said, “I hate Oasis,” because it was true and I was nervous and young enough to think rudeness was edgy. His sad eyes grew sadder. We sat side by side on his futon mattress, staring at the posters in silence, before rejoining the party. There was no snogging.
It wasn’t just Indie Phil; none of my British friends seemed to understand my antipathy towards Oasis. My friend Phil (different Phil) said what he always said whenever I didn’t like something he liked: “You probably don’t get it because you’re American.” And even though I loved Cadbury’s and Brass Eye and Morrissey and savory pies and every pub ever, Phil may have been right. Oasis never made it as big in the US as other major British bands of the era, and they never sold out shows here the way they did in the rest of the world. Anecdotally, many of my American contemporaries seemed to feel as I did: that Liam’s voice was whiny and annoying. Oasis’s first three albums all went platinum in the US in the end, but as Noel Gallagher said in a 2015 interview: “Rolling Stone hated us, MTV hated us. We never made it in America.”
*
The year Ryan Adams released his sophomore album Gold, I graduated college, got kicked out of the U.K., and moved to New York City. Many of my memories of the next two years are soundtracked by Gold and Adam’s (finer) debut Heartbreaker, as I walked every inch of Manhattan listening to the albums on my Discman, longing for Ryan Adams to do like his song and “Come Pick Me Up.” While I missed my British friends with a constant vibrating ache, New York was revealing its charms, and Adams’s music eased the transition; it seemed to contain something distinctly American. But in a good way. Not in the way of going to war to seek weapons of mass destruction we knew didn’t exist, of George W.’s thin but confident drawl insisting his—our—motives were pure, that we were helpers, each night on the news. The music felt American in the way of cold beer and harmonicas, of talent honed through obsessive hard work. Of earnestness and folk art and homespun simplicity. It helped me miss London a little bit less.
And then, that fall, came Adams’s 2003 EP Love Is Hell: Pt. 1 featuring his now-famous “Wonderwall” cover. He’d started playing the song live several years before, but this recorded version was the first time I’d heard it, and I was enraptured immediately.
According to Rolling Stone, “Wonderwall” has been covered by at least a hundred different major recording artists. From the beginning of his career, Ryan Adams made covers a huge part of his output, covering artists from Iron Maiden to Bryan Adams, from Madonna to Ozzy Osbourne to The Grateful Dead. Everyone knows that in 2015, he covered Taylor Swift’s entire album 1989, but by the time his “Wonderwall” cover came out in the early aughts, he was already on that bullshit, having reinterpreted The Strokes’ This Is It on four track as a blues album. (Sadly, he hasn’t released it and says he never will.) With the creation of Adams’s “Wonderwall” cover, the stage was set for an explosive combination: one of the most covered contemporary songs, recorded by one of our most prolific contemporary cover artists.
Adams strips “Wonderwall” to its barest essentials. First, we get fingerpicked acoustic guitar instead of those mindlessly strummed chords. Then the bass comes in, perfectly balancing the plaintive guitar. And just when you start to feel things are getting too dark, too sad, that love is too impossible, the piano bursts forth, bringing all the hope of a sunrise after a whiskey-soaked night. Throughout the song, Adams sounds like a man daunted by the sober, numinous nature of love, looking through the wrong end of a telescope at all of its potential pitfalls. When he sings “All the roads we have to walk are winding,” he sounds like a man at the beginning of a journey he knows won’t be easy. When he sings, “Maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me,” he heavily emphasizes the “maybe.” As though he has considered this question at length, knows no one can save him, but wishes it were otherwise. When he sings, “After all, you’re my wonderwall,” he seems to be saying: we both know you are, whether I want you to be or not. There’s longing there. Grief. And finally, resignation. The reverb at the end of is haunting, suggesting the song’s dilemmas will never end, but continue to echo on.
And that line: I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now.
Coming from Adams, the lyric takes on a tone of genuine musing and wonderment. He’s considering this idea—that it’s possible he loves somebody more than anyone else in the world does—with an appropriate amount of gravitas. As though he truly understands the attendant responsibility.
*
It’s obnoxious to argue for the greatness of a cover by making the claim that the original version is lesser. But in arguing this—and I am doing that—I feel bolstered by the fact that to some degree, the Gallagher brothers agree. From a 2009 SPIN interview:
Interviewer: Liam told me he hates “Wonderwall.” It’s the one song he literally hates singing.
Noel Gallagher: That’s interesting, because he would never say that to me. Well, I hate him singing it, too…We’ve never got it right. It’s too slow or too fast. I think Ryan Adams is the only person who ever got that song right. I’d love to do the Ryan Adams version, but in front of 60,000 Oasis fans that wouldn’t be possible.
And yet, Oasis did go on to cover Adams’s cover of their own song in front of their fans. Many, many times. I recently watched a video of Noel performing the Adams version for Virgin Radio in 2009, and it’s fine, not great. He’s strumming the acoustic in a blunt repetition—no fingerpicking—which flattens the delicate articulation in the Adams cover. There’s more passion in Noel’s performance than there is in the original version featuring Liam, not that this is a high bar to clear, but it’s campy in places. It doesn’t feel entirely genuine. It’s hard for me to say whether this copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy is better than the original; neither does much for me, though at least now, there’s a jolt of nostalgia to be had from the 1995 version. Either way, it’s not in same universe as Adams’s musically thoughtful, emotionally intelligent cover.
*
In 2019, the New York Times published an article in which seven women stated Ryan Adams manipulated them over long periods of time, dangling the promise of music career opportunities in exchange for sex and psychological control. These women included recording artist Phoebe Bridgers and Adams’s ex-wife, musician Mandy Moore. The article also alleged that Adams engaged in an inappropriate sexting and Skyping relationship with a minor for a period of nine months. At the time, Adams denied all claims. Later that year, the FBI opened an investigation into the alleged relationship with the minor, found no evidence, and quietly closed it. Though Adams continues to deny all claims related to the underage fan, in 2020, he issued a statement to The Daily Mail apologizing to the women he damaged in a less illegal manner. Said Adams, “Having truly realized the harm that I've caused, it wrecked me, and I'm still reeling from the ripples of devastating effects that my actions triggered. There is no way to convince people that this time is truly different, but this is the albatross that I deserve to carry with me as a result of my actions.” Whether or not you believe his words are sincere, or in fact care—the damage he caused, perhaps, speaks for itself—Adams has been attempting to get on with his career. Since being dropped by his label and his manager, he has released two albums through his own PAX/AM independent label and plays long sets on Instagram Live for his reduced fanbase.
Interestingly enough, in 2017, in response to the allegations against now-known predator Harvey Weinstein, Noel Gallagher told a reporter he didn’t think sexual harassment existed in the music industry. Said Gallagher, “I guess in the film industry, a lot of the time the females need the male bosses to get them further up the ladder, you know what I mean? Whereas in the music industry, if a girl writes a great song, it’s still a great song. It seems to me to be a bit more…equal, in the music industry?” He also said, “I love being around women, and not to objectify them, they’re funnier than most men half the time.”
Reading that interview made my jaw drop, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. Still, by the year 2017, it seems impossible that anyone as active in the music business as Noel Gallagher could have been oblivious to industry’s well-documented history of sexism. Meanwhile, Adams, to whom Gallagher had close ties—they’d toured together—was actively engaging in such behavior. But of course, when considering the words Gallagher used in his statement—“females,” “girls,” not to mention the assertion he seemed to feel generous in making that women are funnier than most men half the time—the sentiments are hardly surprising.
I don’t know exactly what Noel and Liam got up to at the height of their fame, when they were infamous bad-boy rock stars doing four grand’s worth of heroin monthly and trashing hotel rooms. Liam was accused of grabbing a butt in 2017 and grabbing his girlfriend by the throat in 2018, while I had a harder time finding accusations against Noel. There may be more, or things may have happened that will never come to light; it seems there would have to be things. Perhaps there are not. I’m not sure that’s the point of this essay, but I’m not sure it isn’t, either. What I do know is that I wanted to talk about the music here, and I wish men in the music industry wouldn’t make it so difficult to just talk about the music.
And when it comes to the music? All I know is which version of “Wonderwall” I’d put on my wedding playlist. All I know is which artist sounds, to me, like a sad-eyed boy who could love you so well and which artist sounds, to me, flippant and insincere.
Since the long-ago days of my crush on Indie Phil, who looked so sweet and sensitive on the outside—and indeed, may have been—I’ve learned you can’t judge a man by his gentle, pining gaze. You can’t tell anything about who he is, about how he’ll behave in private, based on how he looks, how he sounds. I’ve learned this the hard way, though that’s another essay.
But when it comes to music, sound is everything. And I’m not going to let the behavior of any man on this earth take Ryan Adams’s haunting, virtuoso, superior-to-the-original, 10/10 “Wonderwall” cover away from me.
Emily Flouton's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, DIAGRAM, and other places. She currently lives in Denver, where she teaches with Lighthouse Writers Workshop.