Tom Waits “Top Of The Hill”
Sex? No
Drugs? He lists “opium, fireworks, vodka and meat” seemingly out of the blue and follows it up with “scoot over and save me a seat”. Maybe these four items are elements to a show, the kind of show that Tom Waits would attend…
Rock and Roll? Yes!
What does it tell me? This is somehow reinventing rock and roll, by adding beatboxing and a hip-hop beat, Waits made what could have been straight dirty rock and roll, and turns it into something new. The abstract poetry rapped in a guttery voice is interesting enough, but the funkyness added to it makes it randomness you can dance to.
Reminds me of: Hobos rapping at Gambler’s Anonymous; a cartoon farmhouse; driving a cherry red Rolls Royce that turns into red chicken coop; riding with my 55-year old dad as we tap our hands and get close to home for the summer after driving three hours from my last day as a sophomore from college
From the get-go, you can tell this is something monumental. “Can I get a little more on my voice?”, asks Waits, knowing his voice is an instrument crucial to the song. And it is. It revs like a chainsaw immediately after the spacey futuristic music that opens the track, making it sound like a radio transmission from an alien world. Wait’s voice slurs and sounds more stretched and painful than ever. The beatboxing sounds like a shocked dog with an electric collar yelping as it runs past it’s invisible boundaries. “I seen a mattress on the freeway” and “ocean of wine” are the kind of dream-like images you get throughout this song. The static horn that breaks up the song gives a frantic “step right up!” feeling of listening to a ranting old man at a circus who should not be missed do to his obscure fantasies he boasts as his non-fiction past. Sometimes the song feels like just a bunch of random sentences that sound good together but are really like a miscellaneous pile of rhymes Waits complied together because he didn't know what else to do with them. But that’s the beauty of the song, how it feels like Freud’s unconscious seeping out random information and memories into dreams; putting things together on the same stage in some sequence of “chance encounters”, blurring fantasy and reality. The menacing laughter at the end of the track comes on as both sincere and appropriate, as if Waits is amused by the absurdities of his own unconscious dream world as a kind of inside-joke, and all the pride and frustration that comes with such moments of esoteric euphoria.
Tom Waits “Top Of The Hill” Sex? No Drugs? He lists “opium, fireworks, vodka and meat” seemingly out of the blue and follows it up with “scoot over and save me a seat”. Maybe these four items are elements to a show, the kind of show that Tom Waits would attend… Rock and Roll? Yes!
What does it tell me? This is somehow reinventing rock and roll, by adding beatboxing and a hip-hop beat, Waits made what could have been straight dirty rock and roll, and turns it into something new. The abstract poetry rapped in a guttery voice is interesting enough, but the funkyness added to it makes it randomness you can dance to. Reminds me of: Hobos rapping at Gambler’s Anonymous; a cartoon farmhouse; driving a cherry red Rolls Royce that turns into red chicken coop; riding with my 55-year old dad as we tap our hands and get close to home for the summer after driving three hours from my last day as a sophomore from college From the get-go, you can tell this is something monumental. “Can I get a little more on my voice?”, asks Waits, knowing his voice is an instrument crucial to the song. And it is. It revs like a chainsaw immediately after the spacey futuristic music that opens the track, making it sound like a radio transmission from an alien world. Wait’s voice slurs and sounds more stretched and painful than ever. The beatboxing sounds like a shocked dog with an electric collar yelping as it runs past it’s invisible boundaries. “I seen a mattress on the freeway” and “ocean of wine” are the kind of dream-like images you get throughout this song. The static horn that breaks up the song gives a frantic “step right up!” feeling of listening to a ranting old man at a circus who should not be missed do to his obscure fantasies he boasts as his non-fiction past. Sometimes the song feels like just a bunch of random sentences that sound good together but are really like a miscellaneous pile of rhymes Waits complied together because he didn't know what else to do with them. But that’s the beauty of the song, how it feels like Freud’s unconscious seeping out random information and memories into dreams; putting things together on the same stage in some sequence of “chance encounters”, blurring fantasy and reality. The menacing laughter at the end of the track comes on as both sincere and appropriate, as if Waits is amused by the absurdities of his own unconscious dream world as a kind of inside-joke, and all the pride and frustration that comes with such moments of esoteric euphoria.