Today marks the Sweet 16th birthday of Nirvana’s Nevermind. If that album were a girl, it’d be celebrating with a day out of rehab for an empty and overblown party worthy of an MTV reality show. Our impression at the time was that Nevermind was a muddle of plagiarized tunes, and that the drummer had all the talent in the band. We bravely stand by that opinion, although our pal David T. Lindsay phrased things better—but we can’t remember exactly what he said that got Kurt Cobain to storm out from a radio interview that year. Could’ve been anything. Kurt was very sensitive.

Anyway, 1991 was still a good year in music. We even had Joe Jackson once again attempting to make sense out of rock ’n roll. Laughter & Lust was meant to be Jackson’s return to the mainstream, and he was talking about playing things straight.

It turned out, however, that Jackson was contrary as ever. His choice for the first single was certainly doomed with college radio. Here’s the opening to “Obvious Song”:

        There was a man in the jungle
        Trying to make ends meet
        Found himself one day with an axe in his hand
        When a voice said, “Buddy, can you spare that tree
        We gotta save this world—starting with your land.”
                It was a rock ‘n’ roll millionaire from the USA
                Doing three to the gallon in a big white car
                And he sang and he sang ’til he polluted the air
                And he blew a lot of smoke from a Cuban cigar

The video was pretty much a straight staging of the lyrics. We don’t usually like that kind of thing, but it worked well here. All of that got us to a chorus where we’re informed that you don’t have to be a hippie to believe in peace, that’s obvious. It is obvious, but college-radio was busy trying to sell us Natalie Merchant at the time.

“Obvious Song” is ultimately about people coming together in the wake of major change. (A wall had fallen in Berlin, but Kurt Cobain hadn't noticed.) That’s a rare case of Jackson being too optimistic. He even brings up some notion about teachers being worth more than Marines. On the song’s second—and final—verse, though, Jackson sounds more conservative than Libertarian. He may be dismissing the drug war, but Jackson doesn't sound sympathetic while talking about a young crack dealer with a gun in his hand. Then he's fairly scornful while laying blame on the kid’s customers for needing help to dream.   

Laughter & Lust is a great album, but it’s less political than 1980’s Beat Crazy. That’s why our emphasis is on “Obvious Song.” The rest of Laughter & Lust is dedicated to Jackson’s equally insightful takes on sexual politics. He sounds conservative on that topic, if not downright old-fashioned. We also had The Pursuit of Happiness around by then, but adulthood was going out of fashion.

And for trivia fans: The other big deal revolutionary album of 1991 was Public Enemy’s Apocalypse ’91: The Empire Strikes Black. Whatever happened to those guys?

Make it your own: We once again present great music going for cheap. The video for “Obvious Song” isn’t included on the Laughter & Lust Live VHS tape, but it’s a typically great Jackson concert from 1991, with fine reinventions of older songs. We’d been seeing Jackson in concert since 1988, and never heard a straight version of “Is She Really Going Out With Him” until 2003. That’s when he took yet another stab at rock with Volume 4—which we’ll get to later. More importantly, Jackson didn’t change the lyrics to “Obvious Song” when he included it on a live album from 1999.

 

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