49. QUAD CITY DJ’S – “C’mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” (1996)
There was a bit of chat the other day when Pitchfork released its list of Top Tracks Of The 2020s So Far; as is often the way it was sparked by the site’s practice (a tale as old as time) of taking regional scenes, or in some cases national scenes, and anointing one track from among them. There’s a bit of kayfabe going on here – we know, and they know, that the lone and excellent baile funk song they pick is not the best baile funk song of the last 5 years any more than Noah chose the best giraffe, it’s about collective breadth creating an illusion of depth. If you want to be harsh, the squeak rap, Rio funk, and other one-shot tracks congregating near the bottom of the list are a matte scenery painting in front of which the true dramatis personae – Lana, Kendrick, Fiona et al – can perform.
But I don’t want to be harsh. I think the open-armed policy, gesturing at worlds of music beyond the centre of critical attention, is a very good thing, even if the performance of expertise accompanying it gets exhausting. My preference has always been to admit the differentials in knowledge and interest going into a list, and of course to make sure that what you’re picking is still, you know, good. Maybe there is no true critical centre to push out from, but there’s an attentional centre, and there are things advertisers want a music site to cover, and you can move away from those and have value even if an individual blurb is no more than a gesture. (There are more detailed debates to be had about which gestures are worth making, of course.)
All of which is a rambling way of saying that I’m glad I first encountered “C’Mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” as an unwanted promo CD single, discounted to 50p, and not when it came top of the 1996 Pazz And Jop Singles Poll, which would have established a context for it in probably unwelcome ways. I’m not sure this song got a UK release, and while there’s no reason for it not to do well – we handed two No.1s to the Outhere Brothers! – it feels like an unlikely import without some Radio 1 DJ getting behind it for a laugh.
It’s not a subtle record. I bought it, unheard, because it had a train on the front and because it looked like a good time. I was right. As seven minute tracks based on train noises go, it’s less beautiful than Kraftwerk, but more effective. We aren’t here to admire the scenery, unless “the scenery” is the other passengers, but even the sexual metaphor is a distraction here: sometimes a choo-choo is just a choo-choo, Herr Doctor. No, we are here to ride the train. The axles and pistons of the song come from Barry White, put to piledriving use, but the MC conductor is doing heroic work stoking the boiler. I particularly like how the tempo starts to drop on the fade, though – hey! We’re reaching the station!
I don’t know, but can guess fairly easily, why this regional party hit broke containment and became a national smash – it was the year of the Macarena, a good moment for big dumb songs. What I’m not so sure about is how it then contrived to top the annual list of the rock critics of America, a body not known for friendliness toward “jock jams”. It feels like an outlier, everyone picking the same token fun track before getting back to the proper business and getting a shock when the votes tot up. The unstoppable momentum of the collective elevating a song about exactly that.
The problems of tokenism in lists – and rare triumphs like this – happen more at this collective level, when individual experience and judgement is tipped into the general soup. Pitchfork, in particular, no longer has bluffers like me writing for them – or they used not to before they fired half the staff – and the days of Ryan Schreiber jive-talking his way through a Coltrane review were an embarrassing memory even when they did. But one contributor’s deep love and knowledge of the squeak rap game can look like smirking or pomposity when it’s piped over the editorial tannoy, next to 99 other blurbs all writing with the same habit-hardened authoritative distance. Collective voice in an individual-influencer world is a problem.