12tone

A funny thing happens when you mention the 1995 Oasis hit Wonderwall. It warps whatever conversation it's brought up in, transforming it into a debate about the song's merits, its meaning, and what a "wonderwall" even is. It occupies a near-unique place in modern music culture, the poster child for the overplayed, a deeply controversial song that everyone seems to have an opinion about. Here's mine.

I am very serious about this. I'll be honest, I don't really have a good explanation for this one. I just wanted an excuse to do an excessively thorough deep dive through every possible three-note chord and I needed a framing device and this sort of happened from that. Sometimes that's how art works, y'know?

Never change, AC/DC. Do you ever just stop and think about AC/DC? I do. They fascinate me as a band because they simply figured out what they wanted to sound like early on and then just, like, stuck with it. Over the years, they've actively refused to evolve their sound, with Angus Young even openly mocking the idea that they'd want to, and yet they still made a huge mark on the world of rock, because the sound they were so stubbornly committed to was really, really good.

Who is the Devil? As a longtime rock and metalhead, I've heard hundreds of songs trying to answer that question, and the thing that strikes me most is how varied those answers are. As an artist, the Devil is whoever you need him to be, a symbolic chameleon taking whatever shape best fits the song. He's one of our most ubiquitous folklore characters, as slippery as he is powerful, and to better understand him, Polyphonic and I are turning our attention to one of the most definitive depictions of the Devil in rock: Sympathy for the Devil, by the Rolling Stones.