Stone Roses - Waterfall (live on British TV, 1989)

[highplainsdem]

4. Ian Brown could write some really great lyrics. This is from a retrospective

by NME a couple of years ago:

https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/stone-roses-debut-album-dissected-765093

But, really, the most timeless aspect of the album is the lyrics. Ian Brown gets a lot of shit for his vocal ability, but that’s like slagging off a great author for their handwriting. The important things here are the mood and the message, and the Roses singer is an underrated philosopher. Many great songs contain a meaning that’s poignant whenever and wherever they’re played because they speak to fundamental aspects of the human condition: Pulp‘s ‘Common People’, LCD Soundsystem‘s ‘All My Friends’, Bruce Springsteen‘s ‘Born To Run’. On ‘The Stone Roses’ there are 11 of them. Optimism and hope reign supreme.

-snip-

Throughout ‘The Stone Roses’, Ian Brown softly delivers lyrics that combine anger at the Monarchy (“It’s curtains for you, Elizabeth my dear“) and the government (“Every member of parliament trips on glue“) with sacrilegious arrogance (“I am the resurrection and I am the light“) and the unbridled optimism of talented youth (“Sometimes I fantasise, when the streets are cold and lonely and the cars they burn below me“). These are mood-lifting and perspective-changing anthems. Best of all, from ‘She Bangs The Drums’: “The past was yours but the future’s mine“. Any young person who doesn’t have that attitude is doing it wrong.