Ween - "Roses Are Free"
(from Chocolate and Cheese, Elektra, 1994)
"Roses Are Free" is the kind of song, it's so catchy that if you wake up with it in your head in the morning, which you will, you'll start out on your commute to work already singing it, only to find that it didn't sync onto your iPod, so you'll scroll through the hundreds of artists that did successfully sync, and then you'll start to recognize a weird dissatisfied feeling in your stomach as you read the names of your favorite bands, and realize, absurdly, that you would rather give up -- now that it's there, in your head -- and walk the ten minutes to the train, and then ride the train for another thirty-five, all without playing any music at all. Just your headphones in, fogging out the city noise a bit, so that you can better hear the little recordplayer we all have in our brains play this song on repeat. The thought of other music becomes impossible. The bright keys, the dwarfish voices. Tinsel and pumpkins. The way the chorus winds itself up. The guitar solo, the fuzzy, perfect thing.
That's just it. I think this is a perfect song. Capital-P Perfect. Which is weird, because it sounds like maybe what you'd get if you mixed a chorus of elves singing a Christmas jingle, a Van Halen concert, a trashy amusement park carousel ride and 450milligrams of mescaline sulfate. Ween is one of the most perplexing bands in the history of pop music, and "Roses Are Free" may be their ultimate achievement.
I do not know what this song is about, but I am convinced that it is pure evil. That it is doing twisted, gloriously debauched things to my brain.
MP3: Ween - "Roses Are Free"
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