MOG

Ah, 1990. Different world, same Steve, it seems.

A pop-lovin' fool all caught up in Madchester craziness bugs the heck out of a long-since-gone suburban Chicago record store that was known for stocking imports, calling almost daily to ask if "One Love" by The Stone Roses has come out yet.

Once in his hands, right around his 20th birthday, our hero feels a sense of sadness. Something's changed, as Jarvo would sing a few years later after BritPop emerged from the ashes of baggy. The cover, even in reduced 5" CD form, is all...wrong. Not a Pollock knockoff, not a mildly abstracted painting, but more something along the lines of a collage, ending a streak of frameable Stone Roses sleeves.

Mirroring the cover image, the music, too, has changed. Neither an incessantly jangly and wondrous piece nor the phenomenal funk workout that was post-debut-LP single "Fools Gold," "One Love" is instead reedy and thin, the funky drummer beat artlessly welded to John Squire's wet-sounding flanged guitar lead, Ian's voice sounding rather shite throughout but especially on the listless (by Roses' standards) chorus, only Mani's nimble bass performing up to par.

Surprisingly, the song is redeemed somewhat on its four-minute fadeout (long tracks having become the norm for the band at this time), when Squire makes seagull noises with his guitar and the rhythm section locks into a groove long past the point where a casual listener - or someone hearing it on the radio in its edited 7" form - has gone on to something else. But an interesting instrumental jam does not a good song make, lest our hero become a Phish phan.

Flip side "Something's Burning" was the aural equivalent of someone lighting a match after a particularly nasty squat on the loo, which too became the norm after the band ended a four-year silence with the tired funk and guitar heroics/hysterics of Second Coming, which was anything but.

If ever a band lived down to Sick Boy's unifying theory that "we all get old and then we can't hack it anymore" (i.e., that most artists only make inspirational art in their earliest years), it was The Stone Roses. RIP, mates.