Cannonball. The Breeders. 1993. 4AD/Elektra.

 Near the end of Lovers Of Today, the Pretenders ballad about surviving love’s tendency to wound and scar, you hear Chrissie Hynde singing—forcing herself to be heard above the silence of the song’s fade out—“I’ll never feel like a man in a man’s world.” The gender distinction is crucial because it allows us to see, with poetic clarity, how our sexual natures, chameleonic and evasive to begin with, are often the final components we look  to replace when repairing the disarrayed ego following a period of emotional tumult. We first heard Kim Deal as the voice of voyeurism back in 1988, watching “him walk her every day into a shady place;” possibly, following the dream logic of the rock and roll experience, the same shade where much of the sexual drama of Cannonball, five years on, unfolds. I like imagining that the Lovely Legs of Gigantic is the very same Last Splash of Cannonball; that is, the woman being watched on the Pixies’ debut LP is the same woman who no longer has to wish for her Cannonball, her Paul, her real cuckoo, her hunk of love, declaring “I’m the last splash.” Much of Gigantic’s tension is resolved in Cannonball’s rhythmic bravura, the dynamism of sexual satisfaction given song structure and pop single brio. At the absolute top of their game, the Breeders, along with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and [insert your favorite artist here] were among those era-defining acts who ushered us through the exit of the bloodless rock and roll apocalypse. Either stoned or drunk for much of the decade, my memory of the nineties consists largely of my view from the record store cash register or night club barstool, or images ripped from zines and an assortment of other national periodicals, as well as snatches of conversations with friends who were as obsessed with  low culture as I was, and, finally, those market derived album cover artworks that still litter the internet with their strange power to ignite instant nostalgia. Cannonball merits iconic singles status because, like Carol or Revolution or Oh Bondage! Up Yours!, it condenses the energy of its hour into jukebox fission whose aftershocks continue to signify. Its brief commentary on how we once went about stylizing sexual attraction at millennium’s close is also the continuation of the radical democratization of human sexuality that, being outside hegemony, began with female rock. Experiencing sexual equality in the stark light of radicalism within national borders where freedom has  now been fetishized into a luxury vice should’ve rang like a warning. But our transition between centuries instead closed the door on rock and roll and cool. It was where our farewell to the praxis of liberty began.