I’ve been reserving this rant for long enough – it is time for some unleashing! Upon close listening and consideration on the Stone Roses‘ eponymous debut, I’ve realized that there are, perhaps, a few tracks that both versions (UK and US) could have done without and that, with the power of song deletion after ripping, you can practically remove from the record’s playlist. Beyond are a complete list and the reasons why I picked these songs.
Just so that you have some perspective, here’s the playlist in its entirety (in bold are the songs I would remove):
I Wanna Be Adored
She Bangs the Drums
Elephant Stone (US)
Waterfall
Don’t Stop
Bye Bye Badman
Elizabeth My Dear
(Song For My) Sugar Spun Sister
Made of Stone
Shoot You Down
This is the One
I Am The Resurrection
Fool’s Gold (US)
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And now onto the bashing:
Elephant Stone
Great, amazing track. Very upbeat, very energetic – great. The word I am mostly looking for here, however, is redundancy. She Bangs the Drums, the song immediately preceding it, does the exact same thing that this song does, though Elephant removes the catchy chorus and turns the volume up quite a bit. In terms of keeping with the overall vibe of the record, She Bangs the Drums just fits better, and so the distributors in charge of the UK playlist knew better than to include Elephant Stone from the release they were responsible for.
Don’t Stop
Don’t Stop is a song that takes Waterfall’s rhythm and climaxes and backtracks, twists and re-arranges it in a fantastically awful but faintly structured manner, resulting in a song with its own lyrics and pacing and such, but also takes the entire philosophy of the album and completely discards it. You cannot dance to it, you do not feel like singing it, and it is 5 minutes too long. This is what you call a B-Side, and as such it breaks the pace of the album. Why this song is part of the record just boggles my understanding of life entirely.
Fool’s Gold
Now here’s a great track. Just great. It’s funky, it’s catchy, it’s danceable – it’s perfect. However, and this song has the same problem that Elephant Stone has. The song that precedes it, in this case I Am the Resurrection, is the be all and end all of a song allotted to the spot it is specifically designated for (album closer). Resurrection closes the album perfectly, and it does so in 8 minutes already, so to sit through another ten of Fool’s Gold certainly takes away from Resurrection’s effect. While the song is great, it isn’t the epic album closer that Resurrection is, and that is its problem.
If you are more of a whole album kind of listener, then I think you get where I’m coming from in terms of flow, redundancy and so on. If you are, however, spinning The Stone Roses at a party, nobody’s going to care about Elephant Stone and Fool’s Gold being missplaced. The only thing that everyone should universally agree on is that Don’t Stop just does not belong on this record, in no order.
