My Top 100, No. 87: "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" by Brand New

Brand New's Deja Entendu is one of only a few albums in existence that doesn't have a song I don't like. I'm sure I was only one of a few hundred thousand mopey Mid-Atlantic teenagers who figured out it was possible to wear out a CD through overuse by playing this disc on repeat for most of 2003-04.

Deja Entendu also gave me irrational hope that every vapid emo band's second album would be amazing, at least until Panic! At the Disco proved conclusively that the opposite was true.

I started writing about "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" and immediately regretted including it in the original Top 100, because its larger message--about picking up drunk girls at bars--veers directly into the Territory of the Problematic if it's taken at face value. So I spent the entire weekend going back and forth about whether to make a change before ultimately deciding to keep it in.

I did this for two reasons: 1) Given the tone of the song, I'm pretty sure this is one of those instances where the narrator of the song is a character and the band doesn't actually espouse the message. I'm fully aware that this is what people say to excuse, for instance, Tyler, the Creator, and that I might just be telling myself that to feel better about liking this song. 2) The reason I'd listened to "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" over and over for 12 years and never picked up on the meaning is that the meaning of the song has absolutely nothing to do with why I like it. So much so that the lyrics, as a whole, almost didn't register. 

I like this song for two reasons: one specific and one general. 

The specific reason lasts about 11 seconds, from the last line of the first verse to the first line of the second, and is an example of the thing that made Deja Entendu in general so special: vocal countermelodies. You get it in "Okay, I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't" (which is a title I usually shorten in my head because it sounds transcendently stupid when you write it all out like that) and "Play Crack the Sky," the latter of which is the traditional Brand New album closer, an acoustic bit that, along with "Soco Amaretto Lime" off the previous record, shows that Brand New was very aware how much time their fans would spend sitting around bonfires in groups of seven or eight, with one of those seven or eight being a teenaged boy who had a guitar and no other way to impress girls. 

Anyway, the first verse is a vocal solo and ends on the line "Out of cash and IOUs," while the first line in the second verse is "I've got desperate desires and unadmirable plans" and introduces a harmony. Only the two lines overlap, so you get those two lines and the intermingled "I've got you" when you put them together. It's so simple and yet makes me so giddy I want to strip naked to the waist and cover myself in mud.

The second is that this song sounds like what being depressed feels like. It starts out quiet and whispered and just sways quietly along for about three minutes, until all of a sudden you've got a big, hammering cymbal beat, distorted guitars and feedback, and the signature emo scream. It goes from quietly hurting yourself to noisily hurting others. Then, just as suddenly, it's back to the original theme and fading out. And it doesn't matter what the larger message is.