My Top 100, No. 14: "The Weekenders" by The Hold Steady

I went on a whole tangent in one of these posts--I forget which--about why I hate RENT so much: The lyrics are supposed to move the plot and fit in with the music at the same time, but they wind up not doing either well at all. The Hold Steady's "The Weekenders" is the opposite of RENT.

The Hold Steady's "The Weekenders" is the opposite of RENT.

Which is not to say that these lyrics are perfect--it does, after all, start with the line "There was that whole weird thing with the horses," which while memorable, isn't as poetic as The National or Springsteen, for instance. Though even so, "She said the theme of this party is the industrial age / And you came in dressed like a train wreck" is pretty much perfect.

What leaves me in awe of "The Weekenders" is how perfectly the lyrics fit the melody of the song, while at the same time bearing about 90 percent similarity to how they'd look if they were written in prose, or with no respect to a particular meter or melodic form. The result is a song that generates and exhibits unfathomable forward momentum, as if Craig Finn just opened his mouth and this is what tumbled out, like an oversized bite of spaghetti. It's propulsive without being conspicuously energetic, which I feel like fits in the dad jeans aesthetic of The Hold Steady.