My City Was Gone—The Pretenders
#365Songs: July 10
Here at #365Songs, we love a good Theme Week. All three of us writer-editors have done more than a few, and I’m going to start another one with this post.
My theme? Songs about hometowns.
Why did I choose this as my theme? Primarily as a challenge to myself. Because, as a general rule, I hate fucking nostalgia. I hate songs that obsess over the past. I hate shit about people’s dogs and their houses and the kids in their neighborhoods. I hate songs about first loves, first kisses, first anything.
For a song about a hometown to not drive me insane, it’s got to be pretty fucking great.
And “My City Was Gone” is pretty fucking great.
Obviously, Chrissie Hynde is a god among mortals. One of the most unique voices ever to come out of rock and roll. And by “voice,” I don’t just mean her singing voice (which is totally badass), but her authorial voice—her vision, her style, her approach, her concept.
“My City Is Gone” is a great example of Hynde at her best. Tough and snarky in one moment, heartbreaking and pathos-laden the next. Her talk-sing thing is endlessly cool, and when she uses it to deliver brusque and brutal lines that brim with attitude, it’s impossible not to love it.
I went back to Ohio
But my city was gone
There was no train station
There was no downtown
South Howard had disappeared
All my favorite places
My city had been pulled down
Reduced to parking spaces
Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio
And then, of course, there is that bassline. It’s like a funkier, rootsier, more rock and roll spin on the Talking Head’s spin on Al Green. Locked in with founding member Martin Chambers on drums—whose elegant Charlie Watts-isms are always in the pocket—it gets you right in the strut.
Being a tele man myself, I love the guitar work, provided here by Billy Bremner, who delivers a veritable clinic’s worth of Steve Cropper-inspired soul.
But in the end, it comes down to Hynde’s lyrics and how she delivers them. Among the many challenges any hometown-focused song faces is how to avoid the extremes. On one side, there is too much specificity, too much localization, too many inside jokes and references that exclude a listener from connecting. On the other side, things get too generic and cliche-addled. If it could be anyone’s street, it’s no one’s street.
It’s the same with sentiment. At one extreme is snarly dismissal. Where I’m from sucks, I’m in pain, listen to me whine. At the other extreme is where you find the rose-tinted glasses and the over-romanticized treacle.
Hynde lands beatifully right in the middle, toughly and gruffly, but with traces of her rusted heart showing on her sleeve:
I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls
Said, ay, oh, way to go, Ohio
Right about now, you may be wondering where you were when you first heard this song. Well, if you’re a right-wing asshole, you were probably listening to Rush Limbaugh. Yes, that’s right, he used this song by The Pretenders as his theme song, and he thought he was pretty clever for doing so—until Chrissie Hynde took his licensing fee and donated it to PETA.
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