"Speakers Push the Air" by Pretty Girls Make Graves from the album Good Health (2002)

At some point “rock and roll” became “rock,” a shift indicative of the form’s self-awareness. Rock’s self-consciousness led to its pompous self-seriousness and pretentiousness, but it also opened the gates to a quest for understanding that has always separated the genre from others that don’t ask the important questions. “Speakers Push the Air” repeats the mantra-like axiom “Do you remember what the music meant?” enough times that it becomes bullying. It’s a trick question — in couching the query in a self-reflexive ode to music’s ability to clear away life’s complications and frustrations, these Smiths-obsessed Northwesterners created a Moebius strip of a song that answers its own question with another series of never-ending questions.

_Daniel Brockman