FAITH NO MORE – A
SMALL VICTORY (SLASH)
Life is all about
small victories. While the big wins
remains out of reach of mere mortals, time can be well spent stopping to smell
the flowers and realising those times/moments when things go right, when effort
pays off and when fortune smiles on our efforts and actions. Music holds many small victories. The play of your favourite song on the radio,
coming across a lost record in the racks or basically sharing something
wonderful with an acquaintance.
Everything has a soundtrack, even pinfalls in professional
wrestling.
My fondest memory
attached to “A Small Victory” is actually pinned to the wartime artwork and the
fact that seeing a large fly poster of it plastered to a wall in Bloomsbury presented London Essex . I was
so happy that day. It was a few weeks
before my birthday and after my parents had gone on holiday leaving me behind
to baby-sit the dog for a week, seemingly out of guilt dad took me to London Bloomsbury one summer Sunday. Things felt that they were trending
upwards. I was wrong.
“A Small Victory” is a
great accompaniment and antidote to “Midlife
Crisis”. On the surface it is an
upbeat, optimistic song as it opens with oriental strains by Roddy Bottum which
serve to conjure wonder. However there
is quite the darkness attached to it as a military/war motif remains. Mike Patton has said that it is about his
father who was a coach and wanted to win all the time. Its about competition and the reality that
you cannot always win and small victories should be appreciated and valued. By the time the song reaches the chorus he is
unleashing a mantra about not letting it bother him but conceding that it
does. In essence this is a man having a
conversation with himself, waging an internal battle. It’s a sexy scene.
Originally I bought
this on cassette single but later purchased it again on CD single at a record
fair because I needed the b-side “Let’s Lynch The Landlord”. At the time I didn’t even realise that this
was a Dead Kennedys cover version and certainly did not appreciate how they
mutated a west coast punk song into an accordion driven skiffle blast sung in
the style of Elvis, I just found myself blown away by the track on its own
merits. To the day this remains probably
the best Faith No More b-side they ever made (which itself originally appeared
on an Alternative Tentacles compilation of Dead Kennedys cover versions called Virus
100).
Other than that the
disc is just an edit and full length version of “A Small Victory” along with
album track “Malpractice” (with its Kronos Quartet sample). I’ll just keep my mouth shut.
A big victory.
Thesaurus moment:
conquest.
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