I have said it before, and I’ll say
it again: all the best songs make strictly intuitive sense. You can’t
parse this. It has already expressed itself as a fully reduced equation.
You can’t break it down any further. You can only swallow it,
and you will only feel bile in your throat when you do. The swirl
of motionless rage consumes the singer, and the listener along with
him, and the band that holds the whole thing up grinds the song’s
mean sentiment into your forehead like a lit cigarette butt. Its narrator
finds the burning feeling of nearly uncontrollable power that lurks
in the bellies of helpless things; whatever his situation actually
is, it’s not going to stay unresolved much longer. The song is
the lighting of the fuse. Let in on the moment, we feel like we are
watching a brush fire about to break out. Which is to say, after the
song’s run through its second verse and mandatory chorus-repeats,
that "Hash Pipe" serves up a truly great rock moment: a
feeling that everyone can share whether or not they can make any sense
of it.
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