5 Songs is a weekly series where we point out the strange, the grand, and the unique connections between our favorite songs. Let’s get weird.

Words by Chris

I commit to “pop” because it’s more fun to say than “soda”. Look, soda is flavorless ephemera that has to be mixed with gin to work as a beverage at all

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“Suburban Beverage” / Real Estate

This song slides through just like a lazy sunny day, with nothing taxing on the horizon. “Budweiser, Sprite, do you feel alright?” is repeated hazily until the song jumps up for the latter half, a wordless jam that reminds me of playing release with the neighborhood kids. I have no clue just who is supposed to “feel alright”, but the atmosphere created by the music has obviously lost its sense of care, and that’s alright with me.

Real Estate / Suburban Beverage

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“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” / Modest Mouse

There’s a lot of spacey meth-fueled shit on this record, where the songs are injected with paranoia and desperately lost in wide open parking lots if they’re not wandering the “tundra” or “lunar surface” of the middle of nowhere. “Does anybody know how a body could get away?! Does anybody know a way?!” is especially frightening given the setting of the open road. Here, Isaac Brock is quenching the madness with an ice-cold Coca-Cola, “I can feel it rolling right on down my throat.” Big Gulps, huh?

Modest Mouse / Tiny Cities Made of Ashes

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“Bone Machine” / Pixies

Not too far off the nightmare scale is this classic opening track from Surfer Rosa, and is dedicated lovingly to “Carol”—basically an insane love song to a cheating woman. Somewhere along the line: “I was talking to preachy-preach about kissy-kiss. He bought me a soda, he bought me a soda and tried to molest me in the parking lot, yep yep yep yep!”

Pixies / Bone Machine

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“Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997” / Beck

There’s a lot of pop-related references on Mellow Gold, which to me added to Beck’s character of the slacker guy closed-up in the basement down the block listening obsessively to L.A. Punk Rock, Mississippi Blues and Hip-Hop. Here, between detuned strings that sound like straw and weary harmonies, a character seeps through like the detached twittering of birds, “I was born in this hotel, washing dishes by the sink. Magazines and free soda. Trying hard not to think.” And then later, “She can talk to squirrels, coming back from the convalescent home, staring at sports cars, crying.” Phew.

Beck / Whiskeyclone, Hotel Lights 1977

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“Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)” / Saul Williams

Not unlike its use in the Mouse song above, here Coca-Cola is the quintessential American product, and can stand-in for capitalism. This song is one of the more politically fierce songs ever recorded, with Williams just tearing up, line-after-line, asking you to understand the will to act. The song just keeps escalating in intensity, omitting de la Rocha’s chorus after a couple of verses, not losing any steam, “If you share the guilt of blood spilt in accordance with the Dow Jones. Dow drops, fresh crop, skull and bones. A machete in the heady, Hutu, Tutsi, Leone. An Afghani in a shedy, Doodle-Dandy Yank on. An Iraqi in Gap khaki, Coca-Cola, come on.” Amid all this violence he still says, “But Brutus is an honorable man.”

Saul Williams / Act III Scene 2

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Soda or pop? Doesn’t matter because you can’t argue with these awesome songs. Can you think of any other tunes powered by pop? Leave us some comments.

Filed under: 5 Songs, Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan