58. Verve, "The Drugs Don't Work" (1997)

(listen)

Obviously another drug song, but one I find allusive, unexpected, and surprisingly utilitarian. I have typically taken it to be about a love interest whose antidepressant regime has begun to fail. Look into it a bit and you learn that singer/songwriter Richard Ashcroft had drug problems himself when he wrote it; also a dying father on drugs with side effects. "The Drugs Don't Work" comes from the album Urban Hymns and was a #1 hit in the UK. Stateside, only "Bitter Sweet Symphony" creased the top 40, along the way earning a frivolous lawsuit from the Rolling Stones, which the Stones won (and you still wonder about the reality of that deal at the crossroads). I like the Verve album pretty well even though it tends to clot a bit, the sawing sadness of it only coming into sharper focus on various songs but never changing much across its length. "Bitter Sweet" works it pretty well, so does "Sonnet," but it comes into its sharpest focus for me here. If it seems to me now very much of its time, perhaps that's because of the way I take it and the coincident rampant rise of antidepressant use in the late '90s, a fact in some ways depressing in itself even as I got caught up in it too for several years, a bit further down the road, and if pressed would have to acknowledge they do some good. I always thought Nick Tosches had the best line on the matter, characterizing them as a class as the only drug you take in which everyone around you feels better as a result. And I found them far more mood-altering than others seem to. Jesus Christ, isn't that exactly the reason people take them? But now I'm straying from the point.