Hidden But Not Forgotten: The Stylus Magazine Non-Definitive History of the Hidden Track

Stylus Staff

“Let’s Roll’” -- Great Hidden Tracks In No Particular Order


PJ Harvey — Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

In this fraudulent and criminal age of the illegal and immoral music downloader (bastards! bounders! cads! rapscallions!) there no longer exists anything as novel and “clever” as the “hidden track”. Oh no; global-capitalism necessitated multi-territorial release dates have made an already shite phenomenon even more fucking flatulently redundant, because hidden tracks aren’t even allowed to be hidden anymore if you’re signed to a major label; oh no, they have become “UK bonus tracks” and the like. Look! There’s a line space! And the last song’s got no number next to it! That must mean it’s “hidden”! Damn, marketing departments, damn you all to hell! As it happens, This Wicked Tongue is a fantastic furious finale to a spectacular record by Polly Jean, a wantonly vicious Seattle-slaying blues+scorn+sex number that’s wonderfully at odds with the beatific bliss of the album’s otherwise final two tracks, “Horses In My Dreams” and “We Float.” After “We Float” drifts slowly over the aural horizon, all insouciant metronomes and idyllic retributional pastures, silence rules for two minutes and then Polly KICKS ASS. So you thought she’d cheered up, did you? Suckers.
Nick Southall


AMM- AMMMusic

It’s ten seconds of silence, one separate track for it, to be programmed “wherever you wish”. It might be a more compelling listen if it was available on vinyl (the dust would ensure the sounds would be slightly different the more you played but not on CD), but that would defeat the purpose of allowing the listener the choice of programming it wherever he/she saw fit. Last time this was played I focused on the sizzling sound coming from my ears (courtesy of sludge metal bands). Never bothered to program it. I’m just too lazy for these sorts of things. I think this may be due to the fact that the record itself is so exhausting, the sounds coming from it so extraordinary that I just let it pass- out of some twisted sense of respect.
Julio Desouza


Blur - Modern Life Is Rubbish

Things were nearly quite different for Blur. Modern Life Is Rubbish Mk. I was an exploration of mostly obtuse sounds; the record company balked, not recognizing any marketable singles. Many of the songs jettisoned from the first draft of the album were used as B-sides for its lead single, “For Tomorrow”. Two of the single’s b-sides’’Peach’ and “When the Cows Come Home’’found their way onto the American version of the album. (As did non-LP single “Popscene”, which was inserted near the middle of the UK running order.)

The inclusion of the woozy “Peach” paid off: The delicate, ghostly balled was a surprise college radio hit. Featuring a harmonium, it works well and serves as a fitting coda.

More interesting in the band’s progression, however, is the knees-up music hall pastiche, “When the Cows Come Home”. The song features numerous soon-to-be familiar, parochial Blur trademarks including a rousing brass section, a character-sketch lyric, a flirtation with waltz time, and a vaudevillian spirit. A scornful portrait of a tight-fisted middle-management type, “Cows” was widely considered to be about Food Records’ boss Dave Balfe, which hastened its removal from MLIR. A triumph of timing more than its own success, had this been on The Great Escape it could have seemed cartoonish and grating, but sitting along Blur’s 1993 work, it is an odd charmer.
Scott Plagenhoef


Mercury Rev — Yerself Is Steam

Mercury Rev fans were rewarded with a genuine bonus at the far end of the American CD version of their debut album—the brilliant non-LP single, “Car Wash Hair.” It appeared on track 99, after 76 3-second pieces of “Very Sleepy Rivers,” the record’s last track proper and an additional 14 tracks of silence. The song was presumably buried because it was recorded with the assistance of Galaxie 500/Luna majordomo Dean Wareham, rather than regular Rev producer Dave Fridmann, who was temporarily banished for spending the band’s advance money to send his mom to Bermuda. Nice form, Dave.
Todd Hutlock


D12 — Devil's Night

The serviceable, but ultimately disappointing debut of Eminem’s group is accentuated with one of Em’s more humorous (and ridiculously conceived) diss tracks to date tucked away at the end of the album, “Girls”. If you allow yourself to disassociate the lyrics from having any real-world significance, i.e., open threats based on petty squabbling, some of Em’s best battle one-liners are delivered, including some unintentional homoeroticism: "Now see if you diss me and I respond, the beef is on /But if I help you sell one record and I see you at a show, I'll strip you naked." Targets this time around include Everlast, DJ Lethal, Fred Durst, and Dilated Peoples.
Fredrick Thomas


Oval — ovalprocess, ovalcommers

Give Markus Popp an interview in The Wire and he’ll drone on with pseudo-mystic glee about his unfixed-generative-spontaneous-open-ended-and-process-oriented software devices designed to tear down all those pesky preconceptions about composition. Give Markus Popp a compact disc and he’ll cram it to the last available second with the rigidly fixed sounds of recorded digital audio — both of these hidden tracks are placed a good twenty-some minutes past the final listed piece, filling each disc to capacity at exactly seventy-four minutes and two seconds. Which is not to say that there’s anything musically inappropriate about either of these elegant postscripts to the first two installations of the oval(blank) series. The former is a heat-distorted afterimage of fractal guitar distortions and organ sputters, the latter is an alternately spiky and shimmering two-part suite of hiccupping clicks and subterranean growling. But there’s more than a little whiff of conceptual duplicity lurking behind these addendums. Beautiful as they may be, they’re curious subliminal indications that there might not actually be too much room for us in Popp’s conceptual universe. After all, he’s already crowded it to the last available bit.
Joe Panzner


Pulp- His n’ Hers

In Britpop’s formative years, UK non-album singles were often hidden at the end of U.S. releases. The best of these is Pulp’s “Razzmatazz’” the last of the band’s three Gift singles (later compiled on Intro).

Beneath the song’s Casiotronics beats the heart of a low-rent scoundrel, as singer Jarvis Cocker coos and chortles his way through a cruel dissection of his ex. With the wisdom and comfort of hindsight he gets the knife out for his former lover: “You started getting fatter / Three weeks after I left ya”. When Jarvis insults her new boyfriend, he nearly chuckles. And when he asks if his ex is “going out” or “sitting at home eating boxes of Milk Tray”, he knows the answer to the question. Cocker’s theatrics, pregnant pauses, and scornful slashes at wounded pride seem like the work of a confident artist, but they aren’t so much triumphant as opportunistic, the sound of a longtime loser finally relishing the chance to be the victor. It could very well have been him feeling the pain and it probably had been in the past.

Fittingly, for a longtime musical outcast this was the first record to earn him widespread notice. Finally finding his voice, with the Gift singles Cocker built the foundation of one of the 1990s most fascinating characters and thrilling artists.
Scott Plagenhoef


T.Power — The Self-Evident Truth Of An Intuitive Mind

T.Power’s lost 1995 lysergic drum’n�bass masterpiece (and it really is lost — you try finding a copy anywhere but eBay) contains one of the most interesting uses of the hidden track idea. Divided into twin sides of “intellect” and “emotion” (the intellect tracks named after shapes, the emotions after colours), once track nine (“Amber”) concludes the record proper, a countdown to the unnamed track ten begins, -18:22 minutes on the CD player readout. Eight minutes of total silence drift by before a whisper of drums fades in and then dissipate a moment later. At “10:14 a strange posh bloke utters “bud out of bud” out of bud’ out of bud’ out of bud out of bud out of bud out of bud’ out of bud’ out of bud’ bud out of bud out of bud’’ and continues to do so for three minutes, an extraordinary, tedious, drugged citation of’ something or other. At “7:20 sonic oddness ensues, drowning the odd posh blokes continuing utterances beneath a melange of filtersweeps and strange FX. Come “3:30 and sub-bass ambience joins with mysterious electronic blips in the mix, before the posh blokes voice speeds up, down, and is looped backwards and forwards for two minutes from “2:15. And then, at 00:00 a moment of silence again before track 10, all forest floor ambience and warm peels of bass pulse drifting through the cones. A strange, disconcerting finale to a revolutionary record.
Nick Southall


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