90's Guilty Pleasures #45: Silverchair "Ana's Song (Open Fire)" (1999)

Silverchair’s official missives and MySpace blog posts reveal them to be some massively huge douchebags, especially Daniel Johns. When he was 14, he wrote a song about class separation (“Tomorrow”) and 2 years later it ended up becoming the biggest song on modern rock radio for a few weeks in the Spring of 1995, just in time for them to permanently remain the official “death of grunge” marker. But you know what? They should be commended. Just think of all those anorexic teen girls who Silverchair helped guide through the tough times, all while adoring Daniel Johns as such a glorious and vulnerable public figure. This was achieved with the autobiographical melodrama “Open Fire (Ana’s Song),” soon to be made into a Lifetime Original Movie. The verses act as a fitting “binge” section to the chorus’s “purge,” with the amazingly awkward key-change separation as the part where the fingers physically enter the throat. On the plus-side (not “plus-size” you fat fuck), at least there’s any key change at all, which is more than what was offered from virtually every other modern rock radio ballad throughout the 2000’s.