The Alternative Number Ones: Suzanne Vega’s “Blood Makes Noise”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Suzanne Vega is a writer. Her lyrics are clear and sharp and focused, and they have the power to make you feel the things that she describes. She's got a wonderfully soothing, compulsively listenable voice, but it's not the kind of voice that draws attention to itself. Instead, she sings in ways that pull your brain toward her words. She's the kind of songwriter who writes more than songs. She was publishing poetry when she was still a kid. An anthology of her writing came out in 1999. In 2016, she and Duncan Shiek wrote a play about the novelist Caron McCullers. If Vega's music career had never taken off, she would've almost certainly found her way into some other creative field, or maybe into many other creative fields. Her writing probably would've been central to any of them, too.

Given all that, it's kind of funny that Suzanne Vega's greatest pop-cultural legacy is a wordless string of syllables, doot-dooted out casually but hypnotically on an acapella album track. Some British dance DJs remixed those doot-doots and turned them into a giant international hit, and the doot-doots keep popping up -- re-remixed or sampled or quoted or used to soundtrack some stray piece of ephemera. Vega's song "Tom's Diner" is specifically about existing in the world and feeling like you're not a true participant, like you're just watching everyone else. Most writers know this feeling. It's kind of central to the act of writing. So maybe it's appropriate that Suzanne Vega herself has almost been a passive participant in the life of "Tom's Diner," a song that she wrote and sang. Her doot-doots have taken on all these lives that she could've never envisioned, and that is beautiful.