The Workmen and Their Tools

0959. THE ENEMY, “You’re Not Alone”
Written by the Enemy ; produced by Owen Morris & Matt Terry
WEA/Warner 2007 Did not make pop charts

Even back in the old record store days of LPs, I was always fascinated by how music was sorted. Then and now, a lot of stores just threw up their hands and dumped 75% of the stock into something they called Rock/Pop. However, as music has been more and more anatomized and balkanized over the last three decades, subdivision increasingly prevails.

Witness the classification of this song. If you don't just find it classified as "Rock," it is often specified as "Punk" or even "Aggro," the latter even the title of another single by the same band. Musically, though, this is not really punk--well, I guess it is if you file your old Sham 69 singles under that categor. I, on the other hand, have always considered them more Power Poppy--check out the power chords--okay, let's compromise it and call it Power Pop with chanting.

If I had to classify this song solely by its lyrics, however, it would be simple: it's a protest song. What's that you say? Protest songs are played on acoustic guitars and underproduced with about half the energy of this so that they remain "real"? Not where I come from. Even back in my twenties, my two favorite protest songs were "Free Nelson Mandela" and "Sun City," and those are both high energy, mightily produced songs. And how about "By the Time I Get to Arizona"? That was a song that lit the fuse to an existing protest movement that actually ended up succeeding.

All these songs are written in what musicologist Benjamin Filene has wonderfully called "the musical vernacular"--simply put, the music people live and breathe in on a daily basis. Since World War II, that has frequently meant some form of pop. And when the factories began closing in Coventry in 2007, the Enemy didn't even think about what kind of music they should set their angry words to. Like any real bards of the people, they used what they had lying around, up to and including the brilliant inverted steal of "Don't let the sun go down on our empire" for the lyric.

"You're Not Alone" is the first and (so far) the most brilliant protest song of the Second Great Depression. I hope it will be performed at least as long as "This Land Is Your Land" is.

Mood Music

740. KAISER CHIEFS, "I Predict A Riot"
Written by Nick Baines, Nick Hodgson, Simon Rix, Andrew White, Ricky Wilson
B-Unique 088 2005 Did not make pop charts

90% of pop music proceeds by generic musical cues; 95% of good pop music plays with those cues to liven up the experience.

As usual with me, let's dispose of the words first: yes, these people think a riot would be a good thing.

The fun part, though, is the expectations that the arrangement sets up. Not only those opening guitars but that organ is as "scary" as the first verse promises. Then the chorus kicks in, and here we are among bracing power chords and all those la la las. Suddenly, a riot doesn't seem like all that bad an idea. Seriously, people, where do you want to "be"?

Simple, but effective.

Beta Testing

154. BOBBY WOMACK & PEACE, "Across 110th Street"
Written by J. J. Johnson & Bobby Womack
United Artists 196 1973 Billboard # 56

The release of Watchmen is reminding me about the pros and cons of soundtrack sampling--not just featuring music on a soundtrack, but using music on a soundtrack that's already been recorded for a different purpose.

Seriously, I don't mean to scapegoat Watchmen. (Not yet. I haven't seen it yet. I've only heard similarly comic-versed friends see it and shriek in horror.) But I have listened to the soundtrack album, which struck me as fairly unimaginative. Each song, as in "Forrest Gump," simply cues the audience via nostalgic association for a specific reaction to a scene.

If you're going to reuse music that's been recorded elsewhere and do it right, it needs to provide counterpoint, not double the melody. The most famous US pop example of this may be Martin Scorsese's use of "Layla" over the montage of mafia hits in Goodfellas. "But it's an elegy," the director disingenuously insisted. Still, you have to admit that playing an elegy for lost love over a sequence of dead bodies of criminals provides an interesting disjunction.

Which brings us, finally, to "Across 110th Street." To begin with, it's as beautiful a title song as blaxploitation cinema produced in the 1970s, so much so that I'm surprised that Marsh missed it in his original accounting of the period. But what brings me to address it here is Quentin Tarantino's reuse of the song in Jackie Brown (1997).

Yes, the film is an homage to blaxploitation cinema, right down to the casting of Pam Grier, the queen of blaxploitation, as the title character. The truth is, though, that Tarantino has never gotten credit for this, this best film, even down to the genius of this specific repurposing of a song.

Yes, this song was played over the credits of another film, almost a quarter of a century before--but the passage of time is very much the point here. The "day-to-day fight" Womack sings of has been going on for Grier's character for almost 25 years, and it shows. That magnifies the song, makes it bigger, extends its implications. Reusing the song in this specific case doesn't just tie the film to earlier blaxpolitation films. It legitimately asks what would have happened to the characters who had the wits to survive those earlier works. Okay, they survived that environment. Would they have thrived? By taking it down to the middle ages of the characters, the song isn't just reified--it's complicated.

A Master Class in Signifyin'

99. JAY-Z, "99 Problems"
Produced by Jay-Z & Kareem "Biggs" Burke; written by Shawn Carter, N.Landsberg, Felix Pappalardi, Rick Rubin, Billy Squier, J. Ventura, & L. Weinstein
Def Jam 000248411 2004 Billboard: # 30

Just after this single came out, a friend of mine was scheduled to speak at a conference on Black Masculinity in the Twenty-First Century. I suggested he and the other participants spend the conference taking apart this song.

Let me roll things back a bit to put this in perspective. In 1931, Louis Armstrong recorded "Shine," a song that lists nearly all of the qualities that are supposed to identify the stock Negro of early twentieth century culture. No one would deny that the song itself is deeply racist, a late survival of the worst minstrel show tendencies. The argument comes over what to make of Armstrong's interpretation of the song. Some--especially those who have seen the 1932 film A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, in which Armstrong performs the song in a leopard skin--would argue that his recording perpetuates the worst traits of racism, that one of jazz's great revolutionaries had by 1931 become no more than an Uncle Tom, allowing himself to be seen exactly as racist whites wanted to see him. For me, though, Dooley Wilson's version of the song in Casablanca is much more stereotypical. Wilson may be wearing a suit rather than a leopard skin as he sings it, but his eyes roll all the while, he hangs on the audience's reaction, and his vocal attack on the lyrics wouldn't have been out of character for such turn of the century minstrel legends as Arthur Collins or Byron Harlan.

By contrast, if you open your ears, what Armstrong does with the song is much more radical. He does more than simply "scat" the lyrics--he deconstructs them into smithereens. His vocal and improvisatory skill is so manifest, and the sounds are so chopped up into fragments, that the lyrics almost don't seem to exist anymore. He doesn't inhabit a racist song and allow it to endure. He stomps it into submission until we'll never be able to take the "real" words seriously again.

Jay-Z's performance on "99 Problems" is much the same trick, but it's more a matter of semantics than phonics. He takes one word that he, like many 1990s rappers, has rightfully been accused of overusing and rings a series of changes on it. The word, of course, is bitch, and if you don't think HOVA ever used it too casually, listen to 1998's "Can I Get a ---?" again (even though that track does technically give women equal time to complain about their worthless men).

Here, though, that noxious word gives rise to a masterpiece of the genre. Listening to Jay-Z on this record, from his supposed "farewell" album, I think he's not only read the complaints about his language, he's read the conference papers and dissertations about him too. He turns the word on its head, implicitly acknowledging that the concerns that dominate most rap lyrics are relatively trivial. The icing on the cake, of course, is when he takes a verse to brilliantly relate a far-too-typical DWB pullover and ends the cop's spiel with the line We'll just see how you feel when the canines come, taking bitch back in the ensuing chorus to its literal meaning. The drop to the downbeat between that verse and chorus may be my favorite hiphop moment ever.

Talking Vernacular Blues

876. GLENN FREY, "Smuggler's Blues"
Produced by Barry Beckett, Allan Blazek, & Glenn Frey; written by Glenn Frey & Jack Tempchin
MCA 53546 1985 Billboard: # 12

877. JOHNNY CASH, "Singing In Viet Nam Talking Blues"
Written by Johnny Cash
Columbia 45393 1971 Did not make pop charts

Oh Lord, he's talking Miami Vice again.

But seriously folks . . .

There's a traditional form in twentieth-century folk music called the "talking blues." The talking blues is not a "protest song" per se. It's more like a broadside, a song of indeterminate length in which words about recent events are more accompanied than set to music. The point of talking blues is to pass along information to the listeners, be it about the sinking of the Titanic, a strike at a shoe factory, or a day trip to Bear Mountain. Diehard folkies would probably suggest that there can't be such a thing as a pop talking blues, because the presumed slickness of pop would have to distract by definition from the self-conscious information drop of the words. Nevertheless, when Chuck D famously referred to rap "the CNN of black America," he as good as suggested that in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the talking blues had migrated into pop, into the undeniably polished tracks of contemporary hiphop.

But what about white Americans? One could argue that they don't need a muscial CNN because they already have the 24-hour news version, but no American above the age of eight would seriously suggest that what comes out of the mainstream news organizations is what we seriously need to know. Certainly in the pre-internet, not-yet-really-cable-ready 1980s, it wasn't. This is why, to complete their instruction about Reagan-era diplomacy in the Western hemisphere, many mainstream Americans needed . . . Miami Vice. The series was not just "anti-authority," as so many pieces of post-Vietnam American culture were. Episode after episode of the show, right down to the series finale, were premised in the idea that, no matter what the President might say, the War on Drugs would always suffer because its true success would undermine the supposed cause of fighting anti-communism.

In no case was this more true than in the episode entitled "Smuggler's Blues." Glenn Frey, who also appeared as an actor in the episode playing a shady pilot, even wrote this song for it, and its verses punctuated the narrative transitions from location to location. The song isn't exactly a summary of the episode's actual plot, but it does borrows amply from it, right down to the punchline "It's the politics of contraband," which is uttered near the end of the episode by Don Johnson as the frequently sockless Sonny Crockett.

As in most talking blues, the music here is instantly forgettable. The words are the point, and even they contain no self-conscious flourishes that might draw attention away from the data they wish to impart. We are taken through a drug deal from start to finish but we are asked to see it in organizational terms. For a Reagan-era pop troubadour, drugs are not just recreation or a scourge on society. They're part of our foreign policy strategy for winning the Cold War. As Jackson Browne almost acknowledged when he rewrote "Cocaine" at a Christic Institute concert a few years later, this was the politically self-aware drug song that that more-respected singer-songwriter wished he had written.

Johnny Cash's "Singing in Viet Nam Talking Blues" is a more respected song than Frey's and a more obvious heir of the classic talking blues tradition so I won't belabor my analysis of it. But I would point out that Cash almost does the opposite in this song of what Frey would do in his song fourteen years later. Frey took something considered personal and recreational and connected to global politics, whereas Cash takes the most pressing geopolitical issue of his time and takes it down to the level of the personal. From the opening scene at the breakfast table, this is a song about a married couple who go on a trip. The purposefully understated, even labored folksiness of it is meant to disarm the listener. It reduces our trip through the war zone to a human level, which in turn makes the rain of shells even scarier. This is not the world of either Barry Sadler's or John Wayne's Green Berets. This is a scary environment in which the politics of the war seem ultimately irrelevant.

By the end Cash could shout, as almost no other country singer of his time could or would shout, for the "boys" to be brought home "IN PEACE!" and no one could mistake him for being pro-communist. Like Frey, he wasn't just preaching to a left-leaning proudly folkie choir. He was using the musical vernacular of his time, and spreading the news to a mediated crowd.

*Definitely* Not a Dweeb

165. THE OFFSPRING, "Self Esteem"
Produced by Thom Wilson; written by the Offspring
Golf 001 1994 Billboard: # 45

Yet another chapter in the continuing saga of loser protagonists in postmodern pop. I am particularly fond of this one, though, since it skewers in its oft-repeated title one of the most counterproductive post-hippie sociological concepts that the Donnie Darko generation had shoved down their throats while growing up.

As usual in Loser Pop, the listening experience is based in a double-edged irony. The (presumptively male) listener is supposed to identify with the narrator and feel superior to him at the same time. Unlike Beck's "Loser" et al, however, this lyric has a progression and a payoff. When the narrator gets to that last "little bit," we begin to realize that he may not be quite as dumb as we thought. Even if he's still far from boyfriend material.

The Way It Happened Was Like This, See . . .

545. C. W. MCCALL, "Wolf Creek Pass"
Produced by ; written by Chip Davis and Bill Fries
MGM 14764 1975 Billboard: # 40

For once, I won't belabor it: a yarn pure and simple, spun by William Fries, advertising man, who reinvented himself as the hyperhomespun "C.W. McCall" for a series of ads for the Mertz Bread Company. "Convoy" is better known, it even spawned a film with Ernest Borgnine and J.J. Walker, but I've always preferred this song, with words that twist and turn like that downbound road that the narrator travels. Like many great country and hiphop songs, this one is firmly in the epic rather than the lyric mode, but there is much to savor along the path of this particular mock-heroic journey--particularly, for me, the telephone pole math.

A few years later, Harry Chapin wrote a song ("20,000 Pounds of Bananas") that ripped off both this and David Allen Coe's "You Never Even Call Me by My Name," but slumming in country is never the same thing as living in country--or in Country, to be more precise.

Can We Give the Drummer Some?

243. GO-GO'S, "We Got The Beat"
Produced by ; written by
IRS 9903 1982 Billboard: # 2

Of all the New Wave bands that get no respect from doctrinaire punkists, none are more unfairly vilified than the Go-Gos. When they proclaimed on a comeback single (that I'll post on eventually) "Punk rock isn't dead!" many casual listeners must have wondered what they were talking about.

But the Go-Gos did form on the Sunset Strip in the late 70s as a punk band, at a time when the definition of what punk meant was a lot more fluid than it would be after Classic Punk was over and therefore writ canonical. What the Go-Gos became and succeeded as, of course, was a retro pop band--but then again that was what Joey Ramone always wanted his band to be and could never quite pull off, especially with DeeDee in the mix.

With the Go-Gos, as with the Rolling Stones and so many other groups, the band is a lot more generic if you focus on the lead singer and (here I go again) the lyrics. Listen to the instrumentalists. In this case, listen especially to the drummer: Gina Schock. Like most drummers who aren't vocalists, I'm not sure she ever got the respect she deserves.

Listen to the drums on this song, and you can hear the roots in punk--which is to say, the roots in surf music, which is the musical DNA of all American punk, especially the rhythm section. In this case, given the nominal theme of the song, the beat tries hard to be as generic as possible. If you heard it in a club or at a party in someone's basement, "The Beat" is almost too easy to find. It's got a backbeat you can't lose it, etc.

But hark ye now the little lower layer. Put this on headphones, earbuds if you must, and crank it up. Play with your equalizer if you're oldschool enough to know how to do that. Listen to it closely and you'll hear it. That simple beat has microbeats inbetween. The drum stutters, and not in a predictable pattern. What sounds generic at first listen is actually subliminally idiosyncratic and quirky.

This single doesn't succeed because it's blatantly generic; it excels because it's covertly aberrant. And you know how I feel about boring from within.

Fun in 4 B. C.

280. RANCID, "Time Bomb"
Produced and written by Rancid
1995 Billboard: # 48

Quite simply, this is a song that is not possible after Columbine, at least not as a single that charts this high. Five years later, the song would have been more somber, something more like "I Don't Like Mondays." Here, the black clothing is a joke, the beat is bouncy. Five years later, you couldn't make a hit out of that. Five years from now, maybe you will be able to do it again.

On Hold at the Suicide Hotline

944. CARS, "You're All I've Got Tonight"
Produced by Roy Thomas Baker; written by Ric Ocasek
Did not make pop charts 1978
Did not make pop charts

The one time I ever had an extended conversation with Greil Marcus, after a while the talk turned to his friend Dave Marsh and my semi-obsession with The Heart of Rock and Soul. I talked about how the book gave me a window onto a generational experience that I had never quite comprehended before on a visceral level, but I also mentioned that it was weird for me how there were bands that Marsh discounted that held more significance for those, like myself, of a slightly younger generation. "Like what?" he asked. "Like The Cars," I instinctively blurted out.

I think every generation has bands like this, but for those Americans around my age, the Cars just captured something that was in the air. You could love True Punk in the 1970s and also love the sly subversion that the Cars slipped into the mainstream without most people realizing it. This song may be one of the purest statements of male masochism that has ever made it into regular rotation on classic rock stations. It helped usher in the whole great era of Pop Loserdom that I've referred in earlier postings and will treat at greater length later, but let's just say for now that this song has a kind of John the Baptist relationship to the later post-punk ironic reinvention of masculinity.

And only Ric Ocasek could sing this song. Whenever anyone suggests to me that the Cars were conformist treacle, I remind them to listen to Ocasek's voice. It is innately alienated, no matter what he may actually feel about the words that he is singing. Much like Pee Wee Herman, Ocasek could be singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and it would be conjuring up all kinds of deviant failure.

PS: If you can find a copy of the original demo for this song [featured on Mass Ave, the Boston entry in the old Rhino DIY series], grab it. It was enormously successful on local Boston radio stations before the band ever got a contract, and it is much, much rawer.

Yeah sure I can dupe you a copy . . .

Lost in the Everglades

814. TOMMY SHAW, "Girls with Guns"
Written and produced by Tommy Shaw
A& M 2675 1984 Billboard: # 33

If there was a video for this song, I was never aware of it. From the first time I heard it, though, this song was associated for me with a moving image: a pullback helicopter shot of a car heading into the Everglades on a episode of Miami Vice. I no longer remember what case Crockett and Tubbs were investigating on that episode--maybe they were organizing a family reunion for Sonny's shipmate Elvis--but I remember that shot, and this song.

Research now tells me that Shaw was in both Styx and Damn Yankees (two bands about which I care close to nothing) and collaborated with a former member of Night Ranger (a band about which I care even less, if we can measure such things).

But damn is this a great driving song. The lyrics might offend me if I actually paid attention to them--mostly for the pre-Tarantinoesque misogyny, maybe for the one almost direct steal from Zevon--but once again it's the music, people, not the words: the synth riff and wah-wah throughout; the piano runs as you get close to the choruses; the stumbling drum on the bridge and toward the end; the little scream in the last minute that is most assuredly the last gasp of The Rebel Yell, which shows how far the South has really been brought down in nearly one hundred and twenty years.

And yeah maybe Michael Mann had a little bit to do with it.

One Way to Avoid a Club Fight

598. N.O.R.E. "Nothin'"
Produced by the Neptunes; written by Chad Hugo, Victor Santiago, Jr., & Pharrell Williams
Universal 582914 2002 Billboard: # 10

My best friend insists that "humor can often defuse a tense situation." This worked once for him, when he was at a camp as a kid, and he's used it ever since. In my experience, though, cracking wise in the wrong situation can often get your head cracked open. Usually, when the shields go up, I find it's best to keep my mouth shut.

Then there's N.O.R.E., aka Noreaga aka Victor Santiago Jr., who raps his way out of a club fight on this track, the way only the best of the best can do. On the refrains, Fat Joe sounds as if he is ready to do some very serious damage, but our hero just keeps plowing through. The longer you listen, the more you think, maybe he will talk this guy down. These rhymes aren't threatening or even menacing. They're just . . . distracting, which may be all he needs to slip away without catching it.

He uses everything he's got here, including both sides of his racial heritage. Much was made of the fact that N's next album, N.O.R.E. y la Familia...Ya Tú Sabe, explicitly drew on reggaeton, but here the influences are mixing it up as much he and Fat Joe aren't.His maternal African American tradition of words is laid here on top of a rhythm track (courtesy of the 'Tunes, of course) that owes more to the Puerto Rican music of his father. It's not a fully integrated musical genre, or even a peace treaty between the two cultures. Musically and thematically, it's just a stab at anything that will work.

Respect the Flow

742. DR. DRE, "Forgot About Dre"
Produced by Dr. Dre; written by Melvin Bradford, Marshall Mathers, and Andre Young
Maverick 17206 1998 Billboard: # 5

Rappers simply can't get respect. I'm not talking about the self-conscious contests for respect that have been the premise of the genre since the 1970s. I'm talking about career respect. If a rocker or pop star enjoys three Top 40 singles, they can tour the oldies circuit for decades after that. But even if a rapper's career begins with two or three best-selling albums, if she or he wants to stay in the business for the long run, there are basically two options: act or produce.

After NWA broke up, Dr. Dre produced and fronted The Chronic, almost certainly the aesthetically finest product that the morally dubious genre of gangsta ever produced. And then . . . he produced, and he produced brilliantly. With a typically uncluttered but still full style of production, his work with Snoop Dogg was cleverer than most listeners appreciated. More important, his achievement in discovering and launching Eminem within the genre was literally unprecedented in pop music. It was as if Sam Phillips had been black; as if hiphop had finally found its Henry Higgins; as if Dre were the Apollo Creed of the genre, training Marshall "Rocky" Mathers to take on a ring full of Clubber Langs.

To give credit where credit is due, Eminem almost consistently presented himself as Dre's sidekick. He does it here too, but it's a little sad that this track--released at almost the height of Em's popularity--leads up to the protegee rather than his producer.

That is unless you think the words are irrelevant, and it's just the tweaking bassline that's the point of the song. But this is rap--is that possible?

Yes, because this isn't quite rap. It's hiphop. Dr. Dre was one of the key figures who irrevocably turned the former genre into the latter. Hiphop selfconsciously embraced funk bass lines like the one employed here, so that flow was no longer just a matter of words. And even if it's Marshall gibber-gabbering the words for much of this track, all the way through the flow is all Andre's.

So forget the star--respect the producer. Respect the flow.

(Southern) Goth Chicks

579. BOBBIE GENTRY, "Ode to Billie Joe"
Written by Bobbie Gentry
Capitol 5950 1967 Billboard: # 1

580. TANYA TUCKER, "Delta Dawn"
Written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey
Columbia 45588 1972 Billboard: # 72

581. HELEN REDDY, "Angie Baby"
Produced by Joe Wissert; written by Alan O'Day
Capitol 3972 1974 Billboard: # 1

The mid-twentieth century American national imaginary is almost unimaginable without the South. Not only was it the source of most of the music from that period that was most identifiably American, but it was also the setting for fiction and drama by William Faulkner, Tennesee Williams, Truman Capote, and others that were among the most riveting stories of the age.

This wasn't the first time that the South took over Northern imaginations--in the late ninteeenth century there had been the Plantation School, in the early twentieth century the Fugitives and Agrarians--but it was the Southern Gothic, which really took hold after World War II, that left the strongest impact on American culture. Its underlying focus was personal and psychological rather than political and ideological, and because of that it was probably able to transcend region more easily than those earlier movements.

What made Southern writing Southern Gothic? Mostly it was about decay, as if the broomsedge against which the protagonist of Ellen Glasgow's 1925 novel Barren Ground fights her whole life had actually won out over all human effort. Mid-twentieth century Southern Gothic is among the most decadent literature that the United States has ever produced, in large part because so many of its characters were being choked by the vines of tradition. Viewed in this sense, you could almost call as old a text as "The Fall of the House of Usher" the first great work in this tradition (although you'd have to finally settle on which state gets to claim Edgar Allan Poe as a resident). Whenever it began, Southern Gothic undeniably flourished in fiction and drama during the 1940s and 1950s. It was dark, it was gnarled, and it was steeped in suffocating tradition.

There was another notable thing about Southern Gothic, especially within the specific context of contemporaneous American literature: it was open to women. Start counting on your fingers the widely read American women fiction writers from the 1940s or 1950s who weren't from the South, and you may not even need a second hand. Obviously, there were a great many talented women fiction writers working during this period, but for various institutional reasons Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and others were the women who were actually promoted and read at that time. Certainly, American women at midcentury knew a fair amount about being strangled by tradition and propriety.

Fastforward a decade or two to pop music, where so many cultural movements seem to go to die. They begin in the avant garde, then move to middlebrow literature, movies, and finally pop songs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the New South was finally about to produce its first emblematic president, the hardscrabble Depression-era region that had given rise to the whole genre of Country music had become, for the most part, a reflexively invoked childhood memory for most practicing artists within the genre. For a time, Country grew almost unspeakably morbid for a widely circulated form of music, and women were at the forefront of this morbidity, just as they had been at the forefront of the corresponding literary movement a few years earlier.

The most obvious example of this trend was Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe," quite possibly the creepiest song to ever hit # 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. What occurs in the song is probably wholly natural rather than supernatural--except for whatever gets thrown off the bridge, which listeners have, of course, been speculating about for more than four decades now. But, as Greil Marcus noted sideways during his thorough analysis of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, the point of this song isn't what happened to Billie Joe. It's what's continuing to happen to the narrator: the slow way she's being crushed under the weight of her family's displeasure; the tightlipped escape she may get to enjoy in the song's final verse. As with the best of Katherine Anne Porter's stories, it's almost pointless to ask whether "Ode to Billie Joe" is a feminist text or not: it captures the inner experience of a young woman's life, and Western art always needs more of that.

By contrast, "Delta Dawn," Tanya Tucker's first hit single five years later, is certainly not a feminist text. It observes the title character from the outside and objectifies her. It turns her into a statue in the town square even as it attempts to pay her tribute, and it should come as no surprise that the song was written by two men for a thirteen-year-old girl to sing on her first album. (As noted in a previous post, the great David Allen Coe judged much better when he gave Tucker the beautiful, impossibly aged "Would You Lay with Me in a Field of Stone?" to sing on the same debut album.) The best line in this song's lyric is the first: She's forty years old and her daddy still calls her baby. There's a novel in that. Even better, there's the sort of compression that a good short story writer would use. For the most part, though, we don't get enough of the texture of the protagonist's life in this song to fully appreciate it: it could be supernatural or merely pathetic, mythic or merely cliched. As in the best Southern writing, however, we do get a sense of the weight of the community pressing down on the protagonist, in the way it presses down on the protagonists of so many of Eudora Welty's stories. In a sense that is almost antithetical to the tenets of twentieth-century modernism, the character almost doesn't exist without her social setting.

By 1973, creepy Southern songs had gone so mainstream in American pop that even non-Southern artists were recording them. Thanks to countless episodes of Mamma's Family and Hannah Montana, many people may think that Vicki Lawrence hails from the South, but she was actually from Inglewood, California--not even Bakersfield, which at that point was still very much an Okie outpost. You can tell how non-Southern Lawrence is when you listen to her 1973 # 1 hit "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" (and yes, even though I sometimes consider that song a guilty pleasure, you will note that I haven't given it a spot in The Thousand and One). Lawrence can fake the accent, but she can't fake the feeling. As lurid as her single is, it's a performance of Southernness by an outsider. You don't believe she's ever lived in a house with a shotgun, let alone learned how to use one.

For some reason, Australians seem to make the translation to Southern culture much more easily than Californians do. In a previous post, I've taken note of Olivia Newton-John's spooky-cheery 1971 rendition of the old murder ballad "Banks of the Ohio," but three years later her fellow sheila Helen Reddy did her one better by recording "Angie Baby," not as creepy a # 1 hit as Gentry's but quite possibly a weirder one. On first hearing, and perhaps subsequent hearings as well, the listener comes away asking Did I just hear what I thought I heard? Those of us who lived through the 1970s can remember an interpretative ballet a la Jerome Robbins on a breakaway attic set that accompanied one of Reddy's variety show renditions of the song. Yes, it probably is up somewhere on YouTube, but I'm not sure that I want to find it and see it again. The memory alone gives me the willies.

Technically, we aren't told that the song takes place in the South. (Given the presence of a portable transistor radio, chronologically it has to take place during the approximate period in which it was recorded.) Still, I've always considered this song a part of the same tradition as those other singles, especially since Reddy's own rendition of "Delta Dawn" had gone all the way to #1 in 1973. Certainly, its title character lives in a small town, and she is subject to the same kinds of smalltown pressures as the characters in those other songs. She is constantly observed and gossiped about, and her life is more a performance being observed by her neighbors than a narrative that she can construct for herself.

The fact that all these songs charted so high beyond the country music ghetto in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests that they had less to do with the actual South and more to do with the birthpangs of modern feminism. Heard today, "I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)" is almost painful to listen to, but this song . . . Angie starts out pathetic, but you may find yourself smiling sickly at the end of the song over her little joke on the world. I am by no means a fan of Reddy's, but she does nail the two lines here that matter: It's so nice to be insane/No one asks you to explain. On "I Am Woman," she oversold the song's self-consciously empowering lyrics. These lyrics, though, she tosses off, especially after the release of the bridge. Her undisguised 'Strian accent, the way the As in those two lines almost sound like Is, actually helps the process. Perhaps as a result of cultural prejudice, they make Angie sound like a more likely criminal. In any case, they alienate U. S. ears enough that we can begin to consider exactly how calculating this seemingly pathetic girl may be.

Is this gothic? Noir? Horror? In an age before the Runaways and X-Ray Spex, let alone Hole and Sleater-Kinney, the brief renaissance of Southern Gothic in American pop probably exposed more young girls and women to the possibility of rebellion behind the mask of respectability than Ms. magazine or the collected writings of Valerie Solanis. Songs as seemingly mainstream as these could pass into any home, much like the music on Angie's bedside transistor set. They could do their work quietly, without any immediate, directly challenging signs of revolution. In the end, they may have changed more people's lives than William Faulkner's prototypically Southern Gothic story "A Rose for Emily." So who's to say where the real art lies, in critically recognized literature or disposable 7-inch singles?

Git Along, Lil Incarnations, Git Along

476. PRETENDERS, "Boots of Chinese Plastic"
Produced by Steve Bing and the Pretenders; written by Chrissie Hynde
2008 Did not make pop charts

477. TALKING HEADS, "Road to Nowhere"
Produced by Talking Heads; written by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth
1985 Did not make pop charts

Who says Asian philosophy has to be couched in Asian-derived music? Why not try your Buddhism deep-fried?

Chrissie Hynde performs what is definitely the coolest song ever written about reincarnation (not to mention the karmic implications of globalization) in a style that sounds as if the track was laid down in Sun Studios circa 1956. As in all her best songs, Hynde here is vulnerable and formidable all at once--which is why, to review, she is without question one of the four or five most breathtaking women in the world.

The Heads' track obviously starts out more stately, but it still ain't George Harrison. As usual with Heads songs, you can always depend on Frantz and Weymouth to keep the foundation of the track rolling and lively. Significantly, this is one of only two tracks on Little Creatures for which all four members of the band share songwriting credit. Here, Frantz and Weymouth earn their keep by nudging the Scottish-born Byrne to get in touch with his inner Rowdy Yates and turn the song into the liveliest cattle drive for inner peace ever attempted. And then he shrieks like a strung-out bald eagle on crank. Never has zen been this lively.

One theory of inner peace involves shutting oneself down and personal isolation, but these songs suggest two livelier, more social paths to enlightenment. And isn't it preferable for Anglo-Americans to cast their philosophical discoveries in their own vernacular rather than hearing them poach the music of other cultures? (Yes, Sting, I am calling you out.)

How Real Can You Get?

233. LEAH ANDREONE, 'It's Alright, It's OK'
Produced by Rick Neigher; written by Leah Andreone & Rick Neigher
RCA 64662 1997 Billboard: # 57

I've loved this song since the first time I heard it, but there's no way I'd ever call it "authentic."

This is a singer-songwriter thing. The master narrative goes something like this: Bob Dylan changed American music forever by taking folk music and making it personal. After him, coffeehouses sprung up all over Europe and North America, but suddenly singers were no longer required to sing musty old Scottish songs. They could sing about the material of their own lives. And they did it alone, just them and a guitar or a piano on a stage. It was personal and it was non-industrial, just an artist talking to a selective audience.

There are a lot of problems with that reductive narrative, more than I can cover in a single post, but let me begin with just two words: Joni Mitchell. For me, Joni Mitchell was the greatest of the singer-songwriters, maybe not as great a songwriter overall as Dylan, but certainly the greatest at writing confessional songs that were both personal and relatable. Again and again, she wrote songs that you can "get" on first hearing, but you can still find new layers in them every time you listen.

But you know what? Mitchell's greatest album, Blue, is impossible without technology. I really felt this with a vengeance a few years back when Ted Turner did one of his tributes to modern songwriters and they featured Mitchell. For nearly all her great songs, those paying tribute couldn't really do justice to them with just one vocalist. All those gorgeous harmonies she laid down? Multitracking. Even when she did everything on an album, it didn't recreate a spontaneous, intimate performance, anymore than Beach Boys' Party! did. Each of Mitchell's albums was a labor of construction, every bit as much as one of her paintings, most of which show a lot more craft than your average Jackson Pollock.

A quarter of a century later, we have Andreone, definitely positioned by her label to be an inheritor of the Mitchell-derived tradition. Writing confessionally? Check. On the first Lilith Fair tour? Check. Huge in France? Check. But, on the other side of the ledger, is she a sellout? She doesn't play all the instruments! She cowrites the song with her producer! She's a fraud!!

I have a simple solution: this isn't folk, or even confession, and it's certainly not truth. It's Pop, and rather accomplished Pop at that. This is a good song about an almost total mental breakdown, but it's too polished to have been written by someone who had ever suffered one. I would bet, though, that she has been around someone who has, because several of the details recorded here seem spot-on. Moreover, no matter what the purists might claim, this song wouldn't have been as good on solo acoustic guitar, because you need the rhythm section and especially the organ to move you through it. And are white confessional folk singers from L.A. allowed to wail like that, as if giving into despair inevitably leads to facing Mecca?

One of the great shames about the reverse snobbism of so much 1990s music culture was that it tried to sell smart Pop as something that it wasn't. This song isn't Truth, but it does have a fair amount of soul. And it's not "upbeat," no matter what the allmusicguide might claim.

My Favorite B-Side

724. BEATLES, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"
Written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney; produced by George Martin
Apple 2764 1970 Billboard: # 1 (as B-side of "Let It Be")

Oh, I know: B-sides, such an archaic concept. As one twenty-something acquaintance mocked to me recently (even before Stephen Colbert made the same joke), "What are these things you call CDs?" But well into the 1980s, one of the things that made 45s so fun were the throwaways that established bands slipped onto their B-sides. Even if you thought the group in question sold out when they went mainstream, the B-sides were often the sort of marginal ephemera that you may have wished they still built albums out of. If you don't believe me, check out the B-sides that U2 released straight through Rattle & Hum. That is some seriously flaky shit.

In Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul (which, once again, is really the inspiration for this project, even if I haven't mentioned it since the first post lo those many months ago), he uses the Four Seasons' "Silence Is Golden"as the classic example of a lost B-side, but given my chronological focus I'd like to dig even farther. "You Know My Name" is a song with just eight words in the lyric, repeated over and over. It makes use of all the radio-derived studio tricks that make a track like "A Day in the Life" a critical darling, but it's really a sublimely stupid song, almost the inverse opposite of the singles that the Ramones would record later in the decade. I would say it reflects Lennon and McCartney's love of the Goons, except that the Goons were so much more articulate. This track is as giddily overproduced as the Ramones' singles would be underproduced, and it is as much about its sonic surface alone as its A-side ("Let it Be") attempts to be about its referent. As I have aged, I've grown to appreciate "Let It Be" more, but I've got to tell you, in 1970 none of us was listening to the A-side. This track cracked us up.

But time has given me a little perspective on this song. By now, we all know how little the Beatles were getting along by the time they recorded Let It Be. This track, though, sounds like a group of mates having fun: goody, stupid fun. Given the fact that the group's last two singles ("Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road") were essentially McCartney solo tracks, the latter with a Phil Spector assist, I'd like to count "You Know My Name" as the last real Lennon-McCartney collaboration. And as much as I subscribe to Joe Strummer's notions about phony Beatlemania, how cool is it to go out silly?

A Moment in the Global Dreamtime

226. CHURCH, "Under The Milky Way"
Produced by The Church, Greg Ladanyi, Richard Wachtel & Waddy Wachtel; written by Karin Jansson & Steve Kilbey
Arista 9673 1988 Billboard: # 24

For a certain subset of pop-descended, art rock-derived bands during the 1980s, this is the single that everyone was trying to record. As in a Big Country single, you have a guitar (actually an e-bow) doubling for a bagpipe. As in a Hooters single, you have the attempt to use a melodeon to denote authenticity rather than calculation. Throughout, you have the indirection and vague dreaminess that characterized so many Brit and Anglophile bands in the post-New Wave, pre-Alternative era.

But the Church weren't Brits, of course. They were Australians, which I suspect is part of the reason why they actually pulled it off. That and the fact that this song is a collaboration between frontman Steve Kilbey and his girlfriend Karin Jansson. Allegedly, it's about a club in Amsterdam called Melkweg, and I can't help wondering whether Stew of Passing Strange fame frequented the same club, since he and Kilbey seem to have been in the city around the same time. In other words, this is a song by an Australian and a European about a place in Amsterdam that could only have been produced in the U.S. by one of the great L.A. sidemen (Waddy Wachtel). Because of all this, the song is global and particular at one and the same time.

It is also very much the product of a specific global cultural moment. You might not know what specific place produced this record, but you could never doubt what time. This is why, when Richard Kelly wanted to introduce his audience for Donnie Darko to a familiarly strange high school in the late 1980s, he chose to use this song. We've all been then, even if we haven't been there.