The First Hundred

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, please disregard the date of this posting. Happy New Year!

We have completed the first hundred. At this rate, I should be done with the full thousand some time around the second Obama inaugural. By all means, use the Search Blog feature to find any entries you missed, although I myself recommend going through the tags by year or genre. In most cases, clicking on the title of a blog post will allow you to play the song(s) described through Rhapsody.

For those of you keeping score at home, the list so far is:

ACADEMY FIGHT SONG. Mission of Burma.

ALL APOLOGIES. Nirvana.

ANOTHER LONELY CHRISTMAS. Prince.

AREA CODES. Ludacris.

BABY GOT BACK. Sir Mix-a-Lot.

BACK IN BLACK. AC/DC.

BANKS OF THE OHIO. Olivia Newton-John.

BEHIND THE WALL OF SLEEP. Smithereens.

BEWARE. Panjabi MC ft/Jay-Z.

BIG POPPA. Notorious B.I.G.

BLANK GENERATION. Richard Hell & the Voidoids.

BOTH SIDES NOW. Joni Mitchell.

BOTH SIDES NOW. Judy Collins.

BROWNSVILLE GIRL. Bob Dylan.

BUFFALO STANCE. Neneh Cherry.

CELEBRITY SKIN. Hole.

CENTERFOLD. J. Geils Band.

CHRISTMAS IN WASHINGTON. Steve Earle.

CLOUDS. Hole.

CRAZY. Gnarls Barkley.

CRAZY. Seal.

CULT OF PERSONALITY. Living Colour.

DETOX MANSION. Warren Zevon.

DEVIL'S HAIRCUT. Beck.

DOIN' IT. L L Cool J.

DON'T LEAVE ME THIS WAY. Thelma Houston.

DON'T YOU WANT ME. Human League.

DOWNTOWN TRAIN. Tom Waits.

DREAM ON. Aerosmith.

867-5309 (JENNY JENNY). Tommy Tutone.

FAT BOTTOMED GIRLS. Queen.

FELL IN LOVE WITH A GIRL. White Stripes.

FIGHT THE POWER. Public Enemy.

FIT BUT YOU KNOW IT. The Streets.

4 MINUTES. Madonna ft/Justin Timberlake.

GALANG. M.I.A.

GET LOW. Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz.

GO WEST. Pet Shop Boys.

GO WEST. Village People.

GUERRILLA RADIO. Rage against the Machine.

HEART-SHAPED BOX. Nirvana.

HOW SOON IS NOW? Smiths.

HURT. Johnny Cash.

I WANNA BE SEDATED. Ramones.

I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE. Sleater-Kinney.

I WISH I WAS A PUNK ROCKER (WITH FLOWERS IN MY HAIR). Sandi Thom.

IF I COULD TURN BACK TIME. Cher.

I KNEW THE BRIDE (WHEN SHE USED TO ROCK AND ROLL). Nick Lowe.

INSANE IN THE BRAIN. Cypress Hill.

IT'S RAINING MEN. The Weather Girls.

IT'S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME. Billy Joel.

JUST LIKE A PILL. Pink.

THE KELLY AFFAIR. Be Your Own Pet.

KING OF THE HILL. Roger McGuinn.

KING OF THE NEW YORK STREETS. Dion.

THE LAST DAY OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE. Sinead O'Connor.

LIAR. Rollins Band.

LIP GLOSS. Lil Mama.

LUKA. Suzanne Vega.

MASTER RACE ROCK. Dictators.

MEXICAN RADIO. Wall of Voodoo.

MIRROR. All the Queen's Men.

MISLED. Kool and the Gang.

MISS YOU. Rolling Stones.

99 LUFTBALLOONS. Nena.

911. Wyclef Jean w/Mary J. Blige.

911 IS A JOKE. Public Enemy.

ONE HIT (TO THE BODY). Rolling Stones.

ORGASM ADDICT. Buzzcocks.

PERSONALITY CRISIS. New York Dolls.

PINHEAD. Ramones.

PON DE REPLAY. Rihanna.

RADIO NOWHERE. Bruce Springsteen.

RANDOM. Lady Sovereign.

RAY OF LIGHT. Madonna.

THE REAL SLIM SHADY. Eminem.

REHAB. Rihanna.

REHAB. Amy Winehouse.

RISE ABOVE. Black Flag.

ROADRUNNER. Modern Lovers.

ROCK ME AMADEUS. Falco.

SAVE A HORSE, RIDE A COWBOY. Big & Rich.

SAVE TONIGHT. Eagle-Eye Cherry.

SHAKE YA ASS. Mystikal.

SPLENDID ISOLATION. Warren Zevon.

SUFFRAGETTE CITY. David Bowie.

SUPERSTAR. Carpenters.

TEENAGE RIOT. Sonic Youth.

THESE ARE DAYS. 10,000 Maniacs.

THIS TRAIN DON'T STOP THERE ANYMORE. Elton John.

THONG SONG. Sisqo.

TIME WARP. Richard O'Brien et al.

TONIGHT TONIGHT. Smashing Pumpkins.

TURN THE PAGE. Metallica.

T. V. EYE. Stooges.

ULTIMATE. Gogol Bordello.

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR. Buggles.

WHAT'S THE MATTER HERE? 10,000 Maniacs.

WOULD YOU LAY WITH ME IN A FIELD OF STONE? Tanya Tucker.

YEAH! Usher.

Happy listening in 2009!

The Man Has a Dream--You Got a Problem with That?

991. STEVE EARLE, "Christmas In Washington"
Produced by Twangtrust; written by Steve Earle
1997 Did not make pop charts

I know the dates are screwy, but I'm writing this on 31 December. Last weekend, I went to a huge family Christmas party deep in the bowels of Bergen County, New Jersey. It was hosted by an older cousin, on whom I had a crush when I was a teenager, and her husband of decades now, a kind, pleasant, hard-working man whom I just noticed has a framed picture of himself shaking hands with Rudy Guiliani in his dining room. He also has a copy of one of Rush Limbaugh's books in his living room. Okay, it's a paperback, but the fact is he kept it, and there weren't many books on that shelf that he appears to have wanted to keep.

One of the saddest things for me about politics in my lifetime has been its relentless binarism. I was seven years old in 1968, more focused on the impending moon launch than the war in Vietnam, but sometimes it has felt as if I am going to live for the rest of my life with my older siblings' wars. Individually, locally, there are more than just two political camps, but somehow since the late 1960s, when we raise politics and social action to the national level, it is always Us against Them.

My cousin is a nice guy. He probably shrugs at all the bumper stickers on our car when we park in his driveway, but can he possibly comprehend that the first person that I heard use the abbreviation "p.c." to denote "political correctness" was the vice president of the gay and lesbian society in college, as an inside joke to vent off steam? And could he possibly understand Steve Earle, dedicated acoustic twangboy, declaring that a second term of draftdodging adulterer Bill "Bubba" Clinton wasn't liberal enough for him? When a mohawked urban punk screams for revolution, it fits the established categories, but when a country boy calls for Emma Goldman and Malcolm X to rise up from the dead and take to the barricades, it shortcircuits many people's ideas of The Way Things Are or Ought to Be.

I haven't thought for more than two decades that we need a true Revolution in this country, but we do need (and have recently been promised) Change. First and foremost, we need to burn down the categories: no red America, no blue America, not even some watered-down variety of purple America, even though purple is a lovely color that can, after all, provide us with so many pleasant tints. No Jesse Jackson/Benetton rainbow America either, all 80s pluralism with all the separated shades so nicely defined and demarcated. We just need color, every tint, every shade, wherever it falls. We need to see the national landscape whole, with all its beautiful presences and troubling lacks intact, from both coasts and the heartland at one and the same time. That's all.

Happy Holidays, y'all. Let freedom ring.

I LIke You So Much More When You're Being Bitchy

979. ELTON JOHN, "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" Produced by Patrick Leonard; written by Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Polygram International 588895 2002 Did not make pop charts

Oh, I have a confession to make. I've never really liked Elton John much. (My sister will kill me.) As you can probably guess by this point, it's not that I don't like sentimentality. I just don't like his kind of sentimentality--or Bernie Taupin's kind of sentimentality--it's so confusing. I'll get to that soon. I don't know. Maybe it's a Brit thing.

In any case, I love this song, in no small measure because it sounds at first blush like a repudiation of everything John and Taupin had done for over thirty years. This leads us into the hall of mirrors, the question of who means what precisely. The video for this song is a striking continuous take of a surprisingly bearable Justin Timberlake as a young Elton wandering backstage at an early 70s arena show where virtually anything a young man could want is offered somewhere, in one of the rooms off that seemingly endless corridor. In this case, song and image blend beautifully, and that makes one think that this song communicates Elton's actual feelings about his past and present.

But then you remember that it's Taupin not John who writes the lyrics. John just writes those chords around the pre-existing words, the same chords that he has freely admitted in interviews he has stolen outright from Anglican Church hymns. These are Taupin's words, but are they words he has chosen to write about John's life?

The key to surviving this song is the bridge, as textbook an example of what a bridge is supposed to do as Tin Pan Alley ever produced. The singer and the lyricist are both running down, and the song is a defense against the exhaustion of age. What they both mean is that this train doesn't want to stop. Whether it will . . . well, that's anybody's guess.

Mama's Gotta Let Go

145. MADONNA, "Ray Of Light"
Produced by William Orbit and Madonna; written by Dave Curtiss, Christine Leach, Madonna, Clive Maldoon, and William Orbit
Maverick 17206 1998 Billboard: # 5

A balls-out tribute to parenthood pure and simple. Yes, it's written by committee, but I've got to believe that that chorus came straight from Lourdes' mom. And the titular phrase pays tribute to the mortality that is inevitably buried in the joy of parenthood. Without children, you can unconsciously pretend that you are going to be here forever; with children, you are almost constantly in the presence of a reminder of your own eventual passing. Shantih shantih shantih. Get down.

A Gentleman's Guide to Clubbing

146. NOTORIOUS B.I.G., "Big Poppa"
Produced bySean "Puffy" Combs; written by The Notorious B.I.G.
Bad Boy 79015 1995 Billboard: # 6

You know, if you listen to him now, in the wake of Fiddy and crunk, it's amazing how polite Biggie sounds. He wants to get to know this woman, and her friends--a real gentleman. Sure, there's that whole patriarchal thing going on with the title, but there are definitely points in here where you would never believe that this was the man who wrote the graphic lyrics that allowed Lil Kim to anatomize her anatomy.

No--*Neither* of You, as a Matter of Fact

547. HUMAN LEAGUE, "Don't You Want Me"
Produced by; written by
A&M/Virgin 2397 1982 Billboard: # 1

If there's one vibe the British have a lock on, it's bored passion, and during the early 80s, British bands like the Human League rode a restrained pulse bomb of it to a near dominance of MTV and the American charts. Probably the other most indelible example of it during that period was Animotion's 1985 hit "Obsession," but that hit was more annoying and laughable, especially if you saw the video.

This single worked much better, and not just because you could safety dance to it. It's got to be the oddest He Said/She Said narrative that pop has ever seen, the antipodal opposite of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas' red hot "Tramp." That song was all about sex, even if the lyrics themselves were mostly about trading insults. Here, it's harder to picture the two protagonists actually having sex, but they still make you curious about their relationship. You don't believe that either of them is telling the complete truth, but if you're not careful you'll catch yourself trying to figure out who's lying more. It's as if Noel Coward had decided to write a New Wave single, maybe during an elevator ride the way Cole Porter wrote "Bianca." If you're at the party where these two run into each other again, you don't want to take either of them home, but you do want a ringside seat for the reunion.

Plus Ca Change . . .

31. GNARLS BARKLEY, "Crazy"
Produced by Danger Mouse; written by Brian Burton, Thomas Callaway, Gianfranco Reverberi, Gian Piero Reverberi
WMI R1251791 2006 Billboard: # 2

32. SEAL, "Crazy"
Produced by Sean Chennery, Guy, Trevor Horn, William Orbit, and Tim Simenon; written by Sealhenri Samuel and Guy Sigsworth
ZTT/Sire 19298 1991 Billboard: # 7

Two snapshots of R&B, fifteen years apart, showing how far we've come and gone.

Despite what you might think, the later track is less produced. It's just drum and bass for the most part, with strings on the choruses. Even though the earlier track had Seal, the later track trusts the vocalist more, and Cee-Lo soars more on a GB single like this than he ever could with Goodie Mob, even on a beautiful track like "Inshallah." Perhaps because it has so many producers, the earlier track has more elements to its sonic surface and more outright polyrhythms.

And then there are the lyrics. Both songs are about alienation, even dissociative disorder, as a response to the protagonists' condition, but Seal's track seems to be more about the presumed conditions of African American life, so much so that Spike Lee used it for Clockers, some years after its release. The GB track, on the other hand, is less race-specific. Even when viewed from the point of view of class, it's much more of a middle class track than a working class one.

What difference does this make? Well, if the songs can be read synchronically, for the working class schizophrenia is a way of coping; for the middle class, it is a way of life. Which might make you rethink the whole question of whether society should really present assimilation as a desirable goal.

Nerddom uber Alles

273. DICTATORS, "Master Race Rock"
Produced by Murray Krugman; written by Adny Shernoff
1975 Did not make pop charts

Quite simply, the Ramones before the Ramones--but richer.

As much as I love them, you don't listen to the Ramones for the lyrics; there aren't too many things that might slip by you if you don't pay attention. But the Dictators could slip some real whoppers by you if you weren't on the ball. I've included "pomo" in the subtitle of this project, but this may be one of the most postmodern tracks on here, up to and including the way in which it parodies early 70s guitar solos at one and the same time as it uses it to great dramatic effect. There's so much going on here that the allusions to Nazism are almost incidental--and how many late twentieth-century works of art can you say that about?

To Wax TNG: The Naked NOW

958. GOGOL BORDELLO, "Ultimate"
Produced by Victor Van Vugt and Gogol Bordello; written by Gogol Bordello & Eugene Hutz
2007 Did not make pop charts

You know, normally I try to spread things out chronologically here, and I've already done more than enough singles from last year for the time being, but I just saw this band the other night and I can't stop thinking about them.

You know how Keith Richards always says that it's ludicrous to call the Rolling Stones the greatest rock and roll band in the world? That every night there's a different band that's the greatest rock and roll band and that they could be playing anywhere? Well, Friday night this was the greatest rock and roll band in the world, and they were playing in a drained pool in Brooklyn. People were dancing in circles, women were kicking their heels all the way up to their butts, and men were ripping off their shirts. Then a samba drumline joined the band onstage, and the lead singer, the disturbingly mustachioed Eugene Hutz, invited the entire audience to an afterparty at the band's favorite restaurant on Ludlow Street in Manhattan. It was the most intense show I can remember seeing in ages, particularly with that big a crowd.

And this is the single to commemorate that with, not just because it was the song they opened with, not just because it opened their most recent album, but because it's about saying fuckit to order and memory and all things tidy. There was never any good old days/They are today, they are tomorrow/It's a stupid thing we say/Cursing tomorrow with sorrow. This is an entry I didn't plan, simply to commemorate the gloriously unruly music of the eternal NOW.

Instruments of Seduction

335. KOOL & THE GANG, "Misled"
Produced by Jim Bonnefond and Kool & the Gang; written by Kool & the Gang
DeLite 880431 1984 Billboard: # 10

For me, this is one of those singles that slipped through the cracks. You won't find it on virtually any early 80s compilation, and I freely admit that there are so many reasons to disregard it: by this point, Kool & the Gang was past its prime; the instruments here sound more pre-programmed than on their 1970s classics; it's neither a dance song nor a rocker; when they laid down this track, the couplet She's as heavy/As a Chevy was at least a quarter of a century past its shelflife . . .

But sometimes it's just a groove, in this case the dialogue between the bass and the rhythm guitar line. Yeah, I know it's far from spontaneous and way overproduced. Yet it seduces me enough, leads me on, that every time I hear the song I keep listening, even though I find the narrative depicted in the lyrics too preposterous for a silent film starring Theda Bara. This is another one of those songs where the words ultimately don't matter. No, I simply want to live where the power chords meet the funk and never die into the fadeout, where vocalist J. T. Taylor is so ensorcelled by their fused sound that he just shrugs his vocals from the resistant verses into the hypnotically enlivened choruses. When genius seduces you, it's no marvel, but when mere competence does, it sometimes seems even more like magic.

Plus Kool & the Gang were from Jersey City, birthplace of Flip Wilson, Richard Conte, and Will Durant and rightful hometown of the Statue of Liberty. That's got to count for something.

How High Can You Count?

217. MODERN LOVERS, "Roadrunner"
Produced by John Cale; written by Jonathan Richman
1972 Did not make pop charts.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. This is exactly what it is like, and a mere four-count can't possibly introduce it properly. It's doubly good.

Listening for Xs

399. WALL OF VOODOO, "Mexican Radio"
Produced by Richard Mazda; written by Charles T. Gray, Marc Moreland, Joe Nanini, and Stan Ridgeway
IRS 9912 1983 Billboard: # 58

400. BUGGLES, "Video Killed The Radio Star"
Produced by the Buggles; written by Geoffrey Downes, Trevor Horn, Bruce Woolley
Island 49114 1979 Billboard: # 40

401. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, "Guerrilla Radio"
Produced by Brendan O'Brien; written by Tom Morello and Brad Wilk
Epic 79270 1999 Billboard: # 69

402. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, "Radio Nowhere"
Produced by Brendan O'Brien; written by Bruce Springsteen
2007 Billboard: # 75

[Hold on, gang, this is a long one, probably my longest yet. In a way, it's a history of the twentieth century.]

At the end of World War I, Dr, Frank Conrad seemed no different than so many other American radio geeks. Gugliemo Marconi had sent the first wireless signals in 1895, but those had been telegraphic, mere dots and dashes. Voice and sound transmission hadn't become feasible until 1906, and the war had pushed the new realm of wireless even farther both as a practical technology and as a popular fad. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson was the first president whose voice was transmitted by radio waves, but the president wasn't really the sort of person for whom most wireless geeks were listening. They listened for each other, especially at night when the transmissions could travel farther. Frank Conrad had a wireless set in his garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and used the call letters 8XK. When you heard another person's transmission, you wrote them and they sent you back a postcard with their call letters on it, which you added to your collection, the way 1990s teenagers added IM friends and 21st century geeks add Twitter followers.

But there was one thing that made Frank Conrad different from most wireless geeks: he worked for Westinghouse, and his employers were very interested in the commercial possibilities of this new popular technology. In the fall of 1920, Conrad's bosses encouraged him to turn 8XK into a more formal entity called KDKA-Pittsburgh. Most early radio stations were started in this way, by appliance companies, furniture companies, department stores, or newspapers, all entities that hoped to sell more hardware by turning out more attractive software that could only be enjoyed on it, a trick that Steve Jobs and Apple would reinvent three-quarters of a century later by opening iTunes. KDKA was only on for a few hours every day (in the evenings, of course), but a loose schedule of its programming was printed in the local newspaper, so that early adopters of the new technology could know when to tune in. The station still operated out of Conrad's garage, though. Even when it transmitted live election returns that November, they only had a staff of four. Nevertheless, Conrad was allegedly the man who invented the term "broadcasting," and most media scholars consider him a key transitional figure in the U.S. between the amateur and professional eras of radio history.

Conrad is also the first person who played records on the radio on something like a predictable schedule. He played classical music--jazz would have been unthinkable and rock didn't exist yet--but still he was, in a way, the first American "disc jockey." For almost three decades after Conrad, as radio went network and therefore national, playing records on the radio remained a mostly local phenomenon. Because of protests from the American Federation of Musicians, any network program that wanted to air current music essentially had to use a live band to do so, which is one of the reasons why so many swing bands either got shows of their own or supporting gigs on variety shows fronted by singers or comedians.

Nevertheless, even more than movies or recording, the arrival of network radio ushered in the so-called Golden Age of Mass Media, a period from about 1933 through 1970 during which a definable, mediated mainstream almost exclusively dominated American popular culture. Radio provided the first opportunity for millions of people in vastly different situations throughout the U.S. to be listening to the same sounds at the same time. That, in turn, when combined with the fact that there were only two or three networks to choose from, ensured that the same songs would keep popping up again and again in most people's surroundings, something that had been far more difficult to ensure at the beginning of the century, when sheet music rather than radio had been the dominant means of mass cultural transmission.

What made early American broadcasting unique in its time, however, was that it was a wholly market-driven phenomenon. In Western cultures as seemingly separated as the U.K. and Germany, the state ran the broadcasting and essentially decided what was good for you, whether you wanted to hear it or not. In the U.S., the networks--and more essentially the program-specific sponsors who really ran radio in a way that they would not come to run television--had to guess what you wanted to hear.

Thus began the great game of twentieth-century mass culture: is what we think they want to buy what they really want to buy? If it isn't, can we convince them that it's what they want to buy? As the movies had learned a few decades before radio, mass producing widely salable cultural product is much harder than it looks. If a cultural product is going to succeed with a truly mass audience, it can't just be bland and nonthreatening. It has to be both easily assimiliable and infinitely variable, both known and new at one and the same time.

But no product, no matter how well calculated its launch into the market may be, ever succeeds universally. Consequently, every moment of seeming mass cultural dominance produces its own kind of counterprogramming--a mass counterculture if you must; a niche market if you're feeling timid. The first widely reported instance of these were the so-called "border-blaster" or "X" stations that broadcast into the U.S. from the northern regions of Mexico, some of them at as much as a million watts of power. In a pre-internet age, broadcasting from a physical plant outside the U.S. was the best way to escape U.S. regulations while still enjoying the advantages of access to a broad crossection of U.S. consumers. Ads on border-blaster stations were not subject to FCC or Better Business Bureau scrutiny and could claim whatever they wanted. The music on such stations was whatever would attract attention. Given the stations' position within the market, broadcasting the hit parade would have been counterproductive. Consequently, the X stations broadcast the things that people wanted to hear that were not on the hit parade, most notably the Carter Family, whose dour country music was not quite the kind of homespun sound that the Grand Ole Opry wanted to carry when it went national.

Fast forward four or five decades. Television has replaced radio as the dominant form of broadcasting for variety or narrative programming, AM radio has played Billboard's Top 40 on a regular basis for at least two decades, FM radio now exists to supplement AM by providing more marginally popular music, and Wall of Voodoo (as FM a band as you could find in 1982) suddenly has a mainstream hit with "Mexican Radio," a perhaps overly exoticized paean to the old border-blaster stations. "Mexican Radio" was one of a number of songs from this period that looked back on radio nostalgically, including such less memorable works as the Ramones' "Rock and Roll Radio," Queen's "Radio Gaga," and Starship's "We Built This City."

These songs were the products of a fairly odd moment in radio history. In the early 1980s, FM stations were being rapidly swallowed up by media conglomerates like Infinity and ClearChannel, and their d.j.s' playlists were being more tightly constricted than they had been during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years. But even though these acts were nostalgic for the freeform days of early FM, some of the songs they wrote seemed even more nostalgic for the old days of AM radio. The Ramones' and Queen's songs certainly did, even if Starship's was probably a tribute to the late 1960s programming on San Francisco's KFOG. Wall of Voodoo may have half-jokingly been espousing a true radio alternative, but it's worth remembering that it had been the station XERB, located in Rosarito Beach, Baja, that had originally launched Wolfman Jack, maybe the most universally recognized Top 40 d.j. of the 1950s and 1960s. In other words, some if not all of these acts seemed to be quite happy to listen to pop music. They just wanted to hear a different kind of pop than their radios were currently receiving.

An even stranger form of broadcasting nostalgia was evident in the most famous British contribution to this subgenre, the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," whose status as instant trivia question answer has long obscured how odd a song it really is. Not only is this song not nostalgic for 1970s FM, it's not even nostalgic for rock and roll. Instead, it looks back longingly on freshly composed symphonies played on the Beeb back in 1952. An anti-technology song played as technologically as any other late 1970s British New Wave track, "Video Killed the Radio Star" feels like a musicological equivalent of "The king is dead! Long live the king!" or, even more, like the sort of salute in passing that characterized the so-called "Vanishing American" depictions of Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Given the fact that the Buggles were British, it's worth asking whether they were seriously (seriously?) nostalgic for the good old days of state-controlled radio during which listeners got a steady diet of what was good for them. During the late 1960s, the BBC had not broken rock and roll bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or the Who. The last band in particular had benefited from the so-called "pirate radio" stations that had broadcast just outside British waters and played the songs that the Beeb had been too genteel to endorse quickly. Pirate radio's relationship to state-run radio in England was very different than the border-blasters' relation to commercial radio in the U.S. The pirate stations were challenging a music selection that they saw as censorious and providing a self-conscious alternative to it--from which they did, admittedly, hope to make a profit. During the years between the premieres of the Who and the Buggles, British pirate stations broke a great many punk bands, even as BBC2 loosened up a little and managed to offer a wider range of music for its listeners, particularly via the legendary Peel Sessions.

By the 1990s, it was American commercial radio that seemed to demand a self-conscious alternative, which is exactly what "Guerrilla Radio" is supposed to be about. By then, FM had become almost fully corporate, with specific entities owning up to five stations in every market, each carefully shaving off a different sliver of musical interest: classic rock vs. alternative; r&b vs. hiphop, etc. Starting with the rise of demographic analysis in marketing during the 1970s, record companies and broadcasters had learned that more money could be made, not by selling to a theoretical aggregate as media businesses had done throughout the midcentury, but rather by selling to specifically tailored tastes. With these new, more narrowcasted FM stations, you could turn on the radio and hear mostly just what you wanted to hear, with few songs that would disturb your individualized taste. "No rap, no metal" as I heard one repackaged Boston station put it at some point in the early 1990s, which of course caused me to promptly remove it from the quickselect buttons on our car radio.

If you listen closely to Tom Morello's lyrics, however, "Guerilla Radio" doesn't really want to challenge this state of affairs all that much. It just wants to supplement it. Rather typically for a decade in which the most mainstream pop music was labelled "alternative," this song premises cherished personal taste on opposition. What the singer wants to hear is not the sort of freeform radio that had been available on early FM stations but rather an underground station that only plays stuff that would never show up on any of the corporate-owned stations that currently dominate his dial. He doesn't want nicheless radio--he wants radio that recognizes his niche.

The decade since "Guerrilla Radio" was released has seen nothing but greater and greater specialization of music media along these lines. Both radio and records are now more consumer-driven than at any time in their history, and the mass audience for pop has not been this irrelevant to the music industry since Frank Conrad first started fiddling around with a wireless. Radio has also become mostly irrelevant to popular music, because so many Americans under the age of 50 now carry their favorite, private radio station in their pocket, with white earbuds to stuff in their ears like so much cotton to keep out any nonpreapproved sounds that might bleed in. Listeners buy singles now, not albums, and services like Pandora offer ever more sophisticated ways for them to find music that they don't know that doesn't sound too different from the music that they do.

Less relevant as a market force but even more interesting symbolically, satellite radio has taken this process even farther and turned broadcasting into narrowcasting on an unprecedented level. Now you can listen to radio stations in your car that not only offer no rap or metal but no music not composed by a single artist. "Every performer's dream," Bruce Springsteen has quipped in concert, "Turn on the radio anytime, you always hear one of your songs."

But Springsteen, we should note, is a friend and sometime collaborator of Tom Morello, as well as a host of other acts that don't exactly show up too often on the Billboard charts. He's never said as much, but I suspect that "Radio Nowhere," the lead track and single off his 2007 album Magic, reflects his ambivalence about All Bruce All the Time radio. It's a very typical song for him, addressed to his audience and even repeating a line in the chorus (Is there anybody alive out there?) that he has used throughout his career to get sedentary audiences up off their feet. As in so many Springsteen songs, the narrator is someone driving at night, flipping through the dial like the narrator of the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner," trying to find fresh sounds to fill his ears. Do these sounds have to be exotic, all worldmusicky and foreign like the ones that may have turned on Wall of Voodoo? Probably not, given the fact that the song's guitar riff is an obvious steal from Tommy Tutone's "867-5309 (Jenny Jenny)," as poppy and nonalternative a song as one could imagine.

What does the narrator want to hear? Pentecostal preachers? Sure. Excessively localized stations coming in at night from New Orleans and Memphis like the ones that inspired a Canadian boy like Robbie Robertson to pick up an instrument? Absolutely. Silly new pop songs? Why not? He wants all of it. A million different voices speaking in tongues. He wants something that hasn't been tailored to him, that he didn't specifically choose because it might be like something he already knew. This was the real Spirit of Radio, the one that Rush could never really dream of, the one that seems pert near dead in our current, young century. At its best (at night), radio seemed like a limitless ocean that could take you to faraway places and cultures you never thought you'd visit, if you'd only let go and stop hugging the shore near the ports of familiar stations.

It's silly to be nostalgic for an era, let alone a medium. Still, if we now all surf the internet rather than the radio dial, I hope that Google remains a little imperfect. To grow culturally, we don't need what we know we want. We don't even need exotic alternatives to what we know and dislike, cool music sites that friends recommend to us because of the things that they dis and refuse to play. Those are just "alternative" arms of capitalist marketing, and they have been for at least four decades now. No, what we need to grow culturally is the random: the voice in the night of a friend we haven't met yet; the odd sounds that claim to be some kind of music, but to which we don't yet know how to listen.

What You Gonna Do?

74. THELMA HOUSTON, "Don't Leave Me This Way"
Produced by Hal Davis; written by Kenny Gamble, Cary Gilbert, & Leon Huff
Tamla 54278 1977 Billboard: # 1

Some might say that all disco anthems were the same. If that was true--and I'm not sure it was--then this song was the epitome of disco anthems, somewhere between the early rousing pathos of "Touch Me in the Morning" and the heedless empowerment of "I Will Survive" (both of which I will be getting to later on in the thousand). Houston sounds so frail and wounded at the beginning of this record, soulful but hurting; much more convincingly abject than Gloria Gaynor ever could sound. But she picks up steam with the arrangement, to the point where, a minute or two in, she starts challenging her interlocutor and calling him out, almost calling him chicken the way Shannon would in "Let the Music Play" and Madonna in "Into the Groove" a few years on. Some of the credit has to go to the incredible pop pedigree behind the record (Davis, Gamble, Huff, et al), but much of it goes to Houston herself. Like many other successful records in its genre, this one demonstrates that, in its prime, disco was only a latin hustle away from the high drama of musical theatre.

We've All Been There

418. NICK LOWE AND HIS COWBOY OUTFIT, "I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock 'N' Roll)"
Produced by Huey Lewis; written by Nick Lowe
Columbia 05570 1985 Billboard: # 77

Or the groom for that matter. Good Lord, if you haven't lived through this song, you haven't lived. I even have one old friend who hurled herself against me in one All the Friends photo from my own wedding just to bear witness to this sort of feeling (I think). The lie is that rock and roll never ages; the truth is that rock and roll never forgets.

Cranky Old Man Strikes Back

419. BILLY JOEL, "It's Still Rock And Roll To Me"
Produced by Phil Ramone & Billy Joel; written by Billy Joel
CBS 8753 1980  Billboard: # 1

Believe it or not, this was Billy Joel's highest chart position ever.  And he deserved it.  

Glass Houses, the album on which this song appeared, was Joel's least pretentious ever, a deliberate attempt to come out with an album of songs that it would be fun to play live, without the self-conscious homages that he would use to make An Innocent Man a few years later.  The album, and this song in particular, was a response to the rise of New Wave, saying that it wasn't new but just a repackaging by record companies and journalists of older sounds and styles.  He wasn't saying it wasn't fun.  He was just saying that it wasn't a revolution.

You know, I can't believe I'm typing this next clause, but Billy Joel was right.

But this is by no means a blanket absolution.  For one thing, "We Didn't Start the Fire" still feels a little too much to me like the Long Islander doth protest too much.

The Song That Sent Me Tragically Wrong

59. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS, "(I Belong to the) Blank Generation"

Produced by Richard Hell and Richard Gotterher ; written by Richard Hell

Sire SIR-6037C Did not make pop charts

You know sometimes all it takes is one song.

Confession time: I didn't really listen to rock and roll that much when I was a kid.  I mean, it was around and all, but I didn't really listen.  It didn't get my attention.  The songs I would really devour when I hear them were showtunes.  I loved taking apart the lyrics, turning them over, figuring out their little hidden tricks.  Most rock that I heard (this was the 70s, remember) seemed too simple, particularly the lyrics, compared to that.

And then I heard this song.  From the first verse, this lyric blew me away--in part, because it was so outrageous, in part because it was so clever, but in large part because the words flowed so beautifully on top of the notes:  I was saying let me out of here/Before I was even born/It's such a gamble when you get a face.  That's so jerky that it shouldn't work.  You just can't be jerky and smooth at the same time.  "I Wanna Be Sedated" may have been funny, but Cole Porter wouldn't have been impressed by it (even if he did enjoy being sedated)."  "Kill the Poor," which I'll get to it at some point, was a lyric that Porter could begrudgingly admire (even though he didn't have a political bone in his body).  But "Blank Generation" was a song that Cole Porter could never have written, simply because it's hard to juggle the irony and the polyrhythms and make them work so smoothly together.

This is why, when people talk to me about the Great American Songbook as if it was something that ended around 1960 or so, I often point them toward Richard Hell.  Not that it works that often, but I do indeed so point them.

No Time for Elocution! For the Love of G-d, DANCE!!!

460. MADONNA w/JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, "4 Minutes"
Produced by Cutee-B, Vincent DiPasquale, Junkie XL, Eric Kupper, & Bob Sinclair; written by Hills, Madonna, Mosley, & Timberlake
Warner Bros. 463228 2008 Billboard: # 3

I always knew Madonna was a superhero--and here she is once again coming to save the day! With J.T. the Boy Wonder chanting her name in the background!! This, as you know, helps her channel her powers. Give her a Peron-worthy mob of adoring fans all chanting her name, and she could move the Houses of Parliament to the other side of the Thames simply with her iron will.

This is one of those songs for which I would not want to see the official lyrics even if they had them. For example, is she saying "you intervention" or "U.N. invention"? I know it's probably the former, but given the global stakes here it definitely could be the latter.

N.B.: Depending on which mix of this single you listen to, the world is either saved in 3 minutes and 52 seconds or 4 minutes and 10 seconds. In other words, 4 minutes was a pretty good guesstimate there, Madge. Shalom.

What Second Acts Sound Like

300. ROGER MCGUINN, "King Of The Hill"
Produced by David Cole ; written by Roger McGuinn & Tom Petty
1991 Did not make pop charts

301. DION, "King of the New York Streets"
Produced by Dave Edmunds; written by Dion DiMucci & Bill Touhy
1989 Did not make pop charts

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that there are no second acts in American life, but that's not exactly true in rock and roll. Since Chuck Berry finally hit # 1 in 1972 with the truly execrable "My Ding-a-Ling" at least, the comeback has been built into nearly every rock career. You fade away and come back ten or fifteen years later and get one chance to prove that you still have it. In most cases, the performers sound like a pale shadow of their former selves, but somehow the force of nostalgia generates enough sales to get them by.

These records are two stunning exceptions to that rule. Both registered on the Modern Rock Tracks chart but never made a dent in the Hot 100. It's not unusual that both Roger Mc Guinn and Dion DiMucci got younger artists who grew up idealizing them to help them make their records more current (Tom Petty in McGuinn's case, Dave Edmunds in Dion's). What is unusual is that the content as well as the sound of their songs grew up during the interregnum. An East Coast pop star of the early 1960s and a West Coast pop star of the late 1960s sing about life on the top, and both come to surprisingly similar conclusions, particularly about cocaine and the shallowness of their success. In both cases, words and music combine to give a similarly bittersweet experience. A Boomer could live in the groove that either of these songs lays down, but the words of each song tells the truth: lived in long enough, grooves become ruts.

They Endure

964. SINEAD O'CONNOR, "The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance"
Produced by Chris Birkett, Sean Devitt, & Sinead O'Connor; written by Sinead O'Connor
1990 Did not make pop charts

The life cycle of a woman going through a divorce: same words throughout, but the feeling changes. If you listen closely, you can almost hear her heal.

Awww, Aren't Newlyweds So Cute?

734. NIRVANA, "Heart-Shaped Box"
Produced by Steve Albini; written by Kurt Cobain
Geffen 21849 1993 Did not make pop charts

735. NIRVANA, " All Apologies"
Produced by Steve Albini; written by Kurt Cobain
Geffen MVCG-13011 1994 Billboard: # 45
There they are: the Scott and Zelda of indie rock. God, they're both so pretty that you want it all to work out. It didn't, of course, but I at least wanted it to.

Both these singles are tracks off In Utero, my favorite Nirvana album, the one that proved you could be difficult and still write catchy songs. Both these songs are about Cobain and Love's marriage, although the first one refers to it so obscurely that many people never realized it. Personally, I think "Wait/Wait/I got a new complaint/Forever in debt to your priceless advice" should have been a tipoff to some kind of domestic squabble, but admittedly "I want to eat your cancer when it turns black" is such a great line that it could tend to draw your attention away from the submerged subject at hand. Charles Cross, however, confirmed in Heavier than Heaven, his superb biography of Cobain, that even the title of the song referred to a present that had passed between the couple and was usually kept at their bedside.

By contrast, the subject matter of "All Apologies" is unmistakable. You can't get much clearer than "I'm married/Buried." Yet Cobain widens his scope to include critics of all varieties, not just his resented spouse. Yes, he sounds at points like a selfish junkie who feels besieged, but I think he's still self-aware enough at this point to know how whiny he may come off. Sometimes he can be hysterically funny in this exaggerated pose, What more can I say?/Everyone is gay being a classic case in point.

For those who think Courtney Love doesn't know the meaning of restraint, I'd like to point out that to my knowledge she never replied to this song, which I certainly would have if my spouse had written it. And as time proved out, one major difference between the Fitzgeralds and the Cobains is that in the latter relationship, it was the woman who was the (moderately) sane one. Personally, of course, I wouldn't have wanted to be married to any of them--Scott, Zelda, Kurt, or Courtney.

Nixonian Longing

425. CARPENTERS, "Superstar"
Produced by Jack Daugherty ; written by Bonnie Bramlett & Leon Russell
A&M 1289 1971 Billboard: # 2

Since I lived through the 70s the first time, for me the Carpenters are a love/hate thing. Actually, it's mostly hate, because I despise nearly all their orchestrations. If Phil Spector's overstuffed arrangements had taken the longing of the early 1960s and raised it to operatic levels, Richard Carpenter's arrangements for the tracks he and his sister Karen laid down in the early 1970s made passion and even desire safe for mass consumption. And of course, when Herb Alpert's one of your bosses, it never hurts to throw in a few peppy horns on the choruses, no matter how depressing the song is supposed to be. After all, you want to make sure all that those L.A. session players can keep drawing a semi-regular paycheck.

What keeps me coming back to the Carpenters, though, is what keeps anyone coming back: Karen Carpenter's voice. That voice may be safe, but it's not shallow. There is a sadness there that haunts even a song like "Close to You" that's supposed to be about indescribable bliss. In retrospect, we know now that Karen Carpenter's sadness killed her. It almost literally ate her up from the inside out, and no matter how much I appreciate her performances, I would much rather that she had been happy than successful. I would never have wanted to be her boyfriend, but part of me might have liked to have been the brother that a sweet soul like her deserved.

Supposedly, the vocal for this song was recorded on the first take, because Karen was uncomfortable with the sexual contact implicit in the lyrics. As it was, watchful brother Richard rewrote the original lyrics of the song so that "sleep with you" became the more ambiguous "be with you." Nevertheless, the Carpenters chose to record this song, even if it was a little out of their comfort zone. That's what makes the single interesting, of course: that it is a little out of the Carpenters' comfort zone. Birds and butterflies and beasts and children are easy. Waking up to realize that the love of your life was a one-night stand is hard.

Before Karen stepped up to the microphone for that single take, this song had already been sung by Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie (who cowrote it), Bette Midler, Rita Coolidge, and Cher. Subsequently, it would be recorded by Luther Vandross, Sonic Youth, and Chryssie Hynde. And you know what? Karen Carpenter still owns it. Even though I wish her brother Richard had left the lyrics the way they were, I don't think "Superstar" is primarily a song about sex or its aftermath. It's a song about unfulfilled longing and the confusion that it brings. And something makes me think that Karen Carpenter had more of a handle on that than all the rest of those singers put together.

It Doesn't Have to Be Pretentious to Blow Your Mind

56. WHITE STRIPES, "Fell In Love With A Girl"
Produced by Doug Easley; written by Jack & Meg White
Import 21097 2002 Did not make pop charts

That this song did not break the Billboard Hot 100 (only Modern Rock Tracks) and "Blue Orchid" did is just proof of a subtle truth of the record industry: all bands pick up steam, notoreity, and promotion as they go on. Just a perfect, perfect single, wholly devoid of the pretension and self-consciousness that can sometimes mar even the best Stripes tracks. Don't you dare call it a revival! Garage rock never died, and never will.

Jolson Lives!

441. ROLLINS BAND, "Liar"
Produced by Theo VanRock; written by Rollins Band
Imago 25072 1994 Did not make pop charts

You know, nobody really gets Al Jolson anymore. I'm not saying he's my favorite entertainer or anything, just that nobody gets why he was so popular when he was. For the most part, his success wasn't about imitating African Americans, not the way that Gosden and Correll pathetically attempted to do so on Amos n Andy, not the way an earlier recording star like Arthur Collins did when he recorded what were at the time called "coon songs." Jolson recorded numbers that could be sung independent of perceived race, as witnessed by the fact that a good chunk of the songs that Judy Garland sang in her famous Carnegie Hall concert came out of the late singer's repertoire.

Live, Jolson did perform in blackface, but that wasn't always about the perceived imitation of African Americans for the most part. Jolson's kind of blackface derived from the effacement of African Americans, just as Godsen and Correll's came from a caricature of them. (Both kinds are racism--just pick your poison.) Jolson's blackface sprung from the widely shared white assumption that people with darker skin were more passionate, more in touch with their emotions. When Jolson put on the makeup, he felt it gave him license to indulge his emotions more, to almost break down, as he did every time he performed "Mammy" or "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face." Watching Jolson was not about having a jokey, fun time. It was about seeing if the runaway train would actually run off the tracks this time, the way it always threatened to.

Which brings me, finally, to Henry Rollins. Whatever this single is, it isn't punk. It's a little playlet, with choruses where the villain twirls his mustache in an aside to the audience as sweet Little Nell still suffers with no hope of being rescued by a strapping beau. Genderwise, Rollins is getting his cake and eating it too here, adopting a feminist critique of sexist behavior while still getting to act out the scene with an aggression I'm sure you didn't get to see in your Women's Studies class. Henry's just a little too into being the bad guy here, probably even more than he is into explaining exactly how other people should act. But the real thrill of the song, I think, is whether he's going to totally lose it. Actually losing it? That would be punk. Teetering on the edge of a breakdown for four minutes? That's Jolson--if he pumped iron.

Tom's Big Time

987. TOM WAITS, "Downtown Train"
Produced and written by Tom Waits
1985 Did not enter pop charts

The highest charting single by one of the greatest late twentieth-century U.S. songwriters--except it wasn't his recording of the song that charted.

Four years after Tom Waits' original recording of "Downtown Train" (released on the Burkeanly sublime album Rain Dogs), Rod Stewart's version made it to # 5 on the Billboard charts. The video for the song shows Rod in front of a number of trains, so he has apparently been in a subway station at least once, but seriously can you imagine Blondey Boy pining away after a woman he sees repeatedly on the G train? I'd buy into the dewy-eyed innocence of "Maggie May" before I'd believe that.

It's a shame really, because if Waits ever had a shot at the big time, it was with this song. It's probably his most conventional ballad, sweet but still gritty. Certainly, "Downtown Train" is not as weird as "Cemetery Polka" or as hopelessly pathetic as "Train Song." "Jersey Girl" is sweeter still, but even Bruce Springsteen didn't try to release his cover of that as a single. But the longing of this song is so beautiful, so perfect. It's almost medieval. And it's really not the same if anyone less shattered than the author himself sings it.

So, to answer your question: no, I don't like all covers. Some tracks are hard to improve on.

Emma Goldman Might Have Been Pleased

284. PUBLIC ENEMY, "Fight The Power"
Produced by Carl Ryder, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Hank Shocklee, and Keith Shocklee; written by Chuck D, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Hank Shocklee, and Keith Shocklee
1990 Did not make pop charts

Speaking of Spike, here's a song he's triply responsible for: he commissioned it for Do the Right Thing and then set images to it not once but twice: first in the Rosie-Perez-as-boxer opening titles for the film, and then in the Brooklyn booster parade of the song's official video.

This track is more on the nose than most PE cuts, maybe even more univalent than Lee's film eventually turns out to be. It also has far fewer lyrics than most of the group's well-known songs. The only upside of less Chuck D and more Terminator X is that for long stretches of the song you can just dance and not worry about missing any good lyrics (although to make sure you get the Elvis dis, Chuck repeats it).

P.S.: Yes, I know Goldman probably didn't actually say that thing about dance and the revolution, but she sort of did. And besides . . . it's my blog :)

Specialized Labor

596. METALLICA, "Turn The Page"
Produced by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich; written by Bob Seger
Polygram International 566591 1998 Did not make pop charts

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had all these friends--not really cinephiles, but literate, educated friends--who loved John Sayles movies and loved Spike Lee movies. And yes, there were things I liked about all those movies. But far too frequently I found myself wishing that Sayles would be something more than a novelist with moving pictures that didn't move enough, and that Lee would be more than a kinetic cinematician with bumper-sticker dialogue.

After a while, I realized what I really wanted. I wanted Sayles to write a screenplay that Lee filmed--great scenes, great shot composition, all around good movie. I've never believed in the hyphenate in cinema. (Woody Allen's two best screenplays, for example, are the ones on which he had a collaborator.) Some people should just write and some people should just direct and some people should just perform.

I feel that way about pop music too sometimes. Since Dylan and the Beatles, there's been this real emphasis on singer-songwriters, but is it really such a great thing that Lindsay Lohan felt she needed to write songs on her albums in order to be "real"? My favorite single of hers is still "Ultimate," the one she did on the Freaky Friday soundtrack. It almost certainly won't make the cut for this list, but it's catchy and she sells it. It's just about right for her. Thank God she didn't feel the need to rewrite it into a soul-baring ballad about her relationship with her father.

Anyway, this Metallica single is for me the equivalent of my dream Sayles-Lee collaboration. Seger has a better eye for synecdochal (rather than allegorical) detail than Lars and James ever did, but when they sing Seger's lyrics they sound genuinely burnt out. As you may have guessed by now, I'm a big fan of covers, as long as they're the right ones.

If Phil Spector Got Funky and/or Drank Banana Daiquiris

624. PRINCE, "Another Lonely Christmas"
Produced and written by Prince & the Revolution
Warner 29121 1984 Billboard: # 5

As you may have guessed by this point, I have a bit of a weakness for Phil Spector records--not Leiber & Stoller records, not Motown records, but Phil Spector records. Yes, they're overblown, even operatic, but that's what I love about them. There are times in your life, especially when you're young, when the emotions just feel so Big that well-analyzed, clear-headed observations just don't cut it. You need to feel as if the Whole World really does depend on a single Kiss.

This Prince record--originally the B-side to "I Would Die 4 U" but eventually a seasonal hit in its own right--feels to me like the record Phil Spector would have made if he had been black (as opposed to just packaging the talent of black artists). It's actually sadder than most Spector records, more like a funk reimagination of "Last Kiss," J. Frank Wilson's classic tearjerker from over two decades earlier. But all those instruments, that epic feeling . . .

And then there are the banana daiquiris. Do you really think that's what he's drinking? That's almost too sensitive to be real. Part of me wonders if this is just a line he uses in Twin City bars around the holidays. Still, he sounds so sad. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Names and Things

108. J. GEILS BAND, "Centerfold"
Produced and written by Seth Justman
EMI America 8102 1981 Billboard: # 1

109. HOLE, "Celebrity Skin"
Produced by Michael Beinhorn; written by Billy Corgan, Eric Erlandson, & Courtney Love
DGC 1194 1998 Billboard: # 85

There's an old friend of mine from high school--let's call her "Nellie," because she played Nellie Forbush to my Emile de Becque back in the day--if you Google Nellie's real name, the first eight or so hits refer to a nude scene from a fairly well-known Hollywood film that was released around the time I knew her. She is nude in that movie, even in that scene, but the pictures that those webpages connect to her name are not pictures of her.

For someone of a younger generation, the idea that there could be nude photographs of a friend of mine up on the web must seem positively quaint. Gens X and Y have been snapping pics and videos of each other and posting them online with abandon now for at least a decade. That's one of the many things that makes J. Geils' "Centerfold" a real historical artifact: an era in which you could be surprised to encounter nude images of someone you knew in school seems so very long ago. We have all been so fully pornographied now that some people can actually be blase about it.

But Peter Wolf is not singing in this silly little single about someone who made private photos that suddenly became available to millions of people. He's singing--well, he's actually singing about himself (typical man), but the young woman whom he is remembering in this song presumably chose to allow a professional to take nude photographs of her, possibly as a stepping stone to a more varied career in the entertainment industry. That was the case with my old friend Nellie: the producers of that film she was in spotted her during a location shoot in Manhattan, asked her if she wanted to be in another scene, there was nudity involved, would she mind that, etc. As it turned out, she was in a second movie the following year, also shot in Manhattan, and this time she wore lingerie. Among us old theatre pals (who were not seeing much of her anymore at that point), the joke was that in her third movie she would be fully clothed. As far as I know, she was never in a third movie.

To hear Courtney Love sing about it, though, such decisions might actually be a viable career path--or maybe not. It feels as if Love is doing that chicken-hearted thing here of being autobiographically ironic by pretending her song is about someone else. Let's not kid ourselves, though: this song is most assuredly about her, even if the publication she was plagued by was probably not Celebrity Skin but Fox Mulder's favorite Celebrity Sleuth. In retrospect, it's clear now that the marketing of nude, semi-nude, or just plain titillating images of celebrities was only getting warmed up in the pre-Britney-Lindsay-and-Paris era when this single was released. I'm sure at the time Courtney thought that she had the whole situation under control. I'm using them, I bet she thought, they're not using me. If she chose to wear an outrageous outfit to get publicity, or to play Larry Flynt's mistress in order to advance her acting career, she was using people's image of her as a way of gaining wider currency for herself.

This seems like another one of those cases--and there are so many of them in pop--where the song in time proves so much wiser than the singer. Ten years on, I'm not sure I'd say that Courtney Love used the star-making machinery more than it used her. The popular image of Love today mostly casts her as the multiply addicted bimbo who married St. Kurt, while the fact is that she was responsible for at least one great rock and roll album (Live through This) and at least a half-dozen very thoughtful songs. That's no small achievement. Still, to a lot of people, she's little more than bright blonde hair, a ton of eye makeup, and a pair of prominently displayed breasts.

As Shakespeare's Mark Antony maybe should have said, the porn that women do lives long after them, but their art is oft interred with their plummeting CD sales. That's why I'm so glad that all those webpages got Nellie's real name wrong--no, that they got her name right and her body wrong. Because Nellie's body should belong to her. Images of it should not be out there for idiots to drool over. Like Courtney Love, the Nellie I knew was an artist, in this case a truly gifted comic actress. I hate thinking of her reduced to a tough answer in a porn trivia game.

Yes, It's All Very Pretty, But Is It Rock?

358. SMASHING PUMPKINS, "Tonight, Tonight"

Produced by Flood, Alan Moulder, and Bill Corgan; written by Billy Corgan

Virgin 38547 1996 Billboard: # 36

Okay, quick question: how many strings does it take to turn a rock band back into an orchestra? On Siamese Dream, the Pumpkins had certainly worked the classical colorings, but on this track from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, one might very well think that they've finally gone a viola too far. Between that, and the title that reminds me of West Side Story, and the kittens in the CD booklet (KITTENS I TELL YOU--KITTENS!!?), I would normally be inclined to say that they've left rock and roll far behind here. I don't care if Corgan is bald and has one killer line in the lyric (crucify the insincere tonight). Rock and roll doesn't have that many strings--and it certainly doesn't have kittens.

Then I always come back to the drums. Jimmy Chamberlin's drumming on this track keeps it from getting too weak. No matter what else is going on with the other instruments, the drum on this track rocks. And thank God for that.

When the news came out a year or so later that Chamberlin was being kicked out of the band (temporarily as it turns out) because of his problems with heroin, I turned to my wife and said "Damn, why did it have to be the drummer?"

One of Them

475. RAMONES, "Pinhead"
Produced by Tony Bongiovi; written by the Ramones
1977 Did not make pop charts

As always with the Ramones, it's not about the words. There are . . . what? Maybe forty words in the whole song. The narrator's in a hospital, maybe of the mental variety, and he's met a nurse who's changed his outlook.

Did anybody take this scenario seriously? No. This wasn't realism in which the audience became emotionally involved. As always with the Ramones, you identified with the performance not with the song. This is a song about being an outcast but feeling as if you've found a home. Despite the clear reference to Freaks, the feeling here is quite the opposite of the one at the end of Tod Browning's mutilated film. In fact, it the opposite of the feeling that the singer declares in the lyric. Along with Joey, we want to be freaks. We want to be pinheads. (Bill Griffith's Zippy comics had just started to be syndicated nationally the year before this single was released.) We all want to shout GABBA GABBA HEY (gabba gabba hey) . . .

People who think punk was all about alienation only get half the story, at least when it comes to the willfully goofy Ramones. If Johnny Rotten wanted to alienate and resensitize his audience to the point where they were self-conscious about the political economy of rock and roll, Joey Ramone wanted to build his audience a big fat clubhouse. We may be alienated from society, brothers and sisters, but we're all freaks together.

Antedeluvian

992. VILLAGE PEOPLE, "Go West"
Produced by Henri Belolo; written by Henri Belolo, Jacques Morali, and Victor Willis
1979 Billboard: # 45

My favorite Village People song. Sure, the horn track could be recycled from "YMCA" or any of their other hits, but I like what this song stands for.

Yes, I like to camp it up as much as the next straight guy. Along with several other students at my high school back in the day, I frequently enjoyed singing an ersatz German translation of "Macho Man" (Maecho Mensch) in falsetto. But let's get real, people: anyone can goof around. It takes a real man to commit.

And that's what this song is about: sincerely committing, not just to a partner, but to a hopeful future beyond the giddy now. In my mind, this song is always linked to McFadden & Whitehead's "Ain't No Stopping Us Now," which came out the same year. Both songs are culminating anthems that celebrate the least ugly part of the 1970s, the drive to build a more open, tolerant, and diverse society.

No matter what comes after, hope like that is always something worth singing about . . .

Apres Deluge

993. PET SHOP BOYS, "Go West"
Produced by Pet Shop Boys and Stephen Hague; written by Henri Belolo, Jacques Morali, and Victor Willis
EMI 58084 1993 Did not make pop charts

. . . because, of course, things do come after.

In the fourteen years that passed between the Village People's original recording of "Go West" and the Pet Shop Boys' remake of the song, a number of things had changed. For one thing, by the 1990s it was clear that the digitized world of disco, which so many straight white male rock fans had assumed was just a passing fad, was here to stay. We sometimes speak of "disco" and "techno" as if they are two different forms of music, but they're really just two stages in the evolution of a single form, just as "rockabilly" and "surf music" are two stages in an evolution that would eventually lead to "punk." The transformed use of digital tracks in dance music during the 1980s was almost like the transformed use of the electric guitar in pop during the 1940s. In both cases, it took at least a decade for the technology to become more familiar, more sophisticated, and more responsive to artists' needs. By the end of the 1980s, artists had learned to envision their singles digitally from the first moment of conception, rather than simply adapting their pre-digital ideas for a single to the new technology (as many writers and producers had done during the so-called "disco" era).

Of course, the other major change to the social milieu of dance music during this 1980s was the impact of AIDS. We will never know if a disco star like Sylvester, for example, could have staged a successful comeback in the 1990s, because he died in 1988. He had apparently contracted his illness quite early in the epidemic, before AZT and assorted drug cocktails made living with HIV more than just a wish and a hope. In the retrospective glance of the 1990s, the late 1970s came to be seen by some as a golden age for dance clubs as well as gay men. A certain measure of 70s nostalgia took hold in the 90s, just as some 50s nostalgia had taken hold in the 70s, although the iconography of pre-AIDS disco has no single equivalent to Don McLean's mythic Day the Music Died.

But this Pet Shop Boys track is not about nostalgia. Like the original recording of the song, it's about looking forward, into the future. In fact, this version makes me think even more of Horace Greeley than the Village People's original did. Neil Tennant's voice--for once not ironic, this time sweet and merely wistful--takes in the loss of the last fourteen years but also the tentative progress, the greater acceptance (particularly in the realm of upper-class consumption) and the greater visibility of openly gay men and lesbians in the U.S. and Europe. Not that the march from 1979 had been one uninterrupted celebratory parade. As it turns out, there was a great deal to stop us now, but there was also, in the midst of all the gloom, a measure of hope.

Being the former music critics that they are, the Boys can't stop at just that, though. This track is also obviously meant to make us think of the future of post-Soviet, rapidly capitalizing Russia. This theme is more obvious if you see the wildly imaginative video for the song, but you can hear it in the single too, in that gruffly fortified male chorus in the background, which seems ready to break into the Song of the Volga Boatman at the drop of a beaverskin hat.


In fact, although I've never read anything to confirm this, I've always thought that this particular single must have been inspired by Tony Kushner's Angels in America, even though the National Theatre's production of the play's second part ("Perestroika") in London almost certainly premiered after this was all laid down. But the way that this version of the song explicitly links western migration in the U.S., the fate of the former USSR, and the future of gay men's love is just too close to Kushner's conception of late twentieth-century history to shake off. As Kushner's Harper Pitt says in the penultimate scene of "Perestroika," "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead." That's exactly what Neil Tennant sounds like on this track: longing and dreaming, moving forward assuredly, hand in hand with his partner, while looking over his shoulder at all the loss in his wake.

In Longtime Companion, one of the first fictional films to treat the early years of the AIDS epidemic, there is a scene late in the film, set at a GMHC fundraiser, in which a string quartet plays a pseudo-classical arrangement of "Y.M.C.A." I've never liked that performance, because it's too tame, too sad, too resigned to "settling down"--which is, of course, something entirely different than "committing." Personally, I would have loved it if Mike Nichols had ended his miniseries version of Angels in America for HBO with this Pet Shop Boys track playing over the end titles. That would have sent me off in the right spirit. As HIV-positive Prior Walter says in the last lines of Kushner's epic, "You are all fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins."