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.

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.