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.