the Microphones :: I Felt Your Shape
Recently a complete stranger said to me “When are you going to start living your life for yourself,” or something to that effect. He was a chiropractor, and I was in his office to talk about the knots in my upper back. It was quite inappropriate really; I started weeping.
I go to this song when I need to feel stronger, and I even get to do that identifying with the object, rather than the subject. (I think about objects and subjects a lot reading and writing this blog—where do we place ourselves in these songs we love?) Phil reminds me of my monumental/elemental nature. My hair is a stampede of horses, my hips are thunderheads, my breastbone is steel girders.* When you know you are tall as mountains, it feels good to take your tree size hand and brush those shoulders off.
*For further reference, please see Ego Trip by Nikki Giovanni (performed by Blackalicious). Can anyone point me to more stuff like this? Because I think I need to up my megalomaniacal affirmation intake.
I Felt Your Shape (2.2MB MP3)
the Microphones
Weezer :: Say It Ain’t So
One of my favorite dudes in the universe is my seven year old cousin. The middle son of my mother’s youngest brother, B is hopelessly enthralled with High School Musical and 90s alternative rock (thanks to Guitar Hero). Every time I go out west to visit family, I spend some time at my uncle’s house in what I can only describe as “the room of awesome.” It’s pretty much just a regular living room, but with an excellent sound system and a huge flat screen of perpetual Wii, karaoke and cartoons. Also in this room, my oldest cousin J (age 15, super into prog, color me proud), B’s brother, is pretty handy on the old family computer machine as most kids are today, and creates music playlists for his brothers including the littlest one, N (5 years old, into metal).
The last time I visited, I was greeted at the door by B yelling, “Kelly! Kelly! Come listen to my favorite song!” He dragged me to the computer and played Say it Ain’t So. I was all, “whaaaa? How do you know this song?! This is my favorite song!” to which he replied, “how do you know this song?!” My explanation and the concept of me being alive in 1994 or ever being 14 totally blew his mind. He played me some of his other favorite songs (most of which were from the 90s), and we were both pretty impressed with each other.
That simple little exchange made me think a lot about nature vs. nurture: how much I have in common with my uncle (age 47, into Talking Heads and Elvis Costello) and cousins, musically and otherwise, even though I’ve spent very little actual time with them. Do the bonds of blood transfer to musical taste? Is a predilection for certain sounds written into our DNA? B just liked the music, he didn’t know I used to listen to Say it Ain’t So as a young teenager, lamenting the past and lamenting my own future as a potential alcoholic. When the Blue Album came out, my father had indeed “cleaned up, found Jesus,” so I was immediately drawn to this song and its literal connection to my own life. I almost hoped that my step-father at the time would become an alcoholic so I could identify with the song even more. I’m the son! I’m drowning in the flood! This song is meeeee! Ah, youth, angsty alienated youth. I even tried beer (not just because of the song) to see if I’d fall in love with it. When I didn’t and hid the bottle in my closet after a few sips, I was relieved and perhaps slightly disappointed.
I’ve met plenty of people who consider Say it Ain’t So a favorite. Barring any literal or emotional connections with the song, I think its basic appeal lies in the sound and earnestness of the lyrics and their delivery. It’s a shame that Weezer turned into a hit-making machine, but it’s really pleasant to find that Rivers’ old brand of earnestness can still be recognized and appreciated, even by a seven year old.
Say It Ain’t So (5MB MP3)
Weezer (homepage, video)
the Kinks :: I Go To Sleep
Listen really carefully to the pick-up notes at the very beginning of this song. As the the harmony enters on the down beat it’s almost drowned out, but the melody’s upper voice sustains right smack up to the cadence (four seconds in) introducing the song’s major motif. In that little space is the point in the song where my eyes close and my chin folds into my chest. My breathing slows way down and in my mind’s eye I can picture Ray Davies recording the scratch track at night, alone in someone’s attic. You can hear the faintest flub just before the vocals enter. That makes me smile.
The vocal melody invokes the image of a somnambulist’s ballet. Each syllable is a new dancer falling gracefully into the spiraling shadow of the next. The successive pulses in the piano’s tenor line suggest an awkward sort of antagonism, like when the sound of your own heart beat keeps you frustratingly suspended between rest and restlessness. As the song continues though, this line seems to settle into a subtle half-time loll. Its rhythm becomes like a mother slowly rocking her fidgeting child into a deep and heavy sleep.
Then all of a sudden the bright intervals of that glorious major chord shifts the song’s mood from haunted, to hopeful, and the narrator daringly admits to losing his loving faith for only a moment. You get the sense that bliss can only come when consciousness slips away. So when the main motif recapitulates, ushering in the final verse, the new dawn doesn’t appear majestic but empty and cold. Like waking up without the person you love by your side.
I Go To Sleep (3.8MB MP3)
the Kinks (wikipedia)
Mountain Goats :: No Children
I spent the past three weeks losing the battle to tonsillitis, intestinal bugs, and strep throat. It was AWESOME (read: depressing, humbling, painful). Much of this sicko time was spent laying on my back in my apartment where I live alone in a country far away from family, contemplating the frailty of humans (me in particular), the smog of Bogotá, and the wack-job reasoning behind Colombian medicine. I couldn’t walk more than a block and wanted to puke most of the time. I couldn’t go up stairs without stopping every third stair to curse the mega germs that have leveled me off and on for the past six months.
Then, on a Tuesday night, I got flea bites all over my ass and my ankles in cute swirly patterns. I woke up from my fitful, barely breathable sleep for an attack of the itchies. I couldn’t swallow, walk, eat, or see people for fear of contamination, so by the time my skin was also attacking me, I decided to take the hint and started laughing at the all the cumulated self-pity I had going for me. I realized that I was so ridiculously pathetic that I ought to at least find a little humor in the fact that I wanted to cut off my feet and my bum. Silly fleas.
It’s like the time I was sick at work in Rogers Park. I was stressed out, feeling down, and had a fever so I decided to take the Clark bus home and sit at my house to fully feel sorry for myself. So I took my pouty self out to the snowy street where immediately a divinely-inspired bird shit on my shoulder. Like a huge wad of bird poo all over my winter jacket and all I could think was, “oh, you’re so right. I’m being ridiculous…and that’s hilarious.” Leave it the wondrous intelligence of this dunkin donut-fed, cow-shaped pigeon to put me in my place.
That’s what John Darnielle does in this song, in my opinion. Who knows, maybe he thinks differently and is still taking himself seriously, but seems to me he had divorce strep throat and the break-up pigeon shat on him. But seriously, how funny is it when you want to rip out your heart and throw it at the one who hurt you? How can you not laugh when everything sucks? Sometimes it’s glorious to feel so bad.
No Children (3.9MB MP3)
Mountain Goats (homepage)
Peggy Lee :: Is That All There Is?
Albert Camus famously claimed that “there is only one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” While he answers this question or “problem” by suggesting that we rebel against the Absurd and find ways to infuse our godless existence with meaning, I find the approach suggested in Is That All There Is? a bit less daunting.
The song, written by Stoller & Lieber (of Yakety Yak and Hound Dog fame) is based on the story Disillusionment by Thomas Mann. In this story, Mann writes that disillusionment is “not a miscarriage in small unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store.”
Is That All There Is? takes Mann’s concept of disillusionment, and, with the help of Peggy Lee’s emotionally detached vocals, describes several momentous life events: witnessing a fire, going to a circus, and losing a love. In each case she experiences some feeling, but not as much as she expected. She also, in each instance, ultimately asks the same question: is that all there is?
Is that all there is to a fire? A circus? A love? Really? This is what all the fuss is about?
If that’s all we can expect from life’s supposedly spectacular events, then break out the booze and keep dancing, because behind every event is immanent metaphysical hollowness. Depressing as this all sounds, Lee conveys the sentiment with a content, if not cheerful, resignation. I mean, once you acknowledge that life maybe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you can sit back and at least enjoy the pleasant moments.
So to answer Camus’ question directly, why don’t we just kill ourselves?
Because we’re not ready for that final disappointment.
Is That All There Is? (6.1MB MP3)
Peggy Lee (homepage)
Chemical Brothers w/ Hope Sandoval :: Asleep from Day
i have never owned a chemical brothers record. i never have because records that better suit my tastes have found their way into the pile at the register. but just ask friends to give you mix cds when you’re going on a road trip and you end up with at least one song that gets you through just about anything. this song’s vocals, luscious and drenched in reverb, set the pace for my trip. driving through utah, the ‘looney tunes’ state, i came upon the most massive storm these eyes have witnessed. curling through giant rock formations that push through the earth, the storm filled my entire peripheral vision. with a smoky grey cloud pushing its way towards my car, i met with the crest of a crack in the earth and saw the storm filling up a valley below and pushing up against a massive plateau, driving into what will become the darkest storm i’ve ever seen. it’s moments like these that make me fear every single god. luckily i could blast this song over and over again, and drive eighty-five with my white knuckled fingers gripping the steering wheel. seeing a sign that said ‘Caution: Eagles On The Road’ had me saying made-up prayers in my head to whatever higher power i could, that i not hit a deer, moose, or an anvil dropping from the sky.
Asleep from Day (6.6MB MP3)
the Chemical Brothers w/ Hope Sandoval (homepages, wikipedia)
the Zombies :: This Will Be Our Year
Imagine a world where wild optimism is a kind of currency. A place where all the flawed parts of who you are can be memories, not unsolvable obstacles. That love is not a pursuit, but something you want to give to someone. Someone whose skin is inches from yours. Imagine the world is constant, and doesn’t serve you the unpalatable. Imagine, that by some sort of cosmic miracle, the words you need to articulate this love, optimism, and solace with the past flow out of your mouth in some perfect melody.
Well, you’d have this song.
It makes me think of three years ago. I had this playlist I made after my brother died. Grief—like indescribable… epic and disastrous… like nothing I had experienced had flooded my life. The mix started with This Year by Mountain Goats, and ended with This Will Be Our Year by the Zombies. The mix, and forgive the sentiment, would make it so I could go to my job that I hated and not indulge in the dark parts of me that were creeping in. The songs, especially This Will Be Our Year made it so I could shoulder a terrible kind of pain. A reminder that things change for the good just as fast as they change for the bad.
I think when a song can fill your life with a sense of motion, it has done you a great service. We spend a lot of time letting songs that take you into cavernous places stand in the way of the ones that make your life better. But very few songs do that successfully without getting silly and saccharine. I can think of maybe two: Under Pressure definitely. And maybe Wilco and Billy Bragg’s California Stars. But these things are guided by a very sentimental taste… mine.
The Zombies do something remarkable… which is just tell a pretty and simple story. You have to admire the simple matter of fact nature of the lyrics. Devoid of artifice, not tempted to dazzle with vocabulary, it’s just a sweet song…a sort of quiet thank you… to someone or something that led you through a tempest.
If I could thank Chris White for this song, I would.
This Will Be Our Year (3MB MP3)
the Zombies (wikipedia)
Depeche Mode :: Waiting for the Night
If you were born anywhere in the world between the years of 1970 and 1977, it is a scientifically proven fact* that you love Depeche Mode. This is also true if you were born in Russia between the years of 1977 and, um, now. It is true even if you keep it a secret. It is true even if you think it is not. Seriously Russians and people in your thirties—You. Love. It.
Choosing one song from this album was very hard. But I know you have Violator in your closet, tucked somewhere between the first eyeliner you stole and the first love letter you found in your locker. I know you can still scare it up if you really, really need to hear Personal Jesus right now. And you probably do.
* With credit to the Bush administration for the expansion and/or implosion of whatever meaning wherever ‘science,’ ‘proven,’ and ‘fact’ used to have.
Waiting for the Night (8.4MB MP3)
Depeche Mode (homepage)
the Futureheads :: First Day
I just started a new job. It’s wonderful and a job that I’ve been wanting for a long time now (or at least since graduating from library school). Anyway, I’m much less cynical than this song relates about my new job (and way less innocent about office work), but I still love it and have had it stuck in my head the last couple of weeks. First, I love songs that speed up in the middle. Second, they have great vocal melodies. Third, and most important, when Barry Hyde sings “Lucky, lucky, lucky on your first day” with his accent, I like to pretend that he’s singing it directly to me (since, in essence, he’s singing my last name). Fourth, but also important, it rocks.
I still haven’t listened to their latest, but I have a feeling I wouldn’t like it as much as this album. Oh well, I’m too busy now to care.
First Day (2.9MB MP3)
the Futureheads (homepage)
the Effigies :: Security
sporting a look halfway between skinhead and steelworker, The Effigies were emblematic of Chicago’s rough and tumble origins and its culturally dominant working class and a harbinger of the look and attitude that would command the local punk and hardcore scene for years to come.* musically**, they cast the die as well, weaving muscular guitars with deftly crafted hooks and melodies that might even have you humming if you weren’t so busy ducking punches. their sound was big and brawny like the city that spawned them. this is the foundation, and a solid one at that; hefty enough in and of itself to have guaranteed the Effigies a prominent place in the local punk pantheon. but something else is going on here: just listen.
though not without precedent elsewhere in the world, the Effigies no less boldly grafted select phonemes of dub and disco onto a regionally distinct but unequivocally American punk syntax, producing a musical creole unseen before or since. British dub-punk hybrids (The Clash, The Ruts) were mostly a success, but on occasion toothless, and certainly more pop that our boys from Chicago could ever hope to be. PIL probably trod the more righteous path first, with a nod to (if not a warm embrace of) the galloping hi-hat and steady 4/4 of 70s Manhattan clubland. i won’t delude myself into thinking that the scores of post-Rapture dance-punk neophytes lay any claim to this ragged, midwestern troupe or that their novel experiment had much significance to Music at large; but it was honest and—dare I say—a little bit courageous, and that means the world to me. architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh once wrote “there is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” yeah, I like that.
* to contrast, the dominant punk scenes in the US in 1981 were the decidedly middle class, straight edge Washington DC scene (‘Georgetown punks’), the blue collar jock-punks of the militantly straight edge Boston scene and all of those misfits out in LA. the beer-swilling sons of Polish laborers were unmistakably odd men out.
** the Haunted Town five-track EP was released on Autumn Records in 1981. it was later re-released in 1984 in Ruthless Records with Security as an added track. the Bodybag / Security 7” single was originally released on Ruthless Records in 1982.
Security (6.3MB MP3)
the Effigies (homepage, more info)