Belle and Sebastian :: We Rule the School
Oh, the workings of memory, and of pain. Anika mentioned the teen yearning of many of these posts, and I think it’s a part of how youth is wasted on the young—I, for one, will never again be capable of the highs and lows of heartbreak and desperation that I was at 15, when life had yet to break my heart. Who amongst us has not laid in a pile of dead leaves in a graveyard on a gray day, unable to contain our multitudes? To borrow a phrase from Jonathan Lethem, most adults feel ‘nostalgia vu’: longing for the longing, remembering the age you were when you imagined yourself being nostalgic for the age you were, from a vantage point unimaginable, but probably a Manhattan loft.
So, friends: it’s a gray autumn day, please feel the tree bark under your hands. It’s a little colder than sweater weather but not yet glove-worthy. The violin goes without saying—that’s the sound a tree makes while tenderly petting your head. I will write a song more melancholy, autumnal, and twee than We Rule the School once I invent a synthesizer that pings each listener’s brain just so, and it would seem like your first heartbreak apologizing to you, or is softly saying your name. The risk of stroke would be considerable, but no more so than combining effete vocals, xylophone, a breathtakingly precious violin bridge, and harpsichord. I don’t listen to this song too often for fear my bloody tears will stain the torn lace of the antique wedding gown I wear to haunt the cemetery, or Target. I don’t listen to this song too often because the burden of all this useless beauty cannot be borne by a working adult but can only brush up against me, suddenly, in October.
We Rule the School (4.8MB MP3)
Belle and Sebastian (homepage)
Ted Leo and The Pharmacists :: the Ballad of the Sin Eater
A couple of summers ago Ted Leo was following me. Every show, every fest, benefits for day care centers, street corners, there he was, he and the guitar player with the white-guy afro. Prior to this magical summer, Ted Leo was a passing thing, the Wilco or Suede of years before—staples of the mixtapes people made me, never to capture my heart.
Well, the dumbasses never put this song on a tape. When I heard it, early in the summer, I was electrified and damned. While my friends walked away when Ted Leo and the Pharmacists started playing, you know, because they had seen them play that morning at the Jewel, I could only stand and wait for this song: a succinct musical indictment in travelin’ preacher patois AND a drum n’ bass n’ cowbell breakdown. It is driving and brilliant, loving and slicing, the perfect song for people who want to travel but know that traveling—especially in that English/Australian backpacker template—has a undertow of privilege and Orientalism that you can’t scrub off. On the other hand, who the hell wants to stay home? Not me and not this guy.
The narrative arc is of a wandering sort, reaching more and more exotic lands, still thinking that he can slouch off his skin and history with his indomitable spirit, only to find: they hate you cause you’re guilty.
Jonathan Kozol’s first book is the impassioned ramblings of a wealthy son of Boston who is brilliant and loving and just found out the world is fucked. From the idealistic mess comes this: “[There are] two very different kinds of guilt… the guilt that simply binds up individuals within a tight and frightened know of shame and fear, and—in striking contrast—that experience of pain and outrage, followed by a sense of individual self-liberation, which functions not as a neurotic bind but rather as a threshold into energetic and reflective action.”
A note on the Beau Geste reference, a literary nod to the English paternalism and adventure hero and a term that has come to mean (according to Wikipedia) “a gracious (but usually meaningless) gesture.” Catch this: the last time I saw them perform this song, Ted Leo took the mic and smashed it into his forehead three times: “They hate you because [bash] you’re [bash] guilty [bash]. “ Blood ran down his face. If the blood of good men could save us, trouble would have ended long ago; but I appreciate the gracious and meaningless gesture, brother. I truly do.
the Ballad of the Sin Eater (7.3MB MP3)
Ted Leo and The Pharmacists (homepage)
Heart :: Crazy On You
This song is for the couples at Cedar Point who wear matching sweatsuits while eating a cup of Friar Tuck’s french fries covered in cheese. He comes home from his job at Jeep and she carves out this moment from the banality of checking on his mom in the nursing home and her sisters and all their damn drama and when he walks in, she just goes crazy on him. And he, her. Some wailing and shredding guitar for all the people who have no interest in sharing themselves with the whole wide world but lay it out there for one… other… person.
I feel sorry for us, as Americans at this precise moment in our late capitalist media determinationist state. We know that porn has hurt us, right? We know that hairless bodies with gleaming teeth and stomachs that look like packs of frozen hot dogs are not going to be what builds us a safe home. We know what feels good but mostly not what feels real. We—most of the people I know—think we are supposed to save the world; we think we are supposed to be famous or hip for the cameras in our heads; we think we are going to do the thing to set the whole world aflame, but really, we’re lucky if we can convince even one person to show us their true self.
As a narrative, Crazy on You incorporates all the ideals of intimate love and social equality. It takes our imaginations to the side of a stream where a unicorn is drinking and dispensing sex magic with its eyes. Then it explodes solid rock.
Crazy on You (5.6MB MP3)
Heart (homepage)
Akon :: Locked Up
This song was everywhere summer 2004. I went and bought the CD because I love socially conscious music. This is a silly term, because what I mean to say is: I like music that reinforces my socialist-feminist-anti-racist worldview. With a beat you can dance to!
This song is off Akon’s first album, Trouble, which also includes the similar-sounding and even more socially conscious Ghetto. While both songs are awesome, I like Locked Up better because if you are going to address social issues previously addressed by Elvis, at least go with a different vibe. This is no Jailhouse Rock—this is a big thud beat and simple piano line. The killer is the cell doors slamming. Subtlety is for math rock and jazz. Additionally, if you stack Locked Up with Trouble Nobody you get a hip-hoppity primer on the criminal justice morass we’ve gotten ourselves into. To sum up: No more prisons.
Even Akon, a good Senegalese immigrant with a jazz musician father, fell into the gruesome double trap set by the Prison Industrial Complex and our top down culture of gangster capitalism. But do not fret! Sure, mostly they set poor people and dark people up with bracelets and parole and the convict label in neighborhoods with no jobs and there is 70% recidivism and no one feels any safer, but at least Akon got out. He wrote this awesome song in jail while serving time for car theft and is now a big famous star.
I was one of only three people in my whole school to be on both Honor Role and Effort Role in fifth grade. For me, sure, it’s a big deal, but why am I telling you? For the same reason Akon name his second album Konvicted. Sometimes it’s difficult to let little identity building experiences go, no matter how trivial they are in retrospect. Akon: it was a car theft conviction. 50 Cent was shot 89 times, and Suge Knight eats babies.
I’m just mean because I’m disappointed. Konvicted is as horrible as its title. If you have ears and left your home in 2007, you have heard the song Smack That, featuring Eminem—the hit song from an album of money-worshiping, lady-hating crap. Clearly, Akon is dedicated to exploring the whole two popular images America offers black men: thug or pimp. He also appears to like money a great deal.
I am sick of money and the power it has and the interests it serves, and I’m tired of watching late stage capitalism eat whole communities. I’m not alone, and while Akon has temporarily abandoned the honest vulnerability of those first songs, I have not abandoned my hope for Akon or the complete transformation of ourselves, society, and the world based on justice in the service of love. Akon, call me.
Locked Up (5.4MB MP3)
Akon (homepage)
Cat Power :: Lived in Bars
This song is drunk. I’ll bet you it had three whiskeys before we even heard it. A cursory search of the ‘facts’ will lose me that bet, as songs can’t technically drink, but doesn’t it feel like 1am at that place on the corner with the all the wood and amber lighting? The beginning is the first cigarette of a long, warm night. This song drank too much, shook Chet Baker awake for the horn part, and perched that unlikable little Chan Marshall on the piano. I sing the “shoo-bops.”
Full of maudlin sadness and empty romance, this song conflates drinking and God, which is why bars look like altars and Episcopalians exist. It’s all spirit, friends! I’m forever struggling with my Drinking Problem, we are all frightened of something, are we not? The more I say I’m frightened, the more others do, too. If you can’t crawl out, dig deeper down. The more I ask of bars, the more I’m disappointed, because they aren’t church, and they aren’t home. I walk out just as I walked in, where was the transformation? Accordingly, this song ends the same way it started, while I’m standing outside after last call, suspecting I’ve been cheated but not feeling that bad.
Lived in Bars (5.1MB MP3)
Cat Power (label site)
Beta Band :: Dry the Rain
Chicagoan-to-be Karen and I listened to this on repeat for days back in 2001, attending a conference in Tzachadzor, Armenia. The town had been a ski resort for the Soviet apparatchik; our Armenian friends told us enviously of Tzachadzor’s lavish opulence and single operating ski lift in the country.
The hotel looked like a scale model of the Barbarella set had been dunked in a pot of coffee, dropped on the floor, kicked into a corner, left in that corner for 12 years, and then enlarged and rented out to foreigners for tremendous profit. The ski lift was a lawn chair welded to rusted wire and covered in weeds. It turns out that Soviet decadence in Armenia was on par with a Knight’s Inn outside of Toledo.
We were suspended in space, living in the woods and the Inn, being Americans together in a faraway place. That’s what I think of when I listen to this song, that and 1000 other things, and I feel hopeful and also really sad. It’s nice to hear that it will be alright because I always forget. Therefore: THIS is the number one song in heaven. I was shocked to recognize it in the John Cusack movie High Fidelity; I really thought it was Karen and I’s secret, possibly created out of Camel smoke and deepest sentiment.
It turns out that John Cusack physically gave birth to this song, recruited a group of Scottish hooligans to pose as “The Beta Band” combining (according to AMG) “post-grunge balladry to funk and ambient breakbeat to Madchester acid house.” Hello? None of those things exist. If that phrase isn’t a Cusackian ruse, I don’t know what is. Conveniently for Mr. Cusack, the Beta Band is no more, and their secrets are lost forever in the maze of their impenetrable accents. We have the song, though. We have it and they can never take it away from us.
Dry the Rain
Beta Band (homepage)
Shangri-Las :: Give Him a Great Big Kiss
When I say I’m in love you best believe I mean love: L-U-V.
For everyone who like boys or bois—good bad not evil ones, like the girl says—a song for spring now that we can see their backs and shoulders proper. Where I work, locked-up girls crowd near the windows on the yard and watch the boys on rec pretend to ignore them. They hoot and bite their hair when the boys remove their shirts—you know, for less restrictive pseudo-obliviousness. Caged heat indeed, and we’re all like this, the adolescents and people like me, forever young at heart. It’s all sarcastic talk and gum popping while we fantasize that someday the horns and vocals will drop out and our girls will handclap us a strut right up to the heartbreaker upon whom we lay A Great Big Kiss.
For some people it goes like that: Pinkie Tuscadero, John Cusack, Italians. For the rest of us, here’s the least cool of the obscenely cool Shangri-Las’ songs—a theme by which we’ll reclaim that precious adolescent mix of awkwardness and heedless, groundless, nearly delusional self confidence!
As a special L-U-V bonus, I direct you to Nation of Ulysses’ Today I Met the Girl I’m Gonna Marry. The Sassiest Boy in America kicks it off by flipping the Shangri-Las line from “best believe” to “better believe”—perfect, since Nation of Ulysses is better but the Shangri-Las are best. I suggest we put these songs together, put on our shades, tighten up our pants and pretend we’re tuff enough to get close…real close.
Give Him a Great Big Kiss
Shangri-Las (fansite)
Today I Met the Girl I’m Going to Marry
Nation of Ulysses (label site)
the Pogues :: Thousands are Sailing
The thing about the Irish, other than the drinking, the singing, and the gorgeous redheads, is the way they reveal the nasty machinations of class in America. You don’t just become successful: someone else must fall. The Irish became white, the Irish became President, and the Irish became the green-plastic-hatted drunk racists of Chicago’s South Side Irish parade. The Pogues understood this mixture of pride and loathing; they formed in England, angry and raw from derision, merging the punk dream of class war with the blood soaked history of Irish music.
Not every Pogue’s song had the fortune of being written by Shane MacGowan; Pogues guitarist Phil Chevron wrote Thousands are Sailing, and sang it when I saw them live in 2007. Chevron’s lyrics and voice lack the dark irony of the Pogue’s famously Fucked Genius. Chevron also permits a dreadful rock-and-roll beat to enter midway through the opening refrain and never makes it leave. The rest, however, is heaven: tin whistle, mandolin, crystalline guitar, bodhran, dulcimer, and, I swear to you, red-headed angels weeping.
“Wherever we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees.” This line alone makes Thousands are Sailing the true Immigrant Song. The tempo and the lyrics move from sentimental ballad to indictment: “We dance to the music and we dance,” he snarls, telling us we’re fools. It’s through MacGowan’s voice that you feel the exhilaration of self-pity, the sentiment of venerating a homeland that hated you, the Irish quality of celebrating failure until success feels like a betrayal.
Thousands are Sailing
the Pogues (homepage)
Elvis Costello & the Attractions :: Beyond Belief
No decent person admits to the lists of songs in their head, but some indecent people have them. My problem is, I only have four lists:
- Songs That, At Some Point, I Listened To, Compulsively
- Songs That Break My Heart
- Songs From the Car
- Jamz That Move My Ass
This is one of the first songs I literally could not stop listening to: Beyond Belief by Elvis Costello & the Attractions, from Imperial Bedroom, an album that should be studied for all eternity, owing to its mix of awesome transcendence, and horrible, horrible crap. Lots of songwriters try to make you feel things but Elvis Costello doesn’t care how you feel: he sings glossy words in a bottomlessly detached voice and suddenly you’re an American spy in Saigon trading sex for secrets, secrets for lies, with a rose in your filthy hair and money where your heart once was. Wait. I’ve said too much.
Beyond Belief
Elvis Costello (homepage)