XTC :: Generals and Majors
Living in and around DC is totally creepy. When I first moved here I was definitely not ready to see people rocking cammo outfits, standing in line at Starbucks on their way to work at the Pentagon. From the intelligence I’ve gathered to date, Marines are really into White Mocha Soy Frapuccinos. However I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a penchant for Double-Berry Coffee Crumb Cakes. That information is what we Beltway Insiders call ‘close-hold.’
Anyway, I was doubly not ready to see unmarked black vans surrounding a huge missile launcher perched on top of the freaking parking garage I pass on my way to work every morning. Note: according to my calculations, the missile launcher appears to be aimed directly at my office. Not to worry though, every other day I am reassured of my homeland’s perpetual and manifest safety by the supersonic jet fighters scrambling above head or the Apache attack helicopters floating ominously past the Washington Monument. Speaking of the monument, that thing is creepy too! It has glowing red eyes at night. I kid you not! I’m also pretty certain it whispers nasty things about me when I pass by it. Am I starting to sound paranoid? Good. That’s the point. Because when you’re at a bar / party and casually ask the stranger you’ve been having a warm conversation with what they do for a living, then all of sudden everyone around you stops talking and all at once starts dialing the same number on their cell phones, then the stranger tells you in a cold, flat tone that they work for the State Department and abruptly walks out of the bar / party you know you’re living in a creepy town surrounded by creepy people doing creepy things for an extremely creepy administration. It does start to grow on you after awhile though.
Then again, so does fungus… especially weaponized fungus created and released by a rogue DARPA scientist masquerading as a reclusive British rock genius. Please, stay calm everyone: The war is almost over.
Generals and Majors (5.7MB MP3)
XTC (homepage)
Holly Golightly :: Virtually Happy
Hey boys, have you ever wanted to be a girl? Have you ever whined: “Girls aren’t forced to play sports. Girls are better at studying. Girls don’t have to get jobs. Girls don’t have to wear ties. Girls never have to beg.”? How often do you hear a girl beg for a date? They either just get one, i.e. someone offers, or they don’t worry about it.
I love Holly Golightly because she has a unique voice and an attitude. She can beg. Her voice goes low, which can be a great talent for a girl (re: Nina Simone). Often, I think of gender theory, or what those theorists call ‘blurring the boundary.’ Virtually Happy was written in the style of what I like to call ‘boy begging’: it has a modified blues set-up, which is appropriate as most blues songs are about begging for returned love. Many other women singers have begged for love in the past in the tradition of country or blues. But why that little topper of ambiguity at the end of the phrase? Why only ‘virtually’ happy?
Hey all you gender theorists out there, what’s hidden in this song?
Virtually Happy (4.9MB MP3)
Holly Golightly (homepage)
the National :: Lit Up
I just bought a plane ticket to New York City. This is my first vacation in many, many years. If I had an iPod I would be listening to this song upon my arrival. And if I were listening to this song and if someone were to snap a digital picture of me and if they were to apply some basic photoshop techniques, I would resemble an iPod billboard as I jammed my silhouetted way down the LaGuardia terminal. You know why? ‘Cause it is summer 2008 kid, the summer of my rebirth and two of my good friends are getting married in Brooklyn.
Lit Up (4MB MP3)
The National homepage)
Grinderman :: No Pussy Blues
If there’s one thing I love, it’s getting *_____. I just can’t resist when someone puts a *_____ in my face, because a *_____ is man’s great pleasure. Be careful though, because not every *_____ is the same. Some *_____ get pretty dirty, you don’t know where it’s been, so wash that *_____ and wash it good. If a hot *_____ is in front of me, I take my finger and feel around to make sure it’s warm and velvety on the inside, spreading the opening, getting that *_____ ready. Then I stuff the *_____ with my hot meat. When I’m done squirt my hot butter inside and all around that juicy *_____. Then I put my lips up against the *_____ and suck the gooey juices out. Finally I eat the *_____ like there’s no tomorrow. Mmmmm. Soon I have *_____ juices all over my face. Like I said, no two *_____ are alike, but I’ve never met a piece of *_____ that I didn’t like.
* potato, -es
No Pussy Blues (5MB MP3)
Grinderman (homepage, more info)
Hobart Smith :: Uncloudy Day
There’s something about death that makes me want to listen to hillbilly music and I think it might be because of my paternal grandmother. When people jokingly say that they never saw anyone in The Carter Family smile, I believe it. Hillbilly music doesn’t allow you to smile when you sing it. To do it right, you have to form a holler and yelp from the diaphragm, push it through the nose a bit, and if you hold your mouth in a stern almost-frown while opening it wide to let it all out, then you’ve just about got the sound right. It’s the sound that Vachel Lindsay, at the end of his poem The Leaden-Eyed, describes in the eyes of the poor children of the world as:
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Anyway, as I was saying, I’m pretty sure I’ve acquired my love for old country / bluegrass / blues / scratchy 78s from my grandmother. She didn’t really listen to music, only the AM country station in the morning until her stories (that’s soap operas) were on. She could yodel like no one’s business, but she did it rarely. She was from the Ozarks, but lived the life of a sharecropper moving from town to town in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas with her husband and eight children (two others died at birth) before I was born. She was always nice to me because she liked me, but she could be a bitter, manipulative, and angry woman who raised some wonderful people and some that aren’t really all that wonderful.
She once pulled a gun on one of my grandfather’s associates because she thought he was trying to screw her family out of money (I probably would have as well). He was only saved by my grandfather knocking her arm up as she shot. She packed her youngest children in the car after that and left, but came back when she was about to run out of gas because she had no money and nowhere else to go. The associate didn’t bother them much after that, but they moved soon anyway. Her husband, my grandfather, died well before I was born, his body worn out from a life of manual labor and the onset of cancer. He was in his fifties.
I didn’t see my grandmother smile much until I graduated high school. That’s not because she was proud of me, although I’m sure she was, but because in the months that followed she had a massive stroke. She survived the stroke to live another 10 years or so, even though the doctors didn’t think she would. She didn’t smile because she lived though, she smiled because her brain was damaged, which completely changed her personality and gave her very strange hallucinations that she used to tell me about. She’d laugh about the things crawling on the walls. She’d laugh about the fact that she had just searched her roommate for cookies she was sure that she had smuggled into the room. She laughed when she made up stories about her children in far off countries while that child sat in the same room she was in. After suffering another stroke in 2002, her brain quickly withered. The doctor would come in every day saying she could die at any moment… and kept saying it for a week and a half, after a few days, looking increasingly guilty. In the week before she finally went, he said it almost as if he couldn’t believe it himself. My grandmother had a hard life, but if there was one thing you could say about her it’s that she didn’t let anyone tell her what she could do and if you tried, she was sure to do the opposite.
A few weeks ago as I was flying back from L.A. where I visited someone for the first time—someone that was close to me that I never knew, someone who fought for herself every minute of her life and who was tired of fighting, someone who loved art and beauty but had so very little of it in her later years, someone speeding toward death after a hard life —the song Uncloudy Day by Hobart Smith (recorded by Alan Lomax) came on my headphones. Hobart sings the lyrics written by Rev J. Alwood many years ago and unlike some treacly contemporary versions I’ve heard, Hobart sounds like he’s resigned himself to hoping there could be a better life after this one, despite what his experiences have taught him. ‘They’ keep telling him about a better land, but because he has no idea of what a land of no cares and uncloudy days is like, he hopes that he can make it on his journey. I listened to the song and turned to look down on the clouds and cried, hiding it from the couple who sat beside me reading magazines—she Glamour, he Sports Illustrated—the ones who laughed at the same jokes I hear from every airline steward during takeoff. It was strangely comforting trying to find a way to be alone on a plane because you can’t be alone on a plane. They weren’t thinking of dreamless starvation with no rewards and no god to serve. They were enjoying their flight.
I listen to hillbilly music when I’m confronted with death and I know that it’s because of my grandmother. I listen to it not in a search for authenticity, but in a search for home.
Uncloudy Day (5.2MB MP3)
Hobart Smith (wikipedia)
the Four Freshman :: It’s a Blue World
We were squealing and giggling in her girlhood room. We were playing, I think, with dolls. Maybe the subject of our pretending got more serious; maybe one of the Barbie moms was fleeing, with her babies, from the police. Maybe teen Barbie was pathologically lonely and admitting it to a Ken that was too old for her. But that’s adult projection. There was no reason for us to feel what we felt next, none in the world. Except quite suddenly, she and I were stricken with that thing—that special childhood terror. You know what I’m talking about. Such a surge that the wallpaper crawls, you hear doors opening and closing everywhere, you hear the panting of somebody, anybody sinister, just outside the door.
I think this feeling is unique to childhood. Adults do not experience fear that way. When we do experience something so abject and meaningless, we call it a panic attack and medicate ourselves accordingly. Being scared that way, for grown folks, means something is profoundly wrong. But kids, they weather that feeling. I mean, all of us remember that shaking, begging fear from nowhere, coming upon us in our childhood beds. That moment when we’re walking home from school and everything is dully, dumbly normal… then suddenly we’re off—running like hell. We look, to adults, like we’re in the midst of some youthful exhilaration, but the truth is we are being chased by something in us, of us, something real that doesn’t quite make sense yet.
The night with the dolls, we couldn’t tamp down the terror. We huddled in her bed with all the lights on, first, then all the lights off, second, so that no one from outside could see where we were lying, awake and vulnerable. We listened to groaning in the walls for what seemed like hours (and might have been). It sounded like human whimpering (and might have been). After much urgent whispering we decided, finally, that our situation was ridiculous. We had to calm ourselves. And our answer was a CD, one of her Dad’s, with a song she liked. A song that promised to be sweet and relaxing.
Of course it took a good bit of pep-talking to convince ourselves it was a good idea to leave the safety of her bed to get the CD. But in the end, we did it together. We found the disc, put the song on repeat, and threw ourselves, breathless, back underneath the covers. It was this song. It drowned out the wall-noises and the breath of imagined killers. It was still on when we woke up the next bright morning to her Mom asking us, “what in the world?”
It’s a Blue World (5.6MB MP3)
the Four Freshman
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)
yourfavoritetune.com
hey dorks — we have a real sweet website now: you’ll notice our url is now http://yourfavoritetune.com — pretty cool, eh? The old link should still work for awhile. TenseForms Mike kindly moved us here, holler if you notice any wonkies. And tell yr peoples where we live now.
Animal Collective :: Peacebone
Just as I don’t understand or enjoy modern dance and avant-garde theater, I have a somewhat conservative ear when it comes to music. Until recently, I felt this way about Animal Collective.
That all changed when my friend played Animal Collective’s most recent album, Strawberry Jam for me. Listening to Peacebone, the first track, I could not believe that this was the same band that had scared me off so many times before. Although the song was every bit as unusual and experimental as their other material, it came in a far more accessible package. Having heard this album, I am now able to enjoy AC’s full catalog of material, including the albums I had previously found unlistenable (with the exception of Here Comes the Indian; that album is still too weird for me).
But my inspiring story of the triumph of music over a conservative ear is not why I love the album and song. More important, is that Peacebone makes me gush with happiness at every listen. The playful vocals and lyrics, the uplifting marching beat, and the random noise bursts in the background compel me to feel as bubbly and joyful as the song suggests (for those of you who know me, you understand that this is no small feat).
This song is easily my favorite tune from the last couple of years. I loved it at first listen, and I’ve loved it the many, many times I have listened since. I hope you will too.
Peacebone (6MB MP3)
Animal Collective (homepage)
Galaxie 500 :: Ceremony
It’s dark territory trying to unpack the kernel of this song. Maybe it’s the weird tenor in Dean Wareham’s voice, or the calamity of the lyrics and drums colliding in strange simpatico. Or maybe because it feels like a farewell. The song is asking you to explore the morose portions of yourself, or at least acknowledge them.
When I stumbled upon Galaxie 500 it was like finding out you’re adopted, but in a good way. Like, things start to make sense. The weird fiction that you are living in finally has this ‘thing’ to make it all palatable. Finally, there is something that matches the tone of who you are.
Someone at the restaurant I worked at accidentally put On Fire in my CD case, and when I got home and put the mysterious album into my discman (it was the 90s) I felt as though someone had boiled my taste to an essence. As if something like that could be taken beyond my body, beyond the privacy of my head.
TRUE STORY: All the songs on that album are great. When Will You Come Home is so sad, desperate and honest, and is a perfect example of how Wareham’s voice straddles the line of being unbearable, but for some cosmic reason it works. The other covers Isn’t It A Pity and Victory Garden are equally as successful in re-imagining a tune. And Strange captures a mania sometimes inexpressible.
Bold and lyrical, surrender and regret, discovery and loss, Ceremony accrues an enormous amount of substance by the sparse yet loaded lyrics. It gets uncomplicated towards then end, less informative, more cryptic, embedded with a sense of failure. I like to listen to this song, and imagine a world where psychic musicians play a score created just for you…
Ceremony (8.2MB MP3)
Galaxie 500 (wikipedia)
(note — song originally written by Joy Division, first recorded by New Order)