sing us your favorite tune

Ennio Morricone :: Navajo Joe

The man grabbed the kid by the throat and slammed his body back against the corrugated aluminum wall. You could hear the cicadas and the cars on the highway.

The kid barely choked out “lemme gko!” as he tried to pry the huge forearm away. I thought, why doesn’t he kick him? With your back against a wall, you can be braced nicely for a kick to the stomach or balls, depending on what kind of person you are. Then I noticed that the kid’s legs were way too long and gangly to get up and cocked in that little space between the huge man and himself.

It was the summer between seventh and eighth grade. We were outside some… temporary place, at a show. It’s hard to describe some venues in Mississippi. There aren’t many in the little musty town of Ocean Springs. One is an old armory, complete with a couple of tank-like military vehicles that the punk rock kids would climb on and try to start (“you know these kinds of army trucks don’t use keys… in case of an emergency… they just start with a button… yeah I’m sure… my uncles are all in the army”). This venue was east of the town of Ocean Springs, halfway between there and the next town, Gautier (pronounced “go-SHAY”), an on the only road that connected them. I’m a big fan of those roads between towns: straight, flat, surrounded by high swamp trees and sticky marsh, and usually only designated by a number (90, in this case, however, it was also called Bienville Road, or Bienville Boulevard if you’re one of those map-readin’ out-of-towners; everyone called it 90).

We were all staring, discreetly at first, at this huge fat bald man, probably some kind of skinhead, as he retaliated for being tripped by a lanky punkass high school grunge kid with hair hanging in his face. No one likes skinheads, although everybody knew one—a friend of some older friend, you know, that guy Nick that hangs out with Nathan?

So many types of music and people come together at small-town shows out on the edge of civilization. If you liked grunge, you came. If you only liked ska, you dressed up, and then came. If you sneered at people who didn’t respect pure punk and the show was grunge or some new rock, or ska, you would come anyway with at least four other pure punk friends and talk about punk outside the show. But everyone came because that was all you were gonna get in that little town, and the next show is either too far away or not for another four months, so you put on your newly “made” shirt (or whatever) with safety pins all in it, or brought your scrappy deck along to show someone your new skate trick (I dated the guy that could ollie over the hood of a Trans Am and land an Impossible every time) and made what you could of it.

But it was asking for trouble, putting all types of people into an old corrugated aluminum building (they used to sell fishing boats there) on the side of a little country highway. It was trouble; Southerners love trouble.

“I’ll let you go, asshole,” he shook the kid’s neck against the creaking aluminum. “But you have to lick my shoes.” He let go and then laughed. Two guys behind him laughed. Where was that guy that always busted up the circle of staring people and said “Hey, cut it out” or “Hey, let him go”? He wasn’t at this show—probably at that arena show in Biloxi.

No one else wanted to get stomped by some skinheads… Except those kids… Four pure punk mohawk heads stood graveyard still staring at the skinheads. Punks versus skins, the classic fight. The crowd mumbled. The kid was not making a move to lick those boots.

Maybe someone went inside to tell; however it happened, the stillness of the moment was broke by the headliners emerging from the dank insides of the shack. They weren’t wearing their instruments, but we knew who they were. They came as peacemakers, filled with the brotherhood of music. They broke it up; the frontman did a cursory check of the kid; and the drummer said something into the grumbling, milling crowd about coming together for good music and putting aside our differences. I don’t remember who the band was, or which big faraway city they were from, but that kind of talk sounded to me like hardcore propaganda.

(see also Mohawk Town by the Vandals)

Navajo Joe
Ennio Morricone (wikipedia)

PJ Harvey :: Rid of Me

The year was 1993. I was in bed with a bronchial infection, and asthma prevented me from moving around very often. The mail came, and I opened my copy of PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, an album I had ordered after reading a blurb in Spin Magazine.

So I put the CD in the player, pressed play, and heard nothing. As I turn the volume dial up a bit, I hear some faint drumming and even fainter singing. So I turn it up some more, put the CD on repeat (I wanted to limit the amount of times I had to get up), and returned to bed. About a minute later, PJ starts wailing and I leap out of bed to turn the volume back down.

Surely I am not the only person to have made this ‘error’ in volume adjustment.

I would also like to think that PJ (or perhaps Steve Albini, the album’s producer) found some humor in surprising or duping listeners into blowing out their ears or speakers in this manner. That is, of course, in addition to the great aesthetic effect of having such varied dynamics — a device that perfectly compliments the song’s lyrics as PJ vacillates between fantasies of total possession of her man, desperate pleas to stay, and unadulterated rage.

I always knew that I was a feminist of some sort — I mean, of course women are equal to men — but I had never identified with the largely folk-driven music by women that I had thus far been exposed to. This is why sitting in bed that day as an asthmatic, angsty adolescent girl, I felt such immense relief at hearing a woman so unapologetically rock.

Rid of Me (6.2MB MP3)
PJ Harvey

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds :: God’s Hotel

I don’t know much about heaven, but when I take my last long stroll into that winterlit forever I hope I get the chance (assuming he is not a cursed earthbound immortal) to bunk with Nick Cave for a minute. His is a heaven I can get with. And when at 1:59 in, he laughs, just a little, at the simple and obvious and brilliant joke by the Bad Seeds, I’m sold. Book me a room.

I wish I knew the word that comes between ironic funny and just plain funny, ‘cos it’d be useful right now. Maybe that word is horsing around. And this song is crystalline perfect serious horsing around. Straight man to clown foil. How everything gets alittle quieter on the ‘deaf’ verse. How the pianist does those ‘dreamscape’ runs. How you’ll never see a sign hanging on the door saying “At no time may both feet leave the floor in this hotel anymore”. Recorded live at like 8am on KCRW, five cats in a little radio studio, sloppy, belting, laughing, goofing. And being so smart about it.

But most importantly, when Cave horses around in Judeo-Christian heaven it is never dismissive, and his teasing reveals My Father’s Mansion’s most important characteristic: Everybody’s got a room.

God’s Hotel (2.9MB MP3)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

M.I.A. :: Boyz

So i’m hanging out with some friends… blah blah blah blah blah… next thing i know we’re at an N’Sync after party in downtown Cleveland. We knew one of the bar backers, so he got us up to the exclusive VIP party upstairs. We walk up this backroom stairwell filled with trash and the stench of stale beer. When we get to the top we’re greeted with a huge roof patio with it’s own bar clad in fake tropical grasses, bamboo, and tiki torches. Unfortunately there were no easter island heads. Justin Timberlake is in the corner surrounded by middle age women trying to get him to sign autographs or whatever. We get pretty bored because nobody wants to talk to the jerk off degenerates that don’t know why they’re there. My friend Tiffany tells me to follow her, so i do and we end up in this annex of the roof patio that’s its own enclosed bar. Friends that i came with show up and we’re the only ones in there minus the bartenders. We order some drinks and help ourselves to the two foot by four foot trays of sushi sitting out on the table. Mind you, we’re the only ones in there, the jerk off degenerates. Suddenly we hear the doors close. We’re shoving sushi in our mouths. Two huge security guards block off the door, and Justin Timberlake runs in to grab a spot to sit. I’m watching him run by, nothing between me and him except some chairs and the columns. I tilt my torso to the left, put my left hand behind my ear, and point right hand at him and yell “Hey Justin! What up Bo-Bo!” Justin returns the gesture by giving me a double up nod, almost responding with another “Bo-Bo” right back at me. Slowly they started letting people in and we were in the real VIP after-after party. We’re definitely the youngest people there, and we’re the only ones that didn’t care. Joey Fatone was sitting in a love seat with two girls, with a chair adjacent to the sofa. He was making out with the girl on the right, and rubbing the leg of the girl on the left. Soon, the girl on the right would leave, the girl on the left would take her place, and the girl waiting on the adjacent chair would take her place. It was this weird make out circle, and everyone just knew what to do. We stood there in the same spot all night eating sushi and drinking beers.

You all know who M.I.A. is. i didn’t like her first record, but this shit is off the hook!

Boyz (4.9MB MP3)
M.I.A. (homepage)

Van Morrison :: Into the Mystic

A couple of years ago, I started making a playlist. At first, it was called “for nostalgia” As it grew, though, I renamed it “for feeling like a White American.” I realized that was what it was really for.

I’ve done more than a little bit of thinking about what this kind of playlist means. There’s the uncomfortable truth that the music on the list — the music that makes my guts feel nostalgic, melancholic warmth — is less linked to my actual past than to some cliché of a racial-national one. How did something that started with nostalgia end up as a kind of scary white patriotism? Then there’s the fact that I am a White American, and that needing a playlist to feel like what you are says something about White America (and about me). There’s the somewhat embarrassing actuality of what kind of musicians are on the list — Van Morrison, Petty, Springsteen, Mellencamp — all husky-voiced, dirty-shirted dudes (not a woman in the bunch). Plus, I’ve got to face it: these are the very musicians being used in creepy, calculating ways to pump up crowds at political rallies; they’re the musicians that get used to sell America to me. Am I sitting around propagandizing myself with my playlists?

A friend of mine has been bouncing around an idea for a Guilty Pleasures party for years — a celebration of the music that makes us feel bad to feel good about. I figure I’ll appear at the door with a cd-r of my ‘white’ guilty pleasures. I’ll burn the White American playlist; I’ll own up to the songs that make me feel comforted in the involuntary way that only something so deeply inculcated could. And Van Morrsion will feature prominently in that collection.

(side note — for years, I thought his line was: “into the MISTAKE” — not “into the MYSTIC.” Maybe telling on a whole other level.)

Into the Mystic (4MB MP3)
Van Morrison (homepage)

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)

Fess Parker :: Goodnight Little Wrangler

The song Goodnight Little Wrangler is from the kid’s album Western Songs for Children, released in 1963. It’s one of my favorite thrift store finds of all time. It’s also one of my favorite songs of all time.

Fess Parker, the main voice in the song, was known as Davy Crockett throughout the 50s and by wearing a coonskin cap in the series of movies, single-handedly created the fad of wearing them (well, that and the company that put out the movies, which shall go unnamed, had some sort of marketing genius). He was later known as Daniel Boone to most every kid with a television set between 1964 to 1970 (and sometimes afterward with reruns—that’s how I know him).

The song seems normal enough, starting with a yawning Fess telling us, “There’s nothing I like more than sleeping. Here’s a little song I like to sing before I hit the hay.” Then the night widens and becomes more surreal as you get into bed. Stars are like ponies standing drowsy with purple eyes blinking. In “moon hay” (!?) you’ll gather dreams waiting “deep down in the pocket of your jeans” (!!??!!).

Then the chorus comes in, and you hear it, “Take me by the hand along with you, long ago I lost my way.” * It’s delivered as a soliloquy almost, to be performed while facing a window and looking at the moon’s drowsy eyelids. This song is about a man who wants to be a child again.** He’s searching for a way to see those ponies with purple eyes. It’s about yearning for the romantic ideal of innocence and idyllic meadows with drowsy horses, huge skies, and probably a mountain and a creek or two. The marimba, pedal steel, and backing singers just add to the surreal beauty of the song (I really think it could pass as a Badalamenti bit in a David Lynch film). Then he gives the sleeping child a final kiss, tucks them in, maybe pulls the coonskin cap off the child, puts it on a night stand, and closes the door as the last little bit of light from the hallway diminishes to a sliver under it and the room takes on the hue of melancholy.

It’s a song yearning for the imagination of a dream-reality while the real world is filled with death (The Big Sleep as it’s sometimes called).

It’s a song that is weird and, ultimately, very lonely, but as beautiful as the sky after a midwest thunderstorm.***

Goodnight Little Wrangler (3.5mb mp3)
Fess Parker (wikipedia)

^*** I so very incredibly miss thunderstorms in Kansas in the spring.

G.I.S.M. :: Endless Blockads For the Pussyfooter

i wouldn’t normally decide to post a hardcore song in a venue like this; hardcore’s very obviously already a niche market at our age. for some, it’s probably just a nasty little reminder of a time long past. remember that show, that basement, that boy, that girl? this won’t be a sermon on the virtues of it, either. we don’t need any more converts, thanks. those waters are muddy enough as it is. ‘then why is he posting a hardcore song?’ you ask. because, hopefully, this one will make you laugh. and that, my friends, is a rare and beautiful thing.

that’s not to say that i don’t take this song seriously; this isn’t the laughter of slapstick or comic relief i speak of (though i do find the song both ridiculous and sublime). i laugh because i think it’s beautifully naivé. or should i say ‘natural’? like other cultural exports, hardcore was witnessed, mimiced and adapted to new milieus all over the world. now, i’m not suggesting that punks in Tokyo weren’t aware of the context from which this music originated. i suspect that they were at least as well-studied as their western counterparts, if not more so. rather, i think that from their unique cultural vantage point—this intersection of east and west—that the rigid subgenre boundaries of rock music so deeply embedded in western scenes just seemed irrelevant. and so they enjoyed a freedom rarely encountered in the US or UK.

just listen: a fuzz tone to put the entire Crypt Records roster to shame; metal histrionics ripped from your favorite NWOBHM band; grotesque lyrics, vomited (or belched) distastefully enough to make even the most seasoned hardcore aficionado stop and take notice. G.I.S.M.—known alternately as Guerrilla Incendiary Sabotage Mutineer, Grand Imperialism Social Murder, or God In the Schizoid Mind—are perhaps the most revered and elusive of early 80s Japanese hardcore bands. Put your thoughts about hardcore aside for a moment, and give ‘em a listen and perhaps you might hear why.

Endless Blockads For the Pussyfooter
G.I.S.M. (fansite, discography)

Lifter Puller :: 4Dix

Three things I love about Craig Finn’s songwriting:
1. a precision of metaphor so sharp it breaks the surface of your brain without your knowing it — hypodermic
2. buckets of compassion for drug users and
3. a penchant for female main characters.
Another thing I love is a biblical allusion. Right here, we get three out of four, since our female lead is kind of dropped after the intro. Let’s say 3.5 out of 4.

Katrina stumbles into the bathroom at the nightclub, cash in hand looking for a druggie treat to keep the night going. The dealers waiting there are cast as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Craig Finn pinpoints a modern occurrence of age-old desperation, slices it up with his incisive wit, and proffers his version of events to us, on a bed of straight-up rock, and topped with his totally quotable talk-singing cadence.

Some people like to look at world events and draw parallels to the descriptions in Revelations, declaring we are knee deep in the end times. Craig Finn is awesome at the inverse, peering into back alleys and rockclubs, examining small scale battles for people’s souls, the small scale damnations and salvations, to fuel his own pop music scripture.

4Dix
Lifter Puller (wikipedia)

Love :: Alone Again Or

Love is a famous band, this song is famous, and it’s from a famous album. A simple google of “Love (the band)” will tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more, so I’ll be brief. Wes Anderson, as you might recall, used Alone Again or in Bottle Rocket to great effect. That precious bastard, his taste is impeccable! Some would argue his creations have become too self-conscious these days, but shit like this makes you remember where he started and forgive him his over-developed acumen.

The song begins beautifully then urgently bursts into a pop chorus with lyrics as dark they are bright. It’s sarcastic and vague, but celebratory. It’s melancholy that you can dance to. I’m a sucker for the Moody Blues, (I could listen to Nights in White Satin a hundred times in a row and never tire) and Alone Again or captures that orchestral sound and emotional weight without getting too sappy. The addition of a mariachi band (borrowed from a Tijuana Brass album), injects exuberance to an otherwise heavy-hearted song. Those horns and that pling plang plung of the guitar remind me of being a kid in New Mexico, when mariachi equaled party time: bonfires, good food, dancing, staying up past your bedtime.

Meaty chunks of nostalgia are packed in so tight with this song that I couldn’t not love Love. The happy little ranch girl meets the sullen sentient and everyone’s pleased. Pick your point of view and listen accordingly.

Alone Again Or
Love (wikipedia)
a clip from Bottle Rocket, The Damned, covering