I Love You On The Floor Today

Pleasure featuring Justine Frischmann “Don’t Look The Other Way” – I do believe that this is Justine’s first post-Elastica single, but it’s only a guest spot. I’m not sure when she’s going to be releasing more new material (It took, what, six years for The Menace to come out? I’m not holding my breath!), but this is very promising. She hasn’t lost her pop touch at all. I’m just wondering if this song is knicking its melody from a song that I either don’t know or can’t remember…

Peaches “Shake Yer Dix” – “Are the motherfuckers ready for the fatherfuckers? Are the fatherfuckers ready for the mother fuckers? No.” Yes! I’ve been waiting about three years for this song to come out – the first time I ever heard/saw Peaches was when she and Gonzales opened up for Elastica at the Bowery Ballroom back in 2000. About halfway through the set, they did this song, and I’ve been searching around for a copy of it ever since. It’s definitely one of the best songs on the somewhat disappointing new Fatherfucker album. It’s not that the new album isn’t good, it’s just that it’s lacking some super-joycore disco songs along the lines of “Lovertits” and “Set It Off.” Too much of the record is really slow and drowsy sounding. That works fine for a song like “I’m The Kinda,” which has a great hook to it, but it just gets a little repetitive after a while. The collaboration with Iggy Pop is really cute, though, and boosts the energy level a bit.

I Feel You In Every Molecule Of Me

Beyonce Knowles featuring Vanness Wu “Crazy In Love” – I know what you are thinking. “Crazy In Love” is an amazing song. Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s this year’s Summer Pop Anthem. It’s the kind of song that God sends to us so that He can prove to us all that we can get along and agree about some things once in a while. But don’t you ever hear the song, and feel as though it is missing something? Like, say, a guy from an Tawianese boy band rapping in Chinese over the bridge where Jay-Z would be? Well, you can rest easy now. This version of “Crazy In Love” was created for the Chinese market with the hope that a cameo by the Chinese star Vanness Wu of F4 would boost the sales of the Beyonce record, since she is a relatively unknown artist in the far east. Apparently, it has worked, and this version of the song is a big hit in China. If any of you out there are DJs, I dare you to play this version at a party/club, just to see how people react when the crazy sounding Chinese rapping comes in halfway through. Let me know if you do.

Richard X featuring Jarvis Cocker “Into You” – This is for all the people who started doubting Jarvis when he started dressing up like a skeleton and singing faux goth songs. This is the sort of complicated mash-up that Richard X specializes in, but I’m not quite sure if I know all of the components. I’m fairly sure that the music is from another song, but I can’t place it. The lyrics may or may not be Jarvis’s, but the chorus and guitar parts are from the Mazzy Star hit “Fade Into You.” If you know more about this song, please let me know in the comments. Whatever this song is made up of, this composition is gorgeous, and one of the finest ballads of 2003 by far.

RETRIBUTION IS COMING!

Since the WFMU archives are still down as of this writing, I’m going to be offering a fairly recent gem from The Best Show On WFMU. In this skit, Tom Scharpling decides to play a prank on the air by calling up a man named Bruce Willis, and interviewing him as though he was the famous movie star of the same name. Things, of course, go horribly awry when Mr. Willis discovers that Tom is teasing him on the air. These four mp3s must be listened to in sequence – when this originally aired, there was some time elapsed between each call, with Tom talking and taking calls on the air. None of that content is relevant to the joke, but it is good to keep in mind that there was a certain tension created by those gaps of time. Also, be forewarned: part four of this set is perhaps the most over the top three minutes of any Best Show skit to date.

Bruce Willis, Part One

Bruce Willis, Part Two

Bruce Willis, Part Three

Bruce Willis, Part Four

Play This Music On Every Route

I’ll try to write more about this tomorrow. I’m running short on time today.

Dirt McGirt (aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard) w/ Pharrell Williams “Pop Shit” – Oh yes, he’s still got it! This is taken from the fantastic new The Neptunes Present…Clones album.

Broadcast “Colour Me In” – This is from the new Broadcast album Haha Sound.

The Flaming Lips “Seven Nation Army Vs. Moving To Florida” – The Flaming Lips recently recorded this in session for Radio 1. It’s the music of The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army” with the lyrics from The Butthole Surfer’s “Moving To California.”

Hey Straight Yr Always Too Late

Junior Senior “Chicks And Dicks” – Ah yes, undiluted joycore. “Move Your Feet” seems like such a one-hit-wonder kind of song, but hopefully this one can at least be a minor hit before the Junior Senior thing runs its course. And I don’t mean that in a dismissive way at all, the ephemeral nature of novelty dance pop is kinda beautiful and poetic in its own way. I should mention that the entire album is consistently fun and catchy, it’s actually one of the best albums that I’ve heard from this year.

Herbie Hancock “All Apologies” – When I returned home on Monday, overcome with the feeling that what I was returning to was not much of a home at all, I sat down at my computer. The computer seemed awkward and vaguely alien to me, which is bizarre considering how much time I’ve spent with it and that I was only away from it for eight days. I scanned through my mp3s, and this was the first thing I played. I’m not sure why I chose it, I just did. And it felt exactly right. “All Apologies” is my favorite Nirvana song, hands down. This version retains the song’s gorgeous melody, but tones down the pathos, while still keeping the general emotional tone intact. In this version, it’s less of a resigned suicide note, and more of a frustrated shrug.

I feel a lot different after my trip. I’m not very willing to talk about personal issues here, but I can say that right now I feel a lot more focused on what I want in my life, and I’m determined enough now that I’m willing to get over a lot of stupid fears in order to get what I want. One of those fears is asking people for help. I definitely need help, especially in the short term. So I’m asking all of you: I need money. I need a job. Preferably a steady job, but little jobs here and there would be fine as long as they pay me. If anyone reading this can help me out, I promise to make it up to you someday. Please bear in mind that it would have to be something in the NYC metro area, or something I could do from my house. I’m not expecting much from this, but it’s worth a shot, right?

I’ve got some experience with writing, secretarial/clerical office work, limited design experience, and a lot of experience with photography. I have a BFA from Parsons School Of Design/New School University. I’ve had experience working as a teacher’s assistant, which included doing some research, and lecturing a class of college students. I can write press releases and other similar kinds of copy with relative ease. I’m pretty good at writing about dry or complex things in an easy-to-read and layperson-friendly manner. I’m very knowledgeable in a number of areas, a lot of which I never really write about on this blog. I’ve been doing a lot of volunteer work with WFMU whenever I can over the past year, and that’s given me some more experience with a lot miscellaneous office-centric work. I think I can be helpful in a lot of ways. If you can help, please email me. The email address is on the bottom of the links column on the right of the screen.

Hi, I’m Back

Hey folks, I’m back from my little trip. I know that I said I’d be back with this today, but I’m really not up for it just yet. On one hand, I really haven’t been thinking so much about the sort of things that I would write about here, it just hasn’t been on my mind so much over the past week. On the other, I am definitely intimidated by the quality of the writing that has been posted here in my absence, and I’d like to at least attempt to compete with some of the folks who were kind enough to fill in for me. Anyway, if any of the folks who I invited to post here would like to post something here today, that would be great. Consider it an encore.

Belle and Sebastian for People Who Don’t Like Belle and Sebastian

Even among those with a strong tolerance for twee, their exists a certain contingent of folk with steely and/or flinty hearts who steadfastly deny the abundant charms of Belle and Sebastian. To those of you not bewitched by the sweet/sly dialectic of Stuart Murdoch’s songs,* or the increasing tightness of the band itself (somehow these ragamuffins just fucking lock in together – at each of the shows I’ve been to, the initial song starts off weak, as if the band hadn’t played together in months, but as soon as the first chorus hits everything becomes fucking beautiful. With the elimination of distraction Isobel Campbell, who seemed only to pout and kibitz onstage, perhaps the band will be even more tight at this week’s show in Prospect Park, which is BTW far too expensive, and it better not fucking rain, dude). An all-too-common sentiment expressed by these tough, tough kids is that “I don’t like Belle and Sebastian, but I like stuff that sounds like Belle and Sebastian.” Well, I have two things for these people: A clue, and some songs by bands that are sort of reminiscent of Belle and Sebastian, but, you know different. I guess they’re similar in an Amazon.com “if you like this, try this” way, which we all know uses the most advanced AI the military industrial complex has ever devised. Think about it. What would be more important than to develop an easy way to convince people to consume more and more of what they already have? But before I start sketching an ASCII version of the infamous GSY!BE (is that punctuated correctly?) record company/military-industrial complex chart (which I think I can improve to implicate Tommy Mottola, as the prime mover behind the current Iraq thing, as a ploy to boost sales of Thalia, but that will wait), let me offer you two bands, one American, one British.

The Americans, The Mendoza Line, are much loved by me for their ruling aesthetic of dogged failure. I finally witnessed them in action a few weeks back, opening for the borecore (well, their live show, reputably – I didn’t stick around for it, though) Luna at Maxwell’s. The 6 person strong band, a few of them more drunk than the others, gamely plowed through a set of songs from their last two albums, as well as a great cover of Arab Strap’s “Packs of Three,” which I tried in vain to find to post here. What you’re getting then is A Damn Good Disguise, which is a damn good song where one of the 3 ML songwriters, Tim Bracy, is at his most bitter and dylanesque. And he really fucking sounds like Dylan when plastered, as he was at the Maxwell’s show. “A Damn Good Disguise” sounds like Belle and Sebastian with less lisping and more pedal steel, which is a good thing. Who the hell doesn’t like pedal steel? This may be, as I wrote on my blog, to which I will not link because it is struggling to be reborn into something less insufferable at the moment, a hootenanny, though I am, as is well known, not an expert at the hootenanical. Nor any other songform, for that matter.

Anyway, check out this entry from The American Book Congress, a collaborative blog from some of the band members, wherein they attempt to write the liner notes to their forthcoming CD. And NYC residents, please note the band will be performing at Mercury Lounge this Friday, August 15, and I may or may not be attending, depending on what my palmist has to tell me.

The other band is not a particular favorite of mine, but they often get lumped in with B&S (finally got tired of typing that), and so I will note them here. I just heard this song yesterday for the first time, so I’m not quite sure how it will stand up, but the title track from The Clientele’s “The Violet Hour” is quite stunning, better even than the standout from their previous material (collected on “Suburban Light”), a song about everyone’s favorite boxer, “Joseph Cornell.” Unfortunately, you’ll have to seek it out yourself. The Violet Hour sounds kind of Californian folk-psych to me, even though these guys are from London. It’s a fabulously put together number, and has a lax, romantic vibe that just makes me want to smoke a cigarette in silence with you at 2 am. Yes, you! The cute one, over there!

(The Clientele are playing at the Bowery Ballroom September 11th, I believe, with Damon and Naomi)

In any case, thank you Matthew for letting me invade your blog, and I thank all of you very sophisticated and no doubt well-groomed and very tall, to boot, individuals, for putting up with my unwarranted love for middling indie rock bands. Let they, with their soft sounds and intelligent lyrics, ease you into the night, or mid-afternoon, or whatever time you happen to hear these songs.

* Yeah, he shouldn’t let anyone else sing or write songs, I know.

Tiga – ’Hot In Herre’

One of the things a good cover version can do is take elements that were already present in a song, however deeply buried or not, and make them textual rather than subtextual, so that the listener comes to appreciate the original in a whole new light. ‘Hot In Herre’ was already camp. It was already almost disco (The Neptunes’ beat is the sound of them well on their to ‘Rock Your Body’). It was already saucy in an almost English way – think Carry On films, or Nelly as Benny Hill, chasing girls round the room… but not in any way that carries threatening or predatory overtones. There’s nothing aggressive about ‘Hot In Herre’, sexually or otherwise. It’s impossible to feel threatened by a man called Nelly, and that plaster on his face has always looked more like a flamboyant affectation (in the best possible sense) rather than a reminder of violence. His most famous song is playful to the point of being absurd – the “I’m just kidding… Unless you’re gonna do it”, the back-and-forth of Nelly inviting the object of his lust to disrobe, and her telling him, basically, that she was going to that anyway… This may not sound particularly reconstructed behaviour, but there’s a gentleness to Nelly that marks him out from other, tougher, more macho emcees – sometimes just boyish, sometimes almost dandyish (not to the extent of someone like Andre 3000, but think about that moment in the ‘Work It’ video with Nelly and Justin Timberlake wearing silk dressing-gowns and talking posh – sure it’s a pisstake, but can you imagine KRS One doing that?).

And there’s the thing. When Nelly drew fire from KRS One, it demonstrated the specific ways in which hip-hop that considers itself any variety of ‘real’ or ‘underground’ – from backpack-laden college campus to ‘the streets’ – always hates hip-hop that crosses over into pop. Hip-pop, for want of a better term, isn’t the right kind of masculine. It’s not manly enough in an overly testosterone-filled, so-heterosexual-it-hurts way (which of course always starts to shade into camp itself, but that’s another story). It involves letting women sing on your records, dancing around, having too much fun, doing it for the kids. (I sometimes wonder if Nelly recording with N’Sync was a deliberate middle-finger gesture of defiance – collaborating with a boy band must be the ultimate act of sacrilege in the eyes of the ‘underground’ – and of course The Neptunes were involved, clever little scamps). To sum up the difference: it isn’t “grrr!”, it’s “good gracious!”.

So don’t let anyone tell you that Tiga is ‘subverting’ the original of this song. He’s not: he’s just showing you a side to it that you might not have considered. Of course, this would all be a little academic if Tiga’s version didn’t have its own merits: that oh-so-casual but word perfect delivery, the beat that makes you dance in spasms like… well yes, a puppet on a string, boy. But the thing I like most about Tiga’s cover is how obvious it is that he loves the song. The cover version as a form of karaoke has given us as many travesties as triumphs (‘Heroes’ by Oasis, anyone?), but when someone pulls it off, it becomes impossible not to be infected by their enthusiasm. This track is a tribute to the shiny, silly brilliance of pop music that in the process becomes the thing itself, rather than just an homage. And that’s why I don’t see it is as a gimmicky novelty record, or just as a way for white hipster kids to enjoy the song without having to admit they like Nelly, even if it becomes those things with wider exposure.

It’s scorchio in London right now, just so you know.

It took me a while to decide what to write about and a while longer to take time to write it which is why I no longer have a blog of my own. Many thanks in advance for letting me scrawl across yours, Flux. Hope you don’t reget it too much.

The Boss

Bruce Springsteen was my first rock and roll hero. The library down the street from the house I grew up in had all of his albums on cassette and I think I got more use out of them than the rest of the community combined. The early hype comparing Springsteen to Dylan was responsible for some sort of bizarre reverse engineering that exposed my nine year old self to The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Woody Guthrie. Not that I liked any of that stuff at the time. Oh no, Bob Dylan was boring. He didn’t have wizz bang gangs from uptown and he sure as hell wasn’t racing in the streets.

But they’re both protest singers. Springsteen probably more so at this stage in their careers. Born in the USA wasn’t the fucking national anthem Regan and his idiot staff seemed to think it was. I understood that at 10, listening to this guy sing about veterans getting the shaft during a fucked up economy. And while I’m not really a huge fan of Springsteen anymore I still respect the hell out of him. It bothers me that people think The Ghost of Tom Joad is a Rage Against the Machine track. He just gets no respect. And then American Skin (41 Shots).

“…You’ve got to understand the rules

If an officer stops you

Promise me you’ll always be polite,

that you’ll never ever run away

Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight”

And the protests. From police groups (of course) but also from firefighters garbage collectors and seemingly every other public service group with an air of authority around them. When NWA said “Fuck the police” and PE said “Fight the power” they were giving a voice to people that weren’t being heard but they were also (sadly) preaching to the choir. But the police, firefighters, trash collectors and that guy with the greasy mullet and the Chevy Super 8 are Springsteen’s bread and butter. Its not like he was trying to be edgy or make a grab at street cred. He had something to lose and he played the song anyway. And thats worth something. Lets face it, most white middle class adults over 40 aren’t going to buy an antiauthoritarian punk or hip hop record but some of them might buy Springsteen: Live in NYC. And maybe some of them got the message.

It ain’t no secret

No secret my friend

You can get killed just for living

In your American Skin

America’s most important protest singer? Maybe.

Scott Thompson – Dear Eminem

I’m not sure exactly why I like this bit so much. I think it has to do with the fact that I do really like Eminem, and the song seems to have a certain genuine affection for him, as well–it just looks to sort of take him down a peg. It’s not the kind of strict, blind hataz stuff you find on morning DJ show parodies, which this superficially resembles. Instead, it’s gentler, more persuasive, a nice character piece; even the jabs at him having a pseudo-gay relationship with Dre feel light-hearted and subtle. (Though they’re not subtle at all.) Maybe it’s something about a faggot calling someone straight a faggot, and in that this resembles the best of Scott’s fabulous “Buddy” monologues from The Kids In The Hall. He’s giving himself a boyfriend, which is nicely ambivalent but also honest, and he doens’t get too campy about it. There’s just something charming about someone making fun of someone else and then threatening to kill their boyfriend with a juicer. It’s nicely self-aware.

Of course, the line, “If we ever adopt a special needs mixed-race child, we’re gonna name him Eminem!” is lovely, as is “It’s so rare to find a black man that sticks around. Believe me–I know!” (The latter is classic Buddy.) The way he delivers the first few lines of the third verse are awesome, too.

Best of all, though, is the chorus, which while horrendously sung, makes fun of Eminem not for being white or dumb or whatever–it makes fun of him for being grumpy. Man, how great is that, huh?

Note: sorry for the lack of critical essays in the last two days, but they’ve been busy ones. I had a few planned out that I didn’t get to, so I’ll probably end up posting ’em next week over at my blog, which is called clap clap blog. (Knew I’d get a plug in there at some point, right?)

the mass psychology of pop

More pop and psychoanalysis! Following on from something I wrote yesterday in my own blog, I’ve been thinking about Allison Anders’ film God Give Me Strength, and her assertion that poised pop is often capable of more emotional depth than the literalism of emo, etc, precisely because its sleek surfaces can call a kind of aural unconscious into being. Interesting. (But depth isn’t always interesting, anyway. Heh.) Kristen Vigard’s rendition of Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello’s “God Give Me Strength” is the centrepiece of Anders’ film, and it’s so fucking beautiful that it makes me cry. Apparently Bacharach and Costello’s demo made Anders cry, too, but Vigard’s dignified performance for the film is far superior to Costello’s own histrionic attempt on Painted From Memory. Vigard’s voicing is just so. She has it down. And this is what opens up a space for our own projections. In the film, Illeana Douglas’ songwriting character is at her wits’ end, having been fucked over again, and pours everything into a bittersweet lament, “God Give Me Strength”, to open her career as a performer. She sings it plaintively for a genius producer of the Brian Wilson mould — Matt Dillon’s character. He paces around her as she sings, and her voice only really cracks at the climatic line, “I want him to hurt”. His eyes widen. Later, after an awkward silence, he can only manage, “Wow. What a sad song”. It is.

“I still deam of Organon.” Many people know that Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” is based on the life of the Wilhelm Reich, a scientist who thought he could control the weather by harnessing “orgone energy”, and who was hounded to death by the US Government for peddling his “orgone accumulators”. But what’s usually glossed over is that Reich was a member of the German Communist Party and the author of the “seminal” book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was the most notable attempt to synthesise Marxism and the psychoanalytic realm up till Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. His troubling, radical thesis: that people’s willing participation in fascism is connected to forms of repression that are at once more general and yet also intimate, e.g. sexual repression. (Here’s a very funny distillation in a few words.)

Hey, what’s this got to do with Kate Bush? Oh well. Ummm… Anyway, note Bush’s traditionally “musical” approach to sampling, in which samples are put to service as simulated instruments — it’s all Fairlights, Linn drums, etc. standing for a string orchestra. Incidentally, I bought the album on which this track appears, The Hounds of Love, on the same fateful day as getting Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, whose approach to samples couldn’t be any more radically different. I recently had an interesting conversation with a hip-hop historian who told me that the rise of hip-hop coincided with the US Government abrogating its responsibilities to fund the teaching of music in public schools. Of course, that had been the teaching of the Western classical musical tradition, in which Kate Bush is so steeped. So in the ambivalent absence of such a framework in the consciousness of kids in the ’70s, the sounds of the street — unlike the African American pop of previous decades — embraced forms that broke wildly from Western musicology. Interesting!

Flux = great, for letting me rant again.

{insert indecipherable vocalisation here}

“PYT (Pretty Young Thing)“, Michael Jackson. There was a time, not long ago, when I used to listen to this song over and over again on the train, to the exclusion of most others. Lots of other songs from Thriller are overplayed, so I’m making up for it with this one. Dunno if I could ever wear this one out, though; it’s real neat. Justin Timberlake wishes he were this neat. Also: for something so crisp and crunchy, it’s not as ferocious as the bigger songs from Thriller, in which Michael started his descent into a strangely muted, almost autistic kind of fury.

I’ll throw in a little bonus here: Michael’s excellent home demo of “Billie Jean“, included on the Special Edition of Thriller. A couple of weeks ago I was at an academic conference about popular music, and one of the hottest papers was called “Saying the Unsayable: the non-verbal vocalisations of Michael Jackson”, in which the presenter argued that Jackson’s yelps and grunts channel those non-conforming layers of his persona — those apparent “crises” of race, gender and sexuality — that are constantly glossed over in the more readily identifiable aspects of his artistry. In this light, it’s really interesting to hear Michael’s moments of glossolalia in those bits of the song where he hasn’t yet written the lyrics. They fit completely with the sighs and screams that remain in the final version of the song. But because the song hasn’t fully cohered in the demo, Michael’s voice seems even more permeable, crawling from a place before words. This would be a good time to go over the definition of the psychoanalytic term, chora:

The earliest stage in your psychosexual development (0-6 months), according to Julia Kristeva. In this pre-lingual stage of development, you were dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. You did not distinguish your own self from that of your mother or even the world around you. Rather, you spent your time taking into yourself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of boundaries.

Be careful what you do. This is Ben from Antipopper, signing off.

Downloadin’ pictures of Sarah Michelle Gella

I can’t really seem to get past the similarities between a Fountains of Wayne album and a Weird Al Yankovic album — the genre-hopping, the references to very time-specific pop culture, the “oh my god I can’t believe he rhymed that with that” lyrics. I’m not saying that makes Fountains of Wayne bad — I’ve always had a fondness for the Yankovic oeuvre (his masterpiece was “Yoda,” but “All About the Pentiums” is a close second).

Anyway, “Hey Julie” does all the right things by taking the awkward, goofy lyrics about office work and mean bosses and sales figures and turning them into a love song. I can’t help but be charmed. It’s my little pop gem gift to you on this, my last Fluxblog post.

Please come visit me anytime over at Waking Ear. I’ve enjoyed getting to meet some new people, and my comments links are always aching to be mouse-clicked. That sounded weird. But you know what I mean.

Oh, and thanks to Matthew for inviting me to be a part of this week.

The Afghan Whigs – When We Two Parted

It’s a grave misfortune of musical fate that the Afghan Whigs ever had anything to do with Sub Pop. Branded for a crime they didn’t commit, the Whigs never quite escaped the yoke of a half-baked musical revolution that had nothing to do with the earnest, near-pretentious white-boy soul and scalding emotional howl that carpets every shaggy inch of Gentlemen.

The cover artwork alone is incredible. Children locked in uncomfortable adult poses are cast in sepia, like a forward thinking memory. Looking at it now, I can’t resist a comparison to the faux-Kevin Smith approaches to sexual politics that have soiled the mainstream in the past decade. I picture Ben and Jen, costumed from Gigli, in the same positions and have to run off for a change of trousers because I’ve pissed myself laughing.

But let’s focus down to the centerpiece, the Columbine Roller-Rink anthem When We Two Parted. I picture Dulli singing this to an anonymous party girl he’s brought home, over whose face hovers a projected image of his One True Love, while disaffected youth skate slowly in orbit around the bed. His arrogance is diminished here, the first place on the record where perhaps he’s not quite so proud to have fucked up. Like the Moebius-strip memory of the cover image, this song is tied to the electro-Stax final admission of ‘I Keep Coming Back’. I wish I could say that this sort of self-awareness is what kept me off the slow-dance floors of my childhood. In fact, as Greg Dulli well knows when he’s drunk enough, it was simple cowardice.

(Brought to you by the folks at The Pork Store.)

Songs By People I Know (Kinda).

These tracks are by musicians who I think are better than most performers you’re likely to hear out there. They’re not on major labels, and as well as making top notch songs, they’re all very approachable, nice people. You should get to know them, too. Me, I’m putting them in order of familiarity, from “lifelong pal” to “traded a couple emails once.”

Squeaky

Birdy and #1 For Takeoff

The very first time I ever stood up on stage and sang, Harry was playing bass. It was at a coffeehouse at New College. We were in a bunch of bands together and he’s one of my bestest friends in the whole wide world. He wrote a thesis on Sonic Youth, and loves nothing more than whacking his guitar into some weird-ass tunings and serving people a steaming dish of melodic rock. Which is what he’s been doing in Gainesville since 1995, as part of Squeaky. They played their last show at Harry’s wedding earlier this year, which is a great sadness. Before that, they opened for pretty much every indie band worth listening to who ever hit G’ville. You can get more of their melodic crunch over here, at Nook and Cranny Records. I’d love this band even if Harry wasn’t in it, because they make my feet move, my head nod, and my stomach tie itself in little knots.

Actionslacks

Close to Tears

Actionslacks is a band from California. (Well, now it’s California and Maine. They get around.) Anyway, Marty and I were both in a few different bands at New College, but never the same ones at the same time. He’s the smartest drummer I know – not just smart as a person, but smart as a drummer. His band’s pretty smart overall, too… smart enough to know that music should be fun. Their slick power pop reminds me of Cheap Trick in the best possible way. This track is from their upcoming album, which promises to be lots of fun. It’s on The Self-Starter Foundation Records, and J. Robbins produced it. There are more mp3s at their site. Check ’em out.

Burnside Project

He Never Knew The Benefits of Caffeine.

Burnside Project was one of the bands I found on mp3.com back when I first started putting my own music on the internet. Those were the boom days, when any new technology would get money thrown at it by ravenous packs of venture capitalists. Sebadoh was still relevant, people were still going to raves, and a bunch of us home recordists were getting to hear each other over our 56k connections. Burnside Project (at the time, Rich called it “Beacon”) had a sound I was sort of striving for… that earnest, anguished vocal over simple guitar lines. Only Rich was also really into dance music – breakbeat, acid hop, whatever. His was the first band I heard that put the two styles together: indie lo-fi over techno. I loved it. And the great thing about mp3.com was that I could tell him so. He liked what I was doing, too, and wound up recording most of my new album. (I had to plug myself somewhere, right?) But his new album is so much better. It’s out on BarNone Records, and there are more mp3s and a video at his site. So follow the link.

Krista Detor

Blue Sky Fallen

I met Krista when I was doing some other recording down in Key Largo. She’s the long-lost biological sister of my friend Erynn. (Odd story: Krista was adopted as a baby, grew up other side of the country, but she and kid sister Erynn are eerily alike – same likes, same affinity for music and musicians…). Anyway, her husband (now ex) played bass on a song I was recording. Turns out, I should have got her to sing a few tracks, too. Maybe even co-written a couple … cuz she’s got that modern folk-pop thing that makes me go all goofy inside down pat. She’s got a self-released CD she’s selling through her site. Buy one. G’wan. You’ll like it, too.

Rebecca Hall

Come Around

I found Rebecca Hall mostly at random, cruising around mp3.com at work, looking for something not too objectionable to put in the headphones while I type. And I found Ms Hall. She’s seriously ginchy. Her voice reminds me of Jacqui McShee, the singer of the 60s folk-jazz group Pentangle. And, as it turns out, she’s done some singing for Pentangle’s guitarist John Renbourn. Her voice has the kind of beauty that should be on the radio all the time, but just isn’t, which is proof that there’s something deeply wrong with the Way Things Are. Songs like this, though, give me some kind of hope. (If the above link to the song doesn’t work, blame mp3.com’s new corporate overlords, and click here instead.) We swapped exactly three emails each, then I started ranting about marmalade and she never wrote back. Which is actually pretty reasonable.

princess against the classes

“I Don’t Need Anyone“, Kylie Minogue (with the Manic Street Preachers). Why don’t the Manics write songs like this for themselves? Fools. I was working for a somewhat indie-centric music magazine when Impossible Princess / Kylie Minogue came out, and we ran our review of the album under the headline “KYLIE IS GOD”. Fuck their stupid indie death threats (oh yes). In hindsight the album isn’t actually that good, but perfect pop gems like this remain suspended in time. As for the mystery of the Manics (yeah, they’re a masochistic guilty pleasure), next time a song of theirs is annoying you with its pomposity, just close your eyes, imagine it’s a Queen song and smile. All better.

yes can do

I am totally in love with Hall & Oates’ “Kiss On My List” and “Private Eyes“. Okay, so I made this reappraisal based on a recent vogue amongst the type of people who wear very expensive ripped denim, but fuck, they’re right for once: Hall & Oates peddle a version of white rock’n’soul that’s actually good. Well, at least sometimes. I’m a sucker any old shifting set of endlessly chiming chords on a keyboard. I’m a chiming keyboard slut. And the middle-eight in “Private Eyes” is one of the best middle-eights, uh, ever, turning the song inside out for a moment, like the best ones do. With these songs, H&O manage to make good on The Beach Boys’ somewhat yelpy and claustrophobic attempts at rock-pop in the ’70s, which never seemed to gel. We have the technology. We can rebuild. When he strains for the notes in whiteboy soul mode, Daryl Hall channels a slicker version of Carl Wilson’s “choirboy-gone-gruff-troubador” act, and it works. Thankyou Lord. And thankyou, Flux.

The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night

The Stooges – TV Eye

Geraldine Fibbers – Get Thee Gone

Price – Kiss

First things first: go listen to “A Hard Day’s Night” and get about 1:18 into the song, and notice the scream. It comes right before they launch into the solo, and oh, it’s a thing of beauty. But it’s also a weird bit, from today’s perspective. For one thing, it reminds you that the Beatles, for all their seeming bubblegumness, were regarded as reckless musical troublemakers at the time, because they did things like scream in the middle of songs, even if that had been a rock ‘n’ roll staple for 6 or 7 years. But this just doesn’t usually strike us as a scream, partially because it’s being used as a transition (as opposed to your traditional drum fill or scratchy-move on the low E string or melodic pickup transition), and partially–and this is the important bit–because it’s a happy scream. And oh dear me, isn’t it? It’s an absolute whoop, a yawp, a yell of joy, of oh-man-I-just-got-to-the-end-of-the-chorus-and-what-a-fucking-chorus-it-is-holy-shit-I-just-have-to-yell! And it’s (I think) Paul and John screaming at the same time, as they’re backing away from the mic into that great, tumbling solo. But it doesn’t sound like a scream to us anymore, because screams aren’t supposed to be happy.

Viz: “TV Eye,” the opening scream of which does the descending “into the abyss!” thing that psychadelia likes, this from the Stooges’ most psychadelic album, Fun House. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a great scream, and a great song. But it’s a long way removed from the Beatles’ scream. And at the time, that was probably good; the dark turn pop took after the sixties was a useful thing. But the problem is, it’s never gone back. The Iggy-scream is still the scream of choice for most of your discerning lead vocalists in the last twenty years, as are the little yelps that the big opener leads into.

A slightly different variation can be found in one of the best songs from one of my favorite bands, the Geraldine Fibbers. The scream here is not placed at the forefront, but rather under a song, much like how feedback went from “whoa that’s a cool squeal, let’s mic it real loud” to “hey, that would be a neat drone to put behind a song.” Carla can often be found bansheeing away behind a particularly good section of vocals (“Dragon Lady”) or instrumentals (“Get Thee Gone”), presaging and, if you ask me, beating the whole screamo thing to the punch by quite a few years. One article (which I can’t seem to find) even focused in a pretty convincing way on the scream Carla lays over the 2nd-half instrumental break of “Get Thee Gone,” which is a wonderful piece of ecstacy-rock, but here’s it’s scream-as-epiphany or response to the power of the music, rather than the exuberance and joy of the performer, like you might find in a soul or early R&B record. (There’s not a whole lot of happy Geraldine Fibbers songs anyway, but that’s OK.)

I won’t even dignify scream-as-expression-of-pain by classifying it, but suffice to say that unless you’ve got a gaping bullet wound at the time you’re recording your vocals, it’s probably a bit too literalized.

The garage-rock revivalists do a half-hearted version of the Beatle-yawp, but it comes out “Ow!” which is half-cribbed from Axl Rose anyway (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and misses the full-throated exuberance of the “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” you hear at 1:18 in “Hard Day’s Night.” It’s not cuttin’ it, fellers.

Maybe the closest thing we have in modern times to that yell is Prince, whose myriad Tourettic outbursts seem of a one with the exuberant music, and seem drawn out of him in much the same way the Beatles’ were. And there’s that same sense of joy mixed with being a little at the end of your rope–the Beatles with exhaustion, Prince with horniness (Prince seems like he’s been through some hard day’s nights himself, if you know what I mean). But especially you hear this in “Kiss,” at 3:28, where after tensing and building and stroking for a good amount of time he just utterly loses control of his voice as it screeches to the absolute top of his range to yell something like “AIN’T NO PARRAAGHHHUURRAL RRRRAG, grr-AM grr-AGATA WITH!!!” because the music’s just that goddamn good, that exuberant and joyful, that there was no other choice at that moment than to have a verbal fit and yell it like someone who just doesn’t give a shit about being composed or cool anymore. And then, beautifully, it comes all the way back down. Now that’s a joycore yell.

Rack and ‘Pinion

I just thought that everybody should hear this if they haven’t already. It’s TV on the Radio’s “Mr. Grieves” cover.

Let’s all drop our jadedness for a split-second and recognize when somebody’s done something really cool. This the ultimate cover — a twist, a wink and a faithful homage.

Ain’t it shocking what love can do?

Morris Day, “Fishnet”

“Fishnet” is the great lost coulda-woulda-shoulda single by the Time. Bitch, please: listen to the guitar solo, totally Jesse Johnson. Listen to the party feel of the track, especially on the full-length version (not the single edit, only half the fun in less time), the Jam-and-Lewis crowd factor (cf. Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay and the Time’s 1990 reunion album, Pandemonium). Lyrically, the only diff between this and a Time single is a switch from an obsession with camisoles (included in at least three separate Time singles I’m aware of, likely a myriad more I’ve somehow missed) to fishnet pantyhose. The clever wordplay – comparing a woman’s fishnet hose to getting caught in a fishnet like little Nemo. And for the love of God, do you hear those high, whining keyboards? That’s so Time you’d think you were listening to What Time Is It? instead of a not-entirely-successful Morris Day solo album. I know your shoulders are rocking – and I know ya bobbin’ ya head. ‘Cause I can see ya. Morris would deserve fame and fortune and obscene riches just for this one song, even if he’d never fronted the Time. But he did, and I’m glad, and you should be, too.

western civilization’s last sigh

“Columnated ruins domino.” Even if you factor in Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up” — written just a few months later for the Smile sessions — is still a revelation. Brian Wilson singing about an inner emotional world is one thing, but a wistful/bitter, apocalyptic lullaby to bourgeois decadance is another entirely.

A blind class aristocracy

Back through the opera glass you see

The pit and the pendulum drawn

Columnated ruins domino

Decline and Fall, indeed. Wilson’s partnership with Van Dyke Parks was inspired, and this song is the shit. Even after the rest of the Boys ghoulishly resurrected Brian’s original, ghostly demo and spliced various arrangements and overdubs over it for this “official” version (the title track of the 1971 Surf’s Up album), the result is still the shit. That said, it’s Brian’s original and slightly off-tune double-tracked vocal in the second half that’s the true killer, and it’s one of those rare Beach Boys moments that benefits from brother Carl shutting up. I can just feel our folly of a civilization sliding into the sea. If the surf is up, it’s the tsunami that smashes everything. You want more surf songs, Mike Love? ‘Ere you go. Magnificent. This is Ben from Antipopper, signing off.