999, 849: Flo-Rida ft. T-Pain — Low

The 00's have drawn to a close. The 90's were the decade of corporate consolidation in the music business to the point where you can basically count the companies that own all the radio stations AND all the "major labels" on one hand. So when the millennium dawned we, the music loving public, had finally had enough. We took our music consumption online, rallying to the slogan "music wants to be free." Music fans everywhere were sure that this new digital democracy would finally put our favorite Queer-core bands, Javanese Throat singers and Avant-noise turntablists into the listening ears of the public. After 10 years of iPods, MP3's, online radio and indie music blogs, our votes have come in and the most downloaded song of the decade is...

LOW, by Flo-Rida featuring T-Pain. A song about spending three thousand dollars at a titty bar that includes free advertising for several brands of gas-guzzling SUV's. The people finally spoke, and with a raised fist they cried, "tell me more about what brand of pants you like to see your strippers wear, right before they take them off!" Allegedly, 5.2 million people PAID to download this song. While there's no way of measuring how many people download a song illegally, I would guess that if 5 million people were willing to pay for this, then at least 20 million got it for free. What is the demographic breakdown of these 25 million people? Certainly, every man who has spent $3,000 in a night at a strip club couldn't make up this massive number - I would say there are maybe 50,000 of those guys in the country, and that's a generous estimate. So we're still 24,950,00 downloaders short of the total. If we add in actual strippers who downloaded it for their acts, we'll say 24,900,000.

I figure that there were probably a lot of guys who like going to strip clubs but could only afford to waste a few dollars who downloaded this as a sort of wish fulfillment. I'll put their numbers at about 5 million. This is again a generous estimate, because in many strip clubs that cater more towards a Caucasian clientele, the music seems to lean towards the stripper classics of the 80's - Motley Crue, et al, or, if the stripper has a lot of tattoos, Nine Inch Nails and their angry successors. But I'll take us down to about 20 million downloaders to move things along, because this is where it gets tricky. From my viewing of reality television, there are many young women these days who, while they don't actually strip, like to dress "sexy" and go out to nightclubs, get drunk, and entice men to romance them with "dirty" dancing. These young women are plentiful, and they have disposable income to spend on music downloads, because guys are buying them all their drinks. There are probably 5 million of these club going young women who bought this song so they could practice their sexy dance moves at home in front of the mirror, and in the car ride into town from the next suburb over.

Now we're at the final 15 million Flo-Rida downloaders. Who are they? The song is too new to be adopted by irony-loving hipsters, too commercial for vintage addidas-wearing hip-hop "backpackers," too raunchy for the soccer moms who like to "keep up with their kids", and too bland to be touted by contrarian music critics who like to rub their love of all things "mainstream" in the face of credibility-obsessed music snobs. I scratched my head over this problem all week as I crafted my review, but after serious digging, I finally uncovered the answer. THIS MAN:

Stock photography model John Johnson, of Retardville, MO, downloaded the song "Low" 15 million times, because he's a big dumb turd. So now, for the rest of eternity, we are going to be subjected to this song every time there is any kind of countdown of the top music. Thanks a lot, Mr. Johnson.

999,850: Ray Charles & Betty Carter — Baby, It's Cold Outside

Well before Sublime ruined the date rape song, Broadway vet Frank Loesser penned the lyrics to "Baby, It's Cold Outside", the preeminent example of the genre, which made the Billboard Best Seller Chart top 10 with two different versions, won an Oscar, and caused the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Usually sung as a duet, "Baby It's Cold Outside" features two characters: the "mouse", who is trying to get home to her mother and father and aunt and sister and brother after a pleasant date with the "wolf", who is using the chilly weather as a pretense to liquor the mouse up and bang her (as is so often the case in nature).

That this is somehow considered a Christmas song is an indictment of our culture, or at least that was the view of influential Islamist thinker Sayyib Qutb. An Egyptian religious scholar, Qutb spent two years in the states observing all manner of decadent, sinful behavior, such as that which occurred at a church dance he attended in the late '40s. When "Baby, It's Cold Outside" began to play on the phonograph, Qutb witnessed the abominable American ritual known as "slow-dancing", which included offenses against God like "light petting" and even "making out". For this and other shocking and unforgivable transgressions, Qutb labeled all of Western modernity as anti-humanity in such widely read books as "The America I Have Seen", which found its way into the hands of Al Qaeda luminaries Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden. You know the rest. Pricks.

Anyway, the song's been recorded about six thousand million times by all manner of artists using variable amounts of irony. Heard here is the Ray Charles/Betty Carter version, from 1961, which is the only one of them to crack the Billboard Hot 100. While most popular renditions of the tune play the wolf/mouse conflict with almost unbearable amounts of light comedy (keep a large vomit pail handy if you'd like to brave the Sammy Davis Jr./Carmen McRae interpretation), Charles and Carter figured out how to make the song sexy. Charles' genius for arrangement comes to the fore, as he chooses an achingly slow tempo to draw out the verses, allowing himself and Carter a lot of room to play with the phrasing—her reading of "Maybe I'd better scurry", coy and beguiling, is particularly lovely. I'd set this song up against the best offered by radical Islam any day of the week.

999,851: Yes - Leave It

I've never been a big fan of the band "Yes," but as I understand it, the album 90125 was considered a big "sell out" by their devoted followers. Instead of side-long epics about the Topographic Oceans, the money-grubbing men of Yes decided to put in a bunch of trendy drum machines and digital synthesizers. For some reason, when bands try this today, it is always a huge disaster - nothing makes me cringe more than hearing Aerosmith and the like discovering "trip-hop" 15 years too late.

But on 90125, a modified version of Yes' original line-up went into the studio and somehow came up with a fairly kick-ass update of prog-rock for the 80's, one that I actually find infinitely more listenable than their "classic" albums. Everybody knows the song "Owner of a Lonely Heart," which introduced the "Orchestra Hit" button to Casio keyboards everywhere, but my favorite song off this album is "Leave It." "Leave it" doesn't have any real chorus or vocal melody to speak of, but it's the most hilariously awesome use of the fact that stereos have left AND right channels. It seems perfectly designed for the hot new "Walkmen" that were hitting the street around the time it was released. Go ahead and give it a play - every other note is in a different ear!

The lyrics are about, and this is just a guess, a band on the road? "I can feel no sense of measure, no illusions as we take in young man's pleasure... one down, one to go, another town and one more show / MaCarthur Park in the driving snow." (this suggests a serious unfamiliarity with the real MaCarthur Park, a hot spot for knock off t-shirts and fake ID's in the middle of Los Angeles). Who cares though? Listen to this and enjoy the glorious abuse of studio technology, as the crisp, digitally processed rockapella voices of sellout-period Yes ping-pong back and forth between your ears.

999,852: Steve Miller Band — Abracadabra

I want you to try something. Pretend that it's early 1982, and you're Steve Miller. Ready? Ok, Steve.

Your recording career, now in its 14th year, began with a well-regarded but only modestly lucrative five-year stint making "space blues" in San Francisco with the likes of Nicky Hopkins and Boz Scaggs. You had been schooled by Les Paul. You had scene cred. But after an album of really long live jams, received with critical and popular opprobrium, you decide to try something different: super catchy, uncomplicated tunes with really dumb lyrics, the kind that even talent-free guitar students could pick up in about 4 minutes.

And suddenly, the world was your oyster! "The Joker", a song so lazily written that it has a completely made up word sticking out of it, went to number one. Whoa. You took a step back for a second, mulling retirement. Was this what you wanted? Was this the life you imagined, studying at the feet of maybe the 20th century's most important guitarist? But back you came with more of the same, two albums filled with affably facile tunes. All they got you were six top-25 hits: three in the top ten, and another number one. Every laid back, simple thing that came out of your guitar, and every half-thought word from your increasingly wealthy lips, became millions of dollars. What couldn't you do? You were barely trying! Steve Miller, unstoppable hit machine!

But then...silence. No hits for four years. No records. You re-thought the direction of your career, hearing the critics lambaste you for selling out. You tried to compromise, with a record that was half tuneful pop rock and half overblown blues jam. You made it to number 24 with "Heart Like a Wheel", but you knew that it wasn't even up to your lowered standards, that people bought it out of habit. Worse, it was stale, reaching back to Duane Eddy while the suddenly abundant New Wave MTV stars around you pushed their sounds into an unlimited future of synth pop.

But now, it's 1982, you've dusted yourself off, and you're back in the saddle again with "Abracadabra". Does it contain a synthesizer? You bet it does, complete with futuristic whooshing sounds. Is "Abracadabra" catchy? It's catchy as hell. Musically speaking, the verse and chorus follow your 1970's three-chord playbook, and you throw in a guitar solo that nods, in angular fashion, to your space blues roots. Are the lyrics dumb? My friend, the lyrics are quite possibly the stupidest that have ever been written.

In a nutshell, there's this girl. She makes you hot. She has you "spinnin'/Round and round/Round and round and round it goes/where it stops nobody knows". What is "it"? "It", we will learn later, is your "situation". Oh. Anyway, she employs an ancient magic word (to wit: "Abracadabra") that has a profound effect on you. Care to elaborate in song?

"Abra-abracadabra
I want to reach out and grab ya"

One wonders if there's any more to it than that. Let's check!

"Abra-abracadabra
...Abracadabra"

This song goes to number one. You're back on top! Forever! If "Abracadabra" is a number 1 hit, then Steve Miller, unstoppable hit machine, is never gonna stop making those hits!

(P.S. Whoops you never had another hit and never will. Bye!)

999,853: Mew — Introducing Palace Players

It's a classic prog rock move to first blow minds for a couple lean years, then go unredeemably pop. After all, if you have the chops to play ANYTHING, why not hits? As long as you're already getting paid to move your hands around on your guitar to create sounds for people to listen to, why not get paid more to create sounds that cause more of those people to have sex with you? Ask any member of Genesis, Journey or Supertramp if they regret selling out and they won't be able to hear you over the sound of all the blow jobs they're getting.

However, most bands make this switcharoo try to make it at the most inconspicuous time possible, after a short hiatus perhaps. Usually they'll hire some hot new singer to provide more distance from the old version of the band. Maybe they'll have a slick new graphic designer design some kind of cool spaceship thing to go on the cover of all the albums. Mew takes a different approach. They go from difficult prog-rockers with integrity to candy coated sellouts halfway through a single song.

But notice how slick the transition is. They open with choppy unsettling angularity then stir in the sugar one teaspoonful at a time till we're left with buttery smooth MOR. One imagines that the fans that Mew picked up during the first 30 seconds of the song feeling rightly betrayed by the lush wash of synths and singalong chorus that eventually crashes the party. They would sniff in disdain at the Johnny come latelies. "Sure they like Mew NOW, but I'VE been listing to them since the beginning the song."

Of course MEW isn't selling out, they're just doing what they always do, which is having it both ways all the time. And why not?

Introducing Palace Players - M...

999,854: David Bowie - The Laughing Gnome

David Bowie’s formative, pre-“Space Oddity” years on the Deram label are a catalog of puzzling creative decisions and musical influences (e.g., Anthony Newley) unfamiliar to most American rock audiences. Nowhere is that more apparent than “The Laughing Gnome,” a novelty song featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks tape effects and a bunch of horrible puns on the word “gnome” (some of which contain British references that will also be unfamiliar to Americans). And it wasn’t forced on Bowie by his record company; no, “The Laughing Gnome” was conceived and written by the future Ziggy Stardust himself. Let’s take a leisurely stroll through it, shall we?

As the song begins, we hear a bassoonist enjoying a rare opportunity to earn income via employment at a recording session. In the first verse, Bowie meets the title character randomly wandering around on High Street. Apparently the sight of a gnome on the streets of London hasn’t attracted anyone else’s attention, and Bowie, smelling opportunity of some sort, invites the gnome back to his place to watch some telly. It isn’t clear whether television is an invention familiar to gnomes in Bowie’s fantastical fantasy land, but the gnome certainly does enjoy it, laughing the day away in front of it, and not helping out with the dishes.

Bowie has to cook for this thing too, and the gnome proceeds to eat his roasted toadstools and get hammered on his dandelion wine. Saddled with a drunken deadbeat roommate who does nothing but watch TV all fucking day, Bowie tries to get rid of the gnome, putting him on a train to the beach resort town of Eastbourne. Before he does so, he engages the gnome in conversation, and learns that it comes from “Gnome-man’s land, hee hee hee.” Bowie replies with a chatty “Oh really?”, but since the conversation ends right there, the wooden chumminess and pointless inclusion of the line end up recalling Tommy Wiseau’s work in The Room.

The trip to Eastbourne really just gives the gnome an opportunity to collect his brother Fred, another ne’er-do-well in need of a place to crash. When Bowie wakes up in the morning, both gnomes have snuck back into his house, and are sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at him, waiting for him to wake up so they can sing him a song. Blinded by English whimsy, Bowie doesn’t seem at all creeped out by this.

So Bowie is stuck with these freakish giggling ninnies who’ve inexplicably latched onto him and can’t be kept out of his house -- much like the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson when he befriended the Manson Family. Bowie, however, turns the situation to his advantage. What does any proper Englishman do when confronted with a new and unfamiliar race/culture/creature? Why, subjugate and exploit them economically, of course. Bowie forces the gnomes to live in his filthy, sooty chimney, call him “sahib” (NOTE: I made this part up), and support him financially by writing “comedy prose for radio shows.” One can only presume that, if said prose is as hilarious as the raft of puns in the song, the merry trio is living the high life indeed. One also wonders whether the gnomes’ comedy chops extend to material that isn’t self-referential, or whether there is simply a plethora of whimsically themed BBC radio programmes in need of industrial-size quantities of gnome puns. At any rate, there is no indication that Bowie and the gnomes plan to share their newfound largesse with the likely starving and desperate session bassoonist.

Bowie is so overcome by whimsical merriment that he is unable to contain his laughter on the closing choruses, breaking down in fits of hilarity as his slaves sing the melody from their carcinogenic miniature tenement above the fireplace. But Fred and his unnamed brother had the last laugh. In 1973, a year after Bowie’s star-making Ziggy Stardust breakthrough, “The Laughing Gnome” was re-released and rocketed to #6 on the British charts, giving Bowie the equivalent of an actress or model’s pre-fame topless photos.

The Laughing Gnome - David Bow...

999,855: Kutiman — The Mother of All Funk Chords

If humanity's present course goes pretty much as I assume it will, then future archeologists are going to be especially busy unearthing artifacts from my lifetime in order to solve the puzzle of how exactly we came to be ruled by a malicious oligarchy of collection agency robo-callers, cell phone companies, basic cable providers, and virility medication manufacturers. Whether Kutiman's "The Mother of All Funk Chords" helps these scientists explain our self-inflicted ruin is anyone's guess, but they will undoubtedly recognize its appearance on YouTube as the moment somebody actually figured out the real, divinely-guided purpose of the internet.

For years, individual musicians had been videographing themselves in poor light noodling on or otherwise demonstrating their instruments, practicing for recitals, singing, rhyming, and giving instruction, and then uploading the results onto the world wide web, all to no apparent purpose whatsoever. Aside from the occasional commenter proclaiming any given clip's GaYNEZZ, no one watched these videos nor understood why they existed. One doubts that the performers themselves understood it, except that they were compelled by an unseen force to engage in what my be called, absent the light of understanding, baldly narcissistic behavior.

Then, in 2009, a semi-known and completely funky Israeli beat maker received the holy word of our deity, Halachbar the Invincible, whose instructions were clear: collect these far-flung and unconnected musical outbursts and weave them together so that the ineffable Word of Mighty Halachbar may be revealed to His children. Kutiman called the project ThruYou, and "The Mother of All Funk Chords", combining the efforts of twenty two percussionists, guitarists, brass and theremin players (plus a blues harpist/vocalist) of incredibly varied ages and backgrounds, is its perfect expression.

None yet know the full scope of Halachbar's motives (may they be ever inscrutable), but one imagines He wanted to spread a message of love, that we are all sublimely linked to each other in subtle ways and will ultimately attain truth and understanding through cooperative sweetness. Either that, or this is somehow paving the way for the ruthless age of dictatorial Spamlords who will mold our society on one interrupted viewing of Demolition Man. Either way it's Goddamn amazing.

999,858: The Chords — Sh-Boom; 999,857: Stan Freberg — Sh-Boom; 999,856: The Crew Cuts — Sh-Boom

When first recorded by The Chords in 1954, the seminal doo-wop number "Sh-Boom" made sense to virtually no one and stoked fears in "polite" society of a coming race war (actually, that was Charles Manson's interpretation of "Helter Skelter", but I lacked a good "grabber" for "Sh-boom"). Anyway, it was a dopey, infectious song containing an obscene-sounding nonsense word whose subtext advocated sex, mild creepiness ("If only all my precious plans would come true", gollum) and, with "If I could take you up to paradise up above", could have been interpreted by an uptight person as a misguidedly suggested murder-suicide pact.

Luckily, parodist Stan Freberg was available to make sense of this R&B hit for white audiences, so accustomed to a demure musical landscape of slow-tempo crooning. Freberg pilloried The Chords in the guise of The Toads, who affect unintelligible accents in order to sell records to a mindless audience who wouldn't care what the lyrics said anyway. (Yikes, Stan Freberg). The exuberant performance of The Chords was mocked angrily, as Freberg shrieked sarcastically along to the scat-singing refrain. That tone of fuming condescension (with and without the histrionics), would be aped by white comedians against the encroachment of rock n' roll for years to come (notably with Steve Allen's treatment of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog").

The Crew Cuts, however, took a different tack, one used so successfully by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra for decades: they would record a slower, staider, non-threatening version of "Sh-Boom" so that upstanding white citizens might feel comfortable buying the record. With their lily-white, college glee-club stylings, (and utterly bloodless delivery, right down to the embarrassing ditto-machine job on the scat solo), the Crew Cuts made "Sh-Boom" a pop chart smash, even while making the Stan Freberg parody seem like a faithful adaptation. At least Stan put some emotion into it.

999,859: Mulatu Astatke — Yekermo Sew

Between iTunes, bit torrent, and Shake It Records, I haven't been to a mall record store in years. Back when I was forced to make the occasional foray, though, I remember thinking that the International section was the most dismal place in the whole store- and possibly the whole mall- full of crappy steel band comps, the Clannad back catalog, and scores of watered down calypso collections whose covers failed to evoke the feeling of Festive Island Fun so miserably that they ended up evoking the much more sinister feeling of Festive Island Clinical Depression.

Since I am genetically predisposed toward Festive Island Clinical Depression, I never spent too much time in the International section, so don't know if, buried behind the Frankie Yankovic tributes and the double disc "Folk Songs of the Andes" sets, my local record store stocked anything from the long-running Ethiopiques series of comps. If I ever find out they did, I will be forced to change my opinion of the International section from "the armpit of the mall" to "the armpit of the mall, which inexplicably cups a rare and wonderful gem."

Focusing mostly on Ethiopian singles from the 60s and early 70s- the twilight of Haile Selassie's 43 year reign- the Ethiopiques collections are like... uh... hmm. Okay, try this: remember that classic Star Trek episode when the Enterprise goes to that planet where someone long ago had left a book about 1920s gangsters? And the entire planet had modeled its society to resemble a slightly weird version of B movie gangland?

Well, imagine if instead of a book about gangsters, someone had left behind a Best of Glenn Miller LP, and a couple of James Brown singles collections. If the planet infused these new sounds with their own unique indigenous music, instead of impersonating a gangster Spock might have ended up having to blow a scorching pentatonic trumpet solo over an off kilter but driving percussion groove.

Sadly, the musician behind this track isn't Spock, but rather Mulatu Astatke, inventor of Ethio-Jazz and the sole subject of the 4th Ethiopiques comp.

yekermo sew - Ethiopiques Ense...

999,860: Judas Priest - Eat Me Alive

A bluntly phrased ode to aggressive fellatio, “Eat Me Alive” was the song that got Judas Priest in trouble with Tipper Gore and the PMRC, landing on their notorious “Filthy 15” list of songs that a handful of Washington housewives thought should be banned from public consumption. Admittedly, the song does contain the lines “Gut-wrenching frenzy that deranges every joint/I’m gonna force you at gunpoint/To eat me alive!”, which could be taken as disturbingly sincere if you hadn’t read somewhere that Rob Halford was really drunk when he wrote this. Certainly the PMRC and others took this as a disturbingly sincere approval of sexual violence…against women.

But what if? What if everyone had known then what we know now about Rob Halford’s sexuality, that he’d been writing about gay S&M since about 1976, and that that was pretty much the source of the band’s wardrobe? What if everyone had known that “Eat Me Alive” was actually about getting aggressive fellatio from dudes? Would that make it more…or LESS offensive to cultural watchdog groups? I mean, sure, they’ll still be uncomfortable with the overall sexual content. But even if you’re nuts enough to take the song at its absolute literal word, it’s CLEARLY not suggesting that listeners go out and rape WOMEN. There’s no longer a feminist argument against the song. And both of the participants in the song seem pretty enthusiastic about the proceedings, aside from that one tossed-off line about gunpoint – which in context sounds more like Rob talking dirty to the guy he’s got consensually chained to the wall. If you’re hell-bent on taking the song as a threat, the only argument left to make is that, having failed in their evil conspiracy to get all but two of their fans to attempt suicide, Priest decided to use their mystical subconscious powers to try and turn all of their fans gay. Now, this being America, you could probably get some people to sign on to that idea. But fortunately, it wouldn’t be enough to form a sizable voting bloc.

Ultimately, what “Eat Me Alive” shows us – besides a graphic gay-dungeon scenario with sweet metal guitars – is a failure of academic theory. Gay male porn is conspicuously missing from most feminist critiques of pornography and objectification, especially when – just as in “Eat Me Alive” – the sexual aggression is transferred onto another male. Nobody knows how to account for it, and nobody wants to try interpreting the abstract symbolism therein, as academic theory is wont to do. This is largely because nobody in our fucking stupid post-Puritan culture knows how to talk about male sexuality – straight or gay – in any terms but the utterly horrified. Fuck you, academia, this is why I haven’t bothered blowing a five-figure sum of money on a master’s degree.

Eat Me Alive - Judas Priest

999,861: Todd Rundgren - Slut

Given the sheer scope of Todd Rundgren’s star-making 1972 double LP Something/Anything?, it’s strange and typically perverse (in multiple senses of the word) that he would choose to end the whole affair not with a sweeping, majestic closer, but rather an ode to an aging barfly. “Slut” is a raunchy shuffle with a blaring horn section straight from New Orleans, the city whose whorehouses gave birth to the great American art form of jazz. Where Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters would later croon in “Young Lust” that he needed a dirty woman, with no small measure of self-loathing on his part, Rundgren unabashedly celebrates the joys of same.

Todd seems to have taken his date to a bar where he notices the title protagonist of “Slut” dancing invitingly. He enlists his background singers to help deliver the message to his date that “You put up such a good clean fight/I’m afraid that you lose tonight.” This alters the spirit of the old Mae West quote “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere” to something more like “Good girls get dumped via singing telegram from guys who are still at the bar, freaking on some drunken hussy right in front of them.” Rundgren then launches into the main chorus, which sounds almost like a cheerleader’s chant in the way it spells out “S-L-U-T” every two lines. The second verse further rubs Rundgren’s date’s nose in it, chastising her for being “so clean, so refined/You don’t care to get messy just to have a good time.” Class, reserve, and even good grooming are apparently not the commodities they once were in the wild dating free-for-all of 1972. Rundgren observes of the new apple of his eye, “She’s got saggy thighs, and baggy eyes/But she loves me in a way I can still recognize.” This couplet underscores the primal, irresistible biological appeal to a male of being selected for mating. It also effectively debunks the American beauty industry (and all the physical insecurities it preys upon) as a billion-dollar sham – at least if a woman’s only goal is to attract a mate. (Seriously, do you know what’s in the Kinsey report? Some dudes fuck LIVESTOCK when no one’s looking. Ladies, you probably don’t need to obsess over eyebrow grooming.) Of course, Rundgren himself was about to enter a glam phase, so it’s not like he had no use for makeup.

In practice, physical affection – however recognizable it may be – is rarely as uncomplicated as choosing the “whore” half of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. We don’t get to hear a “Slut” epilogue with a title like “Awkward Awakening” or “Many Years of Baggage.” (Nor do we know if Rundgren also gets his background singers to help hustle her out of his apartment.) Even so, there is acknowledgment here of the carnal realities of taking up with a slattern – she probably won’t be the looker of your dreams, especially after years of hard living. There is no idealized fantasy here, just dirty grimy sleazy reality, and that’s precisely the focus of Rundgren’s cheeky celebration. Rundgren would deliver the majestic album closer next time out with “Just One Victory,” which – in true contrarian spirit – capped a sonically perverse mindfuck of an album (A Wizard, A True Star) where nearly all of the remaining material was aimed at alienating his newfound pop fan base.

Slut - Todd Rundgren

999,862: Dennis Brown — Westbound Train

Some songs are full of those great melodies you just can't seem to get out of your head. Some might have a verse without much melody, but a chorus that really sticks with you. "Westbound Train" by Dennis Brown, has a single, tinny guitar lick that I have been humming to myself for about 6 years straight. It's the very first thing in the song and it's so goddamn catchy, I can't believe it hasn't been sampled by a million rappers.

The song itself, I don't know. It's been on my ipod for a long time, but I don't think I've ever intentionally played it. It was only about a week ago when it came up that I bothered to look down and see what the song was whose 3 second guitar riff had been torturing my brain all this time. I guess it's about someone taking a train to leave a girl, or to meet a girl? As for Dennis Brown, I don't know anything about him. According to the first line of his Wikipedia entry, he was a "singer." "Westbound Train" has some nice sounding horns too, and... AHH THERE'S THAT RIFF AGAIN. DING DING DING DING DING DEE DEE DONG.

I think what makes the riff stand out so much is that the song has no chord changes at all until the little lick comes in. Put this riff in a Beatles song and it might get lost in the shuffle of a dozen hooks, but in "Westbound Train," it's the king of the song, lording over it like Good King Wenceslas over the kingdom of christmas songs about kings. I almost feel bad asking any of you to click the link to hear the song, because it contains the swine flu of earworms. When you're tossing and turning at night, unable to sleep thanks to the Jamaican studio musician who probably tossed this lick off without a second thought about all the cancer cures and new polymers that wouldn't be discovered because it was playing on a loop in the brains of our nation's scientists, drowning out all rational thought, don't blame me. I warned you.

999,863: Eels — Rotten World Blues

Mark Oliver Everett is hardly the first guy in the music business to be dealt a bad hand on the personal tragedy front. But take away the countless avoidable deaths and injuries caused by over-indulging in the rock n' roll lifestyle (the overdoses on designer drugs, the choked-on-their-own-vomits, the shot-up-by-their-opposite-coast-rivals) and take away the freak disasters (your whole-band-was-killed-in-a-crash deals, your bassist-got-crushed-under-a-tour-bus-while-he-slept-in-it jobs), basically pare down to just the kinds of untimely suburban misfortunes most people will inevitably experience at least once in a lifetime. You could make a pretty good case that E is the musician most haunted by an excess of ordinary adversity, the setbacks that are unremarkable (if awful) individually and heartbreaking in cumulation.

As a teenager, E discovered his father's corpse at home, an experience worth more than enough trauma by itself, and one that helped foster his bent for biting gallows humor and bitter irony. Then, as a young musician, E was forced to cancel a tour when his mother succumbed to lung cancer—a tour supporting an album that was largely written in reaction to his sister's suicide.

At that point it's either laugh or cry, but E forged a path down the middle, developing the kind of outlook that says, "life is a daisychain of shit, but as long as you don't sweat it you'll be ok." His oeuvre is crammed with songs that stretch in both directions, spilling over with acerbic, world-weary lyrics that are delivered by punchy pop tunes so maniacally cheerful they sound like the soundtrack to a car commercial about beautiful 20-somethings packing a picnic in a convertible and singing with the top down all the way to the beach.

"Rotten World Blues" might have the most distance to travel between words to notes, as its kick-ass riff backs vignettes about two really sad characters. One, a nut who prophecies the end of the world while begging for change, and the other a lady who "needs a little lovin'/Looking for a light with her head in the oven".

"Yeah! Head in the oven!" you scream, pumping your fist. Finally, E gets to the third character, a street-walking lady with a secret. She's already figured out that "This rotten world's gonna chew you up/Swallow you whole and then spit you back out", so she's able to let all the world's crap bounce off her while she walks her ass around the neighborhood. I mean, easier said than done, but if you can't wrap your head around it yet just tune out the words and have yourself a little dance party.

999,864: Buddy Guy — Baby Please Don't Leave Me

Unless you count "sounding more grizzled" as a major innovation, aging bluesmen rarely engage in the kind of sonic reinvention regularly employed by musicians whose careers stretch beyond three decades. Sure, revered figures like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf freshened up their arrangements by assembling super-group backing bands composed of hero-worshiping white rockers, but the musical tone itself rarely strayed from that what brung those guys to the dance in the first place (aside perhaps from rocking a bit more).

In contrast, we have the restless Buddy Guy and his Sweet Tea album, which applies the bottom-register noise-making of late period Tom Waits to electrified Chicago blues. Track one, "Done Got Old", is an anti-intro, strategically lowering expectations; Guy admits in a rattling whisper, accompanied meekly by an acoustic guitar, that he's irrelevant, priming the listener for an hour of music by a man who says upfront that he can't play and sing like he used to.

Following immediately, though, is "Baby Please Don't Leave Me", a song that sounds like what might have happened if the invention of music—the primal ur-composition of modern humans, made with cave granite and pieces of burnt wood—found its way over to an amplifier and plugged in. Deliberate, forceful drumming is joined by a grinding bass, stopping by on its way home from job as a dredge on the midnight shift. The guitar follows, loud, wide and trending flat as if reaching toward the bottom, and then comes the unmistakable and undiminished wail of Buddy Guy urging his baby not to leave. A standard blues complaint, but this time chained to huge, filthy, soot-flinging machines and dragged, scraping industrial muck across a concrete floor.

This goes on for seven minutes without wasting a second. No, Buddy Guy can't sing and play like he used to. He's acquired far too much awesome.

999,865: Syd Barrett — Dark Globe

Dark Globe - Syd Barrett

I can’t imagine that we would give the non-schizophrenics the kind of leeway we give the mentally ill when it comes to music. Skip Spence, Daniel Johnston and Syd Barrett, left to their own devices, often play (or played) like kindergartners, given instruments for the first time.

You get the feeling that the chords are random, there’s a lack of tempo and wild-swinging dynamics, as though there were no rhyme or reason to them; as though they’re making their songs up as they go along.

There’s a very thin membrane, in every human mind, between sanity and insanity. Who among us hasn’t pushed up against that slight organic barrier at some point, gasping at the rollercoaster accidents piled up on the other side, all twisted metal and rodeo clowns?

Haven’t we all been so in love that we thought we were going to catch fire? Haven’t we all been so angry that some radically awful options have floated through our minds? Haven’t we all been so alone that we felt invisible, permanent disconnected from the world, like Barrett is in “Dark Globe.”

We recognize that that pattern, that template, that prism, as applied to the pop song as we know it, in their music, consciously or subconsciously. Maybe we find it frightening like the ghetto we’d never navigate; maybe we find it enthralling, like a carnival freak show; maybe we hope that no one sees the same things in ourselves that we hear in the music that these men make.

We give them the leeway to make music this way because it's part of who we are. And we're glad that we're not the ones who need to do it.

999,866: Billy Bragg & Wilco — California Stars

California Stars - Billy Bragg...

I never got the Woody-Guthrie-boner that most Bob Dylan fans eventually develop on their way to being self-righteous folk-loving pricks. The old-timey folk-y stuff just doesn’t do it for me like it does for people who have “Kill Yr Television” bumperstickers on their hatchbacks.

I think it’s because it just seems to prattle on and on, and I can’t slice through anybody’s Appalachian accent today, let alone Rev. Hatfield McCoy’s, cut into a glued-together acetate sometime in 1922.

Regardless, I find myself piecing together Woody’s life from some of the previously-mentioned self-righteous folk-loving pricks and the large amount of PBS that I droolingly ingest.

The guy had a long and pretty successful songwriting life, but then half-lost his mind along with the ability to control his nervous system. He felt himself to be a danger to his family, so he temporarily shipped himself off to California before eventually taking up permanent residence in a mental hospital.

At the end, he started writing strange new words, but couldn’t finish writing the songs, lacking the ability to play an instrument anymore. All these lyrics sat in a box in a basement for decades, until his family sanctioned Billy Bragg and Wilco to breathe life into them.

These aren’t rambling ballads to communist bank robbers; they’re strikingly modern pop lyrics.

My limited knowledge now gives me the picture of this dilapidated man, wanting to go to California and get better and live a free life, like he did in his youth, but he can’t control his own body. He became his own prison. Jeff Tweedy’s vocals don’t howl with angst, they’ve got a sepia-toned longing, just oozing out of them. They smile at memories, sigh, and sit contented enough.

Some of that credit goes to Tweedy and Bragg for the music and singing, but I can’t help feeling that these lyrics pushed the music to exist as it does, that this was how Guthrie would have heard it in his mind as he put them to paper.

Oh, shit. I’m getting a chubby.

999,867: .38 Special — Rockin' Into The Night

Rockin' Into The Night - .38 S...

The other day, on a late-night run to the grocery store for ice cream and cat litter, Leah and I nearly missed out on fantasizing that we, like the young lovers in “Rockin’ Into The Night,” were instead zooming down the highway to a cheap motel to get sleazy for the night. We spent the first two minutes of the song trying to figure out who was playing it.

They stopped telling you what the songs are, on Classic Rock Radio, a long time ago. Maybe they figure that after a hundred-thousand plays anyone who cared would already know their Foreigner from their REO from their Foghat from their Boston, but 97 percent of the time, I have no idea who’s on the air.

And I care a lot.

The problem is, now, what the problem was then: Rock from that mid-70’s to early-80’s era became so homogenized that you could’ve just called everything ROCK SONG by ROCK BAND. Legally, of course, they couldn’t. The Band owned the rights to the name “Band” and was still sitting pretty high on the hog in those days.

Just because there may have been a lack of originality in tone and structure doesn’t mean that these ROCK SONGs were bad. Every Motown song for 10 years had the same group of guys playing the same basic things, but we revere the crap out of it.

ROCK BAND (and their ROCK SONGs) are in need of a non-ironic reappraisal. If one were to experience “Rockin’” outside of the context of Classic Rock Radio, without the weight of everything that came before it, it would be considered a skull-crushing jean-jacket-dream of teenage sex and law-breaking (albeit, kinda tame law-breaking at 80MPH), instead of just another four minutes on the light rotation playlist of your local fireworks sponsor.

Thank the Demons of Rock that we now have the futuristic readout on Leah’s car radio to tell us that “Rockin’ Into The Night” is not, in fact, Bad Company or Billy Squier, but the normally sub-Skynyrd .38 Special; otherwise, we'd have argued right through to "Stairway." If the DJs aren’t gonna throw the love out there, I’m glad something does.

999,868: Susan Boyle — Wild Horses

Have you ever thought that "Wild Horses" was perhaps just a little too pretty a song for Mick Jagger's hokey fake country-boy boy accent. You have? What, are you crazy? Fuck you. The Stones version is untouchable. Why don't you go and listen to the Sundays version of the song. You deserve it. I'm sorry, what's that? Flat affectless 90s quasi-alternative britpop isn't your thing? Well shit. I guess you're out of luck.

Or wait. Maybe I can help you. While I was just home for thanksgiving I found out that my sister had taught my mother "how to Youtube". What my mom chose to do with here new skill, with all the wealth of the internet spread out before her, was watch that Susan Boyle clip one million times. Thus all we listened to for the entire holiday weekend was Susan Boyle's debut album "I Dreamed a Dream". Fortunately, most of that album is made of precisisely the kind of music I can tune out with ease, but there is one track I found myself looking forward to, her cover of Wild Horses.

Is it damning with faint praise to say how surprised I was that this track is actually good? Then let me say that it's actually excellent. After listening to about 10 different covers of this song on Lala, I've determined it to be second only to the original. It tops Molly Hatchet. It tops Alicia Keys and Norah Jones. It even tops the Flying Burrito Brothers proto-version. Of all of them, it seems to be the only one that isn't trying to either blow your mind with their wildly original interpretation, or counting on some residual affection for the song to buoy up their lackluster take. Sure, instead of innovation, the piano and string arrangement we're given is pure boilerplate, but it breaths in a way that this sort of thing often doesn't, sweeping in a pulling back at all the right moments. The strings in particular add all the necessary lushness without ever tipping into heaviness.

So even if you've heard a million versions of this song (you have), you watched that Susan Boyle Youtube clip a million times (You did), and you think you know exactly what this song is going to sound like (you do), I suggest that you give it a listen anyway, if only to hear how Boyle's voice still packs a wallop even when it isn't attached to the image of its dumpy creator.

Wild Horses - Susan Boyle

999,867: Fountains of Wayne — Red Dragon Tattoo

At their best, Fountains of Wayne is the thinking nerds Weezer, At their worst they're Weird Al for guys who think they're too cool for Weird Al. In between is this song. It has the goofy lyrics and insta-dated cultural references (Korn? Really?) that would go on to mar many otherwise fine F.O.W. songs, but it's also a fan favorite and a standout track on their standout album Utopia Parkway.

Most importantly this song, while silly, addresses an emotional truth about male nerds who use humor as a defense mechanism and their unrequited romantic yearnings. Look at this song as a peek inside the mind of such a dude and the it aquires an almost documentary realism. What nerd hasn't, at some point, hung all their hopes for cooldom on a single improbable affectation, a bad beard, a new shirt, or a tattoo. And when has it ever been a good idea?

So if you were or are this kind of nerd, listen to this song and feel the pleasure of knowing that somebody else UNDERSTANDS the way your stupid mind works. On the other hand, if you were the champion football fuckhead in highschool, with a promise ring in the finger of every hottie in the 10th grade, then listen to this song and realize that it isn't a joke, and it certainly isn't funny. It's a living document of the tragedy that is the lives of those strange creatures that surround you as you walk through the halls of your kingdom. Let's them pass in peace, my friend. For their very existence is torment enough as it is.

Red Dragon Tattoo - Fountains ...

999,868: Emmylou Harris - Roses in the Snow

Nothing underscores the fleeting impermanence of life and love quite like a song that moves from marriage to death in two completely fucking depressing verses. That’s the case with Emmylou Harris’ bluegrass classic “Roses in the Snow,” recorded for her 1981 album of the same title and written by the otherwise obscure Ruth Franks. The narrative of “Roses in the Snow” is condensed so drastically that we cover the main bullet points of a life story in just under two and a half minutes. There aren’t many supporting details, and we don’t even know if the singer’s love died young or old; the song could really reflect the life of anyone who’s lost a spouse, which is country-music universality at its best. The nature symbolism in the lyrics is pretty universal too; in the first verse, the singer meets her love in the springtime (youth!), when all the flowers were in bloom (sexual fertility!). By the second verse, God has already taken her darlin’. Maybe it was a heart-wrenching tragedy, or maybe we’ve covered fifty years of wedded bliss in one verse. Whichever the case, this choice in story construction takes the old cliché about how “life goes by so fast” and pumps it full of methamphetamine. Rather than the melancholy sigh of an elderly person who has lived a full life, we are hearing HOLY SHIT IT IS FUCKING PANIC TIME WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE OR LOSE A LOVED ONE IN LIKE ONE MINUTE. Anyway, what are human lives but blinks of an eye in the grand scheme of cosmic time? What will human civilization have meant once conditions on our planet are no longer conducive to life as we know it? How the hell do I ever manage to leave my room without being paralyzed by anxiety?

Yet the music remains irrepressibly upbeat even through the third and final verse, where the singer returns to her husband’s hillside grave to find the wild spring flowers blooming (full circle! life goes on! circle of life! etc.). She vows to leave a rose (love!) in the winter snow (death!) on his grave, and we have the depressing yet life-affirming moral of the story, which may as well be a European art-house flick: everything we do is done in the shadow of mortality, but we do it anyway. “Roses in the Snow” is poetic symbolism for “Love In the Face of Inevitable Doom,” and once we’ve understood and accepted that idea, there’s really nothing left to do but have a good old-fashioned bluegrass hoedown about it.

Roses In The Snow - Emmylou Ha...

999,869: Sid Vicious - My Way

In Frank Sinatra’s hands, “My Way” was a proud, unapologetic look back on a tumultuous lifetime of accomplishment from one of the most important figures in all of American popular music. In the hands of doomed and musically incompetent punk rocker Sid Vicious, “My Way” was something very, very different. Vicious was never really a musician; he was chosen to replace Glen Matlock as the Sex Pistols’ bass player largely because lead singer Johnny Rotten needed a friend and ally in the band, and bass couldn’t be THAT hard to learn, could it? Well, as it turns out, learning the bass becomes considerably more difficult when your new junkie girlfriend gets you hooked on smack. By the time the Pistols broke up, Vicious was a certified waste-case with little bankable talent, aside from a threatening media image that stemmed from a number of violent incidents.

He certainly didn’t have a voice that could support a solo career, as becomes instantly clear in the orchestral opening of his “My Way” version. Knowing full well that he can’t sing for shit, Vicious doesn’t even try, actively making his voice do things that could get him booed off of even a karaoke stage. You could read it as a snotty sendup of Sinatra-style crooning, but it’s abundantly clear that no matter the commentary, this approach is born of a complete lack of talent. Vicious also starts changing the words, replacing “My friends, I’ll say it clear” with the endlessly clever “You cunt, I’m not a queer.” It’s the sort of parody lyric you could get from any number of bored high school students, including this author circa 1992.

After the first verse, the electric punk-rock guitars kick in, and Vicious delivers the rest of the song in a piss-poor Johnny Rotten imitation. This despite his having fallen out with Rotten over the issue of drug addiction, and mocking Rotten as a prat who wears hats in the last verse of the song. It’s less possible here to think of Vicious’ vocals as snotty sendups of the original article; Rotten’s style was by his own admission the product of a less than stellar singing voice, but he at least had an ear for what he could do with it that would fit the music. Vicious, by contrast, sounds like he has no idea how else to sing. And as amateurish as Rotten could be, he still sang in tune, with a steady pitch. Vicious sounds practically tone-deaf here, unable to maintain vocal control even on the extremely basic level that a convincing Rotten imitation would require. He also can’t enunciate very well, which makes it hard to tell exactly how many lyrics have been changed over the rest of the song (although it’s clear that “I did all that” becomes “I killed a cat,” and “I ate it up” becomes “I shot it up”).

But, in the end, this is all exactly what the song is about. The transparent lack of musical talent, the poorly thought-out rebellion, the pointless self-destruction, the terrible life choices that would later culminate in the possible murder of his girlfriend…the utter failure of Sid Vicious is unabashedly celebrated here, and no matter how big a joke the musical results are, it’s conceptual genius. To some, it’s become an iconic punk statement, thanks to the symbolism of inverting Sinatra’s big statement into such a clear antithesis of everything it originally meant. And in one sense, Vicious’ version rings truer than Sinatra’s: when Sinatra sang “And now, the end is near,” he lived almost another thirty years. When Vicious sang it, it was literally true. As such, his version hews more closely to the spirit of the lyrics, providing an epitaph that’s every bit as messy as the life it capped.

999,870: Carcass - Incarnated Solvent Abuse

Some song lyrics are very general, aiming for universal emotions culled from common human experiences. Other song lyrics are abstract and rooted in the subconscious, allowing the listener to interpret meaning from their own perspective. In both cases, we may be left to wonder what a song is really about. Carcass’ “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” is a song about using human remains to make glue, and then sniffing it. No, you won’t get this by just listening to the song, because the lyrics are mostly unintelligible. Yes, you will need two dictionaries – one medical, one regular – to help you decipher the countless 20-cent words you will find on the lyric sheet. But, at the end of the day (as sports commentators are so fond of saying), there is no mistaking the topic of “Incarnated Solvent Abuse.”

But there is more to a song than just lyrics. And at the end of the day (as sports commentators are so fond of repeating two sentences later), “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” is about what most heavy metal songs are about – sweet-ass fucking guitar riffs. This song is packed with them, rivaling contemporaries Slayer and Pantera in terms of power, technical skill, and memorability. This is largely due to new guitarist Michael Amott, who joined Carcass on their 1991 death-metal landmark Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious. Previously a straight-up grindcore band following in Napalm Death’s footsteps, Carcass delved into more traditional metal with Amott’s arrival, and his skill as a riff writer helped give their chaotic noise a stronger sense of structure. The results are still bruuuuutal, yet about as accessible as death metal gets.

Perhaps the only thing we’re left to wonder about with “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” is why the song’s protagonist couldn’t just buy some glue at the store. The all-vegetarian band’s answer would probably be: why are you grossed out by glue made from humans, but not animals? But my answer is, I believe, more accurate and insightful: because if he bought glue at the store, it wouldn’t be made from HUMANS. Duh.

Incarnated Solvent Abuse - Car...