999,900: Kenny Chesney - Living in Fast forward

Recently, I saw a movie called "The Butterfly Effect." It was the worst movie I'd ever seen. It's about time travel, or magic powers, or something - I couldn't really tell. This guy keeps travelling back and forward in time every time he reads his old diary. At one point, he ends up in an alternate universe where his hands have been blown off and for some reason he needs a wheel chair. Because that's what they give you when you don't have any hands. A wheel chair.

Interestingly enough, a year before "The Butterfly Effect" came out, Kenny Chesney released the song "Living In Fast Forward," which deals with a very similar concept. You see, the character in the song has been traveling through space-time in a forward direction along the continuum, and now needs to somehow reverse the flow of time or "rewind real slow." Unlike Ashton Kutcher's character in "The Butterfly Effect," Kenny Chesney hasn't been forced to give himself stigmata to avoid fellating neo-nazi prisoners, but he has filled his body with "greasy cheeseburgers and cheap cigarettes" and done a lot of "runnin' and son-of-a gunnin'." Either way, both of them need to "rewind," although Kutcher needed to rewind real fast, because he was about to get killed in a prison riot.

Like the theme of the Butterfly Effect, which suggests that by trying to go back in time to perfect the present, you can end up destroying the future, "Living in Fast Forward" is also awash in bitter irony. The song, with a catchy, chant-along chorus, honky-tonk fiddlin' and salutes to being a "hillbilly rockstar," practically dares you to take another shot of whiskey. It's a song about a guy who has to stop partying before he kills himself with his bad habits that seems designed to encourage those habits. Perhaps Kenny can read his lyric sheets and travel backwards through time to before he started partying so hard, but we can't, and this song isn't going to help at all. It's "The Butterfly Effect" of music, except it makes you want to pump your fist into the air, not into your own face.

999,901: Martin Denny — Hava Nagila / Scimitar

Lots of fleeting musical trends emerged and vanished in the years after World War II—pretty much all of the trends not called Rock N' Roll, actually—but Martin Denny's exotica was probably the only one based on a kitschy restaurant fad. An amalgam of largely latin instruments, latin rhythms, latin chord progressions and ersatz animal noises (mostly bird calls shouted in turns by members of the combo), exotica's intention was to evoke, uh, the lands of the South Pacific—sort of "Bali Ha'i" as a genre.

Oh, there was the occasional foray into "Asian" territory as well, usually employing the kinds of "Chinese" melodies you can plink out using just the black keys of a piano, but exotica was mainly a phenomenon of tiki culture, that Jonny Quest-ian take on any place that might recently have hosted a death march and was located safely on the other side of a vast ocean. All you really needed was a bunch of Caucasians clad in what you might now call Yacht Rock gear, the suggestion of a non-white nation more than 1,000 miles from North America, and a minor key, and you had the makings of a pretty decent exotica song.

Denny's fake world music was certainly real enough for his fans, the denizens of sunken suburban living rooms in new developments throughout the US, who might well have been sipping home-made mai tais while spinning a side or two of exotica and eyeing the scantily-clad, vaguely Asian or Polynesian lass splayed across the album cover. It didn't matter if it was all make-believe, since if you were resigned to life in suburbia you might as well fantasize about places that technically didn't exist.

And as long as you're mixing together cultures willy-nilly, why not go completely for broke? Why not take your sluggish congas, your grooved cylinders, your wordless female vibratos, your cascading piano lines—all the usual trappings of your grass-skirted, faux island music—and apply them to a Jewish folk song that was written to celebrate the Balfour declaration? And since nobody loves the Balfour Declaration like the Arab people, how about you tack on something vaguely Arabian sounding? After all, Arabs and Jews go together as well as the music of Arabs, Jews, the Chinese, Fijians and Cubans does.

Hava Nagila / Scimitar - Marti...

999,902: The Band — Don't Do it

It takes approximately three great singers and a horn section directed by Allen Toussaint to equal one Marvin Gaye, and luckily that's the configuration The Band went with in covering "Baby Don't You Do It" live (that's "Don't Do It" as in "don't mess up this sweet song"). And wisely, The Band doesn't try to do it the way Gaye did it, even going so far as to retitle it.

Whereas the original is all about propulsion, The Band's version is all about holding back. And although it sounds a lot slower, that's an aural magic trick—The Band only clocks in a tad less speedy. It's as though the music itself is trying to reverse the girl's determination to break The Band's collective heart.

Starting off with Levon Helm's slippery drumming and Rick Danko's pliant bass line, The Band slides into a groove that sits a hair behind the beat. Robbie Robertson's tight guitar riff soon joins in with Toussaint's punchy horns; Helm takes lead vocal, with Rick Danko and Richard Manuel stepping in to buttress him at key moments. And maybe the song's most key moment is when Helm sings, "I tried to do my best", while Danko and Manuel back him with high harmony and Toussaint's saxes accent the phrase with a yearning three-note figure. And the second most was the decision to end the performance on a dot after Robertson's vigorous solo.

Don't Do It - The Band

999,903: Busta Rhymes — So Hardcore

When your run-of-the-mill '90s rapper brags about being "so hardcore", it's almost redundant. You take it as given that the artist in question takes pride in their hardcore quotient, because it is the '90s, and rap is a scary music full of crimes and bad words.

But what about when Busta Rhymes does it? As the oft-professed court jester of hip-hop—the muppet who sits on Jabba the Hutt's tail of hip-hop, if you will—one might expect that Busta's take on the hardcore concept would exhibit telltale signs of his trademark eccentricity. The "real life" Busta was, on the one hand, caught with a machete in his trunk, which seems pretty hardcore, but on the other hand he also named himself after a luckless NFL kick returner, which...less so.

Since real life once again leaves something to be desired, let's turn to his MC persona. Even when he takes a break from repping the apocalypse for a brag-and-dis track—its almost atonal piano riff and a tambourine shake sound pretty sinister (hardcore-ish!)—Busta keeps you off balance. That's "you", the unnamed rapper from "So Hardcore" whose rhyming skills are lesser than Busta's.

First, Busta hijacks "your whole shopping malls." Then, using a remote control, he forces you to "crash cars and shit". Now onto the subject of your wack rhymes; just how bad are they? They "make people start cursin'/Flows contradict worser than the King James version." Ouch! Suffice to say, your so-called "skills" are pathetic.

That's all very clever, and some of it funny, but what does it really say about Busta and his claim to be hardcore? I'll tell you what's hardcore: having the stones to say you're "so hardcore like Quickdraw McGraw", a thick cartoon horse who is probably not even among the most harcore Hanna-Barbera characters. And in case you missed it, Busta compares himself to Quickdraw seven times. There's your hardcore.

So Hardcore - Busta Rhymes

999,904: The Stone Poneys/Linda Ronstadt — Different Drum

Different Drum - Linda Ronstad...

I tend to talk incessantly, with the intent to provoke. My girlfriend, being a smart and classy lady, usually just ignores the shit out of me, while I quack on and on about this or that, generally being a smartass.

A few weeks ago, I managed to punch a hole in the white noise forcefield that she has erected between my mouth and her ears, by claiming that Linda Ronstadt is a slut.

I’m a regular reader of Jezebel.com, and The Bell Jar spent a good part of last year as my daily bathroom reading, so I feel like I have my feminist credentials fully up to date.

As a feminist, let me confirm that we’re taking back the word, making it a signifier of sexual strength and freedom; the female version of “stud.”

In the early stages of reclamation, “slut” still has that tangy zing of insult, which is probably why Leah and I got into a knockdown-dragout over the honor of Linda Ronstadt, an artist that neither of us would be able to successfully pick out at a Linda Ronstadt concert.

I’d probably have to continue sleeping on the couch well into the next decade, if the song on the radio at the time of my remarks wasn’t “Different Drum.”

It’s impressive that Ronstadt (and The Stone Poneys) got away with a female singing this song in 1967, a song with themes that today’s teen-queen divas still use to court controversy: Sex. And lots of it. With multiple partners. I’m blushing just thinking about it.

It’s a coolly enumerated rejection of a clingy boy who wants to love only her. She’s just not ready to have anyone or anything pull the reins in on her. No, she doesn’t explicitly mention S-E-X, but this was the Summer of Love, so what am I to think? That she wants to hold a lot of different hands, to see which suits her best? I think not.

She wants to sample the wares of many a bearded weird-o, and not have to cook or clean or pump out babies. She doesn’t want to have to listen to some dude go on for hours crying about how his band’s not getting its due. She wants to hit the fucking party, man.

If the fellow in question was smart enough to see what was being offered (the ability to “love” Ronstadt from time to time, as well as “loving” whoever else), he could have had a good thing going.

Maybe he couldn’t, psychologically, share a woman. Maybe he wanted to pin down the obvious cash-cow that Ronstadt is, she of big voice and smooth soft-pop music, to set his future in mansions. Maybe he wanted to lower his chances of catching syphilis.

I just don’t get it. Didn’t he know about penicillin?

999,905: The Bob Seger System — Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man

My first response to finding out that “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” is a Bob Seger song continues to be my response to knowing that it’s a Bob Seger song: “Fuck you, that’s not Bob Seger.”

Bob Seger, the unfortunate punchline of Midwest rock? Bob Seger, the Cleveland of the music world? Bob Seger, of “Night Moves,” “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and Chevy commercial fame? Impossible. Unpossible, even.

The internet, not to mention several very patient friends, continues to insist that I’m wrong, so I’ve got to suck it up and give Seger the props he deserves for growling fiercely, over a loping mammoth of a backbeat, that “you can have your funky world, see ya round.”

All current evidence to the contrary, Seger was born hungry on the streets of Ann Anbor; a leather-cloaked tough with a knife and a penchant for back alley dice games; an ugly son of a bitch, with a peacock strut, landing ladies and splitting on the sly.

Swagger oozes from every note, every beat, of this song. Christ, I bet it would put chest hair on a toddler, were one exposed.

Even the toughest hood is no match for a recording industry suit, cartoon wolves that they are. Failure after failure and, one imagines, one too many bad spins of those fortune wheels, makes the sting of defeat hard to ignore.

Eventually, those suits’ suggestions of recording “You'll Accomp'ny Me” began to sound a little more reasonable.

From what I understand, Seger doesn’t play his pre-Silver Bullet Band work live, and is loathe to have it re-released and in print. I would think that it only serves as a reminder of how badass he once was, and can no longer be.

Maybe the truth is that this is Bob Seger. The guy playing “Fire Lake?” I don’t know who that is, and I bet Bob doesn’t either.

999,906: ? & the Mysterians — Stormy Monday

Stormy Monday - ? & The Myster...

Every garage band needs a slow dance in their repertoire. Whether for the purpose of cooling their blistering fingers, exposing their sensitivity to the ladies in the crowd, or letting the fellas pull their gals in a little bit closer, they’ve got to cool it down for a minute.

Best known for their chaotic keyboard rippers, ? & the Mysterians take the chill pill via T-Bone Walker’s “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad).”

The thing about the fast songs is that they tend to hide your mistakes. Folks don’t notice scratches in your car, barreling by them at 100 miles an hour, but on a slow cruise down the strip, every flaw glares like a mirror ball in the sun.

The Mysterians aren’t the most technically proficient band in the world, and that really comes through here. Missed notes, dropped beats and poorly-fingered chords are all here, as is a palpable strain to keep the tempo in check.

The guitar solo goes off the rails, and you can hear the player’s confidence drain and the panic set in, just before the song fades away. The thing is, though, that there isn’t a second of this that doesn’t work perfectly.

Our narrator is shaken, stirred, got-the-blues-so-bad-man-I-wish-I-was-dead depressed, and there’s a slightly above average chance that he’s drunk on fortified wine or bathtub gin, missing the woman who left with his heart.

He’s in no position to do anything all the way correct. If music is supposed to be an extension and reflection of the lyrics, then this is one of the most successful songs in the history of recorded music.

Setting a song of such endearing and obvious honesty alongside juvenile sex-romp macho-postures like “96 Tears” gives them a gravity that they would lack, otherwise.

If they gave out Best Supporting Song Grammy Awards, “Stormy Monday” would’ve won in 1966 by a landslide.

999,907: Phosphorescent — Cocaine Lights

Have you ever done so much cocaine that the next morning, drinking a beer at the kitchen table, you could feel your “own blood clicking”? I, thankfully, have not, but I don’t need too, because Matthew Houck (aka Phosphorescent) has, and has written this pretty rootsy gospel song telling me all about what it’s like.

Recreational drugs serve a variety of useful purposes, but two big ones spring immediately to mind: they can offer unique insight by giving us a new perspective from which to view the world, and/or they can make us feel really fucking awesome. The problem with the former is that these insights are often false (no, that repetitive clicking just noticed buried deep in the percussion is not the most amazing sound ever recorded). The problem with the latter is that the sensation is fleeting, and the memories are usually hazy, if they exist at all.

And you tend to feel not so awesome the next morning.

Which brings us to a third, somewhat ancillary and decidedly less fun purpose for recreational drug use- putting us through the physical, mental, and spiritual wringer so thoroughly, that we emerge afterward completely raw and stripped of all pretense. This is what hits Houck in the gut while he sucks down his post-binge morning beer. After all the coke and the fun he had the night before with the “new set of hips”, he’s left with little besides the longing for what one assumes is the previous set of hips, and the person one assumes is attached to them. But that’s also where he rediscovers who he really is- his “sense of grace” and “rightful place”. Despite the title, this song isn’t about coke-induced epiphany. It’s about the real epiphany that comes the morning after.

Unlike the revelation about that clicking sound, Houck’s insight is something that may stick, at least until the Cocaine Lights start shining again.

Cocaine Lights - Phosphorescen...

999,908: Souls of Mischief — Cab Fare

Before I start getting all egghead, let me begin by saying that this song, which was never released due to legal issues with the sample, really bumps. The beat pulls at least three neck snapping loops from the the theme from Taxi, and still- crucially- stays true to the original. And as you’d expect from the crew who brought you the stunning ’93 Till Infinity album, the MCs shine as well, bringing their distinctive off kilter rhymes and a playful wit that is sadly all but gone from modern day rap. It’s smart and expertly spat, but charming and goofy, a combination which, over this sweet beat, is ear to ear grin inducing.

Now, grinning is all well and good, but what launches this track into the realm of genius is something missing from almost all hip hop from any era: wall to wall cohesion.

It’s okay when hip hop is kind of all over the map. It’s fine if an MC spits a series of fairly disconnected rhyming couplets about what a good rapper he or she is over a Milt Jackson sample. It really is. What does Milt Jackson have to do with being an awesome rapper? Who cares? Didn’t you hear what the man said? He’s an awesome rapper. That’s the point, not Milt Jackson.

It's fine, but it's the easy way out. Souls of Mischief didn’t take the easy way out. They could have phoned in an impressive string of battle raps over this delectable beat, and still ended up with a great track. But they didn’t. Instead, they created a series of cab themed vignettes and characters. A late night party goer gets stuck in a bad neighborhood, getting more and more nervous as a series of caucasian cabbies fly past, ignoring him. A frustrated passenger jumps out of the cab after a greedy driver pulls out every trick in the book to drive the fare up, and the next rapper takes the character of the grumpy cabby. A cash strapped rapper takes a cabby job one summer, and has a blast toting ladies around in his “spectacular… very bright yellow Acura”.

Rhyming about cabs and cab drivers over a beat about cabs and cab drivers. Each piece is impressive on its own, but joined together via the magic of cohesion, they're amazing.

999,909: Mercyful Fate - A Dangerous Meeting

For a time in the early ‘80s, it seemed that heavy metal had hired Satan as its chief marketing executive. Amid all the pentagram logos and the B-movie horror songs that dramatized (but didn’t advocate) evil, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to one-up the pack by selling themselves as a genuine practicing Satanist, for whom occult-themed lyrics weren’t just a posture. That somebody turned out to be Mercyful Fate singer King Diamond, who claimed an affiliation with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan and wrote obsessively about black magic and the sorts of demonic rituals that suburban parents suspected their teenagers were performing in the garage and/or basement. Oh, sure, Diamond has since clarified a number of times that he doesn’t actually worship the devil and is really more of a marketing-savvy atheist. But the “is he or isn’t he” ambiguity still fuels Mercyful Fate’s mystique -- even more than Diamond’s “evil Kiss” stage makeup, which inspired many a black metal band in decades to come.

“A Dangerous Meeting” leads off the band’s classic Don’t Break the Oath album, and may be the most memorable song in their catalog. The sound is post-Judas Priest/Iron Maiden metal, with a healthy dollop of minor-key neo-classical flavor learned via Ritchie Blackmore. Then there’s the one-of-a-kind King Diamond Voice, which takes the falsetto registers of Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson to the next logical extreme, and mixes in some lower-register growling and bellowing. The whole sound is pitch black. Jet black. Black as night. Black as coal. But cutting sharply. Black and sharp, like obsidian. Or a really, really sharp knife that happens to be black. It basically doesn’t matter that the lyrics – which tell the tale of a coven destroyed by the demon spirit they conjured up – are difficult to understand. The music makes clear that this is real-deal evil.

Well…sort of. Read the lyrics, with their slightly awkward grammar, and you’re struck by the exact same B-movie quality of the less committedly “Satanic” metal bands. One wonders if this isn’t partly reflective of the fact that these guys are Danish, and hence not native English speakers. If it’s hard to spell “merciful,” it’s definitely hard to sound evil in your second language. (See also: Germany’s Scorpions trying to sound really sexual in the verses of “Rock You Like a Hurricane.”) Read along, and you’ll hear more of the spots where the King has to rush or stretch syllables to make the words fit the melody line. It’s like watching a horror movie and noticing the camera crew’s reflection in the villain’s mask – the spell can be broken when the artifice is visible. So it’s a testament to the skill of the band’s music that you can mentally plug in just about any misheard lyric without substantively altering the mood and effect (e.g., “Toniiiiiiiight the eeevil mean liiiibraaariaaaaaaaaaaan”). And in the end, if English is your second language too, you won’t be parsing this for meaning below the surface anyway. Hence Mercyful Fate’s vast influence on the even more self-consciously evil genre of black metal. And hence the easy cross-cultural translation and worldwide appeal of heavy metal, in all its glorious lack of subtlety.

Postscript: King Diamond is obsessed with the number 9 as a signifier of Satan. (Example: add 6+6+6, get 18, add 1+8, get 9.) Look what number this song ended up at. EEEEEEEEEEERIE. Makes you wonder where our exclusive algorithm really came from...

A Dangerous Meeting - Mercyful...

999,910: Angel Witch - Angel Witch

Proudly following in the footsteps of bands like Black Sabbath, Motorhead, and Iron Maiden by naming both an album AND song after their band, Angel Witch is one of the lesser-known lights of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Adorning their artwork with all sorts of occult trappings, and writing largely about angels, witches (go figure), and assorted supernatural shit, Angel Witch positioned themselves as arguably the most “evil” band of the entire movement -- save for Venom, who single-handedly invented black metal by playing their instruments poorly and yelling about Satan. Angel Witch’s posturing seems fairly tame nowadays, given everything that’s followed in the realm of extreme metal, but in 1980 this was as dark as it got, and the music was good enough for their first album to hold up very well.

Like so much early-‘80s metal that dabbled in dimestore Satanism for marketing purposes, the song “Angel Witch” isn’t really about the occult; upon closer examination, the titular lady is merely an angel because the singer loves her, and a witch for not returning his love. But in the context of a fast-paced awesome heavy metal song where the chorus is the easiest part to understand, the distinction is lost; it sounds like it must be about evil. The association is already there, and the band is just playing coyly with it, maintaining plausible deniability. Sort of like how I used the technically correct phrase “titular lady” a few sentences ago.

There’s one musical moment, however, that inadvertently dispels all the carefully crafted mystique. Having piled on the fist-pumping riffs and choruses and almost-precise solos, the band opts for a breakdown about 2½ minutes in. And who sings this chorus? Not lead singer Kevin Heybourne. Not Lucifer. Not the titular witch. It’s a gang of heavily accented, melody-impaired Britons, shouting along like they’re at a football match. Sonically, it’s as if the band took time out from conjuring open the very gates of Hell to round up all the yobs getting pissed at the pub down the street from the recording studio. And suddenly we’ve got a completely different picture of who Angel Witch really is. It isn’t really time for Satan to reap souls with his wicked sorcery – it’s time to hoist a pint. Which, in the end, is kind of lovable.

999,911: Morbid Angel - Rapture

Ah, Morbid Angel. As the first American death metal band who 1) could truly play the hell out of their instruments, and 2) truly believed in the occult subject matter of their lyrics, they are positively revered by death metal’s true believers. These guys are deadly, deadly, deadly serious. So much so that guitarist Trey Azagthoth (real name: George Emmanuel III) came across the hoax Necronomicon that was published in the 1970s by a New York occultist using the alias Simon, read up on the fictional H.P. Lovecraft monster-gods contained therein, and -- having never encountered Lovecraft’s own writing -- took them to be actual demonic entities worthy of ritual worship. (SIDE NOTE: Lovecraft unequivocally stated that the Necronomicon was his own fictional creation, in response to people who bombarded him with queries about where they could obtain a copy. “Magicians” find ways to get around this inconvenient truth, claiming that the vehicle of your personal journey is less important than the destination, or that Lovecraft was nonetheless an unconscious medium, or other such fancies.) Sure, it all sounds frightening in its apparent sincerity, but dig just a bit below the surface, and it’s clear that the only real danger here is that you might injure yourself laughing.

That’s actually a pretty good model for appreciating “Rapture,” the first single off of Morbid Angel’s 1993 major-label debut Covenant. “Rapture” was Morbid Angel’s MTV breakthrough, getting airplay late at night when parents were too sleepy to worry that their children were being hypnotized by the magic of heavy metal into becoming evil sorcerers. (This had been a common concern during the Reagan era.) As straight-ahead death metal goes, this is pretty high-class stuff. David Vincent’s vocals are borderline Cookie Monster but are often surprisingly intelligible, and Azagthoth’s riffs are actually kind of catchy for being largely atonal, which is no small feat. The first few times you hear “Rapture” – say, as a Headbanger’s Ball-watching teenager who’s never heard death metal before – it sounds terrifying. Everything is so fast and busy and harsh. It’s an onslaught from the pits of Hell, which is exactly what they’re on about.

But as the seeming chaos of the music’s surface starts to become clearer, and the ears begin to pick the elements apart, its foundation takes shape. Get past all the blastbeats and double-time drum work, and the underlying rhythms of the song are fairly simple things – martial, and…stiff. Really stiff. Listen especially to the drum accents under the first solo, and again toward the end of the song (the part that goes DOOF! DOOF! DOOF! DO-DO-DO-DOOF! DOOF! DOOF!). Pretend you’re on American Bandstand, and see how this music makes your body want to move. It’s a bit too fast to be a march, but start swinging your arms to it. You will soon realize that Morbid Angel have inadvertently created one of the best power-walking soundtracks in all of Christendom. The song even gives you a little breather during the midtempo mosh breakdown in the middle. But then it’s time to start pumping those arms vigorously again! Get that heart rate back up! Put that water bottle back in your fanny pack! Once more around the subdivision!

Sometimes, in a quest for serious authenticity, people forget the value of enjoyment. This is why artistic assessments often get inverted down the line – deadly serious intent can read as profound silliness later on, while the most seemingly ridiculous concoctions can wind up as an era’s most enduring work, once the cultural context has disappeared and the repeated clichés aren’t so common anymore. In the wake of the ‘90s alternative revolution, ‘80s pop has become standard-issue party music. As extreme metal has taken over heavy metal’s creative vanguard (for both good and bad), there’s a definite appeal in Rob Halford screeching about monsters from the sky, or Ronnie James Dio howling about dragons and kings. What once seemed ridiculous is now, again, awesome. Maybe the same will be true of Morbid Angel one day. Or maybe the blind idiot god Azathoth who dwells at the center of Ultimate Chaos will destroy the Earth first.

Rapture - Morbid Angel