Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3t3ua68Qg

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."  — Brian Eno

This is a song in which something terrible has happened.

Saturday Come Slow — Massive Attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnE8dxbonDQ

Massive Attack has this wonderful control over their tone and timbre — they are a band that could make me believe in magic, I think. It's hyperbole, but it's all I've got to describe the sound, immersive and full of quiet, subtle power, bass and strings and swells and releases. The lyrics are a mystery, unpredictable and full, warm and cool and breathless, about things bigger and more important that human love and hate, and yet inextricably tied to them. I love it so much, but I don't know what it's about. The lyrics are poetry, to be felt and heard, not understood.

Skinny Love — Bon Iver

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssdgFoHLwnk

I don't care about the lore around this album. Well, obviously I must, I'm talking about it. Legend has it that Bon Iver, following a breakup (what a perfect origin story for a teenage indie idol) sequestered himself in a cabin in the woods in upstate somewhere, chopping wood and hunting for food and recording a slow, delicate album of emotional betrayal. Isn't that perfect wish-fulfillment? Isn't that just masturbatory? Except that it's true — Justin Vernon, sick with mono recorded For Emma, Forever Ago in a cabin in Medford, Wisconsin.

Which makes it worse.

I love this song on a musical level — it's well-recorded and well-sung and the lyrics are fine and expressive and hardly whiny — the instrumentation is powerful and shiny, drab as it needs to be; he does a whole lot, and he's the only one on the record, multitracked into oblivion. It is great music.

But I don't like to listen to it. Where I am in my life, I need to use prescriptive music, not descriptive music. I've written about it twice, here and here. Perhaps I should make it clearer.

Descriptive music is music to listen to that shows how you feel. If you're happy, listen to happy music. If you're sad, dig your teeth in and listen to sad music. It feels great to be mad as hell and listen to punk music, or to feel confused and listen to strange muddled pop, or to be sleepy and listen to quiet, slow music. And, for the most part, this is fine.

Except that, when I'm sad or angry, I don't want to feel that way for very long. It's not a great feeling, and I don't want to keep it. So there's Prescriptive music, music designed to transition you from one state to another. Music that is a vector, pointing firm towards one headspace. And this song isn't that.

Which is no fault of its own. But it's why I stopped listening.

Lovecraft in Brooklyn — The Mountain Goats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHgZRGLgo0

The second Mountain Goats I ever heard, and the first I ever heard knowingly. A school play used Your Belgian Things in a scene, and I remember it vividly, but it doesn't count. This song was a song I heard of choice, knowingly and in full control; and yet the song takes so much of that away. This is a song I like and understand and relate to, despite its inherent refusal to be understood and related to.

In short, it is a man in Brooklyn for whom Lovecraftian Horror is at first a metaphor for, and then a real description of, his personal anxieties. It plays a bait-and-switch; what is first analogy becomes very real; the music goes buck wild, flailing and screaming and whining as the ocean rises over his head, crossing galaxies to tie the incoming alien invasion of winged monster-demons to the man's own fear at walking on the street, or having people over for dinner, or ordering coffee. And, as such, of course I'd love it.

Kate — Ben Folds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7BUG8LOd8A

I've written before about Ben Folds; once overwhelmingly positively, and once less so. This song, Kate, is less tainted for me, so to speak. It's not as emotionally immature. If we move past the idea that it's a 31-year-old man (well, at the time) singing about having a crush, it spoke directly to me when I listened to it in 2009, nearly twelve years later. Scary to think it's been four years.

I could talk musically about this — it has some funny tricks with counterpoint and meter; a rhythm section with cowbell I really like; fuzzy guitar and sharp high piano; call-and-response; harmonies and dynamics, clever composition and clever arrangement. But I'm afraid on re-listen it doesn't hold up for me — the lyrics seem shallow, in comparison. Perhaps it's because everything I've listened to after (with the exception of Maroon 5, maybe) has been more lyrically complex (look at any of the other songs on this site). But I think Ben Folds knows about this weakness.

One of my favorite albums of all time, without exception, is his fake leak to Way to Normal. The story goes, he decided on a whim to record a fake version of the album with the same track names but different, terrible music and lyrics, and release it for free as a leak of the real thing on torrent sites. His band got together and recorded the album in a few hours — the lyrics are dumb and repetitive and sung with the voice and intentions of a middle-schooler; the music is simple and poppy and dumb. But somehow it all comes together to be satisfying in the way that only pop can be — he screams and simpers and the piano is dumber and poppier than ever, but it's hilarious and poignant and a good reminder of what it's like to be in middle school, where that sort of feeling seemed like all there was.

Wayne Shorter Quartet: Footprints

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyGBNKlrPI

 

Don't you feel so gifted to be able to watch what is clearly a moment of revelation for these people?

Don't you feel so gifted to live in a world where there are people who can do this five nights a week, two sets each night, for their entire lives?

After Hours — A Tribe Called Quest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG8OyVN0wQA

A Tribe Called Quest is one of those hip-hop groups from the late 80s and 90s that embodies the most false nostalgia for me. It's such an overwhelmingly positive, cheerful tone; lyrically positive, musically tenacious, complex and simple and truly great songwriting. I wasn't alive in the 80s and 90s, but if I were, this is what I would've listened to, I'd like to think. Moreover, it samples, heavily: but the samples aren't immediately recognizable. The modern trend in sampling is to use the background for an entire song and to perhaps use another song for the chorus; Quest uses bits and pieces of other songs, chopped up and put together and truly composing with the samples, not just laying them under the verses. They weren't the first, but they emulate a tone I really like — the low-key, simple, relaxed smooth-jazz tones, but with the churning, pounding rhythms that hip-hop needs.

Corsair — Boards of Canada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CZHS52l-4Nw

This song unnerves me. I’m always amazed at how much emotion Boards of Canada can bring from lyric-devoid synth-scapes like this, but I’m doubly surprised at how I can get an entirely different sensation from this song than I do from, say, (Kid for Today). I think it comes down to less apparent aspects of the music – the dynamics, the volume, the tone. There’s a constant swell-and-shrink to this track, coming off a smooth BoC-signature synthesizer, but something about the “peak” feels constricting, claustrophobic. Like a sunny day that’s just a little too bright, or a smile that’s just a little too wide – pleasing at first, but you shortly realize that something’s not right.

Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou) — Sufjan Stevens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0-SKD2D6cBA

Coming in at a whopping two minutes, having only two distinct instruments and repeating itself without much variation, this is an exceedingly simple song. And yet, there’s the distinct feeling of a heartstring being tugged whenever I listen to it. Why? It’s hardly even a sketch of a song – almost a sketch of a sketch. So many of Sufjan’s songs are stories, fleshed out in varying degrees of detail, and I think of this song as the most fundamental level of that spectrum – a sentiment. One word comes to my mind with this song: plaintive. The title adds details that one can build off of in their own minds.

What happened in Redford? Who are Yia-Yia and Pappou? Nobody can certainly say what this song is about, perhaps not even Stevens. But with what little we’re given – the chords, the pace, the chorus of aaahhs – we can construct our own stories.

The Streets of Whiterun — The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim OST

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo3VAltxlr8

I don't know a thing about the game this song is from. I don't know the world or the characters or the plot; I don't know the history or the scope of the game, whether it's meant to be epic or dramatic or tongue-in-cheek. I don't know if this music is in-game or out-of-game; whether it's dramatic to match the plot or the location; whether it's regional music which changes as you move about, or whether it's a constant theme. All I know is that it's powerful music, evocative even without specifics, painting a landscape and a time and a place, like an old movie or a new movie made to look old; worn, with history, family, wars; epic but personal, deep and moving and spiritual and intimate, and full of tricks. How can a song evoke all this with just musical structure? How much of it is based on our society's conventionalities? Are minor chords always sad? Do the deep strings remind me of nature, but others of high society?

Yankee Bayonet — The Decemberists

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03eo0asomyM

I was lucky — I heard this album in the nor'east, in Massachusetts, on vacation, by the seaside and surrounded by the old America — museums, vintage downs, thrift shops, history in action and the smell of the salt. And the album became vintage, 1700s. It helps that it has a mood and a place and a theme, but it was more than that — it's about roots. Knowing who you are and what you're from — it stretches the boundaries of empathy. We keep to ourselves. It's hard to think of our ancestors as people with struggles — overarching ones like marriage and death, and tiny ones like market squabbles and leaky faucets. This could have been a pop song for one of them — if I were a DAR, or a WASP, not a Jew.

39 Thieves (feat. El-P) — Aesop Rock

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4i2qFzbUfF4

 

One of dozens of songs inextricably tied to a place, for better or worse. In high school, I made a commute every few weeks from Baltimore to Chester County, PA to visit a girlfriend – this involved a drive to the bus station, a bus ride to Philadelphia and another bus or train to her vicinity, cutting straight through the heart of southeast PA. I didn’t adore it, but the journey and the music I listened to clung together in my mind. The sounds of this song, this entire album, imbued my surroundings, and vice versa. The sleazy brass, the rhythmic basslines, Aesop’s loop-de-loop flow dictating stories of a festering urban underground – it felt like the perfect soundtrack to the dingy SEPTA train, graffiti-coated concrete sprawls and droves of youths going about their Friday night revelry. Put together, I always had this peculiar sense that I was on the set of a shitty crime B-movie.

Now, do I really know southeast PA, in any genuine sense? Certainly not – I only rode through as an observer at best. But the glue has set; every time I hear this song I feel like I’m on the train to Paoli again, and it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

June Evenings — Air France

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqkH9iDxqaI

Winters, where work is concentrated, have years of their own — winters exist distinctly, settling into that years' burrow. You hovel up for the winter, enclose yourself with friends and family. But all summers are the same.

This is a summer in 2009, connecting genres back and forward in time — modern music that sounds like soul, funk, electronica — timeless, echoing instruments, my soundtrack for many hours of fuddling with programs and machines and tools, of riding the subway and watching things, of trying to deal with sudden bursts of teenage drama. I tie a song to stability (although I know that's not what it's about), and then it holds me down during instability. If I put in the time; if I am true to it, it is true to me.

Ada — The National

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aV0Ka-SSEU

A song about cutting it too close — the phase 'on the edge' can't capture the dread, only the excitement. Juggling things, trying to keep seven, eight balls in the air, knowing one'll drop. Use paper and markers and computers and set out your life — become fast and diligent and efficient, know and trust the people in your life, stave off loneliness. Things catch up to you if you don't do them right the first time. Hold yourself together, hold yourself together, hold yourself together, or things will all fall apart.

To Build A Home — The Cinematic Orchestra

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0ordd2nOI

I didn't need to hear this song. I wasn't ready, where I was, to hear it. Not the time or the place or the person — to or from. But I did, and it stuck like a burr. First innocuous, then diligent, then permanent, a seed, growing roots in me, shaping my tastes and my abilities and my desires — I played this song on the piano, it was memetic, a virus. And I shared it. So it accomplished what it wanted and left me an empty husk — metaphorically, as a virus. But it took its toll — I don't like the artist's other work, and I don't like the room I first heard the song in. I was never comfortable there again.

Maybe it's not even the song. The song is just a timestamp, like a smell or a sight, to cement in how I felt one summer. The chords don't matter at all. But that's how it is.

Let The Music Play — Barry White

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2zBvX89hV0

Music is feelings and dynamics, and feelings have power, have volume, have emphasis. Some feelings are stronger than others; this is a sense of contentment and happiness that is so, so, incredibly strong, it can knock you down — not confidence, but assurance. It's t

The Wilhelm Scream — James Blake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isIABK-0ohQ

James Blake is a mountain, an island, simple and natural and isolated, untraceable in influences and uninterpreted in meaning; pure and electronic and subtle, evocative - but what of? - and an absolutely impossible musician to relate to. If you like him, too bad, I don't know who else sounds like him. He's blue-eyed soul, he's ambient techno, he's neoclassical, he's dramatic and flamboyant and very quiet, an indie darling and a quiet, reclusive mixer of sound, like Imogen Heap. And this song, the first of his that ever came to fruition and popularity, an unlikely single with a slow, dark, horrid build, like Ben Frost, a build to nothing at all. Hold on.

Saturday Sun — Nick Drake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXLWH2IAEN0

This, another song tied irrevocably to a summer and a place and a mood; I played this song on a grand piano in the empty main lounge of a hall in upstate New York; I imagined the campus in the 1960s; the vibraphones fit right in. The summer sunlight streaming in wide through the windows, and it had such mood, the perfect bildungsroman. It transcended era, it transcended angst or depression; I didn't care about Nick Drake's history. I cared about my own, and the song was a blank canvas for me to map out my life thus far on; to figure out who I was, what I wanted, where I was going.

This was the first song I ever recorded; on a friend's iPhone, with a good microphone. Sent online, bounced off an email server and played in secret, very late at night, for a confidential opinion.

Jesus Christ Was An Only Child — Modest Mouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQLgDbs-8AI

I've written before about Modest Mouse's dry, contemporary tone; mixing bitter redneck sentiments with highbrow content and literary criticism. Perhaps there is no line between high and low art; there is only art, and those with influences, be they one or the other. For any one crowd, the other parts of the song scream — this is not for me — and this is the desired effect, for all parties to feel like an outsider, observant and attentive, unable to immerse yourself in music for which there is no perfect audience. There is a violin solo in a song about Jesus Christ; scratching and whining in the background, lyrics about internet cash. It's phenomenal.

When You're Smiling — Louis Armstrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOH_mioL3TU

This song conjures around it a soundtrack, complete and self-sufficient, contained and immersive; New York in the 30s, driving across bridges towards the skyline, black-and-white, maybe a Woody Allen movie. Happy and happy and happy, the day after it rains, driving through and through, onwards to Coney Island, a distraction, a destination, and an era to sink into like a big old couch, still as good as the day it was new. There's no urgency at all in this song — it is a treasure, played by people with nothing to prove; deliberate and unambitious and quietly, distinctively brilliant.

Bodysnatchers — Radiohead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVDSdDoD4Sg

Stepping outside of the lore and myth around Radiohead, this is a damn good rock song, loud and fast and sharp and in motion, delicate and precise and industrial, with anger and love and confusion at its core, twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. I read — and I don't care if it's true, but I feel like it might be — that they recorded this one in an old abandoned house they found; lugged in the equipment, got the echo just the way they wanted. It doesn't matter if I can hear what they heard, because I can hear them play the way they wanted to play based on what they heard, if that makes sense. I don't know what the song means or what it does, but I know how it feels, and I could dance to it.

Remind Me — Royksopp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gy_zq_YuQQ

In praise of air travel and public transportation: of one-hit wonders and songs I'll never hear twice, played on the radio in a train station or an airport, remembering only a vague snippet, frantic googling, excited to see you've truly found it; in praise of listening to the rest of the song and readjusting your expectations to its reality; in praise of music from other parts of the world and other other sensibilities. This is trip-hop, European, chill-out music, electronic and humanized, a driving beat and a jaunty melody, but with intonations and subtleties all its own, defying analysis or description, only enjoyment.

Time — Ben Folds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmE4r7i-rLY

I don't know how I feel about Ben Folds. At a time, I loved him — thought his music was perfection, produced and measured and talented (it still is) — thought his lyrics were heart-wrenchingly honest, confessional, true and observant and relevant (they still are) — thought his content was brilliant and prescriptive, the way life really was, helpful to listen to (it isn't). I've changed my mind, I think. Talent nonwithstanding, his meditations on relationships (especially this song) are unhealthy, condescending, counterproductive, and just generally shitty. There's a heavy undercurrent of preachy, holier-than-thou in his work, and it's hard to notice when you're a preachy, holier-than-thou middle-schooler. I still love it, and it's still great, but it's no longer prescriptive — now it's descriptive, music I listen to when I'm feeling blue or bitter or mad. Not music to be in love to.

Einstein On The Beach — Counting Crows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsW1rdT-K2w

One more sun comes sliding down the sky

One more shadow leans against a wall

This is a song out of nowhere — not off a best-selling album by a best-selling band, but a rarities mix — it made it to the charts, to the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks number-one single position. It's not related to the opera of the same name. It's not overtly about anything, it's not eminently decipherable. The song was an outtake from August and Everything After. It never should have made it big.

I knew, at first listen, it was golden. I think it's about Albert Einstein (of course) and his uncertainty for his contributions to the a-bomb, for his own personal triumphs and failures. I think it's a careful meditation on the psyche of a man the band hardly knew — so, a fictionalized version, but one that is just as meaningful. The lyrics are clear — he has that capacity to do great or terrible things, and it's ripping him apart — he'll get help, but he'll never be together again.

Iris — Goo Goo Dolls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdYWuo9OFAw

This song has so much meaning for my crowd, part of the Canon, imbued with summers of lust and hormones, and years more of nostalgia. Could the Dolls themselves have known that their whiny pop song would be a veritable anthem for its unintended audience? I remember a particular dance, the last year, torn between choices — a question of girls in middle school, but moreover torn between homesickness, wanting to go home so badly, and not wanting to go home, not wanting the feeling of homesickness to end. This was a new feeling; not good, not bad, but angsty, distraught, without a root. And there was a girl at home I was thinking of, and there was a girl here at the camp I was thinking of, and I was caught like a mule between, staring up at the rafters of the enormous gymnasium, swaying in the dark, lost in the thought that I could see, through the skylight, the same sky that everyone else did, everywhere in the world — pushing back the notion that it was overtly romantic, ridiculous, thinking it was the same sky she might be looking up at, at the same time.

One Man Wrecking Machine — Guster

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxyw3Ew5LGw

Dad folk, dad rock, full of regrets and symbolism, striving to justify its own existence, careful and measured and inventive, but not music with nothing to lose — this is rock by and for a crowd that isn't free to experiment. And the song reflects that — the song is nostalgia, weird and cute and sad and whatever, this is the way it is. A younger person would look back and say — no, this was wrong, I can fix this, I can do better next time. But I get the sense from these guys that it's just longing — they wouldn't want to change anything. They've become complacent, they've become happy with their lives, warts and all, and while they may like thinking about the past, it's just a pasttime, a hobby, not a fixation, an obsession.

Girl In The War — Josh Ritter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqLssKusGzM

The first music dumps of my youth, flash drives carried in the keys pocket of my jeans from Brooklyn home each month for a year — a friend, older, with a full library that years of experience gives, living in an apartment, working and feeding himself and living free, after college, and this is what he listens to. Is his music prescriptive or descriptive? High schoolers, college kids, you can ask — are you happy with your life? How are you feeling? What's wrong? They have time left to change, to fix, to build. But adults, in steady jobs with steady girlfriends and steady apartments; habits and TV shows and bars, you can't ask them.

So, was his music prescriptive or descriptive? If he listens to silly music, is it because he's silly or because he's afraid he's losing the silly parts of him with age? If he listens to sad music, does he like the balance or does he really feel sad? If he listens to strange vague folk, like this — sad and happy, poetry and Americana, reminiscent of another time and place, not a flat in Brooklyn — is he longing for it, does he miss it, or is it just variety? How should I use my music as a tool, and how does he, a real adult?

Mercy Street — Peter Gabriel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVVxom8GpY

Here, a tied experience: working late in the ACES library near Allen, doing CS or something, not particularly impossible, but a challenge — due at 8:00 am, working overnight to get it done. It's possible, it's doable, I'm getting help online, but it still feels like an island — it's midnight, 1am, 2am, and I'm looking out over the dark fields around the library, the greenhouses full of weird light, and my dorm out there in the distance like a beacon, a reward for when I'm finished with this assignment. You get the sleeplessness, eyes waxy, thinking is fuzzy, words read screamed inside your head, and you get dizzy, thirsty, tired, but you can't sleep yet, there's more to be done, swearing off this, never again. You snap back to attention for a moment, focus in on the problem, work steady for 10, 15 minutes, and then it gets worse, you realize how little time is left, and how much there is; how could you have waited this long?

This was the song playing. It's gorgeous and slow and beautiful and secret.

Harder To Breathe — Maroon 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV8NHsmVMPE

With pop music like this, I have trouble articulating exactly what I see in a song — it's candy. The rhythms and dynamics satisfy a very basic part of my ear, the part that likes explosions and whispers and the part where everything drops out except one thing. These are basic desires of music. At the same time, they're basic, and I feel some shame listening to pop like this. Why? It's clearly good music — it's well-intentioned, talented, clever production, popular, and critically acclaimed. But to admit to liking pop — I'll be writing about N'Sync and The Backstreet Boys in a bit, I'm sure — is a difficult thing. I don't know why — whether it has to do with a musical ego, or what your friends think of your musical tastes — music is inherently confessional, a very personal part of yourself which it takes time to make public.

Good Friday — Why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXmCIlGstfY

Why? is indie hip-hop, rock and pop and rap and weird, confessional, dirty secrets and wordplay, jazz rhythms and one of the best singers — and worst singers — I've ever heard, evocative and specific and tuned in to just the right weird, dark frequency, talented beyond measure and yet almost impossibly rough around the edges. This music is produced and careful, maybe samples, maybe synths — it sounds like Beck and Aesop Rock and Andrew Jackson Jihad — and, like a lot of modern hip-hop, it gets its rocks off on being nasty and different. Like punk, it doesn't care. Like pop, it needs riffs, bells, backing vocals. And it's relaxed and frantic and listenable, different from almost everything else — not easy to listen to, but worth the while, as so much music is.

Idioteque — Obadiah Parker (Radiohead cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3ivyKx2oo

This is a cover that comes along to change everything about a song — already a stretch from the usual repertoire, Radiohead's Idioteque is techno, synth-poppy, weird and paranoid and seemingly as unmelodic as a song can get, at least at first. But Obadiah Parker's band here takes the frantic rhythms and absolutely brings them to life, turning whatever Radiohead is into indie pop, orchestral and brilliant and choppy — and, above all, melodic. Despite the normal chord sequences, the normal meter, the standard drumming and piano — it comes together in a syncopated way, like birdsong, repetitive and predictable but always new, just one or two beats ahead of where you think it should be.

Down By The Water — The Decemberists

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR9DjdMrpHg

A departure, unlike anything that came before; this is rustic, more folk, more natural; more produced, yet more realistic. Just as a low-budget home-movie film will seem vintage, personal, and uncomplex, yet a professionally-shot film with color-correction, soundtrack, and makeup can seem more like real life; this album is not vintage, not folk, not Americana; yet, it exudes those things. It wants me to think of it as a classic (I do!) and it wants me to know it was there first (it wasn't!).

This song is a folk shanty, set in the 1800s (back when they had accordions and, I guess, jangly electric guitars); a riveting tale of a port town with riotous youth; drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll of the literary schools of the Nor'east; it's anachronistic, but charming and perfect.

Donovan's Colours — Van Dyke Parks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hzCw0_E_nOc

I'll be the first to admit that my music tastes are skewed top-heavily towards the last twenty years - my parents were never lifelong devotees of any particular bands, and we haven't had a record player as long as I've been alive. I ended up mostly self-educating myself with contemporary groups, with only a passing familiarity of anything before 1990. So it's usually tough for me to seriously relate to music before my time - I sink in the quicksand of "how can I relate to this when I wasn't even alive?", turning over old songs in my head like antiques that just didn't age very well. But this song is one of the first I've heard in a long time that really captivated for me. It's whimsical without it being funny; a little unorthodox-sounding, but not in a dismissible way. It's the soundtrack to a spring fair or a movie montage or a jaunt through idyllic realms, and it's also fascinating in itself: it pinballs between all kinds of moods, it weaves through its melodies without retreading on itself. It's a song that reminds me of my own short-sightedness in this context, something way out of left field that's not only charming but truly evocative too.

There Is A Mountain — Donovan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWkGs6MxATc

This song is not about sex, it's about Zen philosophy, but I understand the confusion. This song is a koan: a poem or story designed to elicit an instinctual solution to a problem, rather than a rational one. It is not easy to understand, and it is not designed to be understood. The song is a hippie song, about nature and change and the world outside your house.

I listened to this on the midnight road trip up to Chicago this winter: it was grooving and it carried on, past the red and orange streetlights at 4am in Eastern Illinois, out in nowhere, and the music filled the entire sky.

Take Off Your Cool — OutKast feat. Norah Jones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUQHFqO6HvY

This is a very brave song, a jazz song on a big hip-hop album; a song about one thing and one thing only; a song about being brave and letting down your guard; a bold stylistic and lyrical choice, to bring a brilliant vocalist, but a female jazz vocalist, onto a testosterone-heavy hip-hop album, and it pays off: it's easily the most memorable song on the album, short and sweet and to the point and even a little romantic, musically proficient and just generally incredible. It has this sense of timelessness. Hiding behind a persona, as an actor, a musician, even just a person — this is common, it's always been common, it'll always be common. And begging someone to let that down and show their true self for even a moment, to stop pretending to be cool, that's touching. Hip-hop and especially OutKast-style hip-hop, about being sexy and rich and talented, it so built up on itself, a balancing act that says this guy is great because he's rich because he's talented because he doesn't try because he's great, this is promotional. There are no people like Kanye West. It's braggadocio. But this is not a song that pretends to be honest. This is a song that is honest.

A Thing For Me — Metronomy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYB2Mqs24ss

Let it never be said I don't post enough British eurotrash electrosynthpop. With the quirky bassline and the falsetto and the drumline chorus and the low baritone verses and the delightfully inventive video, it's just all too much. I can't figure out the influences; I have no idea who these guys listened to as kids, or the history of the part of England they're from, or whether the song or band has any cares beyond the stark relationship drama of the song. And maybe that's for the best — not all music is deep and thorough. This is a party song, danceable and maybe even listenable — enough new sounds to be interesting but not enough to be shocking. It's a dance around the edges of what's traditional and what's unheard of, and it does it well.

Masterswarm — Andrew Bird

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgKokFIn3_U

This was the first album I ever bought, I think. It was 2009, and I was at the Strand bookstore downtown. It was my birthday, and I had a bit of money to spend on things I liked — books, music, anything. And I was discovering agency — rather than getting music other people liked and seeing if I liked it, I got to decide. I saw this album on the shelf: I'd heard of Andrew Bird very tangentially, and I really liked the album art. The title songs looked interesting and — this was all it took. It was summer in New York, but I was realizing there were totally immersive environments elsewhere in the world. I bought a Borges collection that day, too — I would read it and pretend I was in Buenos Aires, with all its metaphysics. And this album, this remained (remains!) unintelligible.

I don't have a clue what it's about. There's imagery of parasites, homunculi, life cycles, hive minds; it's comprehensive and complete and impenetrable.

Home — Great Northern

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTNf0nkSXdM

Another song off iTunes, purchased when I was in 7th grade. I liked the guitar and rhythms; the smooth voice like none I'd ever heard; I liked the switching off between male and female voices; I liked that it was busy and complex and somehow relaxing; it sounded like the immersive sounds I heard in movies. I would ride the bus to camp in the summers and listen to — oh, god, my iPod shuffle, the one like a stick of gum — and find songs that fit whatever we were passing, trying to link up the inside and outside worlds, to enforce order. And this song was that — it was happy, it sounded happy, it was about happy things, yet the tempo and instrumentation, the minor chords: it has malaise, a sort of beat-down sadness to it. And I loved this song.

Mr. Hurricane — Beast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eHaps3Ykqk

In the very beginning, I discovered new music through iTunes — there would be free singles each week, one famous, ten or twelve not-so-much. I was young (8th grade or so) and I picked the songs which I liked the most. This, I judged from the 30-second clips they played; a song had to have lyrics I wanted to know more about, a sound I was interested in, and a name I liked. I didn't know you could look up full songs on YouTube (did YouTube even exist then?) so if I wanted a song, that was the one and only way to get it — and I did agonize over the free downloads, wanting to be discerning even then. This was one that stuck with me — my first taste of trip-hop, music that was modern, neither jazz nor rock nor classical. There were banging drums, a chorus, angry sounds and smooth sounds and a syncopation I loved. That was all it took for me to like a song then — I didn't know the context, I didn't know whether my friends knew or liked it. I didn't even care what it was about.

Nuthinduan Waltz — Andrew Bird

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n01Vwr1Wj7Y

Beware music analysis; I knew so much about Andrew Bird. I knew he was 23 when the album came out; it was real, traditional folk, before any of Andrew Bird's later, more experimental work; I knew it was self-released; I knew the genre and the influences and the weird imagery of the cover art. And I showed it to people; it was (is) a gorgeous song, deliberate and musically satisfying.

I showed it to a friend; she saw the song title and began to laugh; I'd missed the pun entirely, assumed nuthinduan was a region, a place, a genre. It wasn't. Nothin' Doin'. I didn't have a clue.

Take Off The Blues — The Foreign Exchange

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a6OueWQ0O4

Ah, R+B. My guilty pleasure. I have no idea where I got this song (it doesn't show up in any of my playlists), but it stumbled into my Genius playlists one day. It fits perfectly; it's the modern successor to Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke. Or, iTunes seems to think so.

I know exactly what I see in R+B — it's catchy, jazzy, soulful and meaningful; about feelings or sex, always. It's talented and danceable and I do love the timbres of it — but I'm more interested in why that timbre sounds so good. Is it because it's so different from the indie rock I'm used to?

Guilty Cocker Spaniels — Modest Mouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igXIB2ArH8c

I was used to the tone and structure of a typical song at this point. Modest Mouse were verbose, redneck, literary and uncultured; clever and professional and yet so rusty and loose. But I was adjusted at this point, so I got to listen to these songs with open ears, listening for songwriting, dynamics; how they'd perform them, how I'd cover them; what they meant and what they did and if they matched; what was a choice and what was interpretation; how they wanted me to see it and how I really did. This song is clever; it has wordplay and nice swells and swoops of phrase; it has Isaac Brock's unusual exaggerated vocals; it's more melodic and yet somehow more full, more wall-of-sound than most; further from trucker rock and more into indie pop, but never twee. I like it a lot, and it was one of those new songs. The ones you listen to and you must share.

Little Bribes — Death Cab for Cutie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uNZuKCSDtw

This affection for music comes and goes in waves. I listen to new music all in rushes; I discover a band and dwell on them for months, and then I reject them and move on. The same for this blog — it's never been reviews, but it's moved away from analysis and journalism into real journaling, a diary of my experiences, a soundtrack; the songs are secondary to my stories.

This was the beginning of a new wave. In middle school, I got myself a new album each of Decemberists, Death Cab, Modest Mouse, Counting Crows — I actively decided to sit down and listen to them. A conscious discovery effort. It was new and exciting and I felt full; each new song had a tone I was used to, from the band; it was educated listening, music appreciation rather than intake. This song marks that. I was in Borders, 9th grade, a reunion; I began to realize that I recognized the CDs on the shelves; these weren't new things any more.

Coney Island — Van Morrison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPfybDTJ-Bo

And all the time going to Coney Island, I'm thinking,
Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?

Summer is coming and I'm growing up by the seat of my pants — in a few weeks I'll have a paying job, an apartment on campus, a roommate; I'll have to pay bills and buy groceries, ration money and figure out what to do with my free time. It's not hard, everybody does it. Still, it feels real and important and exciting, moving house and figuring things out.

Plus, the feelings of summer — peace and sun and warmth, intrinsic natural human responses — and plenty of time for my work, my research, my hobbies. This is what I want it to feel like.

Senseless Sentences — Second Person

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1zKX3Z2nM

I don't like most of the rest of Chromatography, but I do like this.

I finally found a word for this sort of music — I may have described it as cohesive before, but I think a better phrase for it is exists in a vacuum. This music exists in a vacuum. If I don't know the context; if the production is quiet except the essential elements; if the lyrics present a coherent and complete worldview, the music can be said to exist in a vacuum. You can escape into it; it has room for you and all your baggage. It threatens to infringe upon the real world; it can be addictive. This is dangerous music, a complete story with no room for interpretation. It bites down and won't let go.

They Stood Up For Love — Live

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK463fcJebI

I've never heard the end of this song. I got it from the library back in middle school, I ripped the CD, there was dust on it, the song skips and cuts out at 3:53, abrupt and like a record, cutting right to the next song in iTunes. I never bothered to fix it.

Looking back now at what I listened to in middle school, it's super embarrassing. It's a new-age neo-rock band with heavily spiritual lyrics, overproduced and underwritten, vague and sentimental and catchy as all hell — I loved that organ riff, the clean drums, the dramatic vocals — all the things I like about Scissor Sisters, actually — but didn't notice the overt undertones (overtones?). Now it's just weird and uncomfortable to listen to, but I still do love it — if only for its context, the CD rack at the Morningside Heights library back when I was 10 or 11, going to the library every Sunday morning for years, without fail.

Night Court — Mux Mool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTEgI-virsY

This year, these are things that won't be memories or articles or song associations for some time — not until I can ruminate will they become important life-building events. Still, this song might be a theme song for the first improv shows I did here at college in front of an audience, just a semester ago. I know I'll have more to say in a few years; I'll be able to attribute more to this song, to say what it got me though, to, away from; here, it's just an association, no context. Memories need fermenting before they can be strung up like negatives and inspected.

It's Gonna Be Me — 'N Sync

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQMlWwIXg3M

Happy April 30th, everybody.

Soul Flower (Remix) — The Pharcyde

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oo2XO_ub18

Compare this to the original, another similar, good, but very, very different song. Stil, the vibe here is amazing, a sunny day and a smile and a swing in your step all in one, complete and self-sure and brilliant, carefree. It's ambitious rap, and it's totally justified in how amazing it is.

Talking about hip-hop with a friend of mine, it becomes apparent that one of the reasons it's often inaccessible is that it's incohesive. Each line of poetry is tonally and rhythmically related to each other, but often they don't form a strict story, the way songs often do. It's free-form, live-as-thought, clever and cheeky and relevant as hell.

Twistin' the Night Away — Sam Cooke

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSoPeZMHMf4

This song, as the boundary between jazz/swing/bop to rock'n'roll. Not rock, but not big band; there's a showmanship that befits real rock'n'roll, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and maybe the Temptations. Maybe more R&B.

This song, tied to my parents' joint 50th birthday parties; there was a playlist, full of decades of music, from the old to the new; a retrospective through their lives. I got a copy of the playlist, and this song stuck. It's so modern in its sensibilities; it starts with a tag, it balances equal time of vocals and not, even within verses; there's a horn callback; it's swung but steady; it's dance music, endlessly danceable, soulful and happy and charmed and perfectly befitting of my parents' great big party, full of dance and food and alcohol. I went to bed at ten.

ILLYTAL — The ILLZ (Portishead Remix)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHjcaBvJVqQ

I thought The ILLZ was a big, famous old rapper that Portishead got a hold of and remixed; some research shows the opposite; Portishead is the bigger of the two groups, and Delgis Mustafa, a brilliant young rapper, got a hold of it and chopped it up for his own use. As such, it's brilliant, not a sample but a complete remaster, new content, context and meaning; clever and sharp and lyrically impressive, but gets more credit for fooling me, sounding like an old master whose vocals had been stolen and set to other backgrounds.  Phenomenal.

Can't Keep It In — Cat Stevens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zT2YU6-cB0

Tied again and again to travel; this, I showed to a friend who wanted music, asked for something with dynamics, that grew from simplicity into exquisite complexity; this, I showed my mother, driving south along the Henry Hudson parkway, passing 168th and Fairway, rediscovering old Cat Stevens from her youth; this, I listened to on the bus up to Bear Mountain, psyching myself up for my last Spirit Day; this, on the plane high over Pennsylvania coming home to New York for the first time; this, driving in the car to Illinois for the first time. Activity releases emotion; transportation is activity without the visceral, cathartic motion of exercise  When we move, our souls are jetlagged behind us; the way to keep up is with music, to feel at such heights as you would if you had to walk the whole way.

Lover's Lane — Squirrel Nut Zippers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ssP8Uy0QI

Senior year, midtown, 34th street and eighth avenue, maybe — industrial area, near the bus terminal and the subway junctions, old shipping docks and new porn stores, there's a little swing dance place two flights up with a view over the nighttime Hudson. I'd just begun to do swing dance in public, coerced and convinced and encouraged and finally broken through the fear and apprehension into social dance, thrilled, walking to the subway, riding home with a joy in my heart, listening to SNZ, dancing all along the street, a thursday night with school the next day, it's 1am, but I didn't care — I'd found it.

Heroes and Villains — Beach Boys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgSgOTxcEMk

This is an enigma – the Beach Boys sing about cars, girls, surfing, the beach, cars, girls, the beach, more cars. They have a set, they stick to it, it's perfect. They're a snapshot of culture and history and geography; they'll never not be Cali in the '60s.

But there are exceptions — Pet Sounds is a big one. There's a lot more issues on Pet Sounds. It's the sound of Brian Wilson dealing with abandonment issues, depression and sorrow and the need to expand his life. And Heroes and Villains, not even on Pet Sounds, is the most different. It's about... it's a Gabriel García Márquez novel, about a Carribean town, deserting your family; about seduction and time and mistakes; it invents baroque pop as a genre; it's just different. And I don't know what to make of it, but it's gorgeous and fantastic and layered, and layered and layered and layered.

 

Col — Morcheeba

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYPra-5tfeo

There is a quality to this sort of music; it is deliberate, cold, sterile, but overwhelming with emotion and detail and intent; it tells a story, or gets across a mood, or a time and place, as I try to do — but it does so with such force, fueled by this need to communicate, as though it can't be kept inside any more — these are songs that come across well to newcomers. All media can be repeated — TV is the least rewatchable. Movies, often. Books, almost always. But music, I have to. I can't take it all in on the first listen. Part of the fun is learning the patterns of music and letting the song itself remind you of the pattern and then deliberately lead you astray; to be surprised by the bridge; to remember and misremember the lyrics, to suddenly realize what a song is about — this is a property I think is unique. Col struck me immediately as important, but only after many listens do I appreciate it for what it is — a eulogy.

Bad Day — R.E.M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3SSegq9USY

R.E.M. has ever baffled me, something like poetry, with political words but impossibly opaque intentions; liberal, perhaps, with a touch of hippie in there. Michael Stipe's lyrics are perfect in verse, structure, rhyme, tonal poetry that folds in upon itself, wry and smart and succinct, with no easy answers or explanations. This song is about the media, ostensibly — in reality, it's about the joys of listening to tight, smart, rhyming lyrics; the tonality of a fine voice and complementary chords. It's a pop song — the timbre stirs a desire and the lyrics fulfill it. But rather than the lyrics being too simple, too vague, they're instead inscrutable. Some of R.E.M.'s earlier stuff is just thick as all hell, and it's hard to tell if, like good poetry or hip-hop, it means something, it's worth pursuing and understanding, or if it's just poetry, rhyming and carrying on, with form but no content.

Daylight / Nightlight — Aesop Rock

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd_W_x3nclY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLG4gP16LRY

This duet of songs is, together, a phenomenal work, in any medium — as rap, fast and hard, it's difficult to parse — but phenomenal nonetheless. It's a diptych, two works designed to complement each other. Each stands apart, but Nightlight is a dark parody of Daylight, which is an idealistic Nightlight, which... etc. Compare the lyrics side by side — no, go do it, use google, I'll wait.

The production is similar but with contrast; the lyrics are mirrors, the tempo is the same, his done and flow is the same on each track. The idea is so brilliant, it's amazing nobody had done it before. Because it exists within its own self-reflective universe, I don't really have any associations with a place or time — it's more like a book or a film, in that respect. It exists in and of itself.

Oh No! — Dear and the Headlights

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Nm_ahnUgo

Each of these mid-tempo songs from high school is a different portal, a different facet of the outwardly-relaxed-with-a-subcurrent-of-anxiety mood that undercut most of the post-pubescent years, a passivity laced with hyperactivity that manifests in relationship drama and serious plans for the future; wildly variable project ideas, composition and destruction and all the other billions of words that have been written about puberty. This one is uniquely self-aware; he doesn't even begin to keep it together; the song becomes wailing and crying, constrained only by meter; an anthem to the joy and horror of tying your life to someone else's; this, a basic function of adulthood, as the fresh hell a young boy finds himself emerging into.

Luxury Condos For the Poor — Double Dagger

DoubleDagger - Luxury Condos For the Poor

 

I don't think I remember any live musical performance I've ever seen more vividly as this song in October 2011. Double Dagger is renowned in hometown Baltimore - the infectious energy of their live performances is half their reputation. Unwittingly, I attended their last concert after nine years as a staple of Charm City's unorthodox music scene - certain to be an emotional experience for band and audience alike. I personally had never heard Double Dagger, only vaguely recognized the name, decided to go for lack of superior Friday-night plans. I had practically zero expectations. But god damn.

It was like walking in on a supernova. However many people were in there - a few dozen, a hundred, two hundred - didn't matter. Just one terrific churning of energy, a single undulating mosh of people and screams and arms (with elbows). I've got this incredibly lucid snapshot in my mind of Nolen Strals wrapping his limbs around a support pole, his sunburn-pink face screaming into the microphone.  The cramped venue felt completely inadequate to contain the enthusiasm of the crowd or the band; nothing malignant, nothing hateful at all, just the force of hot-blooded people who loved the shit out of their city and its music. I can't ever hear this song without being immersed in all of it again.

 

Kill The Director — The Wombats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrBYrZsp8tY

This song is just SO BRITISH. It's deliberate, even, with soaps and Eastenders and the line about carrots from the last World War, and  Bridget Jones. This band is marketing itself to British folks as being British, native, local, important and big; to Americans as being British, foreign and unusual and clever. And it is — it's traditional pop-punk, swaying and shrinking and exploding into dynamics; a steady drum, shouted call-and-response, it's all very by-the-numbers — not a bad thing. Its numbers make it listenable, fun, exciting. These guys who want to look like kids are in a smart, marketable band that wants to look like a little punk startup, and it works for them.

It's just SO BRITISH.

Round Here — Counting Crows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAe3sCIakXo

Another misplaces attachment to this song — I'm twenty-something, living in Boston, maybe, somewhere in the Northeast with warm buildings and a cold outdoors, maybe I'm postgrad or working, doesn't matter — I have a vision of just malaise, maybe from Good Will Hunting, and I'm not unhappy but I'm incomplete, the music's emptiness and the winter and this weird distant city, not my own New York but somewhere else; I go to concerts and the shows reflect it; it's a college town, but the college rock bands play 90s music, my god, I wasn't even alive in the 90s; this isn't my dream, this is somebody else's; this is the plot of Portlandia, except they're thrilled with it, and I'm dreaming; maybe this was a dream I had on that trip to Philadelphia? And this is the song — a complete life, cohesive and not without its benefits, but not mine, not mine at all.

Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want — The Smiths

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtKBwuOtntw

This is an even weirder cases, a song set firmly in memory as having some sort of nebulous attachment to high school or whatever, but I can't for the life of me remember when. It's a song from an era I wasn't alive during, made famous to people other than I through a movie I haven't seen; I didn't know who the band was for ages, I didn't (don't) typically enjoy the melancholy whining that this genre presents; it's wonderful musically and endlessly listenable, addictive and short and sweet, as all the best, and it's earwormed its way into my life without context, without attached memories, without purpose, and that fascinates me.

Rapping 2 U (feat. Lakutis) — Das Racist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnC8Hm8GxNc

This is the best sample I've ever heard. I'm going to say it again: this is the best sample I've ever heard. In case you missed it, the words 'best sample' back in that first sentence were a link to the sample itself. Here it is again.

It's brilliant because it sees the source material and edits out the bad parts. The song itself quickly becomes too busy and incoherent, with bass and chorus and drums. But the sampler (here, Sha-Liek the Engineer) takes only the good part, like an intelligent hunter who knows they don't need to use every part of the animal. The lyrics of the rap song, while good, are nowhere near as impressive as the sample.

Like, dang.

I Was A Kaleidoscope — Death Cab For Cutie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Ju5TsynaY

All these early 00s indie rock records I first heard in middle school are geographically tied. So much music is; to an era or to a place or a subculture; Death Cab is from Washington state and the Pacific Northwest; they are tied to so much of middle school and exploring the city for the first time; the last days of sledding in Riverside Park as a child, the first days of Union Square / Washington Square Park, of navigating the subways; the last days of legos and television and the first days of trying to actually put myself out in the world; the growing sense of discomfort with staying in for a whole day, even in the winter; I had to find things to do; I had to listen to more energetic music, and this was always it. Even if the lyrics and vocals are softer and more low-key than some, there's a driving rhythm; it had to have been, to survive the dreary Northwest.

Kid for Today — Boards of Canada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=65J9JTlsTfE

I'm always mystified by the timbres of this song. They're all so subdued, so ephemeral that none of them sticks out squarely, and yet there's something emergent when they all combine; it's hard for me not to get chills at the 5:01 when the cycle of the song blooms into something more sudden and intense. It's by all means a simple piece, one that I can listen to in almost every situation and feel like it "fits": long drives, late night walks, sitting in bed staring at the ceiling, consorting with friends, whatever. It's the beauty of songs without lyrics, with less-clearly defined themes and sentiments - one can attach their own meanings and memories to it and make it "theirs" in an individual way. Boards nails these kinds of songs, with blurry synths and drums that seem more organic than electronic.

If I had to take a stab at the ever-slippery question of what this song is "about", I'd probably point to the title; it's about slowing things down, making things simple, being a kid again for the day. And maybe that's why I find it so germane to everything I do, and why I feel like it's a song almost anyone could connect to: everyone was a child once, everyone had a time where things were simpler.

Furr — Blitzen Trapper

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtlcHiSHTE

It's an awful thing that all the folk I know is modern folk; my concept of a genre rooted firmly in the past is, itself, rooted firmly in the present. I know about old folk: Dylan and Wainwright and such; I also know modern folk, like The Decemberists, Andrew Bird, Band Of Horses, Bon Iver, even R.E.M.

What defines this genre? It's about nature and its effect on the human psyche: how rural living is, what it's like to live subject to the seasons; a past-oriented culture, rather than the present, hedonistic suburban culture or the modern, forward-facing industrial culture. It's about and set in the country; it uses naturalistic imagery, but it is nostalgic, a return to the past. As such, 60s folk has no greater claim; after all, real folk music is indigenous. The music of my great-great-grandparents, Polish folk songs and shanties and such. Bob Dylan has no more claim to it than Bon Iver.

So why am I ashamed?

Rock the House — Gorillaz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRlmM88zzbY

I recently posted about Nujabes' Thank You, which also samples John Dankworth: here, it's much more obvious. I'm more taken aback by the different contexts and how they change the sample. The former makes it sound very jazzy, smooth and laid-back; the processing on the latter makes it sound more funky and up-beat.

I have lots to say about Gorillaz — the popularization of sample-based music, brilliant lyrics and a subtle multimedia experience which never quite came to fruition; a race-blind hip-hop; the combination of what seems like kids' animation with adult content; and, in particular, the role of the band Blur. I think I just said most of it, though, so... yeah. Enjoy this weird, weird video.

Boston — Augustana

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ASJBXu8tNo

It's always distressing when a pop song is good. We want pop to be shitty, because it's easy to explain — this is a simple, four-chord pop song, with a produced instrumental featuring piano, maybe a buzzy 90s guitar, a guy with long hair singing about lost love or something; there's a riff, we all know the chorus but none of us know the verse. But this is an exception — it's all of these things, it's anthemic and cathartic and all the other ics, but it's good. I don't have any particular explanation. The lyrics are less vapid than I'd expect; the arrangement is tasteful and not overwhelming; the emotional content is vivid without being preachy. It just works. Comparatively, this is a triumph.

More Than A Feeling — Boston

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSR6ZzjDZ94

Oh god, that word, 'classic'. I'd never really intently listened to the lyrics before; it was always just one of those songs I just knew from experience; it was on Scrubs once, I heard it on the radio, it was part of my knowledge but never garnered my attention. I knew Boston was a band, I knew it was a great song, but... I don't know. There's a sweet spot for music, where it's not popular enough that you can just ignore it, but it's not totally off your radar. I love this song, I'd cheer for it on the radio, but I could never analyze it. It's an anthem hit, it's feel-good, but I wouldn't listen to it for comfort or advice. It's just... there.

Sultans of Swing — Dire Straits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB3b1W6rEDw

It's easy to write about modern electronic music because modern music has no context. It exists as music; we listen to the chords and comment on the production. Of course, you can do that for older music too, but it's sort of missing the point. The reason we listen to old rock'n'roll is because it has context, value, history — whether that is a function of the music itself or a device of the time passed between may always be a mystery. Not to say all old music is political; Sultans of Swing, in particular, is only about the one band and their lives; it doesn't claim to be a great statement; it's technically proficient and a pleasure to listen to. But I cannot imagine modern music being written in such a tone.

Don't You (Forget About Me) — Simple Minds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqoNKCCt7A

For a song written for and tied irrevocably to a movie, this song actually

Mole — The Mountain Goats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW8WJrb0XmY

There's  a moment in this song — 1:24, I think, and then strongly at 1:57— where this ghostly, horrid piano comes in, elevating the song from acoustic guitar and voice to acoustic, bass and voice, to, suddenly, this incredible, desolate landscape of — well, it's an aesthetic reaction to a combination of things. I think it's evocative of a large, empty room; of a single, lonesome pianist; its sudden intrusion is like a dam bursting; it is a moment of both great importance — this must be said — and great isolation — only this can be said, I must be louder than the rest — and it breaks my heart. The song is about waking up from a coma, I think, and this one moment has tricked me into listening to the song three, four, five repetitions at a time, and it's just... listening to it now, it's quieter than I remembered. Maybe I wasn't expecting it. These songs are like visual poems; each comes quicker the second and third time, but they have this ethereal quality that resists analysis. I love them so.

Thank You (feat. Apani B.) — Nujabes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnba1fKRNZo

I've written about Nujabes in other articles, but never about him directly — he has a distinctive sound, but he doesn't write his lyrics and he doesn't write the instrumentals — he samples. As such, he is a curator; it's easy to attribute the music to him, but it's much easier to look at the individual artist (incidentally, Apani B., who I've never heard of before, absolutely kills it here), and his samples of Gypsy Queen — Part Two and Modesty Blaise (which I guarantee you know), while brilliant for their selection, are nearly unedited; how much credit can I really give him? I love his output, I love the music he puts out, but it's... is it creation? Apani B. wrote the lyrics, which are what I listen to with intention; the instrumentals are large bands full of people, written and arranged and produced by someone else uncredited; what did Nujabes do? Not to say I could do it, but... what work of his can I talk about?

But I do love his choices — his choice of vocalist, his choice of sample — and that's enough, I think. Everything about the creative process is choices. If I praise another artist, it's for their choices — in lyric, instrumentation, all the same. He's just a content aggregator, a modern musician. Perhaps undeserving of the same claims to talent, but certainly not to fame.

Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid) — Sufjan Stevens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAJCUGD6FtM

2011, Spirit Day in high school; I have a new album (eight years old, but new to me) and, stuck in a window seat, too early in the morning, I begin to listen to it. It's a long trip, the bus is hot but the outside is horrid and dreary; I press my cheek up against the glass and let the temperature difference flow through me. Flint begins, and it sets in; we drive north through upstate New York, approaching Bear Mountain; my friends from the city, set against this weird landscape, familiar and repetitive but still novel every time. And the song is melancholy and beautiful and slow — and I fall asleep, waking up at the end of the album, when we arrive. I don't remember any of the songs, but on second listening, everything is strangely familiar, inherently false jamais vu.

Blue Shift — Lemaitre

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqkzR0sdtuU

More music devoid of context, but with nothing to suffer from it. Dance music, Norwegian indie-electronica, disco and tech, combining the 70s and the 00s, real vocals and fake vocals, choirs and things repressed into the background, swelling in and out, this music is theatrical; it has nothing to declare or communicate, it only wants to entertain and be fixated upon, one riff repeated endlessly for four minutes until it ends, and your ear possibly wants more, enough to listen again, perhaps, enough to seek out other sons; it has to stay interesting, but it has to stay predictable, and it in that sense is very much pop music; none of this strange Scandinavian indie sweetheart scene, not even disco; it's not feel-good, it's not feel-at-all, it's not thinking-music, it's go-on, go-on, keep-doing-what-you're-doing everything-is-fine, and it swells and sweeps you off your feet and carries you away.

Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors — Radiohead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9L5zbaQML0

MOMA, 8th grade. I've just had a music dump from my cousin Derek, full of Radiohead and Counting Crows, the albums Amnesiac and August and Everything After. My family and I are at the museum, looking at weird modern art, the kind that matches the album art; this song comes on and I am hypnotized; I wander away from my family to sit in one of the big spaces, the antechambers, looking at weird shadows and giant forms of architecture, listening to bleeps and clicks and synths and not needing to know what it all means, but realizing right then and there, on the spot, that this would be one of these stuck moments; the entire album would be tied irrevocably to the clean, clinical feeling of an art museum, perhaps the entire discography.

So Serious — Electric Light Orchestra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_83KIChT_FU

2010, Upper West Side of Manhattan, winter months, January or February, maybe, a few days after the first of the month; 7pm, maybe, but the sun's already set, walking west from Central Park West and 79th street when the weather is good enough (read: not hailing) to try and take the 1 home. It's cold and my new glasses are fogging; I have tiny earbuds, but the walk feels infinite. I've been doing some kind of astro work — depending on the year, it's either abysmally easy or incredibly hard — and my brain is full of mush, and I let my body take over, trudging through the snow, usually, three, four days a week, trying to get home and fudge through my homework, full of sentimentality about the universe in general, full of thoughts of star formation or maybe train delays. This song is stuck to that time — there can be no reason.

How You Remind Me — Nickelback (Motown cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KzP4bC1Ypg

I think the fundamental issue with a band like Nickelback is that, on some base level, they're a fine band. The songs, judging lyrically, chord sequences, riffs and structure and presentation and theatricality, it's all fine — or at least sub-par. But nothing about the songs themselves are bad. It's something else — the in-your-face production, or maybe Chad Kroeger's name or face or hair.

But to take the songs themselves and transform them into another genre, to take the fine lyrics and fine chords and fine riffs and dynamics and transplant them into Motown, an incredible kind of music, that's brilliant. That's open-heart surgery. That's incredible. And it works! The lyrics sound more significant, or at least less vapid. The instrumentals are basically the same, but the change in instrumentation and production makes all the difference. Let this be a lesson.

Radio Ga Ga — Queen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t63_HRwdAgk

Lady Gaga takes her name from this song. Radiohead take their name from the Talking Heads song of the same name. Between the Buried and Me is named after the lyric from the Counting Crows song Ghost Train. The Kooks are named after David Bowie's Kooks. The Mountain Goats are named after Screamin' Jay Hawkins' Yellow Coat. The Rolling Stones are named after Muddy Waters' Rolling Stone. The Beatles are named as a parody of Buddy Holly's band The Crickets. Green Day is a euphemism for a day spent smoking weed — a joke I entirely missed. Joy Division is named after a fictional Nazi whorehouse. Led Zeppelin is a tasteless, wonderful Hindenburg joke. Phoenix is named after the Daft Punk song of the same name. Portishead is just the name of a town. R.E.M., The Pixies, Evanescence, and The Grateful Dead were all chosen at random from a dictionary.

Skrillex is Sonny John Moore's old AIM username.

Lisztomania — Phoenix (Shook remix)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbVaJ5kl7s

Shook (one of my favorite remix artists) takes Phoenix's Lisztomania and makes it more French, more disco-poppy, more dance hall, more syncopated and synth-y, more sparse and reverb, stripping it down to its minimalist essentials, the choralized vocals; it builds back up a bassline, a clav synth, and claps, and pretty much nothing else. And you get this portrait of a song which has been torn open, ribs exposed, and you can see how it works; the song swells properly as the bridge leads into the chorus; the bassline mirrors the repetitions, and the song trudges along nn-ts, nn-ts like a good disco song, connecting another remix bridge between time periods, dragging the past out into the light, examining the stuff Phoenix is made of.

Whenever I Breathe Out, You Breathe In — Modest Mouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0eWHu2aAofI

Every once in a while you'll be in a situation where you hear a song at the perfect place and time; one of those moments where you momentarily wonder if some higher power is tailoring your iPod's current shuffle music tastes to the rest of your life. I was listening to this song this weekend, driving the three hundred-odd miles between Rochester and Baltimore, a trip that cuts directly through the heart of rural Pennsylvania: roads twisting endlessly through wooded hills, dilapidated farmhouses, rusty F-150s, advertisements for advertising and more "adult video outlets" than you can hope to count. All punctuated by the occasional strip mall with the same array of stores. It probably helped that my mind had staled after the first hundred miles, but the song seemed to correlate precisely with what I was seeing: mountains and valleys dwarfing the meager settlements within, while those same buildings tarnished the beauty of the setting they were set against. Positives and negatives, cancelling out to nothing. My eyes glazed over, I tapped my fingers to the anesthetic guitar strokes, and I drove on mindlessly for a while - not angry, not depressed, but not feeling anything at all.

Back Stabbers — The O'Jays

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzTeLePbB08

This song is a glitch in my own personal history: it got tied to an unrelated event and cannot be untied. I must have been listening to it in the car when I was young, listening to motown on the radio; I must have gotten out of the car, taken the elevator up one floor... definitely the elevator, maybe I had groceries? And I stepped out of the elevator, and — boom, the moment before the elevator door opens, the reflective border of the elevator door, and then the mirror over the table with the plastic flowers on the floor landing, that's the moment. Just before the door opens. From time to time — something like 10% of the time, in the year before I left home — I would find myself humming this song to myself. Just a stuck memory, triggered by a specific place and instance. Never getting on the elevator; never getting off at a different floor, never with stairs or any elevator in any other building. But getting off the elevator in my building on my floor, this song pops up. It got stuck.

Magic — Ben Folds (UChicago Voices In Your Head cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_zLOnDnFpw

The winter between 2011—2012; I am stranded at a train station on the NJT, trying to make my way back to New York City. The sun set a while back; my backpack is high and dry, but the rest of me is soaked in snow. The trains are delayed; my train comes but skips the station. I have enough time to make it home, sure; and enough iPod battery as well. But my phone is dead, and I'm hungry and broke. And when the train comes, it whisks me through industrial towns and over swamp and underground, and there are lights and homes of towns I couldn't name, and this song is playing, and I experience frisson — sustained, continuous awareness, a heightened sense of being, fueled by hormones, hunger, exhaustion, anxiety, and this music, this incredible music, had I really never heard a cappella before this? Had I really never heard this song before? What have I been doing, where have I been? In this spark, this moment of enlightenment, everything else seems dull: going to school the next day and suffering through US History is dull, eating lunch in the lunchroom is dull, and only by listening to the song again can I bring back a small fraction of the butterflies in my stomach.

Psyche feat. Martina Topley-Bird — Massive Attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8yaVSLJVLA

Early fall 2011, I am studying for my SAT IIs, taken entirely too late. I find a cold, impersonal cafe up in Columbia, at 120th and Broadway, too far north for the hustle and bustle; it's enclosed, warm; it has food. But it has very high ceilings and large dangling sharp metal sculptures; the chairs are uncomfortable and the people are awkward. I sit there from 9:00pm to 12:00pm most nights for a week or two, studying; there's no internet for non-Columbia students. I go over old physics I really should have known; old algebra tricks, trig and some precalc, graphing by hand; none of it hard, but all worth a look. Occasionally I'll text someone, the human contact is reassuring. This is my music — like the environment, it is functional. It is of human design, but it exudes a sense of robotic efficiency, like a professional businessman in a cafe in Germany, perhaps — all business. I forget that my bed is just a few blocks away, and the isolation gets me to work.

Northern Sky — Nick Drake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y11X5WljnFA

Like the Second Discourse, Nick Drake seems to be disillusioned with civilization; these songs are about nature and wildlife, about the sky and the seasons, about harvests and the days of the week and a simpler time, perhaps idyllic, perhaps idealized. The songs are folk, of course, and they are about magic and holiness in everyday life, focusing on the exceptional moments in a dreary life. They are confessional and strange and sad, but also deeply hopeful, happy and expectant and naive, Rousseau as a bard, linked for me with a week I spent in the suburbs, practically the country for me, reading (trying to read) Tolkien and listening to Nick Drake, reading a Greek language textbook, trying to imagine what it might be like to be just a little bit older.

Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace — The Mountain Goats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ-zZJu6LKI

I often find my ability to communicate what I hear in this sort of music outpaced — there are so many things here that are transplendent, holy and quiet and surreal and perfect, not peaceful and not even polished, but... evocative, perhaps. Piano is better at it than acoustic guitar is better at it than most everything else — it pauses you where you are and makes you listen, it can't be danced to, albiet slow danced. What it's about matters, but not right now. Maybe on the fourth or fifth listening, it'll matter.  It's not happy or sad; it's contemplative, low-tempo, and very present, written and performed with care. This is music that lasts, written without urgency, but about pressing issues, with a driving need. Perhaps to communicate, perhaps to purge.

Wii Channel Song Vs. "Tipsy" by J-Kwon

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wy3iCGi7u8[/embed]

Let's for a moment psychanalyze; what sort of person would create something like this? Who would take the theme music from a loading screen, something innocent and ubiquitous, made for children, suitable for all ages, animated and mass-marketed, unable to offend, unable to communicate, the musical equivalent of the smiley face icon; who would listen to this and think: "Y'know what'd be dope? Let's chop this up and put Tipsy over it."

Tipsy is nearly ten years old, for Christ's sake. This is brilliant.

Red Right Ankle — The Decemberists

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYwkmPKsctQ

I don't know folk music, really. I know the genre of folk music, music written and recorded to sound like older music, written with Americana heritage, that goes alongside Ichabod Crane and pumpkins as symbols of fall in the northeast, things I'm tangentially aware of but seem never to have experienced — and when I have, they don't much count, they're exceptional and rare, the way that vacations seem. I've gone apple-picking, but it wasn't a part of my childhood the way perhaps it ought have been. And this is folk music, simple and repetitive and with provocative lyrics, sad and uptempo and with a definitive story — emotive but not emotional. The Decemberists are an art band; they reach for many goals and hit some of them, but this is one they hit, powerfully.

Blue Bicycle — Hauschka

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKAKBrWesU

Instrumental music, bold and dramatic and powerful, with sweeps and swells, building and releasing like waves on the ocean, carrying no emotion of their own but amplifying preexisting ones a thousandfold, through a natural lens, the currents of the music, strings and edited piano and tonal clashes, dissonance, is it classical? It's not nearly traditional enough. What am I to think? It's pumping along, climbing and dashing and releasing, like riding a bicycle — there we go, that's the name — and the streets rush by, sometimes different from each other but with the same structure, the same sense of knowing where you're going, riding and driving, passive and active, dramatic not out of danger but out of presence, pressing nervousness, a need to get where one's going, what's taking so long, how am I only at 86th street? I was supposed to be there by now! And time slows and speeds up — the song lasts an eternity on first listen, it's five minutes, that's so looooong! And it slows to a halt, parks, dismounts.

Echo — Foxes (FIXYN remix)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aemEQYNZkyY

This sort of music — it's remix music, certainly, processed into next week, built up from real voices and instruments, a history of record scratching and repurposing, distorted until nothing is recognizable but the true music theory behind the music — contrapuntal motion, syncopation, dynamics and style, without the pesky instrumentation that live music demands. Cheating? Maybe. But also far more freeing, with time to dote over every smidge, time enough to process and mix and create rhythms that weave in and out of real music. I don't care about the culture around it or the context or even the song itself, but the sorts of people who create this music are praiseworthy, innovative, the musical equivalent of academics, so caught up in music that they can't help but take new tracks and really think about them.

Overtime — Cash Cash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85ftfVUTzM4

I don't care about any of this song past the 0:08 mark, but let's talk about the first eight seconds. The subtle swell out of dimness, raising into the treble as the drums hit, giving a sense of rhythm, the simple riff already, at the 0:04 second mark, already varying, playing off itself, subverting whatever tiny expectations we've built in the four second the song's been on — not even — until the hit at the end, showing that this was a precoda, the introduction to a song, like candy before a meal.

And the rest of the song doesn't disappoint, but... damn, those first eight seconds.

Basket Case — Green Day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTGr5t3MoY

As ever, context is everything — coming out of virtual obscurity, in an era that didn't need more punk music, Green Day mysteriously flourished, bringing musicality to a genre that rejected musicality, bringing vocal harmonies and technical proficiency and incredible raw energy. Ignore their future for a second — the messy rock opera American Idiot! And pretend 21st Century Breakdown never even existed. Alone, Dookie, coming out of left field in 1994 — it was sudden and shocking, really, truly unexpected — and lighthearted, serious topics and a tongue-in-cheek, teenagers and hell-may-care, perhaps vaguely political, vaguely disinterested in pop culture, written about the frontman's very real panic attacks and anxiety disorders, but transformed through this vibrant, vital resurgence of punk into a chart-topper.

Thriller — Imogen Heap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxrIBCwyk80

There is only so much praise I can lavish on an artist, but Imogen deserves all of it — her music is controlled, tasteful, graceful, well-composed and well-arranged, like all good electronica — her vocals are perfect, processed and trying far harder than she needs to. She has an amazing voice and an amazing sense of rhythm and tone without even the computer in between us. And her normal work — she is most famous for Hide and Seek, processed within an inch of its life. But this, an MJ cover, is pure — nearly entirely her real voice and piano, and it's gorgeous and perfect and I cannot get enough of it.

A Paw In My Face — The Field

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_KmNsGoXHk

This is, like, microhouse, maybe? Techno, but minimalist, ambient, something or other. Axel Willner is intent on finding one great timbre, a loop that sounds great, just so warm and inviting, and playing it over and over as a variety of chords, maybe some syncopated drum clicks and shakes in the background, until it feels like driving and driving and driving — sometimes the clouds break and the sun shines through, sometimes the corn fields end and you see a city — at the 1:30 mark or so it gets interesting-er, but only a step up again, and then — back to regular. The transitions aren't transitions to anything; we stick on the transition, loop over and over, become intimately familiar with the structure of the song, until just the point of irritation, until it clicks away into the next one.

Song 2 — Blur

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbBvKaM6sk

In praise of simplicity, form, structure: Song 2 is the second song off the album Blur, it's 2 minutes and 2 seconds long; it has 2 choruses, 2 verses, 2 bridges; it took minutes to record in the studio; it has a simple, meaningless riff and simple meaningless lyrics; the members of the band went on to do bigger and better things, but the song became incredibly popular — so incredibly popular that it outshines (in America) almost everything else Blur ever did, ignoring that the frontman left to form Gorillaz, ignoring the nearly twenty albums they made — and this was made intentionally to be careless, a purposeful departure from pop music with clever lyrics, this was a parody and an homage to and of American grunge, rock, intended to shock and be unique and different and a departure from any other work the band had done before.

Modesto — Beck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=aDVJCgx6wQ8

When people are crying and laughing at the same time, it's usually because they find something so funny they're brought to tears. Beck's odes to America's dustier corners usually bring me around the other way - by being so pitiably sad that I can't help but laugh. Modesto and innumerable others like it in Hansen's catalog marry the dismal and the absurd: "unglued, depressed / the meatloaf in my chest" is emblematic of the myriad contradictions and idiosyncrasies at play here. But they go on and populate the song to such a degree that it's almost like the twin threads of humor and despair aren't merely related, or even conjoined - they're the same thing. It's a very Beckishly bizarre juxtaposition in the way it's written, but the inseparability of sorrow and comedy is a much more broadly human concept. I listen to this song and hear myself chuckling side-by-side with that gut-feeling of empathy for the singer's misfortune. It's a parody of a tragedy, like an off-kilter episode of This American Life about suburbia's best-humored deadbeats. And it ends with him "choking on a breathmint".

How woefully, hilariously fitting.

Kaini Industries — Boards of Canada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm388S1889s

This song seems to have taken a page out of Borges' book: rather than construct an elaborate story with characters, plots, dialogue, themes and symbolism, he would write only the plot outlines, and then a literary criticism by someone who had read the full story; the brilliance would shine through, but without the trappings of literary constructions. Similarly, this song is just the bare riff, a simple, perfect melody with no need for introduction or denouement, unadorned. It's uniquely musical, no need for timbre or lyrics or meaning — there's no authorial intent to derive, no mood to be extracted, just a mathematical series of rhythms and harmonies that sound good together, for some definition and value of 'good'.

WTF? — OK Go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12zJw9varYE

Back in 2009 — this was ninth grade for me, god DAMN — this was the most inventive, cutting-edge music known to middle school boy, a techy pop song in 5/4, with a high-tech music video, inventive and fun and energetic and brilliant, exultant and thrilled in itself — in touch with cultural acronyms, hip without trying terribly hard to be "in touch with the kids", made entirely out of good-natured fun.

No, really, go look up some other OK Go videos on YouTube or whatever. This is all they do. Their first hit, the treadmills thing that went viral in 2006 on a very early internet, and they've been doing the same shit ever since. God bless OK Go.

In Your Eyes (Extended Mix) — Peter Gabriel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5sgYYE-J3w

To find out suddenly that one of your favorite songs, imbued with significance over many years, played on repeat, sometimes laughed, cried over; company on train rides and slow dances and drenched in adolescent hormones; to know a hundred other people who all attribute the same significance to this song, so regarded it's nearly scripture; to find out that this song, a song I once recognized from the triangle line alone, able to hear the treble on the speakers in a Starbucks through another song I was listening to, to be jolted to attention by a mere fraction of this song; to find out that this one song I'd been listening to for all these years was but a part of another, longer song, a deconstruction thereof, beginning and ending with extra content, isolated motifs from the height of the song — the sudden, deep, in your eyes that first appears around the 1:12 mark, the verses at the climax sung in Wolof — to disassemble a pop song whose parts have never been dissociated — and better yet, for it to be done not as sacrilege, but as part of the original intention, like finding a new book of the New Testament — I cannot express.

The High Road — Broken Bells

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mkr19RSG6k

Another group it took me ages to really pick up on, notice, familiarize myself with. It's so hard to keep up with everything modern; all books, television, movies, music; we're expected to have opinions on things which we haven't yet seen, can't've yet seen, and we're judged by them; by how well we keep up. We know all about a famous movie, have a pre-formed opinion, before we ever see it. Broken Bells is this way — I know the singer from The Shins; I know the producer, Danger Mouse. I knew about the album, I was familiar with the art and some of the tracks, even the general tone of the album, without ever having really heard it.

But the intro is still — damn, that intro.

Don't You Evah — Spoon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaqWSGenyE0

I don't know much about Spoon — they're modern, probably, but have a simple, timeless sound that could be 90s, 80s even. They're muddled and obscure lyrics, clear drums and guitars, harmonies and timbre over content. I don't know what motivates the singer, other than the desire to create something appealing. In that sense, this music becomes very hedonistic — and it's about these sorts of things, too. It only wants to dance, but it's not dance music so much as energy music. There's an underlying sense of things happening, constantly, of being a theme of progress and discovery and recanting of stories, of the past, the future, etc — and yet, here I was, thinking that the song was indicative of Spoon, only to find out it's a cover.

So now I don't know what to think.

Listening Wind — Peter Gabriel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k

An entire album — Scratch My Back — of sublime, beautiful, prolonged and slow covers of songs from the past thirty years or so — some modern, some ancient, from Bon Iver to Bowie, Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Paul Simon. And they're all so, so wonderful, but Listening Wind is the largest jump up from weird, etherial Talking Heads song to something transcendental, updating the timbre and tone for modern listeners, making it slow and dramatic and tense, a horror movie of a song — is the man building a bomb? What is going on? Who's being driven away? And it builds in tension and harmony and beauty, the determination of the man and the strings and the soft horn in the back swelling until you can't break away, you stop what you're doing and stare, thousand-yard-stare, out the window, and it builds and builds and builds, and the song is so quiet and gentle, Peter Gabriel is soothing, but the music is not, like a horror soundtrack, building in swells and sweeps, always harmonic, — and then it breaks out, and you're left hanging over a canyon, only echoes.

People Like Us — Talking Heads

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNcjWdHD6GQ

True Stories was a movie by David Byrne, and then an album by Talking Heads, and I'm not sure if it even matters which was first — I only know the album, but I think it's fascinating that the same song exists as sung by a very young John Goodman.

Moreover, this is a song about the midwest, at least for me — it's vaguely country, but modern and 80s and nihilistic and resigned to the life given, modern America and strip malls and blue collar jobs and a — what's the opposite of romanticized? — version of American life around the turn of the century, the second one — the songs are from 1986, but they're still relevant, maybe not paranoid enough. But they're incredible and terrifying, about a brand new world, full of appearances and reflection and navel-gazing, progress and technology and ignorance, and I feel the meaning chasing me around, trying very hard to tell me something just out of reach.

Help I'm Alive — Metric

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoK63Bk7pgw

I won't write an essay here on the topic of gender in music — I'm not nearly well-versed enough, and, frankly, it's been done. I will say that the few female vocalists I do enjoy are generally either Jazz, Trip-Hop, or Rock'n'Roll. There are some genres where I know female vocalists exist, but I don't enjoy them (modern pop, rap, alt-rock, etc). I can probably name only a few female vocalists off the top of my head, actually... Ella Fitzgerald, Blondie, the woman from Fleetwood Mac, Metric (above), The Go! Team...

Oh my god, is that all I can list? I know the names of male singers from named bands (Thom Yorke — Radiohead, etc) but rarely the names of female singers from named bands (... — The Decemberists? I know Colin Meloy.) Oh! Imogen Heap. This still isn't that many.

Doesn't Massive Attack have female vocalists? Guest vocalists. And, uh, Morcheeba, Portishead! All the associated trip-hop acts.

Oh dear.

 

Fall Right In — Beach Fossils

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMvhso9O1io

Beach Fossils evoke a nostalgia for an era I don't know I've every truly known or gotten enough of — those rare, fleeting moments of summer rain, or beach days on vacation, when things are in stasis and could go on like so for ages. It's gentle and timid, but there's an underlying current of horror and desperation to it — the implication that, as good as things are at the moment, they'll turn bad later — nothing else can compare. The evening will bring disappointment. And the album art, even — a window on a house, a baseball, frozen in time — it's a wonderful photograph, but the implication is that the baseball is about to break the window — and the songs are all about that, about a wonderful, joyous period in someone's life, and they can't just step back and appreciate it. It's malaise and — no, not depression, but exultant praise of monotony. It is especially confusing to think that, when I first listened to it, it reminded me of things that hadn't happened yet; yet, listening to it now, it reminds me not of the past, but of the circumstances of that first listening, in mid-January of last year, in the deep winter.

Misery — Big Troubles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uctff64tYI

I guess this is a prevailing trend in modern pop — this sort-of-indie, sort-of-60s vibe, fuzzy and lo-fi and heavily produced to look under-produced; four-four songs with simple chords and echoey vocals, happy music with a steady beat, but depressed or understated vocals. But it meanders and dawdles — there's no ambition, and there shouldn't be. It's a song for stasis, again — there's no room for improvement, it doesn't want to improve, it doesn't want anything. It's a stubborn and sad song, and it's entirely purposeful. Yet, instead of repulsed by the song's attitude, we are instead seduced by instrumentation, arrangement, fuzzy deep bass and echoes and an inviting sound landscape. It becomes easy to lose yourself in this music and tune out the world. This, I think, makes it dangerous.

Tenderloin — Tilbury

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnwOvjYOepk

A story, and I don't know. I can't know. I think they're from Iceland; all the documentation is translated badly — it's based on a short story named Tilbury, perhaps? By an author named Þórarinn Eldjárn. Perhaps the video elucidates; I know the song has content and confessional tones, I know the song is light alt-rock; I know the song drifts and shivers and shimmies between being light and dark, his voice is gorgeous and surreal; the song marches along restlessly; the strings and synths are beautiful and the bass is steady; I don't know what it means, and it doesn't matter. I know the end comes too soon.

Bizarre Love Triangle — New Order (Vitamin String Quartet cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNOkJ6ysBA

Let alone my personal history with this song — played twice a week, three weeks a year, six years — imbued with emotional and adolescent significance far beyond its origins or means — the formative soundtrack of my summers throughout middle and high school — it remains, in its original form, drastically understated; the chords and lyrics could have been so much more than they are; this, the VSQ cover, elevates it, finds the platonic form of the music and brings it into such complexity and gorgeous arrangement; it reflects and references the original, but it works and soars and improves on it by far; I would rather listen to it than the original at the moment. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for string quartets.

Baby Be Mine — The Jelly Beans

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tRS9u43x-A

Another serious oldie, this one 49 years old this year — never made it big, peaked at #51; the group, The Jelly Beans formed in Jersey City; existed for three years, recorded two hits, disappeared. This is old east coast R&B — there's no legacy, they don't tour, no best of albums. The label was a niche label, making mostly this sort of music — this must have been an industry, forty, fifty people who crossed paths in 1963 or 1964 in New Jersey to make this one song — and then all went their separate ways, some of them continuing to sing or record or mix, some of them leaving music behind — some of them had training, their parents wanted them to become musicians, some of them didn't — some of them, this was a stop on the way to glory, some of them, this was the best they ever had — some of them, they think about this song every day, some of them never think about it at all. Music (at least the music that lasts) is permanent in that way. Not everything we write or do or say will be remembered on charts, but our musical memory is far more detailed.

Shook — Emancipator (Mobb Deep X Sigur Ros)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVEwemk-TRU

Sigur Ros has never quite done the trick for me; I need my music to have driving rhythms, even if it's ambient; nothing downtempo for me. When I first heard this around a year ago, I thought it was merely a remix some Sigur Ros song; when it kicks into high gear around 1:01, it is transfixing, chopping and filtering and switching between vocals and chants and backgrounds, two layers of already indistinct gibberish further removed from context, built into a layered quilt of texture and sound — and then the rap section begins at 2:00, another minute later. The lyrics are unrelated; I love the contrast between the abrasive, violent lyrics and the peaceful backgrounds, mediated by a chopped midtempo beat, made of Sigur Ros but made to fit Mobb Deep. The two artists have never — will never — meet or collaborate, but somebody (Emancipator, here) thought they should, and they were right.