Christmas songs can be tricky, if they're jolly they can teeter on the annoying, if they're sentimental they can border on tawdry. Of course, if anyone can get the balance right it would be Chrissy Hynde and the Pretenders with their now classic 1983 single, 2000 Miles.
Melancholy and hopeful, it recalls the feeling of not being nearest to your dearest and the joys of reconnecting during the holidays. Don't know where the alien spaceships come that grace the cover art come in…
So, since recommending Summer Heights High a couple weeks ago, I have officially become obsessed – as in making all my friends watch it when they're over and therefore seeing all the episodes that are on HBO on demand at least four times so far. This obsession has lead me to the top forty Australian hit “Naughty Girl” (written and sung by Head of Performing Arts Mr. G) which is about a teen “slut” who dies from a drug overdose.
It's over the top and heartless but you know, in a funny way. The video is composed of homemade footage fans sent into Chris Lilley (the song spent some time on the charts, so fans were able to choreograph their own dances, as you'll see) and it features little kids singing about Ecstasy and parties and pantomiming alcohol abuse?and parents who don't understand satire are Outraged!
That news clip looks like it's from The Day Today or some fake news show where obviously, the video in question is so outrageous that it must be a joke. And that's because it is – but I swear it's also a super addictive pop song that Jim and I just cannot stop singing all of the time. All of the time! Seriously, our friends are likely to get annoyed soon.
This is it, the best Grateful Dead song ever – ask anyone, it’s true! Well, maybe not everybody agrees (quibbling and trifling sometimes may appear to the true hallmarks of Deadheads the world over) but this show, recorded live at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on the 8th day of May, 1977 is widely considered be one of the band’s greatest achievements. In fact, the show was so good that 30 years later the mayor of Ithaca declared May 8th to be Grateful Dead Day (which is not too dissimilar to a mayor declaring a pizza to be awesome).
I didn’t initially intend to write a bunch about this, it’s not like any more internet ink needs to be devoted to these particular 25 minutes of bootleg Grateful Dead history (believe it or not, this legendary show has never been released commercially, this sound-board tape has been going around for decades, but this performance will not, for legal reasons ((I think?)), appear on any From the Vault or Dicks Picks collection), and besides what can I really say…
Actually… I can’t help myself, I’ve got tons to say! And besides, I’m about to turn 30, there’s no better time to affect the point of view of an effusive 19-year-old hooked to mixed metaphors – but you don’t have to take my word for it, not only are there are scholars out there proffering far more enlightened assessments than my own, you can click here to listen for yourself (make sure your iPod has some space, it is 25 minutes long, after all). As far as live Dead sets go, it’s pretty accessible – this is the fun side of the Dead, both of theses songs create a kind of vacationy atmosphere, like the ultimate Hawaiian shirt Friday – and I’m sure you’ve heard both of these songs independently; Scarlet Begonias gets more air time than Fire on the Mountain, for sure, but (at least when I was a kid listening to WHCN) classic rock DJs are occasionally kind to these songs (mainly when they can’t find their copy of Skeletons from the Closet).
An extremely celebratory Scarlet Begonias starts with a bang, and the sky turns yellow; the sun: blue. Donna Jean adds some stylized wailing into the mix after the final chorus winds down and at around five and a half minutes the transition begins. To my ears, this particular journey isn’t accomplished so much by seamlessly transporting the audience from one psychedelic shore to another via some inter-dimensional slip stream (standard practice, pretty much), but by forceful keyboard playing on the part of the late, great Keith Godchaux (despite the fact that the shows played this season are universally acknowledged as the Dead’s finest hour, Keith and Donna Jean were out of the band by 1979 – and within a matter of months after that Keith passed away in a tragic car accident). The movement has clear beginning and end points, moments so crisply delineated that it becomes quite clear that there’s a definite destination – and Keith (for one) is in a hurry to get there.
The playing is anything but subtle (while metaphorical scalpels are invoked regularly throughout the band’s long live career as transitionalists, there are just as many occasions where hatchets are pulled down from their hooks and wielded with great ferocity), Keith marches the band along (much like he motivated the latter portion of Jack Straw earlier in the evening), which lends the lead guitarist’s inquisitive playing a preoccupied tone: even as Garcia shines his mind-light into the cosmic caverns the band hurtles past, stuttering on the precipice of exotic sojourns, the anxious pounding at the piano reminds him there are places to go, people to see, and so the passages he plays drop hints of potential trips and foreshadow the mind-blowing things to come. Even Weir, consummate colorist, seems to be chomping at the bit, then the break happens; the destination is reached right about at the halfway mark.
Familiarity is restored and Phil and the drummers slide right into place and establish a rhythmic structure strong enough to sustain the explosive launches that are coming shortly – though not too shortly, now that the band has gotten where they’re going, they can stretch their legs a bit before the real heavy lifting begins. As the signature wah wah key notes emerge from beneath emerald waves, the song takes on a bit of a submarine quality, sound waves flutter through a flooded dreamworld, watery notes reverberate off of walls of light.
As the old psychedelic warlock finishes up the story of a disaffected, lazy messenger service employee and an impotent dragon (complete with a big sing-along chorus) and begins his first guitar solo, he’s transformed into a kind of benign aural-astral educator, outlining some initial principles then wading waist deep into heavier concepts before recalling (having nearly forgotten) that there’s still another verse to sing. The crowd responds accordingly, now that they have a firm idea of what’s in store. Donna Jean throws some of her trademark hard/soft vocal stylings in and before you know it the second solo has begun.
Garcia picks up pretty much where he left off, assuming that the groundwork he just set down is still fresh in your mind and, at about 20 minutes into the piece, the mind-blowing passages begin. Everything he’d been so diligently setting up for the last however many minutes falls into place and suddenly he’s painting with solar flares?– locating the fiery mountain high in the heavens. This kind of guitar playing is typically referred to as spiral latticework, which is an incredibly accurate description. Sound helixes wind and wrap around each other, climbing ever higher into far off starscapes.
After the blaze, a reasonable holding pattern is established before Garcia launches into the stratosphere a final time, straining to reach the top of it all, the highest peak imaginable, when suddenly the explosive apex is attained and, in Icarian fashion, everything comes crashing down. Foundations shake, crystal palaces shatter and the jolting ride back down to earth comes too fast and too furiously. The band synchs up for a succinct sign off and before you even know what hit you, they’re tuning up for Estimated Prophet.
Those great ideas we all have when at a bar, drunk? Well Deep Purple's Black Night proves that they're not all garbage because that's exactly how it was conceived. This was a surprise hit in England and even made it to number three in the charts. Of course, Smoke on the Water is the preferred song by the heavy metal forerunners in this country, and therefore it's woefully overplayed.
Crank this one loud, as they were once called the Loudest Band on Earth by the Guinness Book of World Records, and though the new(er) kids in town, My Bloody Valentine and Swans have unofficially taken the title, the band would probably still appreciate it.
Night Time is the Right Time began playing recently in a restaurant and I automatically thought of the Back to the Future Enchantment under the sea dance. Of course, as you probably already know I was wrong; as in pop culture moron who barely deserves to claim she grew up in the 80s wrong. That particular song was Night Train originally performed by Jimmy Forrest and this one (that everyone seems to remember as “holiday” even though they're actually singing “night and day”) is of course from that famous Cosby Show episode, where the family performs for grandma and grandpa's anniversary.
Theo is looking quite dashing in an overcoat and fedora (and I haven't been a fedora guy girl since my freshmen year in college) and Cliff pulls out all the funny faces, but it's Rudy's show when she mimes the soulful solo of the underrated and nearly forgotten Margie Hendrix.
She was played in the movie (which I haven't seen) by Regina King, who had a hard time finding any real information on the singer, who gave birth to Ray Charles son before he kicked her out of the band and she died tragically young a few years later, most likely of a drug overdose.
While it was Charles and Margie that made this song a hit, previous recordings were by Roosevelt Sykes and Nappy Brown. Later it was covered by The Animals, CCR, and Tina Turner.
I'm actually quite surprised that Ice Cube's It Was a Good Day has not already graced these pages. You may not know it to look at me, but this is an old favorite of mine. While Cube and I may live very different lifestyles, I for example don't play bones and put girl's butts to sleep very often; I have had my grub on without pigging out and I've had my share of pretty good days — like just this last Tuesday when I spotted both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jim Jarmusch in the same day.
This was the most popular single of his solo career, a career been that's strangely veering towards Cuba Gooding Jr. style family comedies for awhile now. The relaxing samples come courtesy of The Isley Brothers' 1977 slow jam Footsteps in the Dark and “Come on Sexy Mama” by The Moments.
Nothing can hammer home your dislike of a particular song more than hearing it on a daily basis can. I have never been a fan of Bow Wow Wow's I Want Candy (though you know I could never say a bad thing about Annabella Lwin, that little stylish vixen), and somewhere in my office that song gets played every day – and even though it's just barely audible, it seeps slowly into my brain like a horrible brain disease. But while doing some research I discovered something far more horrific thing than an over-played annoyance.
This song was covered by Floridian Disney child star nightmare Aaron Carter, also known as Lizzy McGuire's sloppy seconds. It sounds like bubble gum hell – and this is from a girl who likes Hanson.
Songs category pick for the week of 8/18/08
Here's what I said then:
There was this song, randomly downloaded from Lime wire by me due to a mislabeling, and it became an obsession. In it, energetic kids scream/sing about having a boyfriend in Spanish. It is fun and fast and amazing, and in the six years it's been in my ipod (labeled simply at Belle and Sebastian) it has never failed to life my spirits.
I have never been able to put a name to it, however, until this very week. I have found out through the miracle of the internets, that it is called Toma Que Toma and the version I love is from an album called All the Children in School.
A band called Los Ninos also covers it (as do tons of other Latino bands) and they have a video that is flat out awesome. Big headed clay kids melting into the sand and blinking their eyes the way only a claymation kid can, it's a bit of surreal summer sunshine madness that I think we can all appreciate amidst our own surreal summer thunderstorm madness.
Runner Ups:
Strawberry Letter 23
Goonies R Good Enough
Darling Be Home Soon
Get Me Bodied
Bongo Bong
Romantic goths of the late 1980's and early 90's had a friend indeed in Johnette Napolitano, the scratchy voiced, raven haired front woman of Concrete Blonde. Bloodletting, with its roses set against a black background album cover is probably their most recognizable album thanks to the mega hit Joey.
The title track, Bloodletting (the Vampire Song), is a far superior–and a great addition to any Halloween party play lists you might be getting together this week.
O you were a vampire and baby
I'm the walking dead!
The song is inspired by vampire author Anne Rice; catch up on the early 90's goth style with the video.
Manu Chao is truly a world artist. He sings in French, English, Spanish Galician, Portuguese, French, Arabic and Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal; his music has roots in punk, reggae, rock, salsa, and other influences that he's picked up on his nomadic travels.
His biggest hit, Bongo Bong, which I dare anyone to not get hooked on, is a remake of King of Bongo, which Chao performed with his first band Mano Negra. That version is way less mellow and hypnotic, I prefer the remake by far. I also way prefer it to the cleaner, more mainstream Robbie Williams cover (that poor guy, he's so huge in England, but we Americans will just never love him).
This is one of my soon-to-be-brother-in-law's favorites, so I want to thank him for introducing me to such a spectacular song; it just makes me feel good to listen to it.