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A song that feels more than it plays, a somehow soothing foray into delicate notions of nostalgia & cyclical love. Nine & a half minutes of a breeze softly whispering, of a river somewhere that babbles & you walk to; a cellist in the woods, a voice of patience gently luring you perhaps to be cast. Not many songs are indescribable meldings of beautiful things – this is certainly near the top of that list.
One of many songs born out of Once, a glimpse into what the music film has the potential to be now that the line into legitimacy has been crossed. The music & the film are so intertwined, with no clear distinction between where one influenced the other, that the hope can barely help but bleed as if the cellophane were porous. Hansard’s contributions to this project are something unparalleled in modern cinema, & if you know me you know I’m a sucker for art influencing art anyway. It’s simply a beautiful thing, everything about it, & recommendation is perhaps too weak of a word.
A fact of little concern to most is that radio pop stars get their start these days through internet conversations & illegal music swaps, through webs of word-of-mouth & general interest. Katy Perry – former praise & worship songstress turned kitschy pop vixen – became an instant sensation with “I Kissed a Girl,” but was practically a household name for those in the know (not including me; I’m coming onto this scene very late in the game, & have no qualms about admitting that) for “Ur So Gay.” The song is one of those pop gems that stands out above the rest for its directness, its catchiness, & its balls – it’s short & sweet, tickles the funny bone, & will be stuck in your head for days. And that ends me trying to justify my putting Katy Perry on this series; let me lay it out there instead & just say it’s infectious like a rash, but a good kind somehow.
When mature rock music is obvious, we feel it & we know it is something important. There are so few bands of this generation making hearty, heartful important rock & roll in the tradition of spirit, punk, poetry, & heart all at the same time: Modest Mouse had their hey-day sadly pass, Anathallo it seems is on the downward trend after 2 nearly perfect LPs, & The Arcade Fire were never that great to begin with. Then we discover songs like “Jesus Christ” & we watch our faith in modern young music re-instated like a president’s hopeful second term – it is one of alternating dynamics, bursting love/pain, & painfully intimate structure. It’s a song that grows like moss or plaque on old teeth, a rotting infrastructure from the inside out, a growth we admire & fear somehow at the same speechless moment. Scream it, feel it, if nothing else dream of more like this & clench your fist at once.
Early nineties one hit wonder, is there any wonder you’ve found yourself here & this is what you’ve found? Nothing touches my heart & deserves our attention like these artifacts do, nothing so recognizable as these mumbled scattered lyrics, this back & forth guitar riff, these standard drum fills. The vocals mostly make this as special as it is, a wonderful case of leading personality dominating musical history, & we’re all the better for it. I promise I’ll re-offer this space to gems both uncovered & unknown, but today nothing speaks louder or with more heart than those we left behind when we left childhood, when HFS became El Zol. Let it play & let yourself cry for joy, listener, just go ahead now.
If this inclusion turns you away from this site for good, then you’re so beyond the point of what we’re doing here. This song is one of a very small handful that very adequately define 2 things at the same time: the American South & my generation. The reigning duchess of pop began with a bang & when everything else from this century fades away, I’m convinced her biggest breakout hit will remain on top. The storytelling of course is key. The chorus is one to repeat walking through cornfields & cow pies, silo stills & pig sties; it’s the epitome of the spec enlarged, of the human condition simplified the way it should be. Play closest attention to the articulation of the third chorus; put on headphones; plug in your speakers. This is not art for art’s sake, it’s hardly art at all. And this makes it one of the most important tunes we have to live by.
Antiquity re-imagined to simply re-define humor in music. The neo-medicine show’s in town, boys, & these gentlemen are playing around; that’s the point, after all. Not to mention the shoutalong at the end is pretty punk rock & throws the whole mess into completely different territory. One of the great unearthed pleasures of modern folk music, a real delight to dig & dig up.
By no measure am I the biggest Flips fan you’ll find, but that’s pretty purely a result of their last handful of nothing but disappointing pointless pop albums. The fact is that they began their career with one of the strongest streaks in rock history, & released 4 if not 5 solid albums right off the bat. Beginning with psych drug noise shocks & expanding gradually to become the space mavens of Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (somehow they’re strange break-out record), the boys stayed pretty true to the noise-as-rhythm experiment for as long as anyone could expect them to, if not longer. Songs like “Be My Head” eventually became the ends of a messy means & melded wonderfully static & feedback with a pitchless catchy chorus that rose like sonorous satellites themselves. Where are you Lips? Return to this, your senseless droning drug-pop, please.
Legacy is hardly an adequate word to describe just how important this group is, & especially as perfectors of the rhymesayer/hype-man combo. “911″ was a minor hit for PE & it’s a favorite at live shows, but Flavor Flav’s typical goofy-yet-serious angle here is more poignant than just about anywhere else – sometimes the jester can hit harder than the king himself, & the fact that Flav steals the entire of Chuck’s Black Planet show with this one track is forever a testament to that.
Very few jazz albums so immediately disrupted my assumptions of what it meant to listen to jazz music as detached gentle outsider as much as Black Saint and the Sinner Lady did; it was almost like having a necessary heart attack, the pain of which is also a revelation. Mingus’ direction over his collaborative, shifting crew is more than just a pleasure to hear, it almost puts every previous attempt at jazz direction to shame – whereas in the past, bandleaders used the written page of sheet music to box in their groups, Mingus behind his bass uses that comfort to insert his own joy & completely unfenced enthusiasm not merely onto the page, but into the bloodstream of every member of the band as well. Black Saint’s 4-song suite is dramatic jazz like no one’s created before: it is life brought to the surface, the tense magic of musicians in vibe with each other & playing only as one piece, one soul.
