20 Songs For The 00′s

I hesitate to call these the ‘best’ songs of the decade, although many of them have appeared on critical end-of-decade lists. Instead, this is a personal list of songs that, taken together, do a good job of defining the decade in music. As such, it includes vintage keyboards, sultry saxophone, saucy lyrics, international sounds, pleas for peace, a bit of debauchery, a hint of sadness, and some slammin’ hip-hop.

During the 00′s consumers became empowered to seek out their own favorite sounds, and for the first time in the history of popular music, there was no mass consensus. Whatever was on your iPod was what constituted the hit parade. This means you probably have your own batch of songs that provided the score for your 00′s. Here are 20 that did the trick for me…

Gorillaz – ‘Dirty Harry’ (from the album Demon Days) – This song has a little bit of everything – funky keyboards, a children’s choir, a catchy hook, and some bad-ass rhymin’. That kind of four-spice recipe just didn’t exist before this decade, but now seems perfectly reasonable.

Listen: Dirty Harry

LCD Soundsystem – ‘All My Friends’ (from the album Sound Of Silver) – Both this and ‘Losing My Edge’ (from LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut) perfectly capture the inner monologue of an aging, angsting hipster. The fact that both songs were smothered in delicious post-electronica beats made them as iconic as they are ironic.

Listen: All My Friends

Pink Mountaintops – ‘Cold Criminals’ (from the album Axis Of Evol) – From Bernie Madoff to Dick Cheney, this decade was full of cold criminals…

Listen: Cold Criminals

MGMT – ‘Electric Feel’ (from the album Oracular Spectacular) – A slithery keyboard line leads full charge into this hooky, new-age funk spectacular. In the 00′s, it seemed that all musical pasts were present…

Listen: Electric Feel

Kanye West – ‘Gold Digger’ (from the album Late Registration) – My enduring memory of this song is hearing it played on the PA between sets of a totally unrelated concert at The Fillmore. What made it memorable was that the nearly all-white crowd started shaking its collective thing…

Listen: Gold Digger (Featuring Jamie Foxx)

The Strokes – ‘NYC Cops’ (from the album Is This It) – After the World Trade Center towers fell in 2001, the country needed a reminder of the snotty, punk attitude that made New York so great in the first place. The Strokes delivered the snot…

My Morning Jacket – ‘Wordless Chorus’ (from the album Z) – I bought this album shortly before a visit to NYC, and ‘Wordless Chorus’ will always remind me of sitting high above Times Square, watching the Big Apple flow…

Listen: Wordless Chorus

Eminem – ‘Lose Yourself’ (from the 8 Mile Soundtrack) – Whether I needed to get myself pumped up to beat a deadline, go for a run or dig up a fencepost, this single by Eminem provided a ready shot of adrenaline…

Ray LaMontagne – ‘How Come’ (from the album Trouble) – Ugh, the Bush years…

Listen: How Come

Gnarls Barkley – ‘Crazy’ (from the album St. Elsewhere) – Sure it got over-played, but perhaps no other song of this decade better captured the feeling of trying to find grace during strange times…

Listen: Crazy

Outkast – ‘Ms. Jackson’ (from the album Stankonia) – For a few years in the early 00′s, Andre ’3000′ Benjamin seemed hell-bent on proving that hip-hop had room for topics well beyond guns, bling and ho’s. His mea culpa to his ex-mother-in-law was a surprise hit that rocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and helped expand the scope of an entire genre.

Listen: Ms. Jackson

The Coup – ‘Wear Clean Draws’ (from the album Party Music) – Boots Riley’s feminist-leaning words of wisdom to his daughter reflect some of the maturation that hip-hop enjoyed during the decade.

Listen: Wear Clean Draws

Beastie Boys – ‘All Lifestyles’ (from the album To The 5 Boroughs) – Gay rights amendments have recently been shot down in several states, but gays and lesbians were welcomed into the mainstream during this decade, and it seems a foregone conclusion that their day at the alter is soon coming…

Listen: All Lifestyles

Amadou & Mariam – ‘La Réalité’ (from the album Dimanche à Bamako) – Is it just me, or did the world shrink by about 50% during the 00′s? As music becomes more multi-national, it also gets more colorful…

Listen: La Réalité

Lyrics Born – ‘Do That There (The Young Einstein Hoo-Hoo Mix)’ (from the album Same !@#$, Different Day) – Jay-Z got the respect, Kanye West got the publicity, and ‘Lil Wayne got the sales, but Lyrics Born was as dynamite and consistent as any of them. Listen to the man go off…

Listen: Do That There (The Young Einstein Hoo-Hoo Mix)

The White Stripes – ‘Seven Nation Army’ (from the album Elephant) – If you put a gun to my head and made me pick my favorite song of the decade, this might be the one. Simply pulverizing…

Listen: Seven Nation Army

Air – ‘Playground Love’ (from The Virgin Suicides Soundtrack) – A sultry, smoky tune that will always remind me of my wedding day – best day of my decade, and the best day of my life.

Listen: Playground Love

Flight Of The Conchords – ‘Business Time’ (from the album Flight Of The Conchords) – Much-needed comic relief for a decade that could have used more of it…

Listen: Business Time

Iron & Wine – ‘Boy With A Coin’ (from the album The Shepherd’s Dog) – Dark times produce subdued art, and this stands in for a host of hushed masterpieces by artists like M. Ward, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Ryan Adams and Cat Power.

Listen: Boy With A Coin

Arctic Monkeys – ‘Fake Tales Of San Francisco’ (from the album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not) – This spiteful little ditty reminds me of a whole decade’s worth of real tales of San Francisco…

Listen: Fake Tales Of San Francisco

Stuck In My Head: Last Christmas

Merry Christmas from me, The P and El Pulpo…

Listen: Last Christmas [El Pulpo]

*****

[Special thanks to Fred at Ünnecessary Ümlaut for passing this very special track our way...]

Stuck In My Head: Spencer The Rover

For several days in June, the world stopped to mourn the unexpected death of Michael Jackson. It was an impressive display of grief that spanned the globe and sent Jackson’s albums and singles rocketing back to the top of the charts. But the King Of Pop’s death barely moved me. Instead it was another 2009 passing – of the Glaswegian singer born Iain David McGeachy – that left me feeling gut-punched by the loss of a person I’d never met before. John Martyn (as he came to be called) was a mystic Celtic folksinger, a world music explorer who made some of the loveliest unheard albums of the 70′s and 80′s. He was something of a wild child in his day, and as he admitted in a 1980 interview, “I’ve gone through some weird and peculiar periods, I think I got a bit carried away for a while, but I think I’m far more stable now than I was over the last few years.”

Martyn wrote some amazing songs during those weird and peculiar periods, including ‘Solid Air’ ‘May You Never’ and ‘Over The Hill’, but it’s his version of the traditional folk song ‘Spencer The Rover’ that’s been lodged in my brain since his earthly departure. “This tune was comp-o-sed by Spencer The Rover/As valiant a man as ever left home” begins the song, and just like the character it describes, it floats with the fog over green Irish hills. A cello provides a sorrowful low end and the tinge of musical lament, but an examination of the song’s full lyrics reveals it to be about a young man who goes out into the world to find himself – and returns home a contented, saner person.

Have you ever been so happy you could cry? Intense joy and sadness are intertwined within the same emotional bandwidth, and even the best moments in life are tinted with the melancholy of their passing. And that’s what ‘Spencer The Rover’ is about. All things must pass, but only a great few of them leave behind such an indelible ache.

Listen: Spencer The Rover

Doubleshot Tuesday: The Brandenburg Concertos/Baroque Music For Trumpets

[Today: Hide the holiday music...]

I know it’s not a popular sentiment to broadcast, but holiday music generally blows egg nog. Although the argument could be made that most Christmas carols just aren’t very good songs, the problem here is one of quantity not quality. The world is still singing the exact same batch of songs it was singing when I was a kid, and anytime you’re subjected to the same music in perpetuity, bad things will happen. What was inspiring and uplifting as a seven year-old becomes tired and dull several decades and a few hundred thousand listens later. Whenever I hear about homicides during the holiday season, I always suspect ‘Deck The Halls’ as a mitigating factor. Strangely, there don’t seem to be many new additions to the holiday music canon, and most of the recent memorable holiday songs are of the ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ or ‘Santa Got Run Over By A Reindeer’ novelty/kitsch varietal. In other words, we’re talking about a pretty stagnant pool of music.

So what are discerning listeners to do this time of year, besides gouge out their ears with a pencil? There are certainly a handful of very good holiday albums by excellent interpretive musicians – John Fahey’s The New Possibility comes to mind here. It’s an album of guitar instrumentals, and unless you were paying very close attention, it’s unlikely you’d realize you were listening to a holiday album. Which in my book is almost perfect.

But an even better idea is to skip the interpretations and move away from holiday music altogether. There’s a certain strain of classical music that sets the right kind of mood for the holidays, and two of my personal favorite examples of it are Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Wynton Marsalis’ Baroque Music For Trumpets. The obvious huge disclaimer here is that if you’re not down with classical, this isn’t much of a solution. But I think we can all agree that almost anything beats yet another three minutes spent with the likes of ‘White Christmas’. Call it humbug if you must, but there’s no reason to let bad music dampen your holiday spirit.

Listen: Brandenburg Concerto #1 – in F [Bach]

Listen: Concerto for 2 Trumpets and Strings in C-Major, RV 537: I. Allegro [Marsalis]

Listen Concerto for 2 Trumpets and Strings in C Major, RV 537: II. Largo [Marsalis]

Listen: Concerto for 2 Trumpets and Strings in C-Major, RV 537: III. Allegro [Marsalis]

Instant Classic: The Live Anthology

Santa’s elves left a nice little gift under my tree this year: the 7-LP edition of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ The Live Anthology. I had assumed that this was strictly a chronological, greatest-hits-style live collection – thankfully it’s not. The individual tracks bounce from era to era, but Petty et al have mined the same sound for so many years that the leaps in time don’t feel the least bit disorienting (a group like U2, for instance, would be hard pressed to pull the same trick). One three song sequence on sides 5 and 6 goes from 1997 (‘Friend Of The Devil’) to 1981 (‘Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)’) to 2006 (‘It’s Good To Be King’), but feels entirely coherent. As Petty writes in his introduction, “We threw out the idea of ordering the songs chronologically – we were far more intent on getting a sequence that felt right, one musical and emotional moment leading to the next.”

Well then, mission accomplished. The songs are off the beaten path, but make for a revealing set about the band playing them. Petty’s intro to ‘Spike’ tells the story behind the song, provides some context, and leads perfectly into the tune itself. The covers (Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Willie Dixon, Booker T & The MGs, Bobby Womack and more) are a telling pastiche of the the band’s influences. In total this anthology is about one-third established hits, one-third oddball tracks, and one-third covers – selected with enough care to follow the typical pacing and trajectory of a live show (albeit a very long one).

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are at their best on stage, so all of these songs feel organically, inherently correct. Also, the sound quality of this entire set is remarkable. It’s billed as “Long Playing Microgroove” but I’ve learned to eye such claims as so much snake oil – if the source material is poor, all the long-playing microgrooves in the world won’t get you there. Santa’s elves also brought me Tom Waits’ recent live release Glitter & Doom, which has such a muddy sound that it makes me feel like I’m sitting in the balcony of the Berkeley Community Theater. By contrast, the Petty set puts you right inside the speaker cabinet onstage.

This set also includes a 24-page booklet that contains liner notes and essays from various people associated with the group. SF Chronicle critic Joel Selvin weighs in on the band’s month long residency at The Fillmore in Janaury/February of 1997 (I was fortunate enough to attend a couple of shows in that run), during which he writes, “The guys played what they wanted to play. They did their songs the way they wanted to do them… It was music for the music again for Petty and the Heartbreakers, the kind of rough-hewn, hand-made music, rich with the feeling of the moment, usually only heard in rehearsal halls or sound checks.” The Live Anthology is seven LPs of such music, and a vivid reminder of why Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are such an essential American band.

Buried Treasure: Ahead Of The Lions

[Today: Rockin' in the free world...]

Wrap an album in all the pretty paper and shiny bows in the world, lay five-star reviews from every major music source on the table, and at the end of the day, for an album to move you it just has to hit you in the gut – or hit you at some level, and hard. In a very real sense, all the critical hand-wringing in the world (like this blog) is just background noise to the moment of needle hitting record, and album hitting (or missing) heart. That eureka (!!!) moment of hearing a great new sound is what keeps record junkies (or at least this record junkie) taking reccos and reading up for promising new leads. Many miss, but enough hit to keep us/me chasing the high.

Lest you think I’m just wandering through the garden of critical masturbation, fear not – there’s a reason for the graph above. Living Things’ 2005 album Ahead Of The Lions was met with a fair amount of indifferent, shrugging reviews that compared it unfavorably to contemporary groups who were supposedly doing this sound better. The sound in question is straight-ahead guitar/bass/drums rock that aims for the gut and spews a fair amount of young man’s angst. In other words, good ol’ fashioned rock and roll. That in itself seemed to doom Living Things to critical scorn in an era of extreme genre specialization. Who-styled, big arena rock had gone the way of the Lincoln Continental, claimed a posse of paid opinionators. Thanks… next.

But who cares what a bunch of smirking, egg-headed critics think, once good songs start pouring out of the speakers and punching you about the ears? On Ahead Of The Lions, Living Things sound pissed about corrupt CEOs and politicians mindlessly dropping bombs, and at a time (2000-2008) that seemed very grim on the homefront, this music fortified me during my daily commute. Songs like ‘Bombs Below’ and ‘I Owe’ filled me with with the fire to march through another workday even as I wondered if my country was being driven off the rails by an inept chief executive. I think it’s one of the better “lost” albums of this decade, but who knows if it’s your cup of tea. Only you can decide…

Listen: I Owe

Listen: Bombs Below

Listen: Bom Bom Bom

Masterpiece: Elephant

[Today: Jack & Meg White have a ball & biscuit...]

It’s easy to look at the music industry and see an obstacle course of challenges facing any artist in search of an audience. Pirated MP3s rob musicians of royalties. Labels are built to hit home runs, not nurture artists. My feet hurt. And so on. But one listen to an album like Elephant (or Exile On Main St, for that matter) is an ear-opening reminder that the music business isn’t about new-age marketing so much as it’s about riffs and hooks. The gigantic, throbbing guitar line that opens ‘Seven Nation Army’ (and this album) is a clarion call of world domination. You got riffs like that, you can lock your marketing people in the closet and throw away the key. And Jack White has bushels of riffs like that.

At the dawn of the 21st century, albums like this just weren’t supposed to get made anymore. Released in 2003, Elephant is a throwback in both form and function – an album of vintage styles recorded on early-60′s equipment. The distortion, fuzz and blues that form the backbone of this album are exactly what made it sound so fresh in a digital world. After the crunching, Led Zeppelican riffs of ‘Seven Nation Army’ we’re treated to dirty blues, psychedelic rock, tender balladry, and even a torch song from Meg. Retro in all the best ways, The White Stripes don’t simply mimic and pick over the musical past – they infuse it with their own particular brilliance, while playing with the energy of a punk band.

Jack White is one of the best guitarists of the modern era – a high-voltage bluesbreaker who lets loose a frenzy of hot licks every time he picks up the instrument. In one sentence of its original review of this record, Rolling Stone compared White to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Marc Bolan and Buzzcocks. Throw in the serious stomp implied by its title, and you’ve got a landmark album that sounds more timeless with each passing year.

Listen: Seven Nation Army

Listen: Ball & Biscuit

Listen: I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself

Hellfire

Nick Tosches’ 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the best rock books in print, and a worthy rendering of a man nicknamed ‘Killer’. Lewis is an idiosyncratic character who, in his own words, was “one mean sonofabitch”. He’s first cousins with the preacher Jimmy Swaggart, and his life has been an ongoing struggle between the sacred and the profane, with plenty of madness thrown in for good measure. Tosches captures the tone of Lewis’ twisted life with a writing style that’s part biblical brimstone, part gumshoe detective. Hellfire isn’t just a great story, it’s a first-rate piece of writing and a perfectly stylized biography of a truly American character.

Witness Tosches’ vivid description of what happened when Lewis’ disapproving father first discovered him playing rock music in some Southern den of iniquity:

Elmo walked past the crowded bar, past the roulette wheel, the blackjack table, and the Beat-My-Shake – walked until he saw his son, sitting up there at the piano, pounding and howling about how them big-legged women better keep their dresses down ’cause when he stared drillin’ on ‘em they were gonna lose their nightgowns, and that old blind man standing up there next to him, nodding his head up and down and wrenching at that electric squeeze-box as if it were the instrument of his blindness and he could not free himself from it. Elmo liked it – all of it. He had him a drink, and he liked it even more.

The book opens with Jerry Lee getting arrested at the gates of Graceland after causing a drunken disturbance in the wee hours of the morning, and after covering the bases of his life, circles back to an aging rocker losing his grip on reality. One nightmare sequence sees Jerry Lee morphing from dressing room to dressing room, the only things that remain constant are the drink in his hand and the idiotic reporter across from him asking inane questions. It’s a scarifying, crystalline take on the mind-numbing rigors of fame. Another passage finds him lost on tour somewhere in the midwest, ordering a bottle of booze from room service and watching the static on his television turn into a swarm of insects. This is chilling stuff, and from everything I can glean from Lewis’ character, it ought to be.

A straight-up re-telling of the facts of Jerry Lee Lewis’ life would make for an unsatisfying account. It’s a credit to Tosches’ stylized writing that even though Hellfire is nearly 30 years old, it still reads like the definitive biography of a rock and roll hell-raiser.

Listen: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On

Listen: Great Balls Of Fire

Doubleshot Tuesday: ‘Just A Friend’/'Baby Got Back’

[Today: Kingpins and jokers...]

I’ve always been amused at the uproar caused by Hip-Hop. The fact that anyone, anywhere could be threatened by this genre is pretty laughable. Like professional wrestlers and comic book characters, hip-hop artists are meant to be outsized personalities – indeed, their very profession dictates that they must be so. For the same reasons that Ned The Accountant will never be a Marvel superhero, bland nice-guy rappers just ain’t happening. But unlike wrestlers and comic book characters, rappers don’t break down into heels and faces or super-heroes and villains. In hip-hop, most everybody is a bad guy, even if that Bad is more figurative than literal.

For me, the tough guy hierarchy of hip-hop personalities seems to break down along roughly two lines – for clarity’s sake let’s call them kingpins and jokers. Kingpins are the rappers who demand to be taken seriously and with the utmost respect. Whether they’re educating (KRS-One), getting political (Chuck D), flexing (LL Cool J), slinging dope (Biggie Smalls), cornering the market (Jay-Z) or all of the above (Ice Cube, Ice T), these gentlemen are very much not to be trifled with.

On the other side of the coin, you have the jokers – MC’s who aren’t afraid to be tell a dumb joke or be politically incorrect. The Beastie Boys are classic jokers – it’s difficult to imagine them harming anyone, even if they talk a good, street-smart game. But while that’s a fine guiding line, it doesn’t necessarily separate the two camps. Wu Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard threatened plenty of bodily harm, but was such a far-out clown (he called himself, among other things, “Big Baby Jesus”) that it was impossible to take any of his bluster too seriously. Ditto Flavor Flav, who always seems to either be punching a female or rapping about how bad he is. But anyone who wears a giant clock around his neck is definitely a joker, in spite of any rap sheet.

Two of my favorite jokers are Biz Markie, the classic court jester of hip-hop…

…and Sir Mix-A-Lot, a gun-collecting funny man who has never been afraid to speak his mind…

If you ask me, hip-hop today has too many kingpins and not enough jokers…

Weekend Playlist

“Par is whatever I say it is. I’ve got one hole that’s a par 23 and yesterday I damn near birdied the sucker.” ~ Willie Nelson

The Doors | Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

LCD Soundsystem | LCD Soundsystem

Radiohead | Kid A

Dean Martin | For The Good Times

Dave Alvin | Public Domain: Songs From The Wild Land

Les Claypool & The Holy Mackeral | High Ball With The Devil

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | The Jimi Hendrix Experience [Box Set]

DJ Shadow | The Private Press

My Morning Jacket | It Still Moves

Willie Nelson | Stardust

Steely Dan | Gaucho

Elvis Presley | The Sun Sessions

Massive Attack | Protection

Los Lobos | Kiko

Neko Case | Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

Hank Williams | The Complete Hank Williams

Led Zeppelin | Physical Graffiti

Various Artists | Break N’ Bossa

Pixies | Complete ‘B’ Sides

Jerry Garcia Band | Jerry Garcia Band