Songs Of The Days: Week 30

July 23: Noonday Underground - Go It Alone (Surface Noise, 2002)(Not available on Spotify)

July 24: Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You (Gorgeous George, 1994)

July 25: 16 Horsepower - Alone And Forsaken (Folklore, 2002)(Not available on Spotify)

July 26: Joan Osborne - What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted? (Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, 2002)(Not available on Spotify)

July 27: The Raconteurs - Store Bought Bones (Broken Boy Soldiers, 2006)

July 29: The Pogues - Fairytale Of New York (If I Should Fall From Grace With God, 1988)

Week 29: Beck - Sea Change (2002)

"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange”

-          William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”

There are few things in music more difficult than making quiet music sound interesting. Unlike rock or pop, which can fall back on danceable, clappable rhythms to keep people interested, quiet genres like folk or blue jazz must rely on either sheer quality or a hope that the audience is stoned enough to pay attention to anything. By definition, the awe-inspiring, bombastic wall-of-sound techniques of baroque pop are out, as are virtuosic solos and sudden shifts in mood or volume. Quiet music must either focus on maintaining its atmosphere and mood over the entire song or build to a crescendo; there’s little room for the terraced dynamics found in alternative music.

Generally, quiet music is designed to provide a vehicle for the singer. It’s no coincidence that the singer-songwriter genre provides most of the best examples of understated, near-silent songs; even if such songs are often dappled with strings and other instruments, the focus is still almost always on the artist whose name graces the album cover.

While that focus on the singer is present, to some extent, in most Western music, folk, singer-songwriter, and other similar genres are bound by their tendency towards quiet volume. In genres like pop or soul, where the singer is the unquestioned master and ruler, the vocals are allowed to soar in volume and octave to the limits of the singer’s ability. Artists like Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston, and Freddie Mercury used volume and melody to keep the attention of the listener on them during all but the 8-bar intros and solos of their songs. However, that freedom of range isn’t as total in other genres; when changes do happen, they happen slowly.

In quiet genres, the singer must demand attention in other ways, usually through their lyrics. Leonard Cohen, a man often lambasted for possessing almost no vocal range at all, nevertheless commands respect and attention simply through his inventive, beautiful lyrics. Bob Dylan is another case of this, and John Darnielle and Laura Marling are borderline cases.

Songs Of The Days: Week 29

July 16: The Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000)

July 18: Moby - Everloving (Play, 1999)

July 19: The Throne - Otis (Watch The Throne, 2011)

July 20: Tricky - Hell Is Around The Corner (Maxinquaye, 1995)

July 21: The Hollies - Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress (Distant Light, 1971)

July 22: Saul Williams - Skin Of A Drum (The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of Niggy Tardust, 2008)

Week 28: Giant Panda - Fly School Reunion (2005)

Rap is a singles genre. The teams of crack producers aside, rap tends to thrive on the image of a single man (or, very, very rarely, woman) presenting themselves and their opinions in an unfiltered way, an extreme form of the frontman in traditional rock bands. The ideal rapper, in this school of thought, is raw id, able to say the things we would never dream of giving voice to and get rich while doing it.

Without exception, this raw id presentation is diluted the more people are present on a given track. The more guest artists and ghostwriters one has, the more diluted the personality of the actual rapper gets. There’s no real secret as to why this is; the more people you have in a band the more input the songwriter gets for a song, leading them, often, far away from the original emotions they were trying to deliver. Compare the schmaltz of the studio version of “Thunder Road” to Springsteen’s original demo, for example. In my opinion, the wall-of-sound style that’s all over the Born To Run album ruins what Springsteen was writing at the time; Darkness At The Edge Of Town improves on that tendency, but there’s a reason the all-acoustic, ultra lo-fi Nebraska is the music snob’s album of choice from The Boss.

Songs Of The Days: Old School Flashback (Week 28)

July 9: Fastball - The Way (All The Pain Money Can Buy, 1998)

July 10: Jimmy Eat World - The Middle (Bleed American, 2001)

July 11: The Wallflowers - One Headlight (Bringing Down The Horse, 1996)

July 12: Third Eye Blind - Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind, 1997)

July 13: Coldplay - The Scientist (A Rush Of Blood To The Head, 2002)

July 14: Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On (Miss E… So Addictive, 2001)

July 15: Cake - Never There (Prolonging The Magic, 1998)

Week 27: Dr. Dog - Be The Void (2012)

“I was never that young/I was born old and grey/Alone and in shambles/It’s alright, it's ok”

-          Dr. Dog, “Get Away”

What place does the topic of age deserve in discussions about music? One of the most basic ways to dismiss something, from a critical perspective, is to label it as ‘immature’ or ‘childish’, a criticism that I’ve used on this very blog. I stand by my usage of those terms, mainly because such things don’t generally hold up under an analytic lens.

Poptimism, the critical perspective that pop music should not be criticized in the manner I described above, runs into this problem constantly. Artists like Beyonce may be making music that is brilliantly put together, but the accomplished whole doesn’t appear to me to have any real content. Most everything about pop music is put clearly on the surface level, without any need to dig deep for meaning, a pop song can only generate interest in itself by making sure the music is intricately arranged and, at best, offers some kind of interesting composition.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach to music. Entire books have been written on The Beatles, including their poppiest songs along with the ones that came closest to blues or folk music. Oftentimes it’s those intricate pop songs that attract the most critical attention, thanks to how readily they offer themselves to music majors with heads teeming with Italian words and a lot of free time. In a more general sense, pop songs are often the songs large groups unite around when they need something to fill the dead air between conversations. Taking examples from my own blog, I love “The Radicalization Of D” by Gareth Liddiard, but if I were to throw a party I’d be more likely to reach for Holy Ghost. Similarly, if I were to play some Kanye I’d have to cherry-pick from 808s quite a bit (“Heartless” would be a good choice; leave it to Kanye to make crippling depression danceable).

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make pleasant music, which is the only thing that truly unites all pop musicians. I hate modern pop for its constant, almost desperate attempts to eliminate all traces of humanity from their music, simply because doing so transforms pop into uncanny electronica. Making the human voice into an instrument has a long proud tradition in music all around the world and visa versa, but attempts to manipulate the voice in post as if it were a guitar string to be fretted gives me the oogies. How can you have joyful, happy music if the humanity has been clinically removed? It’s like marrying a Stepford Wife.

Songs Of The Days: Week 27

July 2: Booker T. Jones - Everything Is Everything (The Road From Memphis, 2011)



July 5: The Cannonball Adderly Quintet - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (Live At "The Club", 1966)



July 6: Prince - I Wanna Be Your Lover (Prince, 1979) (not available on YouTube)

July 7: TheTheThe day:

The Protomen - The Hounds (The Father Of Death, 2009)



The Budos Band - The Volcano Song (The Budos Band, 2005)



The Lawrence Arms - The Disaster March (The Greatest Story Ever Told, 2003)



The Wiseguys - The Grabbing Hands (The Antidote, 1998)



The The - The Twilight Hour (Soul Mining, 1983) (not available on Spotify)

Week 26: Contemporary Noise Quintet - Pig Inside The Gentleman (2006)

As the title suggests, Pig Inside The Gentleman is an album fundamentally based in stark contrasts. Much like the baroque and grunge technique of quickly shifting from loud to soft, soft to loud (which is called either terraced dynamics or sforzando (sƒz) depending on how pretentious you’d like to be), the album uses surprising shifts in tone, mood, and complexity to keep the listener’s focus nailed down to the music. If you don’t, you’ll likely be unable to recognize any given song on the album from one minute to the next; the Contemporary Noise Quintet work under the assumption that you’re paying close attention to what they’re doing.

While Pig Inside The Gentleman does use the classical technique of sƒz in many of its songs, the real tool of contrast for the Contemporary Noise Quintet is, as suggested by their name, chaos. While the opening track, “Million Faces” provides the purest example of chaotic noise in a mid-song, two-minute long aside, almost all of the other songs on the album use either frenetic percussion or free-flowing solos to suggest that any given song could repeat that kind of breakdown.  By proving their willingness to abandon structure in “Million Faces”, the Quintet are able to make a noisy piece like “P.I.G.” all the more interesting, simply because the listener is kept wondering how long the song’s ramshackle structure will survive.

Songs Of The Days: Week 26

June 25: Kings Go Forth - I Don't Love You No More (The Outsiders Are Back, 2010)



June 26: Fatboy Slim - Praise You (You've Come A Long Way, Baby, 1999)



June 27: Wall Of Voodoo - Mexican Radio (Call Of The West, 1983)



June 28: Digable Planets - Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat) (Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space), 1993)



June 29: The Who - The Punk & The Godfather (Quadrophenia, 1973)



June 30: The Stooges - Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell (Raw Power, 1973)



July 1: Void Pedal - Women In White (Void Pedal EP, 2010) (not available on Spotify) (freely available here)

Week 25: Lucero - 1372 Overton Park (2009)

Country music, as evidenced by the classic cliché, “I listen to everything, except country and rap,” is one of the most regularly dismissed genres of popular music. Like rap, country music is also one of the most stereotyped, calling up images of White cowboys with shit-kicker heels and an NRA membership just as reliably as hip-hop brings to mind Black men with knee-height pants, big sunglasses, and an uncomfortable lust for “bitches”. Needless to say, both of those images are rarely accurate.

The reason why both rap and country music so easily fall into clichés and stereotypes is their focus on story and personality. Unlike the other lyrically focused mainstream genre, rock, both rap and country focus more on narrative than on raw emotion; while this can make the songs more interesting, it also means they often take more time to make their point. A rock song can often summarize their point in one chorus, while some country songs take a few full verses to get interesting; ditto with classic rap music, which required the listener to pay close enough attention to decipher the rapid-fire lyrics.

When rap crossed over to the mainstream for good, it did so by slowing the tempo and putting an emphasis on hooks. Hooks are the choruses of modern rap music, providing something to get stuck in a person’s head and make them stop the dial when surfing the radio. Eminem arguably mastered the trick, using it to embed “My Name Is” so far into the popular consciousness that it essentially guaranteed his future career. Similarly, “In Da Club” turned 50 Cent from an underground hero to a superstar by keeping him from rapping at all.

Songs Of The Days: Week 25

June 18: The La's - There She Goes (The La's, 1990)



June 19: White Zombie - Electric Head: The Agony (Part 1) (Astro-Creep: 2000, 1995)



White Zombie - Electric Head: The Ecstasy (Part 2) (Astro-Creep: 2000, 1995)



June 21: Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know (Jagged Little Pill, 1995)



June 22: The Police - Message In A Bottle (Reggatta De Blanc, 1979)



June 23: Underworld - Born Slippy .NUXX (single, 1996)



June 24: The Smiths - What Difference Does It Make? (Hatful Of Hollow, 1983)

Week 24: The Walkmen - Heaven (2012)

Pop’s getting old. The basic styles and tropes of Western pop music, depending on how you define their origin, are around 50 years old, and unlike other artistic mediums we’ve done little to reinvent the wheel. Even Michael Jackson, the last true watershed artist for the pop world, had his grounding in the harmony-rich, rhythmically driven music of classic R&B, as did Madonna, his close successor.

As such, modern-day pop music tends to build itself as lavishly as possible, creating gothic facades over mundane, sometimes rickety foundations. Layers upon layers of synths, guitars, vocal overdubs, and general effects are used to create songs that were technologically impossible even 5 years ago. Invention over innovation; new tools created simply to be looked at and gushed over.

Not the other road of resistance is much better. Rather than paint oneself up with makeup and fancy dress, some artists chose to strip themselves down to the bones. Modern punks and the basest of garage rock revivalists revel in their ability to become walking skeletons, refusing to innovate or even invent ways to make things sound new.

Songs Of The Days: Weeks 23 & 24

June 4: Richard & Linda Thompson - Withered & Died (I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, 1974)



June 5: Willie Nelson - Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour? (Where Are You, My Love?/I Never Cared For You (Teatro, 1998)



June 6: Matthew Dear - I Put A Smell On You (Black City, 2010)



June 7: Fleetwood Mac - Hypnotized (Mystery To Me, 1973) (not available on Spotify)



June 8: Beck - The New Pollution (Odelay, 1996)



June 10: Alice In Chains - I Stay Away (Jar Of Flies, 1993)



June 11: Calvin Harris - Merrymaking At My Place (I Created Disco, 2007)



June 12: The Kinks - Strangers (Lola Versus Powerman And The Money-go-round, Part 1, 1970)



Wye Oak - Strangers (AV Undercover, 2010)
Wye Oak covers The Kinks

June 13: No Doubt - End It On This (Tragic Kingdom, 1995)



June 14: Fiona Apple - The Way Things Are (When The Pawn..., 1999)



June 16: David Bowie - Stay (Live At Nassau Coliseum, 1976) (Not available on Spotify)



June 17 (Father's Day): Harry Chapin - Cat's In The Cradle (Verities & Balderdash, 1974)



Bruce Springsteen - Adam Raised A Cain (Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978)



Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue (At San Quentin, 1969)



Buckethead - Watching The Boats With My Dad (Colma, 1999)

Week 23: The White Stripes - White Blood Cells (2001)

“Jack told me more than once not to make it sound too good."

-       Stuart Sikes, recording engineer on White Blood Cells, “A definitive oral history: Revealing the White Stripes”

Punk tends to favor personality over talent. For a genre that treats any form of instrumental virtuosity beyond playing three chords and yelling with suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst (The Clash were pushing it with “Complete Control” already, and were essentially cast out of the clan when they released London Calling), the charisma of the performers tended to be the most important factor in the overall band’s success. Those who broke from that idea were either called The Ramones (who relied on playing great, simple pop songs really, really fast) or became the core of the New Wave and, later, New Romantic genres.

The power of personality that John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) and Joe Strummer personified had its root in the pre-Beatles pop music era. Back in the day, bands rarely had anyone capable of writing their own material, let alone at the rate needed to match the then-thriving industry of Tin Pan Alley. Buddy Holly & The Crickets were one of the first groups to manage the feat, and the British Invasion broke the industry wide open a few years later, but the 40s and 50s were dominated by songwriters who approached pop music in the same manner as blues, classical, and musical theatre: as something to be performed.

Week 22: Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)

“I'm sick of spending these lonely nights/Training myself not to care”

-       Interpol, “NYC”, Turn On The Bright Lights

Few bands were as hated for their quality as Interpol was in 2002. Low-level music snobs were united in celebration; finally, there was a good, popular band that wore their influences so obviously and openly that their quality could be dismissed out of hand by even the least well-listened hipster. It was like a connect-the-dots puzzle for dummies, with a straight line between Joy Division and this band of charlatan mimics. People waved off the band, laughing while wearing a Closer t-shirt from Hot Topic: “You only think they’re good because you think they’re original.”

You may have guessed that I was one of those sneering snobs, for a while at least. I enjoyed the bigger singles from the album (“PDA” and “Obstacle 1”) when they were originally released, but the more I read about the band, the more irritated I became. I was outraged that they had allegedly ripped off Joy Division (despite never having heard one of their albums all the way through at that point) and The Chameleons (who I started listening to due to their claimed similarities to Interpol), and I quickly dropped the album out of my rotation.

It was at that point that I attempted to enter the off-putting world of post-punk, one of those cheerful genres that actively works at being alien and intimidating. The effort was short-lived; I enjoyed The Chameleons and have a firm, unyielding love for the Bowie albums that contributed a basic foundation for the genre (the Berlin trilogy and Station To Station, namely), but found the rest of the genre rather masturbatory.

I realize that’s a bit of an odd term to apply to a genre that was apparently focused on reducing music to elements even rawer than punks, but even a cursory glance at the genre reveals that the idea faded rather quickly. Post-punk and punk have in common two things: intent to rip up popular music and start over again (devolution, in other words) and a complete and utter failure to do so. Post-punk had been scooped on the idea of radical minimalism and primitivism in music decades ago; Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” did everything post-punk sought for in 1913, and incited a riot in doing so. By the time Public Image LTD rolled around, John Cage had already mastered the idea with “4’ 33””, a ‘song’ devoted to exploring the natural aesthetics of a quiet room.

There’s also the simple fact that the post-punk music that is today well-known and respected is still pop music. Like the best punk music, post-punk lacks the reckless courage of John Cage and other avant-garde artists in the way it clings to basic pop structures. A more accurate mission statement for punk would have been that they were seeking the devolution of Western pop, a mission in which they arguably succeeded.

Songs Of The Days - Pop Week! (Week 22)

May 28: Madonna - Beautiful Stranger (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me OST, 1999)



May 29: The Kinks - You Really Got Me (Kinks, 1964)



May 30: Crystal Waters - Relax (Storyteller, 1994)



May 31: Aaliyah - U Got Nerve (Aaliyah, 2001)



June 1: The Cars - Just What I Needed (The Cars, 1978)



June 2: Steely Dan - My Old School (Countdown To Ecstasy, 1973)



June 3: George Michael - Careless Whisper (Make It Big, 1984)



Gary Wright - Dreamweaver (The Dream Weaver, 1975)

Week 21: Porcupine Tree - In Absentia (2002)

"It's about people on the fringes, on the edges of humanity and society. […] Why are they unable to empathize? It’s sort of a metaphor - there's something missing, a black hole, a cancer in their soul. It's an absence in the soul."

-          Steve Wilson of Porcupine Tree on the concept behind In Absentia, Vox Online

Progressive rock is much like pop in that it relies almost entirely on presentation. Regardless of the relative minimums of technical proficiency and sex appeal (respectively), both genres strive to present a flashy, impressive exterior with little attention spent on providing meaningful emotional content. Lots of sound and very little fury, in other words.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the tightly arranged, technically pruned sounds of present-day plastic pop was originally inspired by the similarly controlled sounds of 70s progressive rock. Granted, prog achieved that perfected sound through careful production, obsessive songwriters, and extremely talented musicians while pop simply runs raw sound through computer programs, but the end result of glossy product is essentially the same. It’s the aural equivalent of comparing a photograph of a naturally beautiful woman with light makeup to a homely woman airbrushed and Photoshopped to hell and back; the methods may be different, with prog being a playground for musicians and pop for producers, but the final images are fairly similar.

The main difference between those images, in a more complex metaphor, would be the content. Progressive rock, thanks mainly to the boundless influence of Led Zeppelin, tends to be descriptive. It’s no mistake that prog and fantasy imagery often gets linked by artists and record sleeve designers alike; the two fields are similar in that they’re trying to build extremely detailed worlds that can be marveled at by the consumer.

Songs Of The Days: Week 21

May 21: Blockhead - Carnivores Unite (Music By Cavelight, 2004)



May 22: Sugar - If I Can't Change Your Mind (Copper Blue, 1992)



May 23: Fountains Of Wayne - Valley Winter Song (Welcome Interstate Managers, 2003)



May 24: Fred Williams & The Jewels Band - Tell Her (single, 1965?) (not available on Spotify)



May 25: 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me (The Psychedelic Sounds Of..., 1966)



May 26: Demon Fuzz - Disillusioned Man (Afreaka!, 1970)



May 27: Malcolm Kipe - Mr. Politician (Breakspiracy Theories, 2005)

Week 20: Jack White - Blunderbuss (2012)

“A concert is not a live rendition of [an] album. It's a theatrical event.”

“I'm so powerful on stage that I seem to have created a monster. When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man.”

-          Freddie Mercury, of Queen

Presentation of personality has been integral to music from the beginning of pop. Managing that presentation is fundamental to most musicians for two reasons: the fact that people tend to believe what people are saying, even if the words have a melody to them; and the origin of pop music in opera and musical theater. Unless one makes things very explicit indeed, people assume that a singer is their character, whether that character is a sexual misanthrope, misogynist, or sadsack suicide risk; the song is projected back onto the singer, often without a second-thought.

Starting with the second reason, the skeleton of musical theatre and Broadway is still front-and-center in pop music’s closet: one need look no further than Lady Gaga’s long-form music videos and play-like stage presentation to find evidence of this. Pop music is all about carefully developing and maintaining a public image through meticulously edited interviews, stage performances, as well as the modern-day tools of the music video and Twitter feed.

Social media, like Twitter, has made that kind of image maintenance much more labor intensive (I’m sure Lady Gaga’s PR people get paid very well), as well as far more pervasive. These artists rarely, if ever, appear to the public out-of-character; hell, I doubt most of Lady Gaga’s fans even know her real name. The image, the facsimile, has superseded the actual person it was based upon; simulacra over simulation. The pop star is loved (sometimes to frightening extremes) but the people who love them know little except for the tidbits that careful producers throw into the water like chum for the sharks.

What gives those tidbits power and flavor is the fact that they’re presented as quotes; small offerings from someone that fans view as far above them. Kanye West’s Twitter feed doesn’t get attention because of any kind of cleverness, sincerity, or articulateness; people only read it because they can perceive it as a connection to that guy who did “Jesus Walks” and “Power”.

Songs Of The Days: Week 20

May 14: Chris Isaak - Wicked Game (Heart-Shaped World, 1989)



May 15: Public Enemy - Revolutionary Generation (Fear Of A Black Planet, 1990)



May 17: OutKast - B.O.B (Bombs Over Baghdad) (Stankonia, 2000)



May 18: Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band - Turn The Page (Live Bullet, 1976) (Not available on Spotify)



May 19: Maria McKee - If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags) (Pulp Fiction OST, 1994)



PJ Harvey - Dress (Dry, 1992)



Masters Of Reality - She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On) (Sunrise On The Sufferbus, 1993)



May 20: The Clash - Death Or Glory (London Calling, 1979)