The Mix Project

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1. Yoko Ono: “Walking on Thin Ice” (6:00), from Walking on Thin Ice (Rykodisc 1990; originally released 1981).

Having immediately discarded my sure-shot first pick, the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache,” I wanted something that announced itself and that could open up into a wide variety of territory. A groove record of some kind usually works well for this, or something that ends cold as opposed to fading out; you can shift moods more rapidly, go for baroque easier. My original choice, Lyrics Born’s “Send Them,” from 1993 and collected on SoleSides’ Greatest Bumps, ended up being dropped for this reason: it’s funky, it rocks, that looped undercarriage is one of the most hypnotically arresting things I’ve ever heard, but that long fade-out made it seem damnably hard to follow (at least on the day I started this). Here, though, there’s so much sonic activity during the fade, Yoko’s birdcalls and the dive-bombing guitars and the honking horn chart toppling over each other in cacophonous succession, that you can go anywhere afterward.

It’s also one of my very favorite singles. I think at this point we’re far enough away from Beatlemania and anti-Yoko bullshit (or has 1 reinstated the former while my bohemia-dwelling has blinded me to the continuance of the latter?) that I can fear little or no reprisal for saying this is a better single than any the Beatles made. There are several reasons for this. For one, funk and disco’s rhythmic foregrounding meaning as much to me as anything the Fabs portended, meaning that I adore a good groove as much or more than I do a good song. For another, I’d be lying if I didn’t own up to the romantic hold this record has on me right now. Despite the World Trade Center bombings and the pall they cast over the city for awhile (and may yet again, if we’re unlucky), I’ve been in something of a honeymoon period with New York since I got here in March, and “Walking on Thin Ice” is flat-out the most New York-sounding record I’ve ever heard--the city’s jittery rhythms, its nervous drive and clattering sonic life, all seem to make their way onto wax here. Walking through the East Village, however manicured the East Village has become in the 20 years since the song was recorded, with this song on my headphones is like living a dream I’ve been having since I was four years old.

And it’s just as honest to mention that the Beatles’ (rightfully) monolithic hold on my and the public’s imagination has made it damn difficult to pick any one Beatles single as “greatest.” Rightly or wrongly, this can help a one-shot jump in and take the prize when the votes are divided elsewhere. Sure, “Ticket to Ride” is something of a consensus pick in America, “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” in the UK, but is that rightly so or just not wrongly? For instance, I recently asked a friend if he’d be interested in contributing a list of favorite singles to another project I’m thinking of doing if it were to come to fruition; he said sure, and named a couple of personal standbys. Then he paused a moment and then, a little uncertainly, said, “Yeah, I guess that ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ would be the Beatles single.” A few days later, when I mentioned that B-sides were eligible and were he interested he could vote for “I Saw Her Standing There” as “Hand’s” b-side, he proceeded to change his vote, first to “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane,” then to “Yellow Submarine”/“Eleanor Rigby.” Then he threw his hands up and changed the subject. Clearly, this was something that needed to be thought about in great depth.

None of which, I hope, means I’m making my case for this record in completely negative terms. Because what I’m saying here is that despite my abiding love for Yoko’s late husband’s former band, I’d pick this record over any of theirs because, quite simply, I like it better. That’s as much a generational trick as it is anything--the jumpy, hyperalert rhythms of “Thin Ice,” the noise guitar, feel more like the present, not to mention the future, than all but a few Beatles tracks, which through no fault of their own helped portend some of the most stuck-in-the-mud music in pop history (power pop, trad psychedelia). Even if your proclivities run toward the avant-garde, it’s impossible to deny that Yoko’s a better expresser than she is a singer, but the knife’s-edge tension she conveys on the crooned verses and cawed endchoruses and retched bridges fit the groove like a glove, and she’s mixed just low enough--as part of the instrumental mix rather than above it--that deciphering her becomes an ongoing pleasure. And I have to say, this record works its magic on me not least because it makes me wonder what might have been. Forget the flawless, deeply felt superpop of Double Fantasy, which portended a very professional future of gradually diminishing returns; here’s the sound of two middle-aged people (Yoko was 48, John 40) who went into the studio and in one gesture beat both Public Image, Ltd. and Chic at their own game! I mean, how fucking cool is that? Who knows where they’d have gone from there--maybe they’d have kept moving in this direction, maybe they’d have done it only as often as they felt like, maybe they’d have gone back to superpop permanently, having proven they could too be just as bad-assed as the kids who were beginning to move into territory past the rules Lennon had help establish. We’ll never know, of course. But the fact that they got this far is as impressive an achievement as either of them can claim credit for.

RUNNERS UP
The Replacements, “I Will Dare” (Sort of demands a power-pop set, but I wasn’t in the mood for one.)
Lyrics Born, “Send Them” (Ultimately felt like something that should show up in the middle rather than right at the beginning. Also, I went to the very out of order CD shelves in my room and started scanning for the first thing I could open with. SoleSides’ Greatest Bumps was sixth from left on the top shelf, after the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me and Let It Be, both Marc Ribot y Postizos Cubanos CDs, and Jonathan Richman’s Surrender to Jonathan. I told you they were out of order.)

--3 October, 2001

2. Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime” (4:19), from Remain in Light (Sire 1980).

Being in the library and running across David Bowman’s godawful Talking Heads bio, This Must Be the Place, triggered this choice; this link to my review of the book for Seattle Weekly will help fill in that opinion’s blanks. The squiggly keyboards also work nicely in tandem with the wavy chunking of “Thin Ice’s” rhythm guitars; similar basslines and, of course, confluence of time/place--early 1980s New York--have their place here as well.

RUNNERS UP
Joey Beltram, "Energy Flash" (Dark foreboding into more dark, more foreboding.)

--4 October, 2001

3. Tricky: “Feed Me” (4:02), from Maxinquaye (Island 1995).

Simon Reynolds makes a decent case for Cannibal Ox in the current issue of The Village Voice--though he makes a far better one for their and other undie hip-hoppers’ popularity among rock critics being a direct byproduct of their similarity to criticism rather than on purely musical terms, which I’d back him up on, if only to admit my own sometime complicity (not in CanOx’s case, however, they bore the fuck out of me). Near the end, he compared one of the songs on The Cold Vein to “Feed Me,” which I’ve long loved--not just as an album track, but as one of the most perfect examples of “trip-hop” ever recorded.

Listening to this project’s first three songs again, for pleasure and to make sure the segues worked, I was struck by how similar it was in feel, if not quite in sound, with Talking Heads’ “Seen and Not Seen,” from Remain in Light. (It was also the b-side of “Once in a Lifetime.”) Rhythmically, both are mid-tempo funk, albeit with very different beats; Tricky mumbling in the background behind Martine’s vocal calls up associations of Byrne’s spoken vocal; “Feed Me’s” tinkling-glass backdrop is spiritual kin to the darting strings and glassy synth filigrees that make up “Seen’s” soundscape. Since my mixtape logic frequently has me choosing a follow-up that sounds the most like the previous song’s successor on the album, I seem to have unconsciously went that direction, albeit wrongly: “Once” and “Seen” are separated on Remain in Light by “Houses in Motion.”

Funny, but not all that surprising. What Reynolds specifically refers to “Feed Me” in relation to is its place at the end of Maxinquaye--as a glimmer of promise at the end of the album’s relentless grind, a sudden brace of light cutting through an hourlong stroll through the murk. Here, the music’s shimmery feel and uneasy hope connect it to that of the Heads track. And hey: “You may say to yourself/This is not my beautiful house/You may say to yourself/This is not my beautiful wife,” meet “The dream of yesterday/Becomes another lie.” You two have a lot to talk about.

RUNNERS UP
Something by Prince, early 1980s (No particular song came to mind, though I imagine something from between Dirty Mind and 1999; branching the punk-funk territory away from New York would have been instructive.)
Rick James, “Super Freak” (More punk-funk, more bass riff-driven, and also more down to earth, which in this case could move things in a different sort of direction than it’s been going, or is about to, I suspect.)

--5 October, 2001

4. Peshay: “The Real Thing (90 BPM Version)” (7:03), from Headz 2A (Mo’ Wax 1996).

A stasis favorite, and extremely similar to “Feed Me”--it could almost be that song’s cheerier younger sibling, or a remix. You can follow it with just about anything: it’s a seven-minute swoon that ends cold, on an a cappella drumbeat, so where you take things next is anyone’s guess. It’s also what I followed the Tricky song with on the first mixtape I ever made, in February 1997; I almost left it off here for that very reason. Unless I get a really good tip, the song after it will continue in that old tape’s vein. (That’s a hint, readers.)

It might seem surprising that I didn’t really start making mixtapes until I was 22 years old; it is to me, but only up to a certain point. Part of it has to do with the way I got seriously in rock, after years of what I’ll call casual fandom, at least in comparison to what it became later on, e.g. what you’re reading right now. I’d been a major music fan from birth, apparently, and since I began reading at an early age (I was three; my long-deceased great-grandaunt Loretta had taught me) I would go through my uncle Bob’s copious record collection (he was a disco DJ in the late ’70s) and read credits and liner notes. I also had a gift for memorization and paid close attention to factoids about favorite records played on the radio--chart positions, producers and songwriters, etc. It’s hard not to romanticize this aspect of my life somewhat, especially since a lot of it occurred before about age seven or so; I’m going by my mom’s and other relatives’ recollections of it, since some of it I don’t remember that well. At any rate, around second grade or so I ran through a series of pop-cultural obsessions--movies, TV, comic books, old radio shows, baseball--that lasted until I entered junior high. A friend of my mother’s had left a library copy of The Book of Lists at our apartment permanently, and through it I became obsessed with listmaking. So when I entered seventh grade, I went to the media center and--voila!--there was the heretofore unknown to me Book of Lists 2, in the reference center. And inside it was the twenty top-ranked albums from Paul Gambaccini’s Rock Critics’ Choice: The Top 200 Albums, a 1977 book wherein the author polled 48 critics and radio DJs for their ten favorite LPs. Four of the top ten, and five of the top 20, were by the Beatles.

This fascinated me; at that point the Beatles were more or less public fixtures with no point of entry as far as I knew. They were ubiquitous, they were cultural monoliths, but I never thought of them as musicians, as people who made music that you listened to, that was actually good, that meant something private and individual to the person listening to it as well as having a widespread impact on the world. And since I was preternaturally disposed to trusting critics from watching Siskel and Ebert on TV and thinking they had the best jobs in the entire fucking world, learning that the Beatles were responsible for approximately one-fourth of the best music ever made...my curiosity was definitely piqued. I had to know. So I prevailed on my best friend, Eric, to tape me his parents’ copies of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Abbey Road, the white album. One at a time, he’d deliver cassettes, and they were like communiques from another world. Thus began the hunt. And even after digging into Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Singles (1963-88) issue as well as Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, I was still an albums guy. I wanted to hear the things in their entirety. Although I’d later make tapes for road trips in a back-breakingly laborious style with strict, absolutely stupid rules I’d set for myself (I think they might have had about four good segues total, not to mention my steadfast refusal to limit myself to songs I actually liked for the sake of...God, I don’t even want to know what anymore), for the most part I didn’t. Later for using other folks’ artistic statements to make my own.

Cut ahead to 1996; at age 21, I’m living in Seattle, unsuccessfully, working at a pizza parlor and living first in a dilapidated flophouse where my life is threatened at 5am by the maniac in the bunk above mine, then in the basement of a house with a very annoying woman who doesn’t pay the bills the rest of the people living there give her money to do so with. My listening is done primarily on a Walkman, on tapes my coworkers make for me from the CDs I buy but cannot play at home. I also become a regular at an Internet cafe near the flophouse, where I can listen to CDs on headphones.

Among these are some supersized imports from England: Headz 2, the two-part sequel to Mo’ Wax’s 1994 trip-hop compilation, totaling four discs, and the two-disc soundtrack of David Toop’s book Ocean of Sound. I love the book, but even more I’m impressed with the CDs, which do what I’ve always wanted to do with my own tapes: they bring together a wide array of artists and styles to create something entirely new. Even more interesting, they create a sort of interior sound-world, ambient without boredom, mood music that sucks you in completely and keeps on giving long after you’ve gotten the point. Combined with the edgy hipster cool of the Headz comps, which aren’t great but are filled with the possibility I can barely see in my own life at this point, these womblike aural environments are just the ticket I need.

Little surprise, then, that when I returned to Minneapolis in January 1997 on a Greyhound, I began plotting out my first tape(s). “The Real Thing (90 BPM Version)” (there was also a drum & bass mix included on 2B) was the Headz 2 track I returned to most frequently; a vibes/strings/chimes/bright-sparkly-things loop overlaid with a dusty breakbeat and occasional sub-bass drops--given my Toop-inspired fascination with musical stasis, a perfect track to get lost in. Now, most of the dub-hop I was attuned to seems faintly embarrassing, a phase I went through that I’d rather not return to. But even when, last summer, I began snipping onto reference CD-Rs tracks I liked from albums I didn’t, I couldn’t find it in myself to get rid of Headz 2--too much nostalgic value, too much personal meaning. Plus, I still like the cover art.

RUNNER UP
Jeru the Damaja, “Come Clean” (You don’t think Tricky was inspired by this DJ Premier-produced joint or anything, do you? Maybe not for “Feed Me,” but at least for “Ponderosa,” right?)

--6 October, 2001

5. Marvin Gaye: “Please Don’t Stay (Once You Go Away)” (3:27), from Let’s Get It On (Tamla 1973).

For the opening snare hit, which is maybe half a tone off the one that ends “The Real Thing.” The mood-transfer here is perfect, too: from vaguely soulful stasis to outright soul shout, from lovers’ cocoon to lover’s plea, but without the kind of jarring jump that, say, a ’60s Stax number might accomplish. Marvin’s singing is as raw as he got post-What’s Going On, and even though you sense him consciously performing, he’s utterly convincing. Early on, he wanted to be Sinatra, and on Let’s Get It On as a whole, his singing has a similarly dramatic sense of pace, and of distance communicating as (or indistinguishable from) intimacy.

It’s also the song I placed after the Peshay track on that mixtape discussed in the last entry. But this time I promise I’ll stop.

RUNNERS UP
Funky 4 + 1, “That’s the Joint” (Dawn breaks open, immediately but at an even pace, into the most joyous record anyone’s ever made.)
Barry White, “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Babe” (Same principle as Marvin, but even more smooth ’n’ funky; says what “The Real Thing” intimates.)
Elvis Costello & the Attractions, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” (Betrayal, or at least suspicion, following seduction--and, as with Barry White, set to a killer opening drumbeat.)
Luomo, “Synkro (Edit)” (The eleven-minute version from Sonar 2001--five minutes shaved off the album version--this takes stasis into new realms of soulful abstraction.)

--7 October, 2001

6. Joni Mitchell: “Help Me” (3:22), from Court and Spark (Asylum 1974)

One of the nice things about high-flown romanticism is the many varieties it takes. Sometimes it simmers and sometimes it explodes. This tune does both. It’s richer that the Marvin track, with enough going on at any given time that the first impression is either too exotically busy for its own good or, if you close in on the vocal etc., too damn pretty and/or West Coast or whatnot. But put that aside a moment and pay attention to one particular passage. I refer here to the bridge’s end, where all the “didn’t it feel good”s fore and back converge over gtrs, woodwinds, sax, “jazzy” and all that tasty ’70s skyrockets-at-night tripe. Except here it really micro-miniexplodes, pop-rock in yr ear like Pop Rocks in yr mouth, tangy bursts of tonal color fizzing around this way & that, stuff you never thought you cared about (like woodwinds, say--meaning “woodwinds” as a concept rather than any particular instrument/s, the breath of the performer as Breath of Life, Life d/b/a Authenticity, the latter of which a ploy and a buncha hooey from aggressive well-meaners whose mission in life is to guilt-trip every-um-yeah-whatever-one else) doing deliriously wonderful tangos with one another midair, soaring and scything and turning the track into marmalade, served on the dry toast of Joni’s voice and strummy (as opposed to merely strummed--you feel the pick moving over the individual strings rather than a concentrated blur) acoustic.

I’ve always been fascinated by Joni’s hold on black musicians, not so much because she’s white, though that too, but because even her best work’s so damn frostbitten, though from Nina Simone on down arty’s been a big indicator of Soul for lots of folks, for whatever reason. (Untrammelled creativity? Rampant emotionalism uncontained? Silliness that isn’t?--which frequently means oddballitude that takes itself Seriously and is therefore transmuted? But of course.) A lot of the more modern adulation I’m guessing comes via Prince, whose revival is imminent (I hope), but what I get from Court and Spark as a whole and the track we’re microscoping tonight as well is a sense of abandon within strict defined patterns--and if that’s not a good definition of most R&B-and-offshoots, I dunno what is. (Not that that’s really any kind of reason for it--doubt many Are N. Bee singers sat around formulating the above and shouting, “Eureka!”--but you understand.) Much of the album undulates like primo concurrent Stevie Wonder, which could be another connection, too, only where his does so via warbly-sounding synthesizers (ARPs, Moogs, et. al.), hers come from the arrangements, how the instruments tense and vibrate, physically and ideaswise both off each other, as in the example in the previous graf. I’ve been thinking about this partly because I’ve been getting into Court and Spark after long being mostly interested in the “Help Me”/“Free Man in Paris” pairing (not many albums have better one-two punches than this’n), and because of Greg Tate’s recent (marvelous) review of the new Bob Dylan in The Village Voice, wherein he mentions Joni as one of the other whitefolks besides Bob with a gargantuan, manifest hold on black music and its makers. The others are Charlie Haden and Gil Evans, and the latter, to me, seems sort of connected with Joni in an odd way. The handful of Gil I know (Out of the Cool, the Miles stuff) is dead set on atmosphere, and so’s Joni much of the time. At their best, neither stint on specifics, on content, but that stylishness (word-choice affected by second line of “People’s Parties” playing as I write) is definitely a factor of their popularity with anybody. But really, who knows? Right now, I’m happy to listen to two great high-flown romantics twine around one another, refusing for the moment to land.

RUNNERS UP:
Joni Mitchell, “Car on a Hill” (Probably a better conceptual match--near-unrequited lovers being more specific than helplessness-in-love, collective yawn--but “Help Me”’s just a touch stronger and lord knows I love that middle eight. Could you tell?) --8 October, 2001

7. Prince: "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" (4:04), from Sign 'o' the Times (Paisley Park 1987)

One of the nice things about high-flown romanticism is...oh, never mind. Anyway, this one's kind of an obvious pick--an answer song, or rather a tribute song, complete with stop-the-show quotation in the style of and everything.

RUNNERS UP:
Prince, "Starfish & Coffee" (Another case where a different song on the same album might well be/have been the better pick, and in this case it really was hard to decide. But hey--intertextual self-referentiality and whatnot I'm just a sucker for, y'know?)

--9 October, 2001

8. Young Marble Giants: “Final Day” (1:44), from 25 Years of Rough Trade Shops (Mute UK 2001; originally released 1979)

Muted but amazingly powerful, especially when you realize how well it stands up in the context of very different music. A friend didn’t even notice it on the Colossal Youth reissue, after an hour or so of stuff that sounded more-or-less the same, but it knocked him over on the recent Rough Trade box. I actually heard it first on a taped copy of Wanna Buy a Bridge?--the classic 1980 R.T. compilation which I believe marked its LP debut, after having been single-only--in 1994 (an acquaintance taped me one) and felt much the same, e.g. knocked out. (Tragic confession: I still haven’t heard Colossal Youth. Revoke my rockcrit membership?) Here, “Final Day’s” clipped, quiet riff and plainsung vocal move us nicely from Prince’s weirdo mutterings into, thanks to its sudden ending, potentially damn near anything.

There’s probably no way Wanna Buy a Bridge? is ever gonna see the light of day again in its original form--nobody really seem interested in trying to make it so, and even if they were, the licensing seems to be all over the place. Still, even if you can neither locate a vinyl copy nor transfer it to CD, diligent downloading and burning should do the less-legit job just fine (as it did for me recently)*. The box is a fun own, too, not to mention bargain-priced. But I must insist, politely but firmly, that anyone claiming that 25 Years of Rough Trade in any way approaches Bridge? for either sustained thrills or depth of goods is kidding themselves. Still, there are worse ways to discover the indie ’80s--having to actually live through them, for instance....

RUNNERS UP:
Luomo, “Synkro (Edit)” (Again. Following the weird, squelchy end of "Girlfriend," it doesn't hurt to continue the thread.)
King Tubby, “Dark Destroyer Dub” (Or maybe we just wanna smooth out those squelches and slide through unperturbed....)

*For those who’d like to build--or burn--their own Bridge, the complete tracklist: Stiff Little Fingers, “Alternative Ulster”/Delta 5, “Mind Your Own Business”/The Slits, “Man Next Door” [the single version, not the live one; best of luck here--took me a month to find it floating around]/Essential Logic, “Aerosol Burns”/Television Personalities, “Part Time Punks”/Swell Maps, “Read About Seymour”/The Pop Group, “We Are All Prostitutes”/Spizz Energi, “Soldier Soldier”/Kleenex [a.k.a. Liliput], “Ain’t You”/Cabaret Voltaire, “Nag Nag Nag”/The Raincoats, “In Love”/Young Marble Giants, “Final Day”/Scritti Politti, “Skank Bloc Bologna”/Robert Wyatt, “At Last I Am Free.” The Television Personalities, Cabaret Voltaire and Young Marble Giants cuts are all on 25 Years of Rough Trade Shops.

--10 October, 2001

9. Tiger Ranks: “Party Wit Me” (3:39), from 500% Dynamite! (Soul Jazz UK 2001).

Time for some new blood. I’ve been relying on old favorites and/or familiar mix sequences, so I’m throwing a wrench in the works. Since you can basically follow “Final Day” with anything, I decided to do just that--with something I just encountered recently.

Of course, it’s not as if I made this decision consciously; as with almost everything else I’ve featured so far, the decision was instinctive if not impulsive. After getting up a few hours earlier than usual due to the UPS guy waking me up and spending a normal workday (10:30-4:30) listening to records I’m committed to write about, I headed out for lunch, haircut, picking up mail from my old roommate, and getting the new 500% Dynamite!, which I finally have the money to buy. Arriving back at 9pm and having a couple hours to kill before going to catch Richie Hawtin at Centro-Fly, I throw on my new purchase (as well as another record that I’m writing about and need to take notes on) and check email etc. Sounds dandy, and I leave the room awhile; when I come back, track ten’s playing. And whaddaya know--it’s a dancehall version of, hey, Eminem’s “My Name Is.” A damn good dancehall version of “My Name Is,” I might add, with Tiger Ranks’s crew “Coming from the south, east and west…bring[ing] bulletproof vests.” And boom--then and there I know my next selection.

RUNNERS UP:
Augustus Pablo, “King Tubby’s Meets Rockers Uptown” (One of my ten favorite singles, and that opening drumroll is like the gong at the top of a kung-fu epic--a perfect outro, from the end of the world (well, that’s what “Final Day’s” about) to the apocalypse, or a reasonable audio facsimile thereof.)
Luomo, “Synkro” (That freeze-frame-in-reverse opening riff sweeps the ashes away; the setting is the same--a lonely street in the dead of night--but the import is very different, more humane now, though pretty desolate nevertheless.)
The Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the U.K.” (Reuniting the aftereffect with its original impulse.)
Iggy Pop, “Lust for Life” (…Or its opposite.)

--11 October, 2001

Before I continue this, a few words of explanation. I have been a bad Mix Projector, partly because I’ve had so much work to do (work = writing that pays), but I have in fact chosen roughly a song per day and even done some writing on them. I just didn’t feel up to making it coherent--and though the main writing crunch is over (look for pieces in The Village Voice, City Pages, Spin and Time Out New York over the next week or two months), there’s more still to come. Still, having just started this just a couple weeks ago, I felt remiss in my duties. So, back to work. The next five songs were chosen on a virtually day-per-song basis, with a couple exceptions, but there’s no runners-up listed because I didn’t really have time to think of any, and there’s some thematic resonance to the three in the middle. Given the notes I had for some of these before sitting down to try and make good on the Project, I decided to keep the tenses as they were when I was making them. So thanks for being patient, and I’ll try not to let this happen again.

10. Doughty: “Real Love/It’s Only Life” (3:23), from Skittish (no label 2000; originally recorded 1996).

Semi-continuing in weird-covers mode, though the Tiger Ranks song is more accurately a version; nevertheless, this seemed like the right choice, though a definite left turn back into the introspective mode of “Final Day,” not that I plan to keep it going for long. Skittish is a solo acoustic CD recorded by Mike Doughty, former Soul Coughing frontman and contributing music writer for New York Press. Writing as Dirty Sanchez (a pseudonym he wrote a column as) he was always gonzo and often funny, if frequently peevish; his “straighter” writing is generally a lot less entertaining or insightful, though he has his moments. The same goes for this CD as well, which was recorded in a one-day session in 1996 with Kramer producing; the moment is this Mary J. Blige cover, with some of a Feelies song thrown in. It’s a very rough gem--coming off the Feelies lyric, which he uses for a bridge, he hits a serious clinker on his first “real” on the Mary J. title phrase. I still wince when I hear it sometimes, but if anything it serves to heighten the sincerity of his performance. There’s something private about it, not in the cloistered sense but in that he’s almost singing it to himself, wistfully, a kid connecting with a pop song on the radio, and in some ways it’s more poignant than the original.

11. Les Savy Fav: “Adopduction” (3:26), from Go Forth (Frenchkiss 2001).

Despite their frequent visits to Seattle while I was living there, I didn’t see this Brooklyn quartet until this spring, shortly after arriving in New York. They were terrific fun--lead singer Tim Harrington had a predilection for climbing the balcony of the Knitting Factory, and the band pounded plenty. None of which prepared me for this song, whose only real peers are Steely Dan’s “Any World That I’m Welcome To” (“Is better than the one I come from”) and Public Image Ltd.’s “Poptones,” which John Lydon alleged was about “male rape” and whose lyrics painted their scenario in the most elliptical of terms (“Driving to the forest in a Japanese car,” “Hindsight does me no good/Standing naked in this neck of the woods,” “I can’t forget the impression you made/You left a hole in the back of my head”). Les Savy Fav are more fanciful: the song is explicitly a figment of its singer’s imagination, with the first three lines--“Kidnapped/I was kidnapped/I dreamed I was kidnapped”--each panning away from the subject until it’s shown whole. Harrington sings, “I dreamed I was kidnapped/By a guy with a mustache/And a chick with an eyepatch,” and there’s no sarcasm in that description--it’s the way he talks, and what he dreams about: “A chick with an eyepatch--yeah, that’s who’d kidnap me.”

The abductors try to hold him for ransom; his family refuses to pay. “The haggling went on for days/The days went on for weeks and weeks for years/Riding in the trunk was never fun/But soon I just ran out of tears.” It’s funny at first, but by the end it turns sad: “They never even told me their real names,” Harrington sings, after he realizes that his kidnappers were in fact the closest thing to a real family he’s ever had. It’s the sound, then, of some poor lonely passionate slob of a kid who can’t possibly see the way out of his circumscribed situation, or more to the point is just on the verge of finding it (anyone with enough wit/imagination/wherewithal to think up the chick with the eye patch will find their way out somehow, it’s the nature of these things). So here he is, singing his life.

World events right now are too enormous to render these things anything to really care about, some would say, probably rightly. But if anything I’m finding myself care more about small stories like this one, because there’s not much I can do about global politics and plenty I can do to make my fellow humans’ lot a better one. Even as I shudder to imagine what World Trade Center-inspired crap from Jewel or her equivalent that will be unavoidable by this time next year, what flag-waving tear-jerker will simultaneously replaces the national anthem and Whitney Houston’s mauling of “I Will Always Love You” in the hearts of millions, I find myself hearing more of the human toll the bombings have extracted and the war will extract in the desperate, defiant energy to the way Harrington sings the lines, “Someone stole me/I could trust me/Dare I say it/Even love them.” He sounds like a teenager justifying a bad decision, the toothsome smile in the face of adversity, with the falsetto ooohs in the background the sound of pop peeking through the radio into the kid’s dull life. Because I’ve known kids like that, I used to be a kid like that, and I can’t help but wonder how many of those kids were in those buildings, or on those planes.

12. Built to Spill: “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain” (7:00), from Live (Warner Bros. 2000).

I was awakened at noon on 9/11 by my roommate, who needed my room to hold the six coworkers who couldn’t get home--I have a couch and a bigger TV than he does, and we don’t really have a living room as such, plus one of his friends was asleep on his bed. I’m a very sloppy housekeeper, and my room was a mess (it still is), so I had to clean it while taking the news in. After 12 straight hours of CNN (all six people eventually found their way home), I found the two stations in New York that weren’t simulcasting updates: Channel 35, which late at night shows explicit “escort”-service and phone-sex ads, and Cartoon Network. Both are paeans to unmitigated pleasure, albeit at wildly different levels of whatever you can think of, and seeing both was a tremendous respite from the day’s events. Finally, I hit play on my little boom box’s CD payer, not remembering or caring what was inside; it was the Mekons’ Fear and Whiskey, an album Robert Christgau described as “a sort of concept album sort of about life during wartime,” and it was eerie as hell. Except for a couple background CDs I didn’t listen to music for three more days.

9/14 was the first night I felt semi-normal since The Event, so I decided to play some records to attempt to make sense of things. I don’t remember the exact sequence of things, but I recall John Lennon’s “Love” (followed by the queasy realization of “Isolation’s” aptness), the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang,” Big Star’s “O My Soul” (a major favorite those few days after, for some reason following that clean linear lead guitar line allowed me to concentrate on something besides my own raging confusion), the frighteningly appropriate “Pressure Drop” and several other songs by Toots & the Maytals (the Pentecostal feel of Toots’s singing fulfilled my need for gospel or gospel-derived music--something that touches the ethereal but stays earthy), some disco.

The sharpest shock, though, came from Built to Spill’s live version of “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain,” a song I’ve long taken succor in for generalized emotional turmoil and which took on about a dozen times more meaning after 9/11. The guitars lunge into a battlefield roar; Doug Martsch sings like a scared kid shouting helplessly into the void. The song’s bridge features a supercharged descending chord structure that’s like an listening to your heart plummet into the pit of your stomach; when the verse returns, the first words out of Martsch’s mouth are, “I still confide in you almost everyday/Even when you’re not around.” It’s a song about a childhood friendship ruptured by death; now, it’s impossible not to hear it as the cry of a child whose parents are still missing in the wreckage. When I reviewed Live when it came out, I wrote that this song “could blow the top off a mountain.” That statement that was edited out of the final review; two days, they’re the only words I remember from that piece now, and as they echo around in my head while I skip over the news channels in search of relief, I wish to God I’d never even thought of them.

13. Full Intention Presents Shana: “I’ll Be Waiting (Gray & Pern Club Mix)” (6:35), from Disco Kandi 4 (Hed Kandi UK 2001).

Disco Kandi is a compilation series of glossy, vapid, hedonistic, utterly generic disco-house songs, the sonic equivalent of lip gloss and glitter and Lycra bustiers. Around the beginning of August, while I was browsing around the basement of the main Tower Records outlet on Broadway, I heard the fourth volume blasting out of the system, each one disposable, each one perfect. My cash was low, but I couldn’t leave without buying it.

At the time I was dealing with a daunting set of uncertainties: un- or underemployment, an impending move into a new apartment, the slow, almost invisible dissolve of a relationship I’d moved to New York in part to pursue. So it’s no surprise that I fixed hard on this song, in which ain’t no mountain high enough to prevent our Strong But Vulnerable singer from getting on her soapbox and vowing her devotion over a keening, haunting background vocal loop (“ai-eee, ai-eee, ai-eee, ai-eee”) and snaking bassline. Even though my ex and I were (and are) on excellent terms, I found it comforting to wallow in the role of the wronged-but-steadfast lover, especially one with that kind of lungpower: Shena’s belting on the chorus is just restrained enough to avoid melismatic overload while still achieving a sense of abandon. I am also an eternal sucker for a melodramatic breakdown done right, as this one is. And I swear the words of the bridge are worthy of Smokey Robinson himself: “Two arms to hold you/Two lips to kiss you/Won’t do me any good/All I do is miss you.”

I played a lot of disco on 9/14--not for escape value, but because its emotional severity was cathartic, and put me in touch with both a generalized sense of loss and what I imagined the specific feelings of the god knows how many thousands of people whose family and/or friends were victims. I couldn’t find this song that night--I’d misplaced it somewhere while packing to move into the apartment two weeks before. But even after returning to a fairly normal life, it’s been impossible for me to hear the song the same way. I can only imagine how it would have sounded when the businesses around my area were completely covered with MISSING posters.

14. M People: “Excited” (5:03), from Elegant Slumming (Epic 1994).

Disco and house songs aren’t the only ones I obsess over, play over and over again for unconscionable lengths of time, not by a long shot. But they seem to be the ones I do so with most frequently, and it’s a habit I can date back to my discovery of Elegant Slumming, which I seeked out after finding out it had won the Mercury Music Prize (what was that? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was cool that a dance record won a rock critics’ poll). And almost immediately upon my first listen it was “Excited” I latched onto. I remember one evening, sitting at my computer in the kitchen of the only apartment I’ve ever lived in alone (not counting the rooming-house I stayed in between living at my mom’s after moving back to Minneapolis in January 1997 and moving in with the two roommates I’d have until I moved to Seattle in August 1999), writing I forget what now on my computer I played this song over and over again for two hours straight. Considering the CD player didn’t have an auto-repeat button, that’s pretty obsessive even for me.

Listening again (four times, hee hee hee), I realize that every stupid Brazilian- or African- or Latin-inflected dance record I’ve ever given a shot and regretted (along, of course, with plenty I’ve liked or loved, but let’s face it, most of ‘em suck) was done so at least in part because I wanted to recapture the rush I got the first time I heard this, with its upfront congas abetting the 4/4 kick. On an album stuffed with perfect songs (I refer to the U.S. Elegant Slumming, which incorporates some stuff from the previous, U.K.-only Northern Soul, including, I believe, “Excited”), this is the most gracefully constructed, from the piano/synth-strings riff to the clomping b-line to the vocal echo during the chorus. The butch male voices on the last chorus are as stirring as any the Pet Shop Boys have ever employed. The melodic resolution of the chorus is up there with anything I know--the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Cole Porter, you name it; it’s the power of joy condensed into five notes (I think), cascading to the heavens and landing back on the tonic in a perfect swan dive.

What still gets me most of all, though, are the words. It’s not a love song, not even a giddy one; it’s an ode to sexual freedom, more specifically the freedom of finding the person you can fully express yourself sexually with. The second verse, my favorite, is the song’s pivot: “Within our love/There is no compromise/Boy, can’t you see/Seduction in my eyes/So climb right on in/You know our love’s not a sin/You can kiss all of me/’Cos you’re my ecstasy.” Obviously, I understood the gay subtext (the aforementioned butch male singers made it difficult to miss), but even as a het I identified with it, strongly: you can be who you are with me, you don’t have to be afraid of your desires, you can in fact act on them. That’s as “important” a message as you’re gonna get from pop music, or anything else.

--17 October, 2001

15. !!!: “Freak the Funk” (5:29), from Troubleman Mix-Tape (Troubleman Unlimited 2001).

Another abrupt left turn, with a song I barely know but like a lot. Douglas Wolk does a nice job of getting at what’s good (and bad) about Troubleman Mix-Tape (a good new 2CD compilation on the New Jersey punk label) here; I’ll also add that finding information about !!! (which is, as singer Nic Offer puts it on this track, is pronounced “any three repetitive sounds that you wanna say, spelled three exclamation marks, say it anyway you wanna say”) is damn difficult on the good ol’ World Wide Web, especially since Google, among other search engines, disparages looking for punctuation, and not wrongly so, either. And that the opening guitar riff sounds a lot like that of Ornette Coleman’s “Sleep Talk,” from Of Human Feelings, crossed with the faint afterglow (the horns in the background) of Pigbag’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag.” All of which serves to loop this back around to the early-’80s NYC thing I had going at the beginning of this mix. Hmmm.

RUNNERS UP:
Black Masses, “Wonderful Person” (More happy house for depressed people.)
Clinic, “The Return of Evil Bill” (Jangly low-riding spaghetti western guitar riding jangling-nerved low-riding tom-tom Bo Diddley beat, all topped with lonesome melodica-as-harmonica; one of the most insinuating songs off one of the most insinuating records of the year.)
The Moldy Peaches, “Steak for Chicken” (I love these guys.)

--19 October, 2001

16. Barry White: "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" (4:10), from Barry White's Greatest Hits (Casablanca 1975)

Hmmm...freak...funk...hey! Just the man we're looking for. Especially with tape's end looming: this one brings us to 72:48, just over a minute shy of the 74-minute length we need to fill. Wish I had a more interesting genesis for this selection's inclusion, but no--just looking for another CD on the shelves, came across this, and voila. No exclamation mark, note --this isn't the voila! of inspired dreams, it's the oh-OK voila of settling on something you know is good but aren't too excited about. But fuggit. Still, it is a good way to end things--the promise of a new day. Or a new fuck, anyhow, which is sometimes just as good.

RUNNERS UP:
Pigbag, "Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag" (!!!'s obvious predecessors, not least guitar-wise.)
James Brown, "Cold Sweat" (At seven and a half minutes, too long, but tempting as all hell.)

--22 October, 2001