I feel like I’m late to the party with this one, but: She & Him: Volume One is just a great, fun record. (Evidence that I’m late to the party: I’m still calling them “records.”)

Like just about everybody else who saw the movie, I’ve had a crush on Zooey Deschanel since she sang “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Will Ferrell in Elf. No surprise there; that’s exactly what the scene was designed to do. I read an interview with Jon Favreau (or maybe it was the commentary for the movie?) where he said the scene was inserted after hearing Deschanel sing at a party and being blown away by how well she sings.

So now there’s a new record out and you’d expect it to be more of the same, another album from an actress trying to make a music career on the side. But you can already tell this is different, since they promote themselves and the record just as another duo; it’s only when reviewers and musically clueless people like myself start writing about them that anyone draws attention to the fact she’s a movie star.

Even better, you don’t get the sense of anyone sticking to a comfort zone, or trying to make an important artistic statement. It really just feels like a couple of people who love the music they grew up hearing. I’d been expecting more of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” where Deschanel sounds like she’s channelling a late 50s/early 60s movie musical actress. There’s a little bit of that on the track “Take It Back,” but the rest of the record is all over the place. A lot of their influences are listed on their band site; I’m not knowledgeable about most of that music, but even I can totally hear The Ronettes and Linda Ronstadt. And there are several that sound to me like Cass Elliott crossed with Karen Carpenter. But you don’t get the sense that it’s just impersonation or self-conscious parody, but someone who sincerely loves this music and wants to make more of it.

Best tracks are: “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?”, “Sweet Darlin’”, “Black Hole,” and “This is Not a Test.” But the whole thing just makes you feel like summer’s about to start and it’s time to get the car and just drive somewhere for no reason.

Also: I’ve listened to the new B-52’s record, Funplex, and it’s fairly forgettable, but worth it just for the song “Juliet of the Spirits.” Considering how much time I spent driving around Athens in a POS VW Bug listening to “Whammy!” over and over again in college, all this music is making me feel plenty nostalgic.

Also: If you think I just listen to girly music, shut up, who asked you? I listen to plenty of guy music, too. I can’t think of what it is now, since my “most recently played” list is all Amy Winehouse, Neko Case, Allison Krauss, Norah Jones, and now She & Him, but I know it’s in there.

Mike Doughty’s got a new album out, it’s called Golden Delicious, and I was already hooked just from hearing the 30-second samples.

I’m a monstrously big fan of Soul Coughing. My first take on Haughty Melodic (Doughty’s first “real” solo album) was unfair disappointment that it didn’t sound like Soul Coughing, but over time it burrowed its way down into my brain. My gut reaction to Golden Delicious is that it’s halfway between Haughty Melodic and an over-produced version of Irresistible Bliss (”More Bacon than the Pan Can Handle” might as well be a previously-unreleased track from one of the Soul Coughing records). It’s a little bit more experimental than the last record, but lacks that one’s consistency.

But then, there’s a reason I don’t write much about music.

He’s going on tour very soon, and will be in San Francisco at the Fillmore on April 29th, and I’ve already bought a couple of tickets. (At least I hope I did; the website seems to still be in transition).

Savvy record-buyers should be aware that there’s an extra exclusive track on the iTunes version of Golden Delicious. I still went with the Amazon MP3 version, because Amazon’s MP3 Downloads section is excellent. I’ve never been one of those shrill and obnoxious anti-DRM people, but obviously, getting something without DRM is better than with it. Plus, Amazon’s stuff is cheaper, it’s indistinguishably well-integrated with iTunes, and their customer service is excellent. I’m still an Apple fan and all that, but my loyalty is cheap and can be bought with only $1 per album.

My favorite thing on the internet of the moment is this old-school video for “Psyche Rock” by Pierre Henry, the inspiration for the theme song from “Futurama.” Transistors as bombs and spermatozoa: awesome.

A few weeks ago, I rocked the internet to its foundations when I spent an entire week posting lists of my favorite things to this blog. But even by those low standards, I still managed to under-perform on the music section, a fact that haunts me to this day.

I’ve been digging through my iTunes library lately, both to prepare for my upcoming commute and in reaction to the announcement of the new tracks in “Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s” and Guitar Hero IIGuitar Hero 3 (”Heat of the Moment” + “Paint it Black” = awesome).

And going through my music library just makes it clear how the music I like is so much better than the music that other people like. Really, it’s orders of magnitude better. When you realize that, you see it’s my duty to inform my readers and give them the rich, meaty lists they crave.

My 25 Favorite Songs

1. “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin
2. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles
3. “Close (to the Edit)” by Art of Noise
4. “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin
5. “Rolling” by Soul Coughing
6. “Levitate Me” by Pixies
7. “Young Ned of the Hill” by The Pogues
8. “Angelika Suspended” by Palm Fabric Orchestra
9. “Full on Idle” by The Amps
10. “Isobel” by Björk
11. “Straight to Hell” by The Clash
12. “Photograph” by Def Leppard
13. “Song for My Father” by Horace Silver
14. “Lady Pilot” by Neko Case
15. “I Hear the Bells” by Mike Doughty
16. “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
17. “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones
18. “Dogs of Lust” by The The
19. “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits
20. “Sweet Thing” by Van Morrison
21. “Let Forever Be” by Chemical Brothers
22. “Unchained” by Van Halen
23. “More Than a Feeling” by Boston
24. “Stand Together” by The Beastie Boys
25. “Soul Bossa Nova” by Quincy Jones

(Most of those links are to YouTube, so no guarantees they’ll last).

As if that weren’t enough, you get another list! A list of perfect albums. “Perfect” doesn’t necessarily mean my favorite albums, just that they either: 1) don’t have a single bad track on them, or 2) are so strong and build such a momentum that they sail right over the bad songs.

Twelve Perfect Albums

1. Led Zeppelin IV
   Duh.
2. Revolver by The Beatles
   The best pop album ever made.
3. Boston by Boston
   It peters out towards the end, but you can’t start off stronger than this record.
4. Come On Pilgrim by Pixies
   Surfer Rosa is my favorite Pixies record, and it counts too. But Come On Pilgrim is just a burst of concentrated brilliance.
5. Haughty Melodic by Mike Doughty
   I was disappointed when I first heard this one, but I think in the two years since I’ve listened to it in its entirety at least once a week. There’s just not a bad song on it.
6. El Oso by Soul Coughing
   Maybe this list is Mike Doughty-heavy, but you can’t be prejudiced against a guy for making two perfect records.
7. Hello Nasty by The Beastie Boys
   Yeah, Paul’s Boutique, whatever. This is the only one I can listen to without skipping any tracks.
8. Odelay by Beck
   For using the entire Becktionary, from Bazootie to Whiskeyclone.
9. Telecommunication Breakdown by Emergency Broadcast Network
   I love the characters, I love the special effects.
10. If I Should Fall From Grace With God by The Pogues
    The first four tracks are four of the best Pogues songs ever. On most records, it seems like the musicians put a bad track on because they ran out of ideas or talent and had to throw in filler. On this one, it seems like they had to put in a weaker song just to keep your brain from overloading on uninterrupted excellence.
11. Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet
    I thought this was one of the best albums ever recorded for at least a year after I bought it. And then I read the liner notes, which explained that it’s a concept album about time changes, and all of the tracks are experiments in non-standard tempo. Which is kind of like hanging out with Superman for a year and right as you’re starting to get bored of his powers, he reveals he’s also an award-winning pastry chef.
12. Dig Your Own Hole by Chemical Brothers
    This one’s cheating, because the thing dies in the middle with a 6-minute track called “It Doesn’t Matter,” but it doesn’t matter. The rest is unrestrained awesomeness.

Now that that’s done, I can go back to never talking about music.

John Scalzi’s blog passes along the story that Boston’s lead singer died on Friday.

He also passes along some damn lies, saying that the band’s “moment is over.” Spoken like a guy who never played Guitar Hero.

Or, for that matter, never heard Boston. There are very few “perfect” pop/rock albums, and Boston is one of them. Even if it didn’t have the spaceship on the cover, it starts out with five songs that knock it out of the park, only letting up with “Something About You” at the end. And it doesn’t hurt that “More Than a Feeling” works both as a single and as the intro to a classic album; I thought that’s what album-oriented rock was all about.

I’m listening to “Foreplay/Long Time” right now, which starts with the trippy prog-rock organ opening and transitions to yet another of the album’s 10,000 unforgettable hooks. “The moment is over?” Are you high?

So here’s Boston living their moment:

And proof that the moment’s not over yet. Playing this song in Guitar Hero (note: this isn’t me, of course; I can’t get to “Expert” yet) is nothing short of transcendent:

The best performance in pop music is Merry Clayton’s solo in “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. The part where her voice cracks may be the best moment in pop music history.

And there you go. I don’t know from writing about music. You want Lester Bangs, go to a different blog.

Sometimes I’m forced to look into the very heart of my whiteness, and it’s astounding.

It’s like walking down a long, white tunnel inexorably towards a blinding vanilla light. As I get closer I hear echoes of the Hellman’s Mayonnaise jingle and the white granny shouting “Where you at?” from cell phone commercials. Finally I reach the precipice and am forced to stare down into the abysshizzle.

Today I was reading an entry on the “Making Light” blog, which is about 30% sci-fi writers’ lounge, 95% repetition of leftist mantras and liberal outrage. They link to this video of 70s Danish pop star Tommy Seebach’s cover of “Apache.”

That sounds familiar, I thought, and not just because I’d already seen the video several months ago. The hook sounds a lot like “We Run This” by Missy Elliot, another song I got into about eight months after it was already old news. Apparently, it was used in the soundtrack of a movie about white high school gymnasts, and I probably heard it in a commercial.

And that blog post leads to “All Roads Lead to Apache”, a fascinating (seriously!) run-down of the evolutionary chart of the original song and how it stretched from surf music to disco onto the earliest hip hop and then dance, electronic, and back to rap and hip hop. James Burke would be proud.

Turns out Missy Elliot’s version is heavily sampled from the version by The Sugarhill Gang. Which is itself about four levels deep into the cover chain.

So the fact that I’d never heard the Sugarhill Gang’s version of the song before is a good indicator of my whiteness, but it’s also an account of how circuitous a route pop culture takes before it hits any kind of saturation. I’d heard of the band before, and “Rapper’s Delight,” but probably because of a soundtrack or a commercial. Same with Grandmaster Flash and Fab 5 Freddy, who I only know because they’re referenced in “Rapture” by Blondie. Which leads me to conclude: Deborah Harry was a hero to most, but she don’t mean shit to me.

Actually, I see it as a sign of just how extensively hyper-linked we are, and how it’s not a new phenomenon. We like to think that samples and mash-ups and remixes are relatively recent innovations, but people have been making covers and references and allusions and homages and outright intellectual property theft for centuries.

We’ve also been conditioned to think of it in terms of theft and culture rape, usually described as I do above — white people taking black people’s art and robbing it, watering the soul out of it, and making a fortune off it while the real artists toil away in obscurity. There’s plenty of that going on, and there always has been. But in the longer term, and if some measure of creativity is inserted along the way, it’s the way culture works and has always worked.

And we’re at the best point in history to be able to track how these things come about and see every step of the evolution and all the connections between the individual parts. Don’t like a remix? There’s easy access to the original, and to the tracks it samples from, and the track that inspired the original, and the four other covers of that track. Looking up the Ventures’ cover of “Apache” on iTunes, I found a bunch of other songs and artists I’d never heard of before, including some tracks that I’d never realized were themselves covers of earlier songs.

Before stumbling on this article, I’d been getting into a pretty jaded impression of our segment of the Information Age. The “If you like The Pixies, you’ll love Nelly Furtado” “features” on internet recommendation sites never work, because they just keep recommending crap or stuff you’ve already heard. And remixes are hardly ever as good as the original, and blog articles generally repeat the same stuff, are shallow, or just eventually lead to a Wikipedia entry. Occasionally you’ll stumble on some blogger’s all-time favorite obscure band, and you’ll listen and realize that they were obscure for a reason.

Back when I first saw HyperCard and then later, Mosaic, I got the sense that links and aggregating information were a novel concept, even if I couldn’t foresee exactly how they’d be revolutionary. Now, though, I’m back to feeling that there’s a ton of stuff out there left to see. More than even the most dedicated hipster could see in a lifetime.

The guitar hook to the awful James Blunt song “You’re Beautiful” is the tune played at the end of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series.

At least Bob Marley made something cool when he ripped off The Banana Splits.