Category: Music

I’m writing this on Monday night, so I don’t yet know how the election will turn out. I’m confident enough that sanity and decency will win out, but after being blind-sided by Proposition 8 in 2008, and then the presidential election in 2016, I don’t trust people to do the right thing as much as I used to.

Whatever the outcome, though, there’s no blaming the Harris campaign. They’ve been working tirelessly to earn every vote they can, against attacks from all sides, and understanding they’re not just working against the GOP but against voter apathy and cynicism. They’ve been stunningly effective and positive, and I think they deserve a victory lap regardless.

If for nothing else, then for choosing “Freedom” by Beyoncé as the campaign song. Not just as a campaign slogan, not just for the significance of a powerful Black woman using the music of another powerful Black woman, but as an undeniable message that this campaign was different. Dragging America kicking and screaming into the 21st century, prying it out of the claws of desperate white Boomers if need be.

And since Harris has made her last speech of the campaign, her final argument and the summation of her message, it seems appropriate to pair it with “Amen,” the last track on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.

It’s the companion to the starting track of that album, “American Requiem,” which sets up the album’s message: it’s about reclaiming her space as a musician and, more significantly, as an American. I’d initially took it as just a play on genre, Beyoncé insisting that she doesn’t need to be relegated to R&B, she can damn well make a country album if she wants to. But there’s more to it than that, as if the cover image of her wearing a red, white, and blue suit on horseback while waving an American flag didn’t make it obvious. The idea is pretty clear: you don’t own this country, you don’t get to tell me whether I belong or not.

That’s an even more perfect fit for the Harris campaign and what makes it feel so exciting to me. For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had people appointing themselves to be the arbiters of who does and doesn’t belong where. Wrapping themselves in American flags, calling themselves “patriots,” shamelessly declaring that they’re the “real” Americans, acting as if everyone else is here by their grace alone. Honestly, all that Trump and Vance have done is taken that tired old idea and made it explicit. We’ve been hearing it so long, in fact, that people can wave signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” given to them by the GOP at the Republican National Convention, and it barely got a blip of interest from the media. Promises of ethnic cleansing treated with such a lack of interest or alarm, you’d think it was yet another mass murder of children and teachers at a school.

This campaign has been all about taking back the things that have been stolen by the Republicans from Reagan onward: patriotism; belief in the ideal of America; accepting that the ideal has never been perfect, but that striving for it is the entire point; and hearing “anyone can grow up to be President of the United States” as aspirational, instead of a dire warning of the lack of safeguards in our election system.

“Amen” ends with lines repeated from “American Requiem,” and I think they’re perfect: “Them old ideas are buried here. Amen.”

I’ll admit that this week’s two-fer is mostly just because I wanted to hear “Machine Gun” by The Commodores. It came out when I was three years old, but I didn’t discover it until I was almost thirty.

My version of The Commodores was in the 1980s, when they were doing inoffensive R&B hits and I had absolutely no idea that they were ever a funk band. (I’m not proud of it, but I admit that I always thought “Brick House” was by Parliament).

I just assumed that they were indistinguishable from Lionel Ritchie’s solo stuff, until I found out that “Machine Gun” was sampled in “Hey Ladies” by the Beastie Boys.

Which I’d always thought of as a product of the 1990s, but which I’m seeing now came out in 1989. At that point, all I knew of the Beastie Boys was Licensed to Ill, so I didn’t even bother listening to Paul’s Boutique or any of the subsequent albums, thinking they’d be more of the same. It wasn’t until Hello Nasty came out that I got hooked and went back through all of the previous albums. And basically discovered two bands that had been cool this entire time, right under my nose.¹I still really don’t like “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet, though.

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  I still really don’t like “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet, though.

Hey! Do you remember the international mega-hit song “Firestarter” by the Prodigy from 1996? It wasn’t my favorite track from that album (I still say “Breathe” is a more interesting song) but it sure was popular and made them a ton of money.

If you’d like to get in on a piece of that action for yourself, it’s pretty straightforward: first you just need a charismatic and interesting-looking singer¹Who, by literally all accounts after his passing, was a really nice guy, a sewer to hang out in, and samples from a few songs.

Easiest to guess, especially if you’re a fan of The Venture Brothers, is the “Hey!” from Art of Noise’s “Close (to the Edit).” That’s a Tuesday Tune Two-Fer repeat, unfortunately. I’d hoped to include the drums from “Firestarter,” which are sampled from a remix of the song “Devotion” by Ten City, which I can’t find on Apple Music.

The biggest surprise to me, though, was that the other main sample in “Firestarter” was from a song I’d heard about a billion times by 1996, because I listened to Last Splash obsessively. It’s from “SOS” by the Breeders. Which I never noticed, and only learned just recently, over 20 years later.

I think we’ve all learned something important here today.

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  Who, by literally all accounts after his passing, was a really nice guy

The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell.

As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on a variant of “Maps” and sent it to Beyoncé, who turned it into “Hold Up.” Even if it’s not that complicated a story, it still is interesting to me just how much that article in Billboard is a bizarre time capsule. How many of those words would be recognizable to somebody reading it 100 years from now?

Or even farther? It’s fun to imagine a far-distant civilization that had never heard of Karen O, Vampire Weekend, Diplo, or Twitter, and had only vaguely heard of Beyoncé (in the same way that we know of pharaohs only by mention of their names), somehow discovering this pop culture Rosetta Stone and suddenly being able to piece together entire sub-genres of 21st century popular music.

And they’re both great songs, without feeling like just a cover or a sample. “Hold Up” not only borrows a lyric from “Maps” and a hook from Andy Williams, but even the idea to combine them from Ezra Koenig. But it’s still undeniably a Beyoncé song, something powerful built on top of a base of something clever.

My only context for “Maps” was playing it in Rock Band enough times for it to become a favorite. And then hearing it in countless karaoke nights, with the entire room singing along by the end. All my connotations of the song feel completely separate from the “meaning” of it, and couldn’t possibly have been in mind when it was written and recorded, so it seems like it’s gone on to have a life all its own.

Except that the reason the song is so memorable is because its hook isn’t just musical, but meaningful. I’m not sure I understand the lyrics to the original song, but I feel like I get the hook, and it’s universal. So maybe it’s not getting reinterpreted and reinvented, but actually Karen O was so good at capturing an intense emotion inside a single lyric, that she’s shared that exact feeling with everyone who’s ever sung it.

I’ve been a fan of Kim Deal ever since I first saw the video to “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies — they were all doing the same gag, but she was the one really selling it, said my impressionable late teenage mind. On top of having a voice that sounds like only one other person in the world, she’s maintained a kind of integrity that I think is completely unique. It feels like she doesn’t care in the slightest about being a rock star, but cares a lot about music.

It’s something that seems to baffle a lot of people. I’ve seen multiple videos purporting to document The Breeders from formation through Last Splash and the years afterwards, or talking about the success of “Cannonball,” and the guys¹Always guys, it’s worth pointing out making them just seem incapable of getting Deal’s work on its own merits. It’s always framed as a competition between The Breeders and the Pixies²Without mentioning Frank Black and the Catholics or his solo albums, which seem like a better comparison?, as if she’s incapable of ever escaping the looming shadow of Charles Thompson. And people can’t understand how a song as non-traditional as “Cannonball” became such a big hit, without dismissing it as a one-hit-wonder fluke of the 1990s.

I may be a little guilty of it, too, since when I heard that Kim Deal was releasing a solo album called Nobody Loves You More, I wondered why not just make another Breeders record? After hearing the two singles so far, “Coast,” and “Crystal Breath,” it’s obvious: this isn’t going to be a Breeders record.

Usually with a Breeders record, even when I can’t tell who’s singing what part, I can tell what each instrument is doing. It’s odd to hear Kim Deal songs with a ton of production around them, instead of two guitars, a bass, drums, and sometimes violin. “Coast” emphasizes horns — it initially reminded me a lot of Blondie’s cover of “The Tide is High” — to feel lazily tropical. “Crystal Breath” emphasizes the back beat, and it reminds me a little bit of St Vincent’s self-titled album.

The trick is that all the production is still in service of a Kim Deal song, and she is a master at coming up with hooks. In 2013, she released a bunch of disparate singles not collected into a single album, and “The Root” was my favorite. It’s pared back to nothing but guitars and drums (and a car’s back-up camera in a snowy parking lot, for the video), and it still gets stuck in my head.

“Cannonball” still baffles some music critics because it seems too weird to be popular. I think the truth is that it’s full of hooks, but they’re not in the expected places, and I think that’s a recurring trick of Deal’s. She could be cranking out catchy songs non-stop, but she seems to be more interested in making songs that are catchy enough to stick, but weird enough that they don’t just evaporate from memory the second they’re over. I still can’t say I’m a fan of Pod, but in the rest of The Breeders’ albums and her solo work, I think there’s a lot to be said for making music that challenges you to ignore it.

I get the sense that Nobody Loves You More is something like the opposite of all the “Unplugged” performances that bands were doing in the 1990s. Those were intended to show that the bands being given tons of money by record labels were actually talented musicians underneath all the noise and over-production. Kim Deal’s new album seems like it’ll show us what’s core to her music, whether it’s stripped down, or with guest musicians and a full suite of studio tricks.

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  Always guys, it’s worth pointing out
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  Without mentioning Frank Black and the Catholics or his solo albums, which seem like a better comparison?

Pictured is my attempt to make a belated birthday cake for myself, since my favorite kind is just a yellow cake with chocolate fudge frosting, and it seems foolish to order one from a bakery when they’re (ostensibly) so easy to make. As the keen-eyed viewer might be just able to make out: the process didn’t go well. The cake tore apart in multiple places, and the frosting was too runny and never solidified. The message of that cake is not so much “Happy Birthday” as “Why Do I Exist?”

Honestly, I thought the whole thing was funny. But it also happens to be a good metaphor for my overall mood the past couple months. Varenicline (aka Chantix) is a wonder drug in terms of helping me quit smoking when literally nothing else can, and as of today, I’ve gone five weeks without a cigarette and haven’t missed it a bit. But the side effects of the drug (and withdrawal) are lousy. For me: getting extremely nauseated after I take one, and a lengthy depression.

It takes over gradually enough that I’d forgotten that the same thing happened last time I took varenicline (and quit smoking for three years). It feels like something gunking up the gears in my brain, so that they grind imperceptibly slower each day, until they just sieze up. That means going from not really enjoying anything, to being not motivated to do anything, to just not being able to do anything, no matter how urgent it is.

“On Being Blue” is from Art of Noise’s last album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, from 1999. That means I was either on my way out at LucasArts, or I’d just left, and was likely suffering from career-ambition-oriented depression at the time. The song is actually about mood and color, though, which you can tell was a fixation of Debussy’s just by listening to La Mer, a composition that doesn’t sound like the ocean so much as feel like the ocean.

“Sunless Saturday” is from Fishbone’s The Reality of My Surroundings, released in 1991. That means I was in my second year of college and probably still feeling pretty optimistic. Fishbone was singing about injustice, not depression as a side effect of medication, but the reason I like it so much today is the same reason I liked it so much then: it doesn’t shy away from describing what it feels like to be in the pits, but it also doesn’t wallow in them.

It’s stabilizing to know that whatever you’re feeling is temporary. I’ve only got a few weeks left of this prescription until I’m done with it and the needless hassle of smoking. And of course, the upcoming election is filling me with hope instead of dread, for once. If you’re in the US, remember to verify your registration — or register to vote! — at vote.gov.

Lately you might have been hearing cool and totally normal people sounding the alarms about “DEI hires,” which is a real and normal thing to be concerned about, and not just a lazy repeat of the same old dog whistles that go back seventy years or longer. Much like “urban,” and “hood,” all the way through “CRT” and “woke,” it serves a very important purpose: it lets people express all the ideas behind the n-word, without the unpleasantness of the n-word itself.

So let’s take a closer look at diversity, equity, and inclusion, while listening to some comforting white music!

First up is “One Bad Apple” by The Osmonds. This song was written by George Jackson originally intended for The Jackson 5, but went to The Osmonds after the Jacksons chose to record “ABC” instead. Clearly yet another in the countless examples of perfectly competent white performers being passed over in favor of more ethnic ones.

People like to sling out terms like “racist,” or “misogynistic,” or “inexcusably racist and misogynistic,” whenever someone raises concerns about DEI, but critics insist that it’s actually about fairness. And the logic is clear if you think about it for even a second: if anyone who’s not a straight, white, male gets a job or a promotion, that’s a “DEI hire.” That means that every job should be given to a straight white man by default, instead of some racially-motivated special-interest virtue signaling. Why are you bringing race and gender into a discussion about the things to which straight white men are entitled?!

While you’re appreciating that airtight bit of logic, here’s a song by Jack White: his cover of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” with The Electric Mayhem for a Muppets album. This song was written and made into a classic recording by Stevie Wonder, but it took White to make an impression of the original with a “Seven Nation Army” hook grafted onto it.¹Non-sarcastic note: I genuinely like Jack White and think he’s extraordinarily talented, but doesn’t add anything to this song and the cover is inessential at best.

And Muppets often have me thinking about rainbows, and how something that was once so simple and beautiful has been co-opted to have all these weird connotations of “different people living together with respect and harmony” and “freedom to pursue your own happiness.” And how this whole “DEI fad” doesn’t do much for white men like me.

Well, except for how working for a company with an explicit and extensive DEI policy means that I’m surrounded by co-workers at every level with a wider range of life experiences than I’ve ever been in a 30-year career. And I guess that I don’t have to spend every conversation worried about fallout if I mention that I’m gay, and I don’t have to worry that my job is at risk the next time politicians decide to use sexual orientation as a wedge issue to make up for their complete lack of policy.

Actually you know, now that I think about it, anybody throwing a tantrum about DEI is a nonsense-spouting dimwit who can go get stuffed.

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  Non-sarcastic note: I genuinely like Jack White and think he’s extraordinarily talented, but doesn’t add anything to this song and the cover is inessential at best.

After he left Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty wrote a bunch of simpler, pared-back songs and released them on the album and EP Skittish and Rockity Roll. Many of them are just acoustic guitar and a groove box, and most of them are hell of catchy.

My favorite is “Ossining”, which I’ve been singing along to for years without ever bothering to find out what it means. I’d used context clues and the repeated “why not seek Ossining” to guess that it was a playfully made-up word for some kind of enlightenment movement. As it turns out, it’s a small city in New York state. There could still be some enigmatic double meaning to the song, though, and I’m enjoying the continued mystery.

I do know what “Lithonia” is, though — if you haven’t watched that video yet, I don’t want to spoil it but I will warn that it has a jump-scare gory ending — because I grew up near there. So did Donald Glover, since he grew up near there, too. It’s not an especially remarkable city; when I was growing up, the highlight was that it had a Dairy Queen. Now, it has a mall.

Maybe the song isn’t about the city at all, and it’s a character or something from Bando Stone and the New World, Childish Gambino’s upcoming movie. Again, I’m preferring to live with the mystery for now.

I will say that I spent a long time underestimating Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, and I hope I’ve learned my lesson. For instance: I thought it was absurd that 30 Rock picked “Stone Mountain, Georgia” as the hometown of Kenneth the page, and they set at least one episode there depicting it as the smallest, most stereotypical, backwoods shithole in the darkest part of the Appalachians. It’s actually a relatively large city, built up around a landmark co-opted by racists to celebrate the Confederacy. I assumed that the 30 Rock writers intended it as meta-commentary, since the episodes were all about how New York writers had no idea what the rest of the country was really like. Later, I found out that Glover is from Stone Mountain, and he was a writer on the series.

Also, I’d been way too dismissive of Childish Gambino’s music, as just a celebrity side project. I think it was partly a defense mechanism, because it seemed cosmically unfair that someone could be that handsome and that funny and also be a talented musician. It turns out that not only are there some fantastic songs — “3005” in particular — but more importantly, the songs aren’t “celebrity makes a hip hop record” so much as a hugely talented person having too many ideas to fit into one medium.

One morning last week, my cat was performing his daily ritual of standing in the hallway and wailing until we got up to feed him. Instead of waking up immediately to address his concerns, I instead just incorporated his wails into my dream.

I don’t remember what the specifics of the dream were, but now it had a background track of Bronski Beat’s song “Smalltown Boy,” or at least the vocals at the beginning.

I’m skeptical that either Jimmy Somerville or my cat would appreciate being confused for each other, since they were both singing about something so deeply heartfelt and important to them. One the trials of being a young homosexual living in a town that doesn’t accept you, and the other having not been fed for at least six hours.

I really like this interview with Somerville from a Dutch TV show in 2007, where he’s a lot more lighthearted about the song than I would’ve expected, while still being defiant and assertive about what it means. I also have to admit that as many times as I’ve heard it, I never actually knew what it was about until just recently. I’m terrible at being able to decipher lyrics, so I never knew the lyrics beyond “run away, run away,” which I’d thought was the title.

Unlike the song “Run Runaway” by Slade, where I didn’t know the title and only remembered the lyrics “see chameleon, lying there in the sun.”

They’re kind of the opposite of Somerville’s smalltown boy, running back to Scotland to cavort amidst a castle with kilt-wearing pipers and dancers. I’m positive I saw that video back in the 80s, but I saw lead singer Noddy Holder and conflated it with a Doctor Who episode. I guess they’re also the opposite of Bronski Beat in that I’d always heard Slade associated with glam rock, and they are the straightest glam rockers I could possibly imagine.

The Breeders have released a 14-minute video called “Live in Big Sur,” recorded in the middle of a hiking trail in the most beautiful part of the California coast, capturing stripped-down performances of songs from Last Splash. In addition to some gorgeous drone footage, it’s also got short, clever animations scattered throughout.

The whole package is super charming, and a reminder that the band has a hell of a lot of great songs besides “Cannonball.” Here are two of my favorites:

I like “Wait in the Car” mostly because “Wait in the car, I’ve got business” is something I always thought only my mother said. It really helps sell the middle-aged midwestern punk rock vibe of the whole album. All Nerve is my second favorite Breeders album, and it was such a pleasure to see them get the band back together and still be as weird and funny as they were in the 90s.

Like when they recorded “Safari”. Which just cemented the crush on Kim Deal I already had from the Pixies. She’s just the coolest.