Category: Music

I had a hard time coming up with a theme for today’s tune two-fer: what do you say about a totally uneventful Tuesday in February, in the midst of a year of shelter-in-place orders, where every day feels like the same? Even YouTube seems to be in a bit of malaise: I went on this morning looking for something interesting to watch, and I could only see an old action movie from the 1990s starting Alec Baldwin. It’s going to be a long winter!

Instead of anything appropriate, I’ll just pick a familiar classic: this old song performed on Top of the Pops in 1965. I think I was just the right age so that I didn’t know Sonny & Cher as singers, but as guests on The New Scooby-Doo Movies. So they’re always up there in the pantheon along with Jerry Reed, Sandy Duncan, Cass Elliot, and of course, Batman & Robin. Looking back at that video now, I have to say that people were right: Sonny’s hair was too long.

But for a change of pace, here’s this performance from Late Night With David Letterman. What’s remarkable watching it now isn’t so much how much changed between 1965 and this video in 1987, but how much has changed between this video and now. Sonny Bono’s passing, the mentions of Chaz Bono with his name at the time, and I’d forgotten about Cher’s feud with Letterman. I was actually surprised when I realized that 22 years had passed between the first two, but it’s been 33 years since the second! Somehow, I always think of Letterman clips as being contemporary, and probably will forever, since that was part of my cultural “anchor.” I guess it’s a reminder of how time keeps moving on, and you can’t just keep reliving the past.

Today has been a drag, and I almost forgot it was Tuesday. I’d been happy that we were getting unusually heavy rain over the past few days, until I was reminded that heavy rains tend to bring a biblical plague of ants into the house. We spent a good chunk of the morning and early afternoon trying to head them off, and ever since, it’s been a combination of obsessively cleaning surfaces and freaking out when I imagine something crawling on me.

It’s been difficult to get any work done, much less my blogging duties. But in honor of the tragedy, here’s “It’s Raining Again” by Supertramp. I never liked this song, to be honest, but I’ve heard it a billion times because it seemed to play every ten minutes on MTV and Night Tracks. In the early 80s, you just had to make a video “cinematic” to guarantee it got played a lot; it didn’t have to be particularly good cinema. In videos like this, where they hired actors and dancers for most of it, you could only tell who was actually in the band by looking for beards.

I’m pairing it with “Come to My Window” by Melissa Etheridge, because that’s how they’re getting in. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve about had it with Melissa Etheridge letting ants into my house!

“Take Out the Trash” by They Might Be Giants seems appropriate this week, the day before January 20, 2021. TMBG may be my favorite band with one of my doppelgängers in it, and they’ve got a song for just about everything.

I’d thought I was going to use “Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye,” but I discovered to my horror that the title is actually “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye,” which is an image nobody needs now in this time of happiness and healing. If you want to see a bunch of studio musicians in 1969 failing to lip-synch to it, though, that video’s got you covered.

So instead, here’s the only time you’ll ever see Motley Crue linked on my blog, with their timeless hit “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)”. I looked for a pop song titled “Go Get Fucked (You Worthless Shitstain)” or “I Look Forward To Never Having to Hear Your Name Again (You Treasonous Little Bitch),” but didn’t turn up anything. Even from the Dead Kennedys!

“America” is my favorite song by Simon & Garfunkel, but lately I’ve gotten a greater surge of emotion from listening to this cover by First Aid Kit, a duo of Swedish sisters born over twenty years after the song was first recorded. (This live version recorded in Stockholm that got a solo standing ovation from Paul Simon is also wonderful).

Simon’s genius lyrics take a bunch of highly-specific references and generalize them into a perfect expression of the hope and disillusionment of being an American in the late 60s. The cover resonates with me because it shows that the song is even more universal than that: it was never about a specific time or even a specific place, but about an ideal, and the perpetual sadness that comes from seeing that ideal remain unrealized.

Growing up in the Ronald Reagan-led, Newt Gingrich-fueled, jingoistic travesty of America that was the 1980s, I learned to reject American patriotism as the weak-minded arrogance of bigots and fools. So much of it seemed to be manifested in the laser shows at Stone Mountain. There were all the obvious signs of corruption and rot — the show’s climax traced the mountain’s carving of Confederate leaders and animated them riding off to glory, set to a medley of Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson singing “Dixie” and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. As the crowd around us hooted and hollered at the majesty of it all, my (white) friends and I could safely roll our eyes and mock it as gross and misguided but ultimately harmless. Virulent racists were dying out, I told myself, and the casual variety would flee back to their comfortable homes in the suburbs, where they weren’t reaching out to be part of a larger community, but at least they weren’t actively making things worse.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the comically absurd rot — a Confederate War memorial? In 1985?! Ha ha! — was more or less a front for the more pervasive fear and greed that would get more and more entrenched over the next few decades. That was manifested in a song, too: Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” I always misinterpreted it as dumb but harmless, a shallow take on patriotism that was easily dismissed with an eye roll and a wanking gesture. But it’s jarring now to look back and see laid bare just how selfish and transactional it always was. It’s all pride, no responsibility. You’ve got to thank the troops, but only for giving me my freedom and my rights. It’s all my family, not my community. The only suggestion of “stand[ing] up next to you” is to fight to keep what belongs to us.

I can at least understand why people like Greenwood’s version, though: sometimes you do genuinely just want the bombast and pride and being able to shout “America, Fuck Yeah!” Anybody who believes that the whole idea of “the American experiment” is based on just an accident of where you were born — for good or for ill — is missing the entire point, which is that none of this works unless we all to agree believe in it. That requires some faith and some swagger. It’s not a refusal to acknowledge all the layers of disillusionment and injustice; it’s a refusal to drown in them.

There are few more powerful accusations of American denial than Langston Hughes’ poem “America never was America to me.” It was Hughes’ prescient warning from 1935 to any of us who in 2021 are tempted to say “This is not who we are.” As if greed, exploitation, insurrection, corruption, and bigotry were new, foreign things to the USA, and not manifest in every phase of our history. Except that’s not actually the title of the poem, even though I always mis-remember it as such. The actual title is “Let America Be America Again.” It’s not content to just reject the promise of America as a lie; it insists that we work together to make it true.

And because it can’t be said enough: we can’t work together without first rejecting the lie. There’s no unity without justice, and no justice without accountability.

So if you want the simple anthem with waving flags and cheering and middle-aged people on their feet dancing, Neil Diamond’s always had you covered. My parents took me to a Neil Diamond concert when I was a teenager, and I was a capital-C Chode about it because I thought I was too cool for it. Even though it was a huge deal to my mom. I wish I hadn’t been such a chump, because his performance that night (as always) was a show-stopper. And if I’m going to stand up and shout “America!”, I don’t want it to be all about selfishness or fighting to keep what’s mine. I want it to be about welcoming everyone who wants to share in the idea and work together to make something better than any single one of us.

Since my home state of Georgia is in the news so much lately, both for the crucial Senate run-offs today against two of the most crassly, disgracefully, and blatantly corrupt and unqualified Republicans ever to run for public office; and because of a blatantly corrupt attempt to shake down the Secretary of State to subvert the democratic process and steal the Presidential election: today is two tunes from bands from Georgia.

Specifically, Athens, Georgia, which is where I went to college. First up is “McIntosh” by Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, who were one of my favorite bands while I was in college but never seemed to make much of an impression outside Athens (despite having Michael Stipe as a producer). I saw them perform twice at the Georgia Theater, and they were some of the most amazing concerts I’ve ever seen. One of the guys would play guitar, and the other sat in a rocking chair and would stomp on a box with a microphone under it. (They also had a drummer for their live shows).

Second is “Love Shack” by The B-52’s, since the first concert I saw in Athens was the band doing their Cosmic Thing tour. It’s definitely not my favorite song from the album — even before it got so overplayed — but it does mention the Atlanta Highway at the beginning. That’s the road out of Athens that I used to drive every weekend to my retail job in college, a frustratingly long, two-laned, tree-lined road that would pass places like Peanut’s Redneck Bar-be-que. There are several Athens references throughout Cosmic Thing, so being in town while there was so much hype around the band and the album was a neat feeling, like being at the center of something.

I was debating whether to include “Love Shack” or “The Rooster” by Outkast, which is my favorite song from Speakerboxxx, and which I like 99.9% as much as the more popular “Hey Ya” from The Love Below. But I felt like a poseur for naming it, because I didn’t even hear about Outkast until long after I’d already moved out of Georgia.

I hope everybody who’s eligible to vote in Georgia has already voted in the run-offs, or has a plan to before the polls close tonight! It’s crucial to get the corrupt Republicans out of the way before we can even start to make things better.

Until I did a search for year-end appropriate songs, I’d never heard of Two Door Cinema Club, or their song from 2013 “Next Year.”

It’s a pleasant song about making plans for later we can’t carry out today, which seems extremely appropriate for the long-awaited end of 2020. Most remarkable to me, though, is how much the beginning of the track reminds me of the Apple Loops-provided backbeat in my friend Graham’s legendary video “We Sing the Forest Electric.”

I’m hoping that in 2021, we all have more of the uninhibited forest dancing, and much less of the implied killing.

There’s also “Next Year” by the Foo Fighters, which had a video of the gang going to the moon and, impressively, choosing not to wear fat suits for comedic effect. I’m impressed they pulled it off! And I hope next year is better for everyone reading this, and even some of the people who aren’t.