Category: Tuesday Tune Two-fer

This year we watched the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which should be one of everybody’s Christmas traditions. The thing I was most struck with this year is how timeless it seems. I tend to think of it as a time capsule of peak 1990s television, even though it was released in 1988.

I also tend to think of it as this bizarre little one-off gag, making fun of traditional Christmas specials. My 80s brain said that it was a cute joke that they have Frankie and Annette in the cast, and that the locals like Chairy and Conky are given top billing over Oprah and Cher.

But now I can recognize just how much love they put it into it, as if they fully intended for it to still be watched and beloved over 30 years later. Part of that is that the camp — even the playhouse annex being built by buff, shirtless construction workers using fruitcake — isn’t just a sly wink, sneaking gay stuff into a mainstream TV holiday special, during the Reagan era, when the anti-gay “family values” culture war was still in effect. Instead, there’s a real sense of “this is stuff that we love, and eventually, the rest of you will catch on.”

How else do you explain Grace Jones’s fantastic performance of Little Drummer Boy? It capitalized on Jones’s persona as way too outre for the mainstream, made fun of that (“Sorry, Grace, back in the box!”), and then gave it the space to be a show-stopping highlight.

Not to mention defiance of the attempts to gaslight the entire country into believing that it’s always been a Christian Nation of Straight English-Speaking White People, by having Charro perform Feliz Navidad and bringing in Miss Rene for “the Hannukah portion of the show.” (Along with Jewish dinosaurs playing with a dreidel).

The part of the show that I’ve had “a changing relationship with” over the years: kd lang’s wonderful over-the-top version of “Jingle Bell Rock.” (Still the best version of the song ever recorded, IMO).

Back when I first saw the special, I thought it was awkward and tone deaf. Surly teenage me said, “Yeah, kd, we all get that the show is campy, but it’s supposed to be cool as well. You’re a little too on-the-nose.” It was corny, or had I had the word back then, cringe.

Now, of course, I can recognize what an uptight little bastard teenage me was, bundling everything up tighter and tighter for fear of looking uncool. In my defense, it was the 1980s. (And I was still very very much in the closet). Now of course, I can recognize it as someone who was defiantly and confidently asserting her own style, just as much as Grace Jones was, but who’d just recently burst into the peak of her mainstream popularity.

In other words: she understood the assignment exactly, and she delivered a performance that she knew people would still be watching over thirty years later. Or if not, then at least she’d give it everything she could, all while having fun with it.

So I’m wishing everybody Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, and my wish is that we can all live our lives with the unchecked, fearless enthusiasm and joy of kd lang in the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.

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?