52. Funkadelic - "One Nation Under A Groove" (Warner Bros., 1978)
Perhaps the clearest statement of the part of the P-Funk ethos that sets out to unify everyone into one groove nation (and maybe the clearest statement of that by anyone, it's certainly not an ideal limited to George Clinton), "One Nation Under A Groove" is the kind of sloganeering that gives sloganeering a good name. I would say that if you only had to hear one P-Funk song it would be this one, but if you hear this song and don't feel like looking further into the catalog for more bass lines, harmonies, and total-body grooves like this one, we have fundamental differences, you and I. The 12" version is 11 and a half minutes long and about 8 and a 1/2 minutes in, when the synth-bass groove starts changing it up under the chorus, is when it goes from next level to that other level.
53. The O'Jays - "I Love Music" (Philadelphia International, 1975)
I was in Boston recently to watch a Red Sox game, and as my friends and I were trying to get back on the subway with the post-game crowd, we saw a white girl about our age using her digital camera to record a video of an African American gentlemen playing some kind of hand drums for money. Being carried around the corner by the slowly moving crowd, she looked at the musician and very earnestly, perhaps as an affirmation of a common bond between them, said, "I love music, man."
Of course we've been laughing about this for weeks, as at the time it seemed like such a hilarious and meaningless thing to say. It has occurred to me, of course, that one of my favorite songs is this Philly-disco hit by the O'Jays. So why was my reaction to the girl in the subway something along the lines of "LOL, dummy" while my reaction to the O'Jays is "fuck yeah, I love music too dudes!"?
Is it because the O'Jays somehow earn the right to express this sentiment because they're making awesome music? Is it because the ecstatic nature of dance music allows us an appropriate context in which to express simple truths? Is it because there was something in a (seemingly) middle-class white girl (seemingly) trying to affirm the worth of an African-American street performer that made me uncomfortable? Was it just me assuming a good percentage of drunk people leaving Fenway are idiots?
54. Armand Van Helden - "U Don't Know Me (ft. Duane Harden)" (Ffrr/Armed Records, 1999)
Starting a song with a sliver of a sample and then unraveling that sample after the intro isn't exactly an obscure technique, but I'm not sure I've ever heard it used to more ecstatic, glorious effect than it is on "U Don't Know Me", the Boston-born Van Helden's 1999 smash (#1 in the UK, don't you know). It's a song about how it feels to be misunderstood and judged harshly by folks who don't know you, and it sure is euphoric.
55. Craig Mack - "Flava in Ya Ear (Remix ft. Puff Daddy, the Notorious B.I.G., Rampage the Last Boy Scout, LL Cool J, and Busta Rhymes)" (Bad Boy Entertainment, 1994)
Before we get to the complete headfuck that is LL Cool J's verse on here, let's discuss the stuff that's good in the conventional sense. First, there's Easy Mo Bee's beat, an unquestionable East Coast Rap classic, two notes and hazy waves that are perfect whenever they come in. It's not Biggie's best verse ever, but it's still a Biggie verse. Busta is 1994 Busta, so he's one of the most joyfully unhinged rappers ever. Mack has "your album couldn't fuck with one line," which is wonderful (in a recursive way) because if that's true of any line Craig ever said it's that line itself. Rampage is solid if unspectacular and Puffy, well, it's actually kind of impressive how sure he was of his impeding world domination (even for a rapper), considering they were pretty much just getting started here.
But the LL verse is what really elevates this to sublime. Remember this was after 14 Shots to the Dome, a relative commercial failure for him, and just before Mr. Smith, which had "Doin' It" and "Hey Lover" and pretty much established the grown up loverman LL we have today. So the vocal style at the beginning of his verse does, I think, prefigure that sort of thing, more calmly seductive than on his late 80s songs for the girls. But the content! What the fuck?
HEEESHEEE! Uh! blowticious skeevy (mmmm) delicious Give me cous-cous, love me good Hollis to Hollywood, but is he good? I Guess like the jeans, uh! Flava like pralines sick daddy knaamean?
They way people use the term "ironic" when it comes to enjoying music means either "enjoying something bad" which, you know, why would you, or "enjoying something for a reason opposite to which it was created" which, you know, how the hell would you know and who cares? Is it safe to assume from his MO directly following this song that LL thought screeching "HEEESHEEE" was sexy?
However you explain my enjoyment of LL's verse here, it's good enough for science to rocket this song up to #55 on our countdown. We should all be using the word "blowticious" more often.
56. The Velvet Underground - "I'm Set Free" (from the self-titled album, MGM Records, 1969)
Guitar solos are sweet, but I rarely listen to songs only for the solo. The rest of this song is good too, but the solo is one of those sublime moments that elevates every moment spent in its company.
57. Elton John - "Crocodile Rock" (DJM Records, 1972)
Good to great songs about dances are a dime a dozen, as are songs about nostalgia for a rock and roll childhood. However, songs about doing an imagined dance to an imagined song during your rock and roll childhood are, as far as I know, quite a bit more rare and the creation of such a thing by Bernie Taupin is a wonderful move. Whether not actually inventing a dance to go with is laziness or allowing for creativity on the part of the listener or both I'm not sure, but it doesn't bother me. The famously and excellently annoying hook is either more important than the lyrical content or just a cherry on top, depending on my mood.
58. The Flaming Lips - "Superhumans" (from the Transmissions From the Satellite Heart album, Warner Bros., 1993)
This is the #1 Flaming Lips hit in my heart, for me the perfect mix of their scuzz and their world-conquering giddiness. The lyrics combine a message of personal sacrifice (one of Wayne Coyne's favorite themes) with with a combination of animal and space imagery that has pretty much become his bread and butter on-stage. The way Wayne strains for the melody here is completely appropriate for someone singing to a love object which seems to be as grand as a galaxy, and the when the guitar solo soars in, briefly, it soars towards the heavens.
So the Oscars kind of burned me out a bit, but we're totes back. Here's a wonderful song.
59. Amy Grant - "Baby, Baby" (A&M Records, 1991)
I'm no expert on Amy Grant. I know she's like the most successful Christian artist evehr and that she has a wonderful voice, but I've only really heard bits and pieces of her crossover stuff, my fav of which is surprise, surprise, her mega hit single "Baby, Baby". In my childhood memory, it shares space with early, curly-haired Mariah on VH1 (been doing lots of Mariah re-evaluation in preparation for a party we're throwing, more on that soon), and, listening to it now, it holds up just as well if not better than Mimi's wonderful early singles.
The lyrics are about all of nature showing love for that special someone and while, again, I don't know much about her Gospel stuff, some of the lyrics and imagery here (or is it just me that hears "devotion" and thinks religion) recall songs of worship. It's interesting to me hearing someone who sings about God using the same language to describe a more terrestrial love.
Of course, when I was six I had no idea Amy Grant usually sang CCM and I mostly loved her voice and the awesome solo.
60. Three 6 Mafia - "Stay Fly (ft. Young Buck, 8Ball, and MJG)" (Columbia, 2005)
There are only a few minutes left in the annual day on which it is most appropriate to celebrate Tennessee's finest (3/6 of course), so we might as well do it with this monster, which made the transition from "Stay High" to "Stay Fly" effortlessly. I was absolutely overjoyed today when, on my walk to the subway, a dude rolled past me actually blasting Three Six.
61. Miranda Lambert - "Kerosene" (Epic, 2005) 62. Big Black - "Kerosene" (from the Atomizer album, Homestead Records 1986)
"Kerosene" is a simple, direct title that, with a small amount of context, tells you most of what you need to know about the lyrical content of these songs. The female-sung, country "Kerosene" is about a wronged woman burning her cheating lover's stuff, while the Midwestern 80s noise-punk "Kerosene" is about a disaffected, small-town youth playing with fire. For a talented artist, a clichéd concept is as good a jumping off point as any, and these are very talented artists.
63. Luniz - "I Got 5 On It (Bay Ballas Remix ft. Dru Down, E-40, Humpty Hump, Richie Rich, Shock G, and Spice 1)" (Noo Trybe Records, 1995)
I was nine years old when this song came out and God knows I wasn't thinking of goin' half on a sack with anybody (maybe a sack of White Castles but my folks were paying for that anyways). Still, if memory serves (and it usually doesn't), this song coming on the radio or Rap City resulted in anyone within striking distance sinking further into their chair by about 6-10 inches (depending on height, starting position, and chair flexibility). I've never been to Oakland and am woefully undereducated on its history, but I have to imagine this is its civic anthem.
64. David Bowie - "Blackout" (from the "Heroes" album, RCA, 1977)
I have been making beans and rice a bunch recently, as I don't have too much money and it really seems like something that someone who doesn't have that much money should be eating. Obviously beans and rice are also real delicious when prepared with even a tiny modicum of effort. I felt like really going in on some BnR today, so I thought I'd do the one thing that, in the 21st century, we all seem to agree makes any meal better. I threw an egg on it.
Beans and Rice with a Poached Egg (2 servings or so)
Make the rice however you want. There are hundreds of ways to make rice. I used Basmati cuz I had some laying around.
Start the beans by taking three slices of bacon and chop them up. Throw them into a medium-low saucepan that's heavy enough so as not to be useless. Render the bacon fat and then take it out with a slotted spoon, leaving the fat in the pan.
Next, chop half an onion and a stalk of celery and throw it into the bacon fat. Cook that stuff until it's soft and then toss in the bacon, a can of kidney beans, a 1/4 cup of chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon of something spicy (I made some chili powder a while ago, it's delicious, use hot sauce if you want tho), and some salt. Let that cook for like 15-20 minutes until it reaches the consistency you like.
When the beans and rice are done, poach an egg. Don't poach it too long, make it runny. Obviously I was too excited about this meal to transfer the egg properly but it looks even better this way. This should make enough beans for two dinner servings but I'll prolly do it in 1 1/2 cuz it tastes too damn good.
Now that I've fully humiliated myself with my previous post, maybe I've ruined my chances of anyone reading this ever appreciating the wonderful Ms. Lene Lovich (I should have written this one first). As I said, when my best friend's mother gave me Stateless on vinyl, it rocked my world, and I listened to it pretty exclusively for a few months. These days, it makes a regular rotation every month or two, and hasn't lost a bit of its magic. Why she didn't completely blow up in the 80s will forever remain a mystery to me. All the components were there, but there might have been something about her performance arty way of doing things that turned people off. She wore brightly colored braids she fashioned into bows atop her head, performing her songs as if she was playing the lead in a fucked up gothic version of Grease, and occasionally involving half naked men and buckets of blood. So she did all of this, and made great pop music, and failed.
Yet some greater force allows Lady Gaga to remain alive, and successful. God is dead.
Tell me this song shouldn't have been a major anthem of 1980s materialism, Madonna be damned.
And finally, her biggest hit (to date mind you, she still makes music and I'm still waiting for her to blow up), "Lucky Number." Lovich once joked the song would have had more international success if there wasn't a chorus of men chanting "number two" at the end, but it makes her silliness even more endearing.
I wonder (I also wonder whether or not the following is an example of getting too self-aware of how one enjoys music instead of just enjoying it) (but I don't think it is) whether if a song like this came out today, a goofy ("tribal lunar speak"?!?!) Canadian indie-rap song sampling a song I like (no matter how good it was), if there was any chance that I would like it. I'm not sure.
Luckily, this song came out in 1999 and it's amazing and I love it and I wish it was summer.
You know we had to keep it a little extra sexy for song number 69, it's not like we're adults or anything. This has recently become my favorite song on CrazySexyCool and is definitely my favorite thing Babyface has ever written. As the iconic video makes explicit, the ladies are super in-charge on this one, so even when they're offering themselves up fully ("Baby it's yours, all yours") it's clear they're taking great pleasure in their power to do so. "If I move too fast just let me know/'Cause it means you move too slow" is an awesome, sexual bravado-filled bait-and-switch. Chili gets a little more tender on the middle-eight, which sounds more like the hits Babyface was writing for Boyz II Men at the time, and adds depth to (and doesn't at all dilute) the empowerment of T-Boz's verses.
(Oh, and despite the infinitely less cool stand-in in the video, the solo on this song is, indeed, played by Slash)
A symptom of listening to music in the internet age is that I'll inevitably once-in-a-while discover something in my iTunes library and have no idea how it got there. Maybe a friend sent it, maybe I found it on a blog or a message board. There's a kind of lost feeling, a contextual mystery.
Except it's a completely different kind of contextual mystery than the common one of the pre-internet era, hearing a song on an unlabeled tape, on the radio, or blasting from somebody's car and having no idea who it is. With most mystery mp3s, that data is there in the tags or, at worst, a brief Google search of the lyrics away. The harder-to-solve mystery becomes not the identity of the song/performer or even its context in musical history, but the personal context in which we received it.
Q: Where were you when you first heard "Criminal Minded" (Connie's "Rock Me"/"Toxic"/etc.)? A: Well, I was in my living room when it appeared through a void (Except it was there all along).
(If by your second time hearing this song you're not singing along to the "I want it, I need it..." part of the verse I'll be very surprised)
The use of player-specific songs developed first among American sports in baseball, and in a rather unlikely manner. While baseball players (especially closing pitchers) were identified with individual songs long before those in football or basketball, the first fan-created parody chant was esoteric enough that it surprised this writer greatly not to have found an earlier example with more obvious lyrics and a more contemporary melody.
Indeed, the first example used as its melody a song which, at the time, was almost thirty years old and its lyrics do not mention the player by name. It began to be sung in the 2010 season by Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim fans to celebrate the newly signed Hideki Matsui and used the melody of British band Squeeze's 1980 song "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" to reference Matsui's supposedly prodigious collection of pornographic videos.
Its lyrics were as follows:
Behind the curtain his collection's complete when he feels like interracial porn he reaches high up on his tiptoed feet
Pulling pornos from the shelf
The song spread rapidly via the internet and, with it, what now seems like an essential part of American sporting culture began in earnest.
*Hawthurn, John, Live from Right Field: A History of Fan Songs in American Sports; (Seattle, Amazon Digital Texts, 2031) 5
72. The Hives - "The Hives - Introduce the Metric System in Time" (from the Veni Vidi Vicious album, Burning Heart Records, 2000)
One of the many great songs on the Hives' second and best album is this one, a hard rocking number about trying to introduce a revolutionary idea to society at large, and, I daresay, one of the best songs ever about the subject. Their flirtation with both extreme ends of the political spectrum within the context of Rock'n'Roll and Rock'n'Roll Performance (THE HIVES ARE LAW AND YOU ARE CRIME) was so goddamn wonderful and fun; I smile every time "Tick, Tick, Boom" is used in a sports broadcast (which is a lot, recently) cuz I like to see them getting that money.
At eight years old I had this song not on Bacdafucup but on the now hilarious looking MTV Party to Go, Vol. 5 (please, please take a look at that track listing), sandwiched in between "Boom! Shake the Room" and "Informer". It was my favorite thing on the compilation (okay maybe it was tied with "Whoomp! There It Is"), basically a New York street rap song pitched somewhere between PARTY and RIOT (and therefore belonging in the same lineage as "Ante Up"). It's not as explicitly (better yet, specifically) violent as "Ante Up", but I'll be damned if Onyx' (and especially Sticky's) cartoonish menace isn't still menacing. It makes perfect sense in retrospect that Fredro and Sticky went on to have some success as actors; there are mountains of charisma in their verses (the first and last, respectively, if you didn't know) on this song.
