108. Spanish Tide

Family: Fearless (United Artists, 1971);
composed by Charlie Whitney & Roger Chapman

What most annoys me about the notion of “classic rock” – apart from it being yet another opportunity for nostalgic white boomers to congratulate themselves and bemoan the cultural poverty of the present day – is that it does not accurately describe a period when “rock” really did provide an avenue to all sorts of ambitious and genuinely heterodox gambits, because no one was really sure what it was supposed to sound like – even as late as 1971. Prog was just the all-too-obvious high-concept version of this hustle. More interesting were bands like this one: five Brits in a seemingly conventional rock-band configuration, except that the vocalist, Roger Chapman, sounded like he was having a seizure whenever he revved up, and Charlie Whitney’s music kept zinging in a different direction every few bars without losing overall focus or taking on any untoward symphonic airs. Or jazzy ones, for that matter, although you could tell these guys had the ears for it. John Wetton left to join King Crimson a year later, but he never sounded better with anyone than he did here – supplementing Chapman with his own foggy hoot and doubling up on bass and 12-string. But Crimson never sounded better, either.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (or at least regularly) until Donald goes away.

107. 106 Beats That

Wire: Pink Flag (Harvest, 1977);
composed by Colin Newman & Graham Lewis

“Primitive” is an ill-informed value judgment; “primitivism” is an artistic strategy. How few informational elements can you place in proximity to each other such that they still generate a charge? That is what punk was – or came out of – and it is also what post-punk was, which is why what distinguished them (or not) had nothing to do with chronology. Wire’s debut was an art project comprising twenty-one songs running about thirty-six minutes, each of which addressed this question with minimal drums, overdriven guitar noise, and a snarl sounding alternately sardonic and terror-stricken. The title of this track – which runs a minute and twelve seconds - refers to the number of words in the lyrics: a third-person vignette of some irritating arty type. When the words run out, the song simply stops. Notwithstanding this formal stricture, almost half of it – splitting the words into two discrete blocks - is given over to one of the most sinister rave-ups in the music, moving from the simplest descending single line tracing the notes of the major chord, and then quickly doubling to a chorded barrage that instantly feels like it is coming through your bones. People dick around while the world ends.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) until Donald goes away.

106. Prayer

D’Angelo & The Vanguard: Black Messiah (RCA, 2014);
composed by Michael Eugene Archer

All of D’Angelo’s studio albums freak me out, but the fact that he has released only three of them in thirty years is the aspect that actually freaks me out the least. Every time I hear this track from the last album he put out after a decade of silence – (reportedly, Prince had written him a letter the entire text of which was “Well?”) – my first reaction is the same: “How did they get the chiming bells in tune?” Maybe no one cares, but tubular bells have so many overtones that they always sound sour to me. No less so than the brief section of actual tubular bells on Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.” Or Chic’s “I Want Your Love.” Not here. The tonality of the sound centers the whole track. Which suggests that D'Angelo did not get the bell in tune with the track; rather, he got the track in tune with the bell, overtones and all. What sounds like the most basic of drum shuffles by Questlove is glued to a murky electronic wash under which D’Angelo prays for his own sanity. Proof of any pudding is in the eating, but that goes double when the pudding eats you.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) until Donald goes away.

105. Golden Years

David Bowie: Station To Station (RCA Victor, 1976);
composed by David Bowie

This single – and this band - is the only fit object for the term “love muscle.” After the advent of Carlos Alomar (and a John Lennon visitation) produced “Fame,” this sequel is the first Bowie track with the Alomar-George Murray-Dennis Davis rhythm section as its foundation and substance. The lyric is another cautionary litany about fame, but Bowie’s vocal gives itself up so completely to the groove that it projects a wholly different kind of hologram than the pale coke freak he presented at the time. Alomar has been candid that Bowie hired him because he wanted to get the most then-current currents of Black American music into his sound, and Alomar was perfectly happy to do that for him as long as the money was correct. But I still think it was more than the money; after Station, this group with various guest weirdos did Low, Heroes, Stage, Lodger, and Scary Monsters – all over the place stylistically but with a bottom like death throughout. As excited as I was to hear that Nile Rodgers was coming in for Let’s Dance, what resulted (and sold kajillions) did very little for me after that end-of-decade streak. Bowie had his own Chic.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) until Donald goes away.

25. Diddie Wa Diddie

Blind Blake (Paramount 12888, 1929 – b/w “Police Dog Blues”);
composed by Gary D. Davis

Credited to Rev. Gary Davis, this is the first relatively famous version of this song – or “meme,” insofar as there are numerous different songs with the same or similar title, Bo Diddley’s being the most familiar today. And while there are a lot of great Blind Blake records, I am particularly fond of this one – over his polychromic clear-as-a-bell fingerpicked guitar he expounds in his reserved and quietly amused baritone about “a great big mystery” that “sure is worrying me”: “I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means.” The great cosmic joke, of course, is that he – like everybody else who is even remotely involved – may claim not to know what Diddie Wa Diddie means, but there is not even the slightest ambiguity about what it is: it is sex, sometimes it is the parts of you that you have sex with, and sometimes it is every kind of discourse that touches on it – like, you know, good parties do. And inevitably, Blake embodies the whole package: “I went out and walked around / Somebody yelled, said ‘Look who's in town’ / Mister Diddie Wa Diddie.” There is no reason that this could not happen to you.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

24. Living in the Heart of the Beast

Henry Cow & Slapp Happy: In Praise of Learning (Virgin, 1975);
composed by Tim Hodgkinson

As a privileged muso of the Euro-American sphere (ya heard?), I am well acquainted with a great deal of spectacular Art By Marxists, but also privy to a great slew of terrible Marxist Art - a very different thing. This fifteen-minute song is both things. Henry Cow were a bunch of Cambridge weirdos who melded fascinations with Coltrane, Bulgarian choral music, and sundry else into their own variety of orchestrated rock. Not prog rock like contemporaries who thought it a stroke to juice up Prokofiev or Brahms rather than the class-bound embarrassment it was, but electric music that sounded like what was in their capacious heads. Their heads were also trying to make political sense at the same time, so when Slapp Happy-ite Peter Blegvad’s lyrics did not fit Tim Hodgkinson’s mini-symphony, Hodgkinson wrote this godawful Maoist doggerel himself, which is intoned by the quavery Hanns Eisler specialist, Dagmar Krause. And it is gorgeous. Proletarian? Not so much. Does it kick the shit out of Tarkus? Very much so. This album got its title from Brecht whose amused concision is lacking here, but this music would not still stir in such a dark time if they had gotten that lucky.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

23. Mila’s Journey Inspired By A Dream

Eliane Radigue: Songs of Milarepa (Lovely, 1987);
composed by Éliane Radigue

This French composer is known for her electronic drone compositions in just intonation. “Drone” means only that there is no rhythmic movement, as such, and what harmonic movement there is – and there is plenty – operates on such an extruded time scale that it seems utterly alien to first-time listeners. But if Radigue’s drones do not have “plots,” they certainly have arcs – gripping ones. Her wholly-electronic Trilogie de la Mort may be the most emotionally overwhelming example of this. As a convert to Tibetan Buddhism, many of her reference points come from the liturgy. In this piece, however, it becomes lyrics, recited in Tibetan by Lama Kunga Rinpoche – whose first appearance after ten very quiet minutes is like having an ice bucket dumped on you from behind – alternating English sprechstimme by Robert Ashley. For the first half, the former brigand and now visonary Milarepa details to his followers how a dream has illuminated the group’s future devotional practice. The last half hour is all deep electronics in which so many audio figurations begin to pop out of the mix that you are certain you hear chanting or the throb of engines. When it suddenly stops, it is no longer your planet.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).