25. “Remember (Christmas)”

Harry Nilsson: Son of Schmilsson (RCA, 1972);
composed by Harry Nilsson

This album’s predecessor, Schmilsson, was a great one because it instantly made tangible the frank desperation that powered what had often seemed like overly whimsical craftsmanship in his previous music, but never was. This self-mocking sequel took this process further, which is why some of it makes no sense, in both good and less good ways. Unlike the tracks this album is best known for - “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” (response in the chorus: “So, fuck you!”), and “Joy” (which makes “Far Away Eyes” sound like “Sister Morphine”) – “Remember (Christmas),” a piano-with-strings ballad, would have fit on Schmilsson, but only the way that “Que Será Será” would have fit on There’s A Riot Goin’ On. It figures that Randy Newman performed this on a tribute album, because it is unequivocally pretty the way some of Newman’s darkest songs are. Over a lustrous cadence, Harry croons “remember” over and over at the beginning of each line, until he hits the bridge and croons “dre-ee-eeam!” so cheerfully that you instantly know how sad it actually is: “Love is only in a dream.” Happiness is what we make it, and one of the things we make it out of is sadness.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

24. “Lush Life”

Composed by Billy Strayhorn; first performed publicly in 1948

“Lush Life” is one of the most beautiful songs in the American “standard” canon, and not coincidentally it contains a rhyming couplet so abysmal (“awful” paired with “trough full” – full "of hearts," no less) that one has to assume that Strayhorn, who composed the song over a period of years starting when he was sixteen (sixteen!) and well before he had even met Duke Ellington, had to have known what a bummer it was and left it in, deliberately. It sits there like a pill any singer just has to choke down quickly, except its taste never quite gets past you. Neil Young once claimed he originally wrote over a hundred verses for “Sugar Mountain” and left in the very worst of them, “just to show what can happen.” “Lush Life” is entirely about that, and it is also about that pill. The original title, “Life Is Lonely,” thankfully gave way to a title with the truest of double meanings, insofar as it runs in two directions: not just happiness and romance leading to a despairing alcoholic aftermath but - more problematic – back again. And again. His happiness and despair seem interchangeable, but what they are is all of a piece.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

23. “Can’t Hide Love”

Earth, Wind & Fire: Gratitude (Columbia, 1975);
composed by Clarence Scarborough

I have loved this group to pieces ever since “Shining Star” hit and never once worried about whether they were just all too smooth and cosmic. Sure – pretty heavy on the astrology and other such Reasons for playing the Love Game – but their sound was unique and that is even more obvious now. Their groove was The Funk the way Count Basie’s 1930s band had it if you hear it right – not just the horns, but a top-to-bottom interlock keyed as much to Maurice White and Philip Bailey’s vocal trade-offs up top as to the White Brothers’ rhythm change-ups down below. Even when they slowed down, they sounded like an idling dirigible. I would not say this track is typical of anything, but as one of the rare hits they did not write, the inscrutability of its construction raises all the right questions. The horn part that opens it sounds as if a first half has been deliberately omitted, while almost the entire second half of the track is fade-out. The song itself is great, but the fade is the charm: repeating the same four-bar cadence with different inversions until the substitutions take over completely.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

22. “Jo To Se Ti To Spí”

The Plastic People of the Universe: Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned (S.C.O.P.A.-Invisible/Boži Mlýn, 1978 [recorded 1973-74]);
composed by Egon Bondy, Vratislav Brabenec, Milan Hlavsa, Josef Janiček, Jiří Kabeš, and Jaroslav Vožniak

This first album by the rol-a-rok heroes of the post-Prague Spring crackdown has never been more than barely available since it was secretly recorded in an abandoned Bohemian castle in late 1973, and it is even currently out of print in Česká Republika. But Václav Havel did not revere them just because they were Velvet Underground and Zappa fans, since they sounded like neither. They barely sounded like rock and roll, for that matter (only one song on this album even has a backbeat), but rock they did in a strange, clamorous way wholly appropriate to culture mavens who went to jail for expressing themselves, sounded like they knew it was coming any minute, and did not give a flaming fuck. This song is atypical of them only insofar as the only instrument is an out-of-tune piano playing a folk dance rhythm accompanying a chorus of croaky voices, and preceded by weird echoey claps that sound like someone looking for a pilot light. As Paul Wilson's English trot provides: “Look at you, all sound asleep; And you haven’t the remotest notion; How, high on alcohol and beer; I shine like a jewel of the universe.”


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

21. “Strange Young Girls”

The Mamas & the Papas: The Mamas & the Papas (Dunhill, 1966);
composed by John Phillips

This song used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was about six, well before I could make out the words, and only slightly less so years later when I did. Most of this group’s hits were on its first album and this second album was painfully pieced together amidst affairs, break-ups, business hassles, and way too much dope. They got some interesting music out of it (despite a dogshit version of “My Heart Stood Still”), but these songs are just swimming in bad vibes and recrimination, making the overall effect something like an alternate version of Rumours dosed with heroin rather than cocaine. Close harmonies are recorded just a microtone off for effect (like they were on Revolver), and some of the parts were written so high you can tell that they had to be shouted in pitch and mixed down. This song is a somber chorale explicitly about acid – one year before “White Rabbit” – and it contains no rhetoric about “frontiers” or “consciousness.” The “girls” in this song are “offering their youth” and “hiding their madness,” all for the sake of The Trip. Where? Anywhere else but here. Unsentimental, but – most unsettlingly – not at all cautionary.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

20. “Green Eyes”

Erykah Badu: Mama’s Gun (Motown, 2000);
composed by Erykah Badu, Vikter Duplaix, and James Poyser

Despite the lengths she and her collaborators went to make this album sound like a throwback of sorts (not counting the scratchy-78 put-on that opens this track), Badu’s second album is very much the opposite, and one of its great pleasures is how it unassumingly obliges you to catch up to it well before you realize the effort was necessary. Another pleasure is the way the ambition of this ten-minute closing opus is validated by its modesty. Her ex hooks up with a "new friend," and familiarly she suddenly finds her rational thought entirely non-responsive. "I'm insecure," she admits, but not so much that she cannot get across what her inability to know what she feels actually feels like. Her voice rises only to cue structural transitions within the three discrete, rhythmically distinct (and equally gorgeous) songs that are interlaced together here. Although there are no words in this song that you have not heard before (or lived through), not excluding the lines that directly contradict what she has just said, this song - wrapped around her own vocal idiosyncrasies - is just about unique in making it possible to have all of these words in one place.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

19. “Today I Started Loving You Again”

Merle Haggard & The Strangers: The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde (Capitol, 1968); composed by Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens

In a market where singles were everything, it is remarkable that what may be Merle Haggard’s best song was never released as one, which has allowed it to escape too many anthologies. “Today I Started Loving You Again” occasionally gets confused with George Jones’ baroque-by-comparison “He Stopped Loving Her Today” – a hit twelve years later (and which tellingly took George two sessions months apart to get in the can) – but the comparison is still illuminating. Jones describes someone who had to die to get over a broken relationship; Haggard’s ostensibly still-living first person describes getting over a broken relationship all too thoroughly such that all of the jerry-rigged sanity-saving rationales evaporate without warning and leave him with all the same feelings he thought he had talked himself out of having. The backup is minimal, co-composer (and ex-wife) Bonnie Owens chimes in only on the last chorus, and Merle’s naked voice sounds ten years older than it was when he recorded it. It communicates that the truth he woke up to is one he can live with, but it also conveys the certainty that it is a truth he will now have to take to the grave.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

18. “No Depression”

The Carter Family: “There’s No One Like Mother To Me” / “No Depression” (Decca 5242, 1936); composed by John David Vaughan

Even if you could imagine hearing this song when it was first released as a 78, it is difficult to make any sense of it – and utterly impossible when anyone else performs it – because its operative religious sensibility is as obscure to us (and by “us,” I also mean our “fundamentalist” contemporaries) as John Wesley’s is. Or John Bunyan’s, for that matter. Far from being a wish for any kind of “escape” – even from The Depression, let alone “depression” – it promises only the confirming certainty of death in the face of the uncertainty that is this worldly veil of tears. That the Carters could believe in this doleful cosmology to their bones and still be, by all accounts, as “worldly” as any other performers with national reputations could be at that time, does not make its logic any less uncompromising. They knew no other, and it gives their recording its strange momentum, insofar as it essentially defies the idea of “momentum,” itself. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is thinking outside the box, as it were. “God’s word declared it would be so” is so far inside the same box that its edges might as well be curving horizons.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

17. “Im Abendrot”

Composed by Richard Strauss to a text by Joseph von Eichendorff, from Vier letzte Lieder, Op. Posth. (1948); as recorded by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with George Szell conducting the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester, Berlin (EMI, 1966)

Although it is not clear that Strauss really intended them to be a set, this is the fourth (although first-composed) of Strauss’ “Four Last Songs,” the last compositions he is known to have written: one year before he died, two before Kirsten Flagstad and Wilhelm Furtwängler premiered them, and only three after Strauss’ miserable and barely-tolerated existence under the Third Reich came to an end. Accordingly, it often bothers me that my favorite recording of the cycle is by a Former Party Member, but Schwarzkopf was the perfect mezzo for this music: fully rounded and technically flawless but with an evanescence in her timbre that allowed her to just evaporate on the diminuendos, notably the last line of this particular lied: “How weary we are of wandering---/
 Is this perhaps death?” This is the only one of the four not set to a Hermann Hesse poem, and it is “final” in a way the others are not. The voice makes it what it is. Never rising to more than a ghostly murmur and barely floating over the orchestra, it describes a twilight walk in the mountains that seems to erase everything that came before it. Except for sadness.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

16. “People In Sorrow”

Art Ensemble of Chicago: People In Sorrow (Nessa, 1969 – out of print) [available with Les Stances a Sophie (1970) on Americans Swinging in Paris: The Pathé Sessions (EMI-France, 2003)];
composed by Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Roscoe Mitchell

Anthony Braxton once said that the Chicago musicians who went to Paris en masse in 1969 did so because they were dying. He meant that literally. The Art Ensemble was a confluence of two or three different ensembles working in close proximity that meshed to form a provisional but long-lived entity that recorded upwards of eighteen albums during their two-year Paris residency. Two of them were for the French Pathé label, and both are classic, but People In Sorrow was the first and there is nothing else remotely like it in their oeuvre. Or in anyone else’s. Having lost their drummer, the four improvising composers play forty minutes of variations on one unresolving dirge-like melody with no fixed tempo that begins with barely audible tuned percussion and rises to the final seven minutes in which the same gorgeous theme is virtually shrieked by the horns over the wailing alarm of a wound-up kitchen timer that ends the piece when its spring is exhausted. The Tibetan Book of the Dead requires warning the recently deceased about the afterlife’s dangers by having loved ones shout appropriate instructions in their ears. This music warns the living the same way.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

15. “Total Trash”

Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation (Enigma/Blast First, 1988);
composed by Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley

Many terrific artists who never phone it in nonetheless make records I have not bought in twenty years. If Kim and Thurston’s split finishes Sonic Youth I still have many presumably great albums to catch up on, many of which may be better than this one which some early adopters thought was plenty craven in 1988. I have no dog in the “purity” fight, but I know nothing that encapsulates Sonic Youth as a sound idea better than this track, dead center of the album that preceded their decade with a “major label.” Those who thought they sold out to song form on Sister at the expense of their formative microtonal noise excursions may have missed how song form served the noise excursion here. “Total Trash” has words and a tune I would gladly hum for you, but they merely frame an instrumental breakdown where the massive tone cluster undergirding the whole track is driven so hard that when Steve Shelley’s drums drop out you envision a thousand-ton locomotive leaving the tracks and floating away. Comparably, I once saw Baryshnikov and Mark Morris spin in sequence, both effortlessly, except Baryshnikov appeared to have escaped Jupiter’s gravity rather than Earth’s.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

14. “Calypso Frelimo”

Miles Davis: Get Up With It (Columbia, 1974);
composed by Miles Davis

If Miles Davis had not been so sick and cocaine-addled in the early ‘70s, I can only guess what he would have made of the electric music(s) he developed in the five years between Bitches Brew and the six year seclusion he just barely escaped. Maybe just more of it, but we might see its formative points more clearly. My theory about the last studio album he made in that decade (in 1974) is that it might be the Kind of Blue of its period. Not as accessible by any means, but as singular. Concision distinguishes it for one thing and, ironically, nowhere more so than on the two cuts that run over thirty minutes apiece: one is an astounding glacially-paced requiem for Duke Ellington, while the other I have now played more than any other Miles recording I own. “Calypso Frelimo” is based on a four-bar calypso-ish melody Miles plays on the organ to which the two guitars (Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas) respond with a menacing four-bar cadence in a sharply different mode. Three movements in three tempos – fast, slow, lightning – over a straight four with Michael Henderson’s bass knocking on your crypt throughout.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

13. “Leader of the Pack”

The Shangri-Las: Leader of the Pack (Red Bird, 1965);
composed by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and George Morton

If the Shangri-Las were just a Svengali-driven pop act, then so were the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten did more actual songwriting than Mary Weiss, but copped no more attitude. He certainly understood their commonality and spent many years (and quid) beating Malcolm McLaren over the head with it. Also difficult for some to accept is that “Leader of the Pack” itself is as great a punk record as “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is. Shadow Morton supposedly dreamed up this ode to a biker boyfriend on the spot in the Red Bird offices when Barry and Greenwich were dubiously pressing him for new material. Morton got the green light only when he assured them that the biker dies. Which he does, but he is memorialized by a looped tire screech that extends all the way through the fade-out. Leading to that blaze of glory is Weiss' ur-teen narrative broken up by wickedly pointed commentary from the backing S-Las hitting in rapid-fire unison: “By the way, where’d ya meet him?” and What’d he mean when he said he comes from ‘the wrong side of town’?” Could poor Jimmy lead any pack if he had survived? Not likely.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

12. “Surf’s Up”

The Beach Boys: Smile (Capitol, 1967 - unreleased);
composed by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks

Despite it being the most famous album never finished, let alone released within four decades of its making, I have nonetheless managed to hear about half a dozen different versions of The Beach Boys’ Smile, not including the behemoth box set version which I may never hear, unless of course I already have. Brian Wilson’s 2004 reconstruction made the opus that ruined his life sound remarkably sane and concise, although more than one close friend has asked me to turn it off, probably because it remains redolent of someone losing control of his gifts. Much of Smile is gorgeous and unlike anything else, while some of the refrains – even in their later shortened versions - can sound like the maddeningly repetitive dreams you have when your fever gets way up there. This song is of a piece with all of that but its sound is its own, and it contains some of the most sublime music Wilson ever wrote. Formed from two discrete halves (in different keys), it is a window of ruminative longing and sadness within a sensibility trying to be a sensibility again and knowing full well what would happen if it got there and could stay there forever.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

11. “Toyz”

Missy Elliott: This Is Not A Test! (Elektra, 2003);
composed by Missy Elliott, Tim Mosley, and Craig Brockman

This album was Miss E.’s commercial hiccup although that certainly has nothing to do with why I like it so much (does it?), but the humor might have something to do with both. Even the hit “Pass That Dutch,” cracks me up – not least the sonic booby-traps in Timbaland’s production. Elliott claims she made the album too fast under record company pressure and I sympathize, but such circumstances occasionally produce off-the-wall classics like – say – “The Bitch Is Back.” Elliott’s classic development in this vein is this irresistible ode to vibrators. The joke is obvious; the delivery is stone cold deadpan; and all the electric buzzes, the moans, and the shrieks are all hilariously on pitch and just enough behind the beat to give the track an equally hilarious post-orgasmic spaciness. More to the point, she sounds like she means this rebuke a bit more than she means the “where-did-we-go-wrong” of “Is This Our Last Time.” After chastising her man for his now unforgivable failure to attend to proper pleasuring technique she retires to the bathtub, advising Boyfriend not to slam the door on his way out cause “Ya fuck up my concen-tra-tion!”


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

10. “Milonga del Ángel”

Ástor Piazzolla: Tango: Zero Hour (Nuevo Tango: Hora Zero) (American Clavé, 1986); composed by Ástor Piazzolla

Of the many Piazzolla records - and tango records - I have heard since this album opened the genre up for me (and many others), this is still my favorite by far, but I remain uncertain that I have any proper frame of reference for that call. This suggests that this recording was a departure even from the departure that Piazzolla’s Nuevo Tango was from jealously defended Argentine styles. I also think that this track is a departure from its companion pieces, all of which are masterful. This slow milonga (a 19th century style that predates tango, the same way Charley Patton predates Robert Johnson even though they recorded less than ten years apart) is like a cobra rising out of a basket, looking you full in the face, and then vanishing back inside like nothing happened. On its surface, it is the saddest of songs, almost dripping with (and this is the right word – and language) Weltschmerz. But over repeated listenings, the menace in it surfaces. This is “sad” the way Bach – or Weill – is, and it speaks to why those two Germans belong in the same sentence. Its math tells you what it is and that you are here. Suffer.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

9. “Take Me To The River”

Al Green - live performance on Soul Train (1975);
original studio version on Al Green Explores Your Mind (Hi, 1974);
composed by Al Green and Mabon Hodges

This song was never a hit for Al Green, nor is it as attractive as Green’s many very attractive hits. It has always had a cult following because it is very much a cult item insofar as its verses are about sex and its chorus and bridge are about baptism. Some see this as a harbinger of Green’s entering the ministry and leaving secular music (temporarily) behind. Maybe. But it also gives the lie to the quaint notion (arguably David Byrne’s, among others) that the divide between secular and sacred is illusory, since Al Green himself would not have been conceivable without gospel music (or Sam Cooke, for that matter). But that does not mean the divide was any kind of illusory to Green, Cooke, or (especially) Marvin Gaye, the latter of whom that divide probably got killed after it drove him nuts. That is the open secret of this song: the parts do not go together because they are not meant to go together. The relative mildness of the studio version throws people, but a definitive live version from the following year shows the future Rev. Green less transported than mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

8. “Sister Ray”

The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (Verve, 1968);
composed by John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed, and Maureen Tucker

One thing the Velvet Underground did not invent was heavy metal. Although John Cale’s prior experience with LaMonte Young suggests that they could have, this ugly classic demonstrates why they did not. On “Sister Ray,” two guitars, one organ, one very peculiar drum set – and no bass – flail away at excruciating volume for seventeen minutes on one two-bar figure, while Lou Reed bellows about a speed-fueled orgy with sailors, one of whom ends up shot dead on the floor. By definition, this music was too loud to record. There is no bottom to speak of and the waveforms are so constricted that probably 70 percent of what occurred in the studio could not register on tape. This is not heavy metal, which is not defined by volume (on recordings, anyway) so much as the illusion of volume conveyed by the manipulation of virtual otic space and only possible when studios had enough tracks to displace the listener sufficiently. Just before Reed scuttled their reunion, Sterling Morrison reported that they had recently played a version of “Sister Ray” that lasted just two minutes. “It kicked ass,” he said. I believe him, and I will always regret never hearing it.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

7. “Conquistador”

Cecil Taylor: Conquistador! (Blue Note, 1966);
composed by Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor’s music can change your life but not all at once, and never just once, either. Notwithstanding its outward ferocity, starting with his twenty-fingered piano technique, the effect is more like serial concussions just over the horizon. And the outward ferocity is not all that; all of his pieces have portals in them. This 1966 track was the longest he had been able to put on record up to that time, and consequently it breathes in a way that the hyper-wound constructions on the previous Unit Structures do not (although they do plenty of other things). But this 18-minute track is a key to the even lengthier ensemble pieces that followed once he was able to start recording again (seven years later). Relaxed time frames and orchestration bring out his distinctively lyrical themes – and there are none more haunting than the melod[ies] of this piece - that his superlative solo playing often conceals. The effect is the reverse of hearing a Mozart concerto transcribed for two pianos. You hear how the piano and orchestra parts mirror each other, yet without duplication, set in a structure so precisely interlaced that a deviation feels like falling off the planet.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

6. “Bed”

Act IV, Scene 2 from Philip Glass/Robert Wilson: Einstein On The Beach (premiered 1976); composed by Philip Glass

Philip Glass has written that he knew Samuel Beckett had taken theater to a different place when Glass scored Lee Breuer’s 1967 production of Play and found that emotional crisis points occurred in every performance but never in the same places. Ten years later, Glass’ first collaboration with Robert Wilson was a watershed realization of that sensibility (and one of the very few works I would gladly sit for five straight hours to see again). But the emotional nexus of Einstein is always in the same place: the penultimate
scene in which a bar of light resembling the image of a bed appearing in two previous scenes is here shown isolated on an otherwise dark stage lifted to a vertical position during an organ cadenza, and then slowly rises straight up into the flyspace to a scarifying wordless (and almost syllable-less) soprano aria. This was not part of the original plan. One day, somewhat late in the development of the show, Joan LaBarbara, who was vocalist for Glass’ ensemble, demanded that she be given an aria since Einstein was an opera and she was a “soprano diva.” So Glass did. Brecht would not have been Brecht if he had not cheated.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

5. “Babylon Sisters”

Steely Dan: Gaucho (MCA, 1980);
composed by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen

The seemingly arrogant languor of this album pissed a lot of people off when it came out, but no one more than Becker and Fagen, themselves. It took them three years; Becker was out of commission with heroin and casualties; and Fagen was working through a fascination with disco as transmuted through Dr. Buzzard’s Original “Savannah” Band’s first (and only hit) album (which Fagen had publicly praised). But, as Fagen put it later, “We didn’t get lucky.” I think “Glamour Profession” alone argues otherwise, but, more to the point, the twiddley studio arrangements that seemed so sterile compared to the hookier Aja actually allowed Gaucho to convey a far less pleasant emotional reality with unusual precision. On this opening track, the bass clarinet underlines the feverishly disconnected images of a lotus-eating Los Angeles (largely Becker’s, I suspect), while the tense loping rhythm inches us toward the “point of no return” off-handedly tossed into the final verse. Not since Love’s Forever Changes has such an easy listen had so much death in it. I still prefer the thorny candor of Pretzel Logic, but I play this whenever I need to remember what a bitch being an adult can be.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

4. “Protect Ya Neck”

Wu-Tang Clan: "Protect Ya Neck"/"After The Laughter Comes Tears" (Wu-Tang 12", 1992) and later on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (Loud/RCA, 1993); composed by Robert Diggs, Jason Hunter, Lamont Hawkins, Clifford Smith, Corey Woods, Dennis Coles, Russell Jones, and Gary Grice

Hip-hop is now twice as old as it was when this record came out, but its innovation still stands like Monk’s transmutation of “Just You, Just Me” into “Evidence” (or Webern’s “Five Movements,” for that matter). No one before or since has conceptualized a voice and beats matrix like Robert Diggs (RZA) did it here, with uncannily perfect pitch. A shuffling sampled backbeat with three spaced out (in every sense) single-note keyboard figures spanning two octaves illuminate a shifting set of dissonant fourths that refuse to resolve. (I just taught myself to play this on the piano. It held up.) The Wu acquired its initial notoriety in part because it could foreground (here) eight wholly distinct MCs (with their respective aesthetic peaks spread over two decades - and counting, in some cases). But the intrinsic tension of RZA’s sound world could have easily contextualized twice as many and just gotten tastier like a roux gets when the fat suspension is just right. Not even P-Funk could embody multitudes like this. And GZA’s line about “money getting stuck to the gum under the table” is the single best précis of dealing with record companies since Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Workin’ For MCA.”

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

3. “Joy Inside My Tears”

Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life (Tamla, 1976);
composed by Stevie Wonder

Innervisions is awfully close to a perfect album, but if Stevie Wonder really did peak in the ‘70s, I still could not tell you exactly where. Or why. But his voice draws the lines for me. Before it phlegmed up in the ‘80s (like Merle Haggard’s in the ‘70s) it was expressive like no other in American music and his songwriting more than paced it. Fulfillingness’ First Finale reaches so far in so many counterintuitive directions that it is still probably underrated (you might reach in a lot of directions yourself if you had recently survived a log crashing through your windshield on the freeway). Songs was strikingly different, insofar as its erratic long tracks took the most obvious implications of Wonder’s prior excursions and extruded them into endless refrains, jazzy guest soloists, shouted historical litanies and baby noises. But if not for that, he would not have come up with this unassuming masterpiece: a six-and-a-half minute adagio hymn over chromatic synth chords underlining one of Wonder’s most astonishing vocal extravaganzas, brimming with as much ambiguity and doubt as the wild devotion and uncanny alacrity that only come with (face it) knowing the gods love you.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

2. “Paranoid”

Black Sabbath: Paranoid (Warner Bros., 1970);
composed by Terry Butler, Tony Iommi, John Osbourne, and Bill Ward

This track demonstrates how some performers ultimately epitomize themselves through a sharp and dramatic formal departure. Black Sabbath’s music was characteristically slow (not to say drug-impaired) conveying an undeniable grandeur through VERY SIMPLE guitar figures cranked through an overdriven signal processor (Mr. Fuzztone to you) without the encumbrance of, for example, Jimmy Page’s knack for orchestrating Led Zeppelin’s defining group-wide distortions of scale as well as his own guitar sound. Thus Zeppelin defined “heavy metal” despite being wholly unlike anyone else in that putative category. Thus, comparatively (and before I had any inkling of Ozzy Osbourne’s genuine comedic gifts), I thought Sabbath might be the most dimwitted rock band ever, and “Geezer” Butler’s lyrics have never suggested otherwise. But “Paranoid” does, because it is more dance music than heavy metal. The rhythm section clomps along no more adroitly than it does on “War Pigs,” but Tony Iommi’s guitar figures are built not just for speed, but for acceleration. The actual tempo never varies but one’s ability to take in the sonic information seems to expand exponentially over the two and three quarter minutes, as does the song itself. Sabbath never actually accelerates -- (why should they?) -- but you do.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

1. “Don’t Smoke In Bed”

Peggy Lee: Rendezvous With Peggy Lee (Capitol, 1948) and Is That All There Is? (Capitol, 1969); Julie London: Around Midnight (Liberty, 1960); composed by Willard Robison, Dave Barbour and Peggy Lee

If Willard Robison really did write this song, rather than (as is rumored) Peggy Lee solely, then it might well stand as the only significant tune that the composer of “Old Folks” ever wrote specifically about sex. Peggy Lee is best known for it, anyway, and the knowingness of both her 1947 and 1969 versions (latter on Is That All There Is? – oh, perfect) is even more bracing than its subject: fondly kissing off an underperforming husband. In both versions, Lee’s persona wraps around the pseudo-apologia as if walking out was easier than picking up the dry cleaning, just as necessary, and, frankly, no more regrettable. Because she knows you knew it was coming, even if He did not. But the most affecting version for me is Julie London’s. Not half the singer Lee was, and encumbered by titles (and themes) like Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast, nonetheless her husky sexiness made her sound too unmistakably vulnerable to be as mercenary as she pretended to be. In fact, her 1960 version makes the kiss-off sound more like “Gloomy Sunday.” Melodramatic, maybe. But even though you might have “seen it coming,” you feel no assurance that she did.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, appearing one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

25. “The Bitch Is Back”

Elton John, Caribou (MCA, 1974);
composed by Reginald K. Dwight and Bernie Taupin

The 45 of this song is the first recording I ever bought with my own cash, back when it was on the radio ALL THE TIME (and Caribou was my first album). Apart from my 11-year-old’s pleasure in not having to wait five extra minutes for some DJ to play this damn song when I wanted to hear it, I thought the song itself wonderfully bizarre and have never thought otherwise. Even in 1974, no one went to Number 1 on top of this much guitar noise, notwithstanding its textbook AM radio structure: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, repeat chorus, out, in 3:42 flat. And what was this song actually about? Elton’s reliance on a separate lyricist had long allowed him to voice characters or narrators as hetero as his lyricist was. On this occasion, Bernie’s lyric, reportedly inspired by a coke-fuelled post-gig tantrum, actually induced Elton to embody himself, which Elton appears to have relished hugely. The album (the second named after its recording studio) was done in a rush while touring and it sounds like all the insulation was just melting off their wires. Inspired desperation rarely sustains, but rock and roll it does.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, ultimately extended to Twelfth Night (or so). And now, MB has pretty much got all this stuff out of his system for quite a while . . .

24. “You Go To My Head”

Frank Sinatra, Nice ‘n’ Easy (Capitol, 1960);
composed by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie

Not a few people regard In the Wee Small Hours (1957) as Sinatra’s best album, but, for me, the sound of Sinatra playing an unequivocal sad sack for fifty minutes exhausts my patience just like watching Jack Nicholson play a knucklehead in Prizzi’s Honor. Yes, I believe the performances, but it was worth neither my trouble nor theirs. Sinatra may be most devastating at his most formalistic, when the display of pure technique is most naked, and never more so than on the justly revered ‘50s albums on Capitol arranged by Nelson Riddle of which this was the last. Much of the album, including this number, was material he had already recorded a decade earlier when he was one of the biggest teen idols ever. Even then he was developing peerless breath control by swimming laps in a pool without taking more than a single breath. Here, his long-tempered ability to shape exceedingly lengthy phrases without needing to indicate their boundaries gives the romantic ache the words describe a strange weightlessness: as much as one might enjoy the singer’s pleasure in his fantasy, his cool admission of its hopelessness is somehow just as satisfying, and even more intensely sad.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).

23. “99 Problems”

Jay-Z, The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella, 2003);
composed by Shawn Carter; samples composed by Norman Landsberg, Felix Pappalardi, Billy Squier, John Ventura & Leslie Weinstein; produced by Rick Rubin

Cecil Taylor used to stop parties by arguing that Marvin Gaye was as important as Thelonious Monk was. Jay-Z may have Gaye’s musical insouciance, but his accrued amour propre has done far more for both his self-consciousness and his hit rate, which indicates a difference in kind. Notwithstanding his thorough exegesis of this monster track’s lyrics in Decoded, Jay-Z’s words might as well be Google object code, as far as elucidating how their enjambed configuration within Jay-Z’s rhythm argument on the recording was even conceivable, let alone possible. Sonny Rollins’s epochal “Blue 7” extrapolation is close. Charlie Parker’s unaccompanied solo on “A Night in Tunisia” that only Miles Davis could count the time for might be closer. Jimi Hendrix playing “Hear My Train a-Comin’” on an acoustic twelve-string also relates: nothing but wispy phrases that could only truly sound through an amplifier, which was as much Hendrix’s instrument as the guitar was. But it is also weirdly reminiscent of Richard Burton’s complaints while shooting Cleopatra that Elizabeth Taylor’s lines were completely inaudible, until he saw on the rushes that she was clear as daylight, having given the microphone exactly what it needed before it knew what that was.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).

22. “Tulsa Telephone Book”

Tom T. Hall, In Search of a Song (Mercury, 1971);
composed by Tom T. Hall

Between socking it to the “Harper Valley PTA” (Jeannie C. Riley had the hit with it in 1968) and extolling the exceedingly marketable virtues of “little baby ducks and old pickup trucks,” Tom T. Hall developed a country music niche with a singular style of blank verse reportage in which he would recount his personal interactions with the non-famous until the quotidian words simply stopped, as if he was just extemporizing the songs on the spot. It worked better when the reportage crowded out the dull homilies he too often leaned on to “sum it all up,” but I still think it was the fundamentally corny sincerity of his approach that fueled the deadpan insanity of this “novelty” tune, which outstrips peak Roger Miller and Bobby Braddock walking away. Poor Tom describes the emotional aftermath of a one-night stand that leaves him frantically searching for a woman he knows only as Shirley by reading the namesake city’s telephone book thirteen times in a row, and duly warning listeners that “If you don’t know any last names, it ain’t much fun.” The joke ensnares multiple levels of discourse without blinking. It has no equivalent in any other musical genre.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).