12. “Yesterdays”

Billie Holiday (Commodore, 1939); Miles Davis (Blue Note, 1952); Marianne Faithfull, Strange Weather (Island, 1987); composed by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for the 1933 musical, Roberta

I own at least five versions of this song from a now- obscure musical where it was introduced by Irene Dunne. Although its “subject” is obvious from the title, the song is hard to parse, both emotionally and musically. The words wistfully recalling “days of wild romance and love” and oddly rhyming “youth” with “truth,” exude a steely reluctance to mourn anything, and the music follows suit. Major chords glimmer through the minor, and the harmony never quite resolves in any predictable way. The song never lands. Miles Davis’s 1952 version (recorded after he almost fired Jackie McLean for refusing to learn it) underscores this. Billie Holiday’s definitive version was recorded at the same session as “Strange Fruit” and even more jarring than the similarity of the two performances is how appropriate that similarity is. Sorrowful, sardonic, but no regrets at all. Marianne Faithfull’s version with the weltschmertz underlined by Bill Frisell’s guitar and Michael Gibbs’s string arrangement would seem to overstate the case for melancholia were it not for the physical fact that Faithfull’s voice seems to drip with an almost idealized notion of pain so visceral that it is as much a dark joke as nostalgia itself is.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

11. “Soon”

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless (Sire/Creation, 1991); composed by Kevin Shields

As anyone even remotely familiar with this band knows, the album that this song closes is all of a piece, conceptually differs wildly from the (sole) album that preceded it by three years (pretty great, but it took me a while), and was never followed up, numerous press releases and reunion tours notwithstanding. But nothing encapsulates the full-bore weirdness of Loveless like its coda. The one tune with a dance rhythm, but it is the obverse of what contemporaneous dance music was turning into as it perfected itself by dispensing with live drummers. “Soon” has a “live” drummer, but Colm Ó Cíosóig is rarely more than just audible under a hyper-sampled onslaught that is deafening no matter how low the volume goes. It is deafening because the guitar is so overdriven that it engulfs the available sonic space and pushes every other detail to the periphery, denuding the music of any physical reference point – like Jupiter: massive but nothing to stand on even if you could get there – and makes even Bilinda Butcher’s cooed vocals sound menacing. Which they are. Either a lover or an opiate tells you: “Someone like you can find the reason / Of what I did to you."


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

10. “Nacht und Träume”

Composed by Franz Schubert, to text by Matthäus Kasimir von Collin, D. 827 (Op. 43, No. 2) (1822)

The composite words of this three minute lied form a praise song (auf Deutsch) to night time, as if the dream life fell into our heads with the darkness, as though this was an unexceptionably pleasant thing, and as though dreamers necessarily cry for its return when the morning takes it all away. It is the music that makes this argument, however. The entire score is incredibly quiet (pp) and lulling throughout, but the rhythmic structure is deliberately disjoint; the accompanying piano is much faster than the vocal line, which accordingly floats over the top like a single steadily expanding cloud that does not appear to move as it falls. This song is also one of only two pieces of pre-existing music that Samuel Beckett included in dramatic works (Beethoven’s “Ghost Trio” is the other), this for German television and very late in his life, which this piece appears to capture. A sleeping man twice dreams of himself being comforted (or nursed?) by the hands of an unseen other (possibly himself again), differentiated by the second dream image's greater size as if it is slowly crowding out the dreamer, who may or may not still exist in the waking world.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

9. "Follow The Leader"

Eric B. & Rakim (Uni 12-inch, 1988); composed by Eric Barrier and William Griffin

Even before I had actually heard any of it, rap interested me. Just from seeing it described in print (even by the numerous hostile) its long game was obvious to me, and also that it ultimately could not be just “spoken word” with music. It was some time before I began to hear records that sounded like what I expected rap to sound like, which is not to say that I could have imagined how the first hip-hop record I loved would actually sound. "Follow the Leader” broke through to me like nothing before it because (in Jay-Z’s precision terminology) the “rhythm argument” in Rakim’s flow, keyed to Eric B.’s constantly self-destabilizing beats, presented an immediate right brain problem: It was music I heard as music rather than a rhythmic verbal flow that I heard as words first and then had to go that extra inch to process (and thus ultimately hear) as music. I might have hit that sweet spot with The Treacherous Three and, in their initially austere way, Run-DMC when they first emerged, but both (and Public Enemy) always impressed me more than they confused me; and the latter is what I need great music to do.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

8. “Because”

The Beatles, Abbey Road (Apple/EMI, 1969); composed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

This is the last song The Beatles recorded. John Lennon wrote it around the chord sequence from the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata played backwards, originally by Yoko at John’s inspiration. This song belies practically everything Lennon said publicly about his partnership with Paul McCartney, up until just before he died, by which time Lennon finally had the rudiments of a working method that did not highlight McCartney’s absence from the room. That is not to say that “Because” is not Lennon’s sole composition, but it is also neither the “rock & roll” that supposedly distinguished him, nor would it have been one of the late Beatles singles that were usually McCartney songs (irrelevant now; but not then, even to the Beatles). “Because” is, however, perfect: 2:45 of reverse Beethoven sung in triple-tracked three part harmony by John and George with Paul’s upper partials. This is what we have. As Linda McCartney said in 1984 (when Paul was out of the room): “I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again. … People thought, Well, [John's] … a househusband and all that, but he wasn't happy. He couldn't write and it drove him crazy.” We will never know.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

7. “There’s a Riot Goin’ On”

Sly & the Family Stone, There’s a Riot Goin’ On (Epic, 1971); composed by Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone

This is the title track of the first album by Sly & the Family Stone in two years back in 1971 when such a gap was unusual for an act so popular. Nevertheless, the album went straight to No. 1. And its title song does not actually exist. On the LP label, the track’s time is clocked at “0:00.” It would seem more likely that Sly Stone’s massive cocaine intake was simply messing with his sense of humor, were it not, firstly, for the strange gripping quality of the music you could actually listen to. The group that played Woodstock was largely absent from these sessions. Sly sang and played most of it himself, with a few session musicians and spot vocals from Rose. Even on the hit singles (of which there were three), the songs are like being woken up by a threatening phone call. The title comes from “Riot in Cell Block #9,” a 1954 song by the Robins. Its joke is that the partying rioters depicted are as doomed as the ones at Attica were just a few months before Riot came out. Rather than tell you this directly, Sly rings you at midnight and hangs up.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

6. “What Have I Done To Deserve This?”

Pet Shop Boys (featuring Dusty Springfield), Actually (EMI, 1987); composed by Chris Lowe, Neil Tennant & Allee Willis

Before this duo formally came out (wryly observing that they surprised no one), their hits shared a decided delicacy toward gendered pronouns and a comparable indelicacy toward the moral collisions the songs were about. Although this song is as quintessentially chromed as a Fairlight-driven ‘80s pop tune could be (and it went to No. 2), it is as much punk rock as the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays In The Sun,” which, as Dick Hebdige once observed, is both about and an example of semantic disorder. Dusty Springfield’s guest performance is key, because she imposes her sound on any aesthetic without sounding like she is part of it. Effectively, she is no less detached than Neil Tennant purports to be. The song is not a duet. They are not singing about “their” relationship; they are singing about “relationships” breaking apart semantically as well as emotionally, notwithstanding even the most cynical motives. One line goes, “Now you’ve left me with nothing – can’t take it.” Its counterpart one verse later goes, “Now I can do what I want to – FOREVER!” As willed optimism it rivals the Velvet Underground’s “Beginning To See The Light,” and puts a lump in my throat every time I hear it.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.