21. “Ecstasy”

PJ Harvey, Rid of Me (Island, 1993); composed by Polly Jean Harvey

I have not heard anything Polly Jean Harvey has recorded since Stories From The City ten years ago which (unlike many other sympathetic listeners) bored me silly. But I have never once thought I was “all done” with her, nor do I think I ever will be. It was once said about Richard Rodgers that he “just pissed music,” and Harvey is one of the only people in contemporary art of any kind to give me a similar impression. Nothing epitomizes that sense like the closer to her second album from 1993, the entirety of which is terrific, but “Ecstasy” - probably the simplest song on the album - is an uncanny masterstroke. Based on a riff she probably came up with the very first time she ever tried to play slide (the recorded take might well be the second time), she just lights into a humongous groaning maelstrom, and then traces her own melodic path over the top of it, and in and around it, with a voice that never overloads, never goes past its limits, but pulses and penetrates, leaving no doubt of the intuitive rightness of Harvey’s vocal contour at each turn. You and she will meet again.

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).

20. “Kind im Einschlummern”

Composed by Robert Schumann, from Kinderszenen, Op. 15 (1838); as recorded by Mieszyslaw Horszowski (Nonesuch, 1988)

Schumann’s Kinderszenen is a well-known cycle of piano pieces written when the composer was 18 years old. Its best known segment is probably “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”), which Alban Berg once praised for its deceptively complex harmony, but the most disquieting (for not dissimilar reasons) is this next-to-last segment, “Child Falling Asleep,” in E minor, culminating an increasingly somber sequence with a precipitous drop into an intense Romantic microcosm lasting less than two minutes: the deepest fear and sadness of a child fading from consciousness and watching himself fade at the same time, diagrammed to the millimeter harmonically, and thus graspable by the listener, and that much more harrowing. Schumann apparently meant Kinderszenen to evoke childhood as experienced by children in childhood, without any intermediate adult sentimentality, which means the apparent playfulness ultimately gives way to its generating principles: we are happy here, but we fade. My favorite performance is the one recorded in 1988 by Mieczyslaw Horszowski, when he was 95 years old, who had begun his career as a child wunderkind a full century ago. I find it impossible to listen to this man play Schumann (or especially Chopin) without imagining the lightness of my own corpse.

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).

19. “She Moves Through The Fair”

Fairport Convention, What We Did On Our Holiday (Island, 1969); composer unknown

A group as mercurial as Fairport Convention was could never really hit a “peak,” but the coincidence (not confluence) of temperamental opposites, Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny, is the consensus favorite. Still, the numerous high points are shadowed by a handful of utter duds: not just dull listening but utterly misconceived. Which are what is purely subjective, however, and the serious intent of the duds speaks to how serendipitous the high points probably were. This particular high point, a traditional Irish folk song, was on their first album with Denny in 1969, when they still might have been aspiring to be Jefferson Airplane. Apart from Thompson’s electric guitar counterpoint, it is not rock, but their communalist approach illuminates and defines the song in a way no folklorist ever had, and inspired countless subsequent versions. It is both more playable and mysterious. In the first verse, a girl assures her lover that her parents have waived all objections to their marriage. The entirety of the second verse has him watching her walk away. In the last, she tells him: “It will not be long, love, ‘til our wedding day.” The original third verse explaining that she is now dead was omitted.

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).

18. “Dali’s Car”

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969); composed by Don Van Vliet

Even if eighty percent (by my rough estimate) of what has been said about how Trout Mask Replica was made is not true (including most of what its auteur ever said about it), that detracts absolutely nothing from its achievement. Which raises the question of what all the mythopoeia was actually for. Did it answer any genuine need for empirical evidence that these 28 tracks comprising such ruthlessly engineered collisions of allusive wordplay and musical strokes (like the painting kind) were intentional, as we understand the word? No, because we do not understand the word. “Dali’s Car” is a polytonal instrumental guitar duet lasting barely a minute and a half, smack in the middle of this two-LP behemoth. The music is beautiful, grim, and in tone utterly unlike any of the other tracks, except for the only other instrumental, “Hair Pie” which is presented in two different renditions (or “Bakes”) just to show that it was “intentional.” Two “Dali’s Car”s would be redundant, because it is a challenge like Gertrude Stein's riposte to a journalist with the temerity to ask her why she didn’t write the way she talked (i.e. “normally”): “Why don’t you read the way I write?”

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.

17. “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”

Parliament, Mothership Connection (Casablanca, 1975); composed by George Clinton, William Collins & Bernie Worrell

The great U.S. Funk Mob had hotter jams than this, but their oeuvre never readily boiled down to high points. This aggregation (“band” is inadequate to a project this conceptual) got far more mileage than anyone else out of what would be filler from anyone else: midtempo grooves on which the harmony group at its core could expound vocally and, above all, rhetorically. This track was edited and shortened by half for single release in 1975, but it makes no sense reduced to its hooky bits. It requires its full six minute length for the groove to unwind properly, underlined by Bernie Worrell’s sublime bridge sections, interlaced with Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker’s horn lines, interrupting the overall flow periodically while underlining George Clinton’s explication of his extended metaphor. The Mothership on the album cover (and in the shows) was not just slick science fiction marketing; it was a chariot to the next life. Certainly, Electric Light Orchestra could hardly land their own copycat spaceship and start quoting the Book of Revelations -- saying “it’s nothing but a party” and “it’s just me and the boys,” and then caution listeners thus: “When Gabriel's horn blows, you better be ready to go.”

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.

16. “The Moon In June”

Soft Machine, Third (Columbia, 1970); composed by Robert Wyatt

“The Moon In June” is a nineteen minute last gasp of unassuming greatness from an English band that was pioneering (or succumbing to) a kind of electrified doodling that could be marketed as “jazz-rock,” but on this double-LP comprising one title per side, it was their jazziest player – drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt – who crafted the only non-instrumental track, and the songiest song. And in a period when tedious nineteen minute (or longer) epics were becoming a common ploy among the ambitious, this track is unlike any other. Wyatt warbles a bunch of words about sex and homesickness that he sounds like he is drumming to, and has claimed in interviews that he has absolutely no memory of. But all are buoyed by an oddly discursive melody that steadily varies but never quite repeats; it just snakes across the record sounding like nothing but itself, until the music gives way to the best jazzy-rock playing on the record and a moaning coda with demented violin soloing over manipulated tapes. Wyatt’s departure from this group soon after was so acrimonious that he claims his confidence never really recovered from it, but his group never recovered from this.

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.

15. “I Want Your Love”

Chic, C’est Chic (Atlantic, 1978); composed by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers

At its edited-for-radio length, the more modest of the two hits off Chic’s second album was even more obnoxious than the immodest hit ("Le Freak" – Atlantic's best-selling 45 ever, once). There is barely a song there: just the same four descending notes in a single chord over and over. However, at its full seven-minute length, it becomes completely different music, and the most weirdly pure example of what distinguished disco once its aesthetic definition began to take hold. The vocalists sing the humdrum words in unison, abjuring any soloist’s “expressivity,” but the guitar and bass vamping weightlessly over drummer Tony Thompson’s rippling straight four with no clear downbeats allows the music to distend itself, making the ostensibly inexpressive vocals strangely hyper-emotional, and extending into the instrumental breaks which do not, by strict definition, contain solos. A string section plays a cleanly articulated counter-melody; brass repeats the same phrase and same rhythm; and by the time Nile Rodgers takes the track out with nothing but a rhythm figure on guitar, the tune is in midair. It was difficult to discern this breakthrough amidst the treacle marketed as disco on late ‘70s radio, but it still 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.