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).

22. It Ain't No Use

The Meters: Rejuvenation (Reprise, 1974); composed by Art Neville, George Porter, Jr., Joseph Modeliste, and Leo Nocentelli

The easiest quick description of the Meters is that they were to New Orleans in the ‘60s what the M.G.’s were to Memphis: the premier backing band for the star acts of their respective scenes, who also made their own records. The M.G.’s had national hits on Stax with a few of their danceable instrumentals, while the Meters had local ones on Josie, like “Cissy Strut,” but those are magical tunes – winding and snaky grooves animated by Ziggy Modeliste playing drums like each of his brain hemispheres had its own extra stick and foot pedal. When the Meters and Allen Toussaint got deals with Warner Bros. in the ‘70s, they adapted what the Meters had been doing on singles to albums and album lengths. First try on Cabbage Alley in 1972 was a mixed bag with an odd taste in covers, but second time was the charm with all original material: eight personable and often prickly tunes with Arthur’s vocals on top surrounding this twelve-minute workout that opens with a fairly standard love-gone-wrong prologue and proceeds to a long quartet interplay that unassumingly smokes along as though second line was an atom you could split and run civilization on forever.

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).

21. Remember?

A Little Night Music (Columbia Masterworks, 1973);
composed by Stephen Sondheim

I have never been a musical theater guy, but I can carry a tune in an untrained way, so there were incidents in my student days. Yet we never went to bed together, even metaphorically, because notwithstanding the ubiquity of the form, I find musicals fundamentally harder to understand than opera – the discursive shift of extending or interrupting dialogue by breaking into song requires usages that simply weird me out. One of the reasons I esteem Stephen Sondheim apart from my belief in not arguing with wonders of nature is that all the difficulties and all the rewards of the form come in one full-strength package. This is my favorite of his musicals because it sounds the most distant from American vernacular without really sounding European. Set in Sweden around 1900 (and based on a Bergman period film from 1955), you think you hear bits of Grieg or Strauss, but it is a different music for a nether world in which ghosts break into song because that is the only way they can remember their lives. This is a quintet waltz in which singers recall trysts with each other that they may or may not have been physically present for.

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).

20. Could It Be I'm Falling In Love

Spinners (Atlantic, 1973);
composed by Melvin and Mervin Steals

Could it be my favoritest song of all time? Steady, now. I feel at a loss about this song, occasionally, because I constantly forget that Thom Bell did not write this like he wrote “Betcha By Golly, Wow” for the Stylistics, but he sure produced and arranged it, and that is the most sensuous of rubs. The rich orchestrations of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s production style characterized what was labelled “Philly Soul” in the ‘70s; Thom Bell was always a seeming adjunct, but sort of the way Billy Strayhorn was to Duke Ellington. Bell had plenty of hits and each of his productions always sounded just a little beyond whatever the Gamble & Huff norm might be said to be. They were almost baroque in the way Burt Bacharach’s were – the break on this song has a harpsichord solo, interpolating the sharply articulated string and horn parts – but the words set this music, not the reverse, and the combination sets an unusually anticipatory as well as seductive mood. Since the Steals brothers’ lyrics do not poop out after the first chorus like Linda Creed’s did, you really do wonder why Bobby Smith does feel so . . . funny.

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).

19. Lunch

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Darkroom/Interscope, 2024);
composed by Billie Eilish O'Connell and Finneas O'Connell

It was not until I heard this that I realized how fervently I had been anticipating a full on dance song and even fuller on sex song from Billie Eilish, without having the foggiest notion that I was. Not that I had any doubt she and brother Finneas had it in them, or anything else, insofar as even the relative juvenilia on Don’t Smile At Me pops almost as hard as the stuff on the debut, and without a lot of industry types getting in the way, they have not made even an ordinary record yet, let alone a bad one. “Baby I think you were made for me / Somebody write down the recipe,” she goes, and when you read it back you immediately realize that the words in your head are probably nowhere near close to the way she sings it, slipping and sliding lubriciously over what sounds like the evenest of rhythms, but is not. And while this music really is about her – Finneas’s own merely pleasant solo music barely gets out of the driveway – it is also about the way they hear each other. “She dances on my tongue,” but that is hardly all that does.

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).