121. Ихесъ (Yikhes)

Belf’s Rumanian Orchestra (Syrena Grand 11079, 1912 – b/w Сихмасъ-Тойре)

I know very little about this group or this record. No one does, and it is not just that we are a century and change apart – this record could have been top of the pops on Krypton. Yet this crackly 78 is so pop in its way, if you get it all the way in your head. They were not actually “Rumanian” – that was a term of art, as was “Bulgar” or “Odessa,” both as those cultures influenced the music over time and as euphemisms for “Jewish” – as was “Klezmer,” a centuries old term loosely translated as “musical instruments.” Yiddish speakers might get more out of the song’s title than Google Translate, which renders it in English (ha!) as “Yikes!” There were any number of very similar Yiddish-speaking dance orchestras around the western part of the pre-WWI Russian empire at the same time, but this one was fortunate enough to be recorded by an enterprising record company in Warsaw, and the records sold well enough for copies to still exist. Although emigres like Abe Schwartz and Naftule Brandwein got Klezmer going over here within a decade, this music is like what jazz might be if someone had recorded Buddy Bolden.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.

120. Take My Hand, Precious Lord

composed by Thomas A. Dorsey

This may not be the premier gospel song of the previous century, but I doubt that there is any other that connects with so much of that century. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last written words were a request that this be played “real pretty” at a (then-)upcoming service. Mahalia Jackson sang it at his funeral. Its author composed it in part as a way of dealing with the deaths of his wife and son in 1932. Dorsey had only just recently returned to religious music after being half of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, a great blues act of the 1920s, and key accompanist for Ma Rainey. Nitpickers point out the melody’s many antecedents, but more intriguing is that it does not really have a melody. The recordings of the song I know are all different, except for its trademark cadence – the rising uplift of its first three phrases: “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on.” – a plea to the great unknown for divine influence. On its first commercial recording in 1937, the Heavenly Gospel Singers sang it as a shape note hymn with no melody at all. Mahalia barely departed from the tonic. Elvis Presley did nothing but.

Note: Secular (mostly) essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.

119. Skinny Little Bitch

Hole: Nobody’s Daughter (Mercury/Cherry Forever, 2010);
composed by Courtney Love & Micko Larkin

Insofar as Frances Bean Cobain survived into adulthood many years ago, any reasons I might have for disliking Courtney Love from this distance are pretty much irrelevant. I am sure she is incredibly hectic to know, but yards ahead of everybody else in the room most of the time, and that correlation is the proverbial rub. She recalls Eve Babitz, without the late-breaking reactionary turn (which could still happen – she was tight with both Kanye and Russell Brand before they went over), and even if we never get any books, we do have all of those lovely nasty records of hers. This track from a later edition of Hole is her flavor of archetypal. The skinny little bitch dissolving in bad dope and dopamine could be Courtney herself, or some alternate version that burned up like magnesium long ago. Genuine cautionary tales risk seduction to render up their usable data, so she lays that ugly-tuneful rasp over ten-cylinder guitar noise and runs you over. Anyone who still thinks she leeched the life out of Kurt Cobain is never going to get it. All evidence points to her leeching it into him, and really - maybe that was what killed him.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.

118. Love Is Strange

Mickey & Sylvia (Groove 4G-0175, 1956 – b/w “I’m Going Home”);
composed by Ethel Smith

Composed by Bo Diddley (but credited to his wife at the time), his original recording of it - not released until decades later on his Chess box set – shows its subsequent recasting by these two pros as the miracle of art and commerce that it was and remains. For one thing, Bo’s version really sounds like the title – love is strange, mysterious, oppressively hermetic in its disinclination to give forth anything like clarity, and his rueful performance follows suit. In contrast, Mickey Baker and Sylvia Robinson make it sound more like a Bo Diddley record than Bo’s version does – a struck gong and a call to whatever the secular equivalent of prayer might be. Mickey’s adamantine guitar figures over the tremelo rhythm are even more flagrant come-ons (and come-here’s) than the cooing vocal duet, notwithstanding the colloquy that caps the duet at the end: “Sylvia?” “Yes, Mickey?” “How do you call your lover boy?” Mickey continued to play killer guitar for all kinds of acts over here, until he moved to France in 1962 and played killer guitar there. Sylvia went solo, palled around with gangsters, and brought us the Sugar Hill Gang and Grandmaster Flash. Fucked them over, too.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.

117. The Best Day

Taylor Swift: Fearless (Big Machine, 2008);
composed by Taylor Swift

Even if I disliked Taylor Swift, I do not argue with forces of nature, and to paraphrase what Mr. Spock once said about a killer robot, “I do not believe there is much beyond Taylor Swift's capabilities,” which is as much threat as admiration. Taylor Swift is a giant in every sense that counts. Not only does she do impossible things, she does things that are impossible because they really ought to be impossible – like writing this utterly sincere and dulcet love song to her mom. The first version came out when she was eighteen. She remade it along with the rest of her then-Scooter-Braun-controlled catalogue when she was thirty-one. It sounds the same as the first – slightly more alto, but not a hair less genuine. The video has a different but equally idyllic selection of childhood videos as the original video had. Many of us develop a sense of irony because we resent the way forces of commerce and public authority generalize and exploit emotions. The irony of Taylor Swift is that she has become the hugest pop star of the moment by doing the opposite. Tunefully, too. My sole complaint is that her albums run a little long.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.

116. Deny

The Clash (CBS, 1977);
composed by Michael Jones & John Mellor

The Clash’s amphetiminic UK debut is the only one of theirs I still listen to with rapt pleasure beginning to end. They gizmoed it up for the U.S. version two years later, and if I was as intent on cracking that market as they had to have been, I might have done likewise, because the original 14-song disc would not have done it – it is just too perfect an evocation of too specific a state of mind. Unlike the cramped urban miniatures on Wire’s debut the same year, there is a weird jolliness to the Clash’s version of mid-‘70s London paranoia, albeit not one iota less bitter. Unlike the other three tracks the U.S. version omitted, this tune is actually catchy, but sitting smack between “What’s My Name” and “London’s Burning,” it lays the whole weird game out: “You’re such a liar / You’re selling your no-no all the time.” The latter is a slang term for salespeople who lose their knack and start talking themselves into refusals over and over. Funnier as it is, this is what “Janie Jones” is about, too. Once the Clash figured out what they were selling, they could not make any more like those.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.

115. Redemption Song

Bob Marley & The Wailers: Uprising (Tuff Gong/Island, 1980);
composed by Bob Marley

Without knowing how close to death Bob Marley was when he recorded this, I am not sure how you would be able to tell from listening to it, but a couple of things catch my attention every time I do. There is the sinuous inescapable melody that could have easily been arranged for the whole band if Marley had been so inclined, with potentially cataclysmic results. Most obviously, there is the solo acoustic guitar accompanying a vocal that shows weariness only in the message conveyed, which is that time is beyond everyone. In these verses, neither pirates selling captives into slavery nor atomic power itself can do anything more to stop freedom – as consciousness no less than political actuality - than to slow it down just enough to raise doubts in those who do not understand how difficult an idea forever is. This man had none. He was a popular artist from the first, but he was also one of the very few who actually derived an almost mystical (his word, of course) connection with the mass audience – even the ones who tried to kill him. These were not his final words, but what a relief he got them out.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.