thump thump thump thump

i am suppressing a desire to excuse my lack of musical knowledge in the face of your expert posts. i have literally erased said self-reproach in favor of this intro, which now is fulfilling the same function despite my wishes. fuck me.

(so of all the weeks to begin this exercise/forum, we get impulsive at a point when i have not actively listened to music in several weeks. (more story than it's worth.) so how to pick a song from the ether? you very nearly got george michael's "careless whisper" due to my friend and co-worker cramming it into my brain this morning, and with it my wandering into the preponderance of saxophone in 80s pop hits, but i will save that jewel for later. let it compress into something more dazzlingly stupid. waiting for something good to hit, you get a post that initiates with a parenthetical.) yes, here instead you get one of the best songs i know to be about not having any ideas for a song. just pounding something out, throwing it away and recognizing its charm. the incessant drum beat might as well be don music's frustration on high speed repeat. the lyrics are squat. but one run-on sentence front loaded with conjunctions eliding them at the end. the guitar never gets picked up, but this is a drum and guitar band, so a vocaled riff comes in to seal the deal and fulfill the lyrics. half the song is comprised of this, the sound you make when you can't remember a song or you're imitating what a song should sound like or you're trying to figure out what the song should sound like or you're doodling a riff on a scratch pad. you can hardly call it a song--an album full of it would be grating, and the single wouldn't likely sell--but sandwich it a few songs into your breakout album and hey, you just made somethin outta nuthin. my only hesitation with this: it sounds a bit polished for what it is, and sometimes i think that may be my one small quibble with the white stripes.

White Stripes "Little Room"

Thalassocracy - Frank Black

Thalassocracy - Frank Black

No man is an island? Well, Frank Black is an island. In fact, the man's a thalassocracy, a maritime empire. And you? You're just a Romanov, just landed gentry all too willing to have your throat slit by mad-eyed proto-communists. Oh, and you collect those stupid Fabregé eggs. Think about it: while Frank Black is tending to his empire, you're collecting decorative eggs. You are a joke.

This song has the uncanny ability to make 98% of all other songs sound absolutely ridiculous. Frank Black doesn't have time for instrumental openings or atmospheric synthesizers. He doesn't have time to wait for an egotistical producer to slowly introduce each new instrument into the mix. And he certainly doesn't have time for exotic instruments or choruses or breakdowns or even a build up to a crescendo. The song is a crescendo. Look, if all of western music is a cult elaborately worshiping the crescendo (and it is), then punk is built on the premise that music should give people what they want. Frank Black is famously adept a teasing the listener before he lets the music explode, but he's also good at this type of full-frontal assault (see "Alec Eiffel" and "Head On"). This song, though, seems even more immediate. I mean, "Head On" takes a Led Zepplin-esque 2:12 to get its point across. But he never sounds rushed; in fact, he sounds surprisingly comfortable. Hell, the man even squeezes in a relatively lengthly guitar solo.

"Barabajagal (Love is Hot)" by Donovan

From the album of the same name. 1969.

Dave has heard this one for sure. This is one of my all-time favorites, but I'm pretty confident people probably haven't heard it. It is one of the catchiest songs of all-time. I am writing this children's book synopsis, and I have been listening to weird music to put me in the mood. One of the songs I have been listening to is "Atlantis," which is one of the most ridiculous pieces of music ever recorded. In fact, maybe I'll send that along as well. But I always sneak this one in, as well as "Season of the Witch," which is also incredible. "Mellow Yellow" I can do without.

"Barabajal" was recorded with the Jeff Beck group (which included Rod Stewart, who did a lot of cool things before he became super lame. Kind of like Steve Winwood.). Beck's ridiculous guitar lick tears through this song. But what I love most is the percussion-- in the hammered acoustic guitar, the shakers, and the sick drumming. The break beat MUST have been used in a hip-hop song before, and had I more talents in that area, I would do it right now.

As you probably all know, lyrics are very important to me. Well, not here. Or are they? Donovan's lyrics are, as ever, truly preposterous. "Barabajagal" is about an herbalist, I suppose, Barabajagal (I have no idea what this is or means, anyone? Sounds like something Lewis Carroll would have written) was his name, who is concocting some sort of hypnotic/ hallucinogenic tea for a woman to drink. It certainly mentions tea more than any other song I have ever heard. Then there's this: "In love pool eyes float feathers after the struggle./ The hopes burst and shot joy all through the mind/ Sorrow more distant than a star./ Multi color run down over your body/ Then the liquid passing all into all/ Love is hot, truth is molten." Even for hippie bullshit, that's bullshit.

Still Donovan was (is, he's still alive) a fucking badass. It's hard for us to remember that Donovan was supposed to be Dylan. That is, when Dylan was beginning to climb, Donovan was the guy on the rung above him. If you've never seen Don't Look Back, watch it, and you'll see what I mean. Though, as I recall, by the end of the movie, Dylan has already passed him, thereby forcing millions of people to not hear "Atlantis." Fuck you, Bob Dylan.

The March Of The Black Queen-- Queen

March Of The Black Queen



So I was hanging out with my son, playing with blocks and whatnot, listening to an old playlist I'd made, when Bohemian Rhapsody came on, and he positively lost his shit when it hit the operatic part. Which is funny, because that's basically the same reaction I had...except for I was 15. So for the past couple of weeks, I've been making my way through the Queen catalog, for the first time in probably close to a decade. Which has been interesting--this is a band that I was obsessed over in my late teens, that, aside from occasionally hearing BR, I haven't listened to at all in recent years.

This track captures, I think, both the highs and the lows of the 21st century Queen experience. From Queen II (1974), it was part of a sprawling, nonsensical album filled with a cast of sexually charged fantasy characters getting into all sorts of fairy trouble, accompanied by a soundtrack of soaring, layered vocals and killer riffs. A year later, they released A Night at The Opera, which really tightened the operatic bits, mixing in a lot more of a traditional rock sound and pop sell-outs (the god-awful You're My Best Friend), becoming their first real commercial success. The album after that opened with We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, and, aside from a glorious diversion into Flash Gordon, their experimental phase was over and they pretty much made standard pop-rock with modified Queen flair until Mercury died in 1991.

So on one hand, this song is positively ridiculous--which is kind of self-evident. It's over-the-top and out of control, and doesn't make a shred of sense. But at the same time, I really find its brazenness kind of endearing. It's Mercury at his most unapologeticaly gay/femmine ("I'll be your bad boy/I'll be your bad boy/Now do the march of the Black Queen"--only Kevin Barnes would do that nowadays, but he'd make sure everyone noticed), and Queen making a record that didn't cater at all to what rock-stars were supposed to sound like, totally unconcerned with nuance, convention, or self-image. It's not political, it's not deep, it's an almost gleeful exercise in production for production's sake.

Then there's the music itself. It's ridiculously busy, almost schizophrenic, like they had fifteen partially developed hooks and crammed them all into a six-minute opus. It gives the impression of a young band sitting on so many ideas that they just didn't know what to do with them all--which is really refreshing when you listen to bands that seem to take one idea and then torture it until it's long-enough for a complete song. I'm talking to you, post Achtung-Baby, U2. Brian May, who is seriously overlooked by history, throws away a dozen, awesome ten-second riffs in this song--each of which could have had a complete song built around them. Mercury's vocal talents are in full effect here, layered Pet-Sounds style on top of each other because no one else in the band could sing, and, for most of the song, they dive in and out of each other and May's guitar to great effect. You get the feeling that this sounds exactly the way they wanted it to--that for better or worse, there's not a single note out of place. Technically speaking, it's more ambitious and successful than BR, it's just so divorced from any real emotion, and so unrestrained, that it ultimately hurts itself in the end. Still, I think it's Queen at their very best, and you don't have to look to far to see the bands that have tried to duplicate parts of this sound. For example, I think this is what the Decemberists would sound like if they had a vocalist and spent a little less time believing their own hype.