I genuinely can’t work out if this makes me feel pride or shame:
All Over The Shop, Reprised
366 Songs 227: Bodega!
Comedy songs get a bad rap. No, wait, that’s not entirely true; comedy songs probably get the rap they deserve considering the amount of terrible comedy songs there are in the world. But not all comedy songs are terrible, is my point, and for every Weird Al parody of the hit song of the day that replaces one of the word with “fat” or whatever, there’s also a funny and well-constructed and -performed songs that are worth listening to. From that world, there’s Nellie McKay and “Bodega!” from her last (I think? I admit, I haven’t been paying the most attention to her career in recent years) album, Home Sweet Mobile Home. It’s clearly a comedy song – Anything that includes the passage “When love fills the air/And he asks me/’When will you be mine?’/I sigh, ‘My Valentine/Proposed to me in a bodega'” is clearly not entirely serious – but there’s a fun to it that’s infectious, and a tongue-in-cheek intelligence at play in the parodic elements, detourning expectations of what to expect in the song as it merrily rolls along. While it’s true that not every comedy record is the Rutles, Nellie’s a good enough substitute for me, thanks very much.
366 Songs 226: Main Theme (North By Northwest)
For once, no commentary. I was rewatching North By Northwest last night, and just felt overwhelmed by this music; it’s been in my head ever since, with its tempestuous sweep and spectacular use of the orchestra (Seriously, those kettle drums). Bernard Herrmann, you knew what you were doing, for sure.
366 Songs 225: A Quick One (While He’s Away)
People, people, people. That’s an entirely live performance above. Seriously.
This is easily one of my favorite pop songs ever; something that’s just so messy and ambitious, so funny (The “Cello Cello Cello” bit, with the word being sung because, in the original recorded version, they couldn’t afford to have real cellos on there, so they just sang the parts themselves) and so amazingly human. Even if I wasn’t won over by the entire thing by the time the song gets to its final movement – And it’s a song that tries to tell a story about a woman missing her lover, who’s been gone longer than she expected and is late in returning, in movements, little excerpts with different moods and points-of-view and, come on, that’s just great, right? – it ends with “You are forgiven” over and over again, which seems… I don’t know, astonishingly, beautifully kind, I guess (Not that anyone in the song doesn’t “deserve” forgiveness; it’s the choral nature of the way the line is delivered, repeated, as if there’s such forgiveness in the world for everyone, the word and the act as a magic spell for the listener).
Here’s the original recorded version:
And, just for fun, here’s a Green Day version that seems to want to do everything just a little bit faster than the original. But they do the “cello cello cello” part that I didn’t think they would…:
You are forgiven.
366 Songs 224: Band On The Run
Firstly, I have no idea why this video for Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band On The Run” seems to be all about the Beatles, but I kind of love it.
Secondly, and more importantly: I’ve never really got into a lot of McCartney’s post-Beatles career (I’ve really only started investigating it in the last couple of years, to be honest), but “Band On The Run” is pretty much a return to the kind of track that McCartney was playing with on Abbey Road, isn’t it? The song-as-song-cycle that, to my ears, Pete Townsend was doing far earlier with The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away.” It’s not as catchy as something like the “You Never Give Me Your Money/Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” sequence from Abbey Road, sure, but it’s still an enjoyable spread of a song, weirdly luxurious and amorphous in construction.
Oddly enough, I’m not sure I’d ever heard the entirety of this song in its original version before I’d heard the Foo Fighters’ cover from just a few years ago; I was still in my “If It’s Not ‘Jet’ Then I Don’t Want To Know About It” phase of my reactions to McCartney’s post-Beatles work, and so when the Foos’ version started I was very “I don’t want this oh no” until the 1:18 mark, when a sense of “What is this?” came over me and took me through the end. By the time I was thinking “You know, this is a great chorus,” I knew I was in trouble. Damn you Macca!
Not My Own Words
TIME accepts Fareed’s apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed’s column for a month, pending further review.
What the news of Fareed Zakaria’s suspension for plagiarism brings up for me – As well as the basic “Why would you do that, do you really think you wouldn’t get caught, you idiot?” thing, because, hi, it’s the Internet – is the larger question about how much working off of firsthand reports counts as plagiarism. As ridiculous as it may sound, that’s something I find myself worrying about quite a bit, especially for things like the Comics Alliance stories I do, which (unlike the Newsarama blog posts) are attempts at straight-forward, no-editorializing, fast (ie, short) pieces that are often just rewriting press releases or announcements. I always try and offer something beyond simply “And then they said this and then this,” even if it’s just trying to draw connections between two pieces of information not necessarily obvious in the source, but, yeah. Man. I probably accidentally plagiarize more than I’m either aware of, or would want to.
366 Songs 223: 1
Easily the best track off the new Blur 21 boxset, “1” sounds like the bridge between Blur and Gorillaz, with the band doing something more free and more groove-based than what they’d been up to previously, with the lyrics and vocals just one more (mumbled) ingredient into the mix. The use of the vibes really helps the construction, too, giving the song its own feel unlike anything else the band ever did. I love this song; I find myself wishing that whatever songs had come out of this previously-unknown session with jazz producer Bill Laswell had found themselves released properly, and Blur was given an entirely new direction, post-13.
“So What Went Right?”
What’s even more impressive is that while high unemployment is driving the national labor-force participation rate down, the Portland area’s participation rate is now growing. In the aggregate, Texas is where people have been moving to get jobs, but if you like overcast weather and independent coffee shops, greater Portland’s not a bad alternative.
So what went right? To an extent, Portland’s benefitted from the fact that some of its local enthusiasms—bicycles, food trucks, microbrews, artisanal whatnot—have become more popular nationally, giving a boost to some growing local companies. The Portland area has also benefitted from the region’s green proclivities. Renewable energy has been a growth industry nationwide, and Portland is home to the North American base of Germany’s SolarWorld and Denmark’s Vestas, one of the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturers.
Way to go, my home town. From here.
366 Songs 222: Ballad of Big Nothing
I’ve written elsewhere, I’m sure, that “Ballad of Big Nothing” is the first time that Elliott Smith actually wrote a song as opposed to a particularly beautiful note to someone (even if that someone was himself); there’s something particularly structured about this song from his Either/Or album that feels complete in a way that earlier efforts didn’t. Perhaps it’s the traditional structure (Is this the first solo song he did that has a separate verse and chorus? That can’t be right…), or the fact that the instrumentation seems to go beyond “Elliott and his guitar and maybe some double tracking,” but this always felt like more of a song song than I’d expected from him, and I find myself with amazing affection for it.
Lyrically, it’s as sharp as ever (“All spit and spite/You’re up all night/And down everyday” is a great description of someone filled with self-loathing, I think), and is delivered with more passion than usual; it feels like the closest Smith had come to Dylan by that point, and may have been the song that convinced some that he had it in him to become a star. He didn’t, of course, and while trying didn’t kill him, it definitely didn’t help him stave off his sadly, seemingly inevitable, end. To this day, I still miss him and wonder what else he could have gone on to do.
(This entry was initially “Between The Bars,” by Elliott Smith, until I realized I’d actually previously written about that song. What was here has been edited into the original entry I wrote, which you can find here.)
“That Is The Real Unfairness of Fate”
For a certain period in every life, a person can do no wrong. That period may last an hour, a month, or much longer, and that is the real unfairness of fate. But length aside, there does come a moment for everyone when he is invincible, infallible, immortal. Even if it lasts only an afternoon.
– Jonathan Carroll, From The Teeth of Angels