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366 Songs 220: Sugar Man

The first time I heard “Sugar Man” was on David Holmes’ Come Get It I Got It mix, and I was convinced that he was doing some weirdness to the song after the 2:00 mark; all those random noises and string saws and the like couldn’t have come from the same original mostly-acoustic song from before, right? And yet, there they are in the full version. I wonder, considering the lyrical content, if they’re meant to imply a trip in some weird, quasi-soundscape way, like a really bad radio play that’s trying to scare the kids off’ve the road to crack.

Considering the precision of the arrangement earlier – Listen to those wonderful horns and that buoyant bassline, this is a song that just sounds amazing – that interlude feels particularly out of place and clumsy; everything else in the song has a clarity – even the extended fake out, with two different performances in either speaker, one echoed and fading faster but lasting longer – that is something to marvel at. I’ve never heard another of Sixto Rodriguez’ songs (It took me long enough to find a full version of “Sugarman” after the David Holmes mix; this was a decade ago, way before Rodriguez’ recent critical revival and movie), but based on this one alone, I can believe that he’s one of those forgotten geniuses that slipped through the cracks of pop culture.

Not content with putting the song on a mix, David Holmes’ then-band project, the Free Association, did a cover of “Sugar Man” that’s… good enough, I guess? But not a patch on the original:

Too much Portishead-lite, not enough of the bounce and lightness of the original, right? The Free Association was a weird thing; I should do something about them sometime.

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Greatest Banner Ad Ever?

Very possibly.

Why the freaky CGI baby? What does that have to do with being a social worker or working full-time while earning your degree? I have no idea. But am I almost tempted to click through to find out? You bet I am.

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366 Songs 219: Sub Rosa

Gene was never “my” band; they were the favorite of my best friend, who understood what they were trying to say more easily than I did. But this song was one of two that I loved, both from whenever he’d play the (second) album Drawn To The Deep End, and whenever I’d hear it on Radio 1’s “Evening Session” show or whatever. It’s the indie boy lullaby of the opening, and its contrast to the guitar wrangling that follows; it gets me everytime, and I’m not entirely sure why. The line about “a hunger to feel welcome/Out in the bedrooms of the world” helps; it’s a wonderfully poetic way of expressing what is, ultimately, sexual frustration and outsider angst, and the subtle brass band pamping away in the background as singer Martin Rossiter mouths those words helps them seem warmer, somehow.

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366 Songs 218: Sunday Sunday

Before they were POPSTARS, Blur did this. And, if you can ignore the cheesiness of the video – I know, it’s hard – then there’s a lot to be enjoyed about “Sunday Sunday,” especially if you wish there were more brass bands in pop songs like I do. But what caught my ear when listening to this recently – or, rather, “Sunday Sleep,” the earlier version that’s on the new Blur box set – was the melancholy in the second verse that’s not that easy to pick out from the performance: “You meet an old soldier and talk of the past/He fought for us in two world wars/And says the England he knew is no more.”

Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but hearing that now makes me feel sad, rather than “Yeah, up yours, Grandad!” I’m not sure which of the two the line is supposed to evoke (If either?), but I feel like it adds some… I don’t know, wistfulness to what is otherwise an intentionally throwaway, somewhat snide slice of nostalgia and the sneering at thereof. Maybe I just need some protein on a plate.

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366 Songs 217: Memory Collector

There are times when Kelley Stoltz evokes his heroes just a little too well, and this is maybe one of those; there’s an undeniably overwhelming Paul McCartney/Elvis Costello vibe to this song, but I love it despite the sense of deja vu and artifice (The line “Dinner’s ready/I hear mother call” strikes me as particularly fake, for some reason). It’s an amusingly precious thing, very short – which is nice; it doesn’t outstay its welcome – and with the integrity of something off the White Album, however you want to take that. It’s something that’ll stick in your head for awhile, and you won’t be entirely sure why.

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366 Songs 216: It’s My Party

Ah, the joys of early ’60s pop, where it was really all about the people you didn’t see, rather than the ones who sang the song. Let’s face it, Lesley Gore is the most disposable part of the original “It’s My Party,” with vocals that do the job, but don’t really impress in any way. No, instead your ear gets drawn to the amazing arrangement (and production?) by Quincy Jones: the horns, the percussion, the piano – everything adds up to make it sound like a party – Seriously, dig the horn stabs, the way the beat is relentlessly upbeat with the Latin-inflected groove, it’s a great sound that’s at odds with the vocals (Not just Gore’s lead, but the swooning “Ooohs” in the background), but in the past way possible. It’s a contradictory wall of sound, and it’s that tension that makes this such a memorable song.

Well, that and the song itself. Putting aside for a second that it’s got such a great, simple and sing-along-able melody, the lyrics are just a perfected teenage melodrama, making “Judy’s wearing his ring” sound like the ultimate betrayal, and “I’ll cry if I want to” appear more noble, more serious, than the petty childish thing that it objectively should be (After all, “you would cry to/If it happened to you”).

It’s no surprise, then, that the song has been covered by countless people through its 49 years of existence (including permanently-aged crooner Bryan Ferry and animated horrorshow Alvin and The Chipmunks), but my absolute favorite version of the song is Amy Winehouse’s, her last official release while she was alive, from 2010:

Putting aside that it’s a great vocal performance – Messy, but just so full of personality, even with that terrible spoken word bit in the middle – again, there’s just a great arrangement there, again from Quincy Jones. That bass line! The new horn arrangement! It’s kind of amazing that, more than four decades between them, Jones can come up with two such wonderful and yet different takes on the same material.

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Just Say No

It’s something that John Amato, host of the political blog Crooks and Liars, knows all too well. Mr. Amato rarely steps away from his site for any significant amount of time, although he finds updating the page multiple times a day exhausting. “You become your blog,” says Mr. Amato, whose site gets an average of 150,000 hits a day. “It’s John Amato. They’re used to John Amato.”

Some bloggers thrive on the manic pace. Getaways for Jim Romenesko, host of the popular media blog bearing his name, consist of a Friday afternoon drive every month or so from his home in the Chicago suburbs to visit friends in Milwaukee. The 85-mile trip should last around 90 minutes. For Mr. Romenesko, it takes nearly four hours — because he stops at eight different Starbucks on the way to update his site.

The longest Mr. Romenesko has refrained from posting on his site, which gets about 70,000 hits a day, was for one week three years ago on the insistence of site owner, the Poynter Institute. He hasn’t taken a vacation in seven years. “The column’s called Romenesko,” he says. “I just feel it should be Romenesko” who writes it.

While it may seem like a chore to outsiders, many bloggers enjoy the compulsion. Mark Lisanti, who runs the entertainment gossip blog Defamer, is much like Mr. Romenesko in his no-vacation tendencies. Although he gets three weeks off each year from Gawker Media, which owns the site, he rarely takes a day. Not because he can’t, he just doesn’t want to. “My plan is to die face down on the desk in the middle of a post,” Mr. Lisanti jokes.

Jeff Jarvis, author of the political blog BuzzMachine, knows the feeling. He has always posted during his annual vacation to Skytop Lodge in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. When the resort had only an expensive Internet connection, he paid the hefty fee to keep his blog current. His son, Jake, now 14 years old, paid for half of the connection costs so he could keep up his technology blog, Wire Catcher.

Mr. Jarvis says he can count the number of days he’s spent away from his blog on one hand. On the occasional break — for a day or less — he opts to leave his blog “dark,” or untouched, rather than have someone fill in for him. “It’s just my space,” he says.

From here. Related: Kate and I recently had the realization that we haven’t had a “take some time off and go somewhere” vacation for over a year, and on the weekend trip we’re planning on taking to change that, we’re both going to take our laptops to keep up with deadlines and everything that has to be done. For me, it’s partly the fear of saying no to things and then finding out that they’d never be offered to me again; so many years as a freelancer, and I still have that panic. It’s ridiculous.

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366 Songs 215: PO Box 9847

Whether it’s the sinking strings, the thumping piano or rolling drums, there’s a ridiculous amount to love in this song, and that’s before you even get to the fantastic, tongue-in-cheek lyrics (“I’ve been writing advertising/That’s not really me”). This is from a relatively late-era Monkees album, The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees, recorded after Peter Tork had left the band, but they were still cherrypicking the best material from other writers; this is a Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart-written song, and the two had actually recorded it themselves earlier, in an almost equally-enjoyable version:

There are a lot of love songs about being in love, or unrequited love, or losing love. There aren’t that many about wanting to be in love, or advertising yourself for the experience. If they could all be as good as this one, I’d heartily co-sign any petition you’d want to change that.

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“If You Go Into Those Internet Worlds… That Will Drive You Off Your Rocker”

I don’t go on the Internet. I never go on the Internet. I don’t go on Twitter. I’m not on Facebook. I’ve seen friends go into dark, dark holes of sadness because of that. Frankly, I don’t have the time or the attention span for it. I would rather go to a movie with my free time than be on the Internet. To me the computer is still where I type my script and that’s it. My whole thing about Facebook is I don’t understand, you have email. Friends are like, “Yeah, but I want to send you pictures of my kids.” And I’m like, “I don’t want pictures of your kids! I don’t want to see what your children look like, ever.” I don’t care about that. I just want to send you a nice message saying, “Hey, want to have dinner on Friday?” and I would like you to respond. That’s all I want! My life is very simple.The thing is, if you go into those Internet worlds, if you’re going to believe the good feedback, you have to believe the bad feedback, and that will drive you off your rocker. If you don’t internally have a feel for the show and have a feel for what you like and where you want to go, then you shouldn’t be doing the show. You can’t look for people to vindicate you, or then when the people go, “You actually suck,” you’re going to sit there and go, “Yeah, I actually suck.” And I’m really not emotionally stable enough for that. I cannot hang with that.

That’s Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of Gilmore Girls and the sneaky-secret show of the summer, Bunheads, talking.

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“Good is Good”

I find myself really interested in this story, and the idea that Gawker.com is using its traditionally-low traffic periods (Weekends) to publish off-topic longform writing that it values in general. Especially because the longer essays seem to be finding an audience, and are helping redefine what Gawker “is” as a site. That AJ Daulerio, the site’s editor, describes the decision to run the essays in non-peak viewing times by saying “Good is good, regardless as to whether it’s supposed to fit in with what the site is supposed to be or not,” feels particularly heartening; he’s really turning into someone worth paying attention to, with the various decisions he’s made since taking over the site at the start of the year. If Gawker can push quality and hits at the same time, then maybe enough people will take notice and realize that the choice doesn’t have to be made between the two. Consider this entirely relevant to my interests.