#99: Uncle Tupelo - Moonshiner

Uncle Tupelo - Moonshiner
from March 16-20, 1992, 1992

In 2005, I once listed Moonshiner as my favorite song. It's not, obviously, but without the methodological benefit that good data management allows, it was the first song I could think of that stood a chance of being my favorite.

I'm guessing that at least a solid 10% of the songs on my list are drinking songs in one way or another (and I had to cut one of my favorite drunk songs due to the constraints of the project!) but no one does the genre as well as Uncle Tupelo. (Another of theirs will appear later in this list.) I think the general ethos is succinctly described in their song Life Worth Living:

We're all looking for a life worth living
That's why we drink ourselves to sleep.

And another line in I Got Drunk --

You spend half your time just staring into a beer
What you need, you know, you can't find here

-- that hits close to the same meaning; but, for years, I thought the line was "staring into a mirror," and I still like that better.

Moonshiner isn't a Tupelo original but an older folk song covered most notably by Dylan, the Clancy Brothers, and Cat Power. None of these other versions can match the devastating power of Farrar's delivery. While I was never able to really get into Son Volt (significantly preferring Tweedy's Wilco) I rank Farrar exceptionally high on my list of favorite vocalists. The single thing that makes good singers great is not technical ability -- this is what American Idol and its clones miss -- but the relatability of not only the singer to listener but the singer to material. Basically, when Farrar sings

I spent all my money
On whiskey and beer
...
If whiskey don't kill me
Lord, I don't know what will

he sounds like he means it, like he knows exactly what that implies. Given the stories and Tupelo's other work, it's not hard to believe that Farrar believed he'd drink himself to death.

When you're young, drunk, and depressed, it's not hard to believe that whiskey is the way out, whether or not you want it to be.

The song is simple and self-explanatory in both music and lyrics, with little wasted movement. Three verses comprising an effective biography:

The first, the scene: a moonshiner who has dedicated his life -- not just professionally but mentally -- to drink.

The second, the existence: daily moving among drink and drinkers, wanting better. I've always taken the focus on women as another contradiction, with the drinking being both the reason for loneliness and the reason to not try and make things better.

The third, the end. What I think temperance always misses is the comfort that drink provides, that it makes the world smaller and easier to handle. It's easy when all you want and need is a drink:

Let me eat when I'm hungry
Let me drink when I'm dry
Two dollars when I'm hard up
Religion when I die

The whole world is a bottle
And life is but a dram
When the bottle gets empty
Lord, it sure ain't worth a damn

The best drinking songs are those that make you want to drink more and never drink again. The best drinking songs make you into a Kierkegaardian [Drunk] Knight of Faith, to believe that both are good and both are possible.

(The best drinking songs make you make references like this. I am not drunk enough yet to continue the metaphor.)

Of all the versions I've heard of this song, the Cat Power one is (a distant) second:



-Lin

#100 - Pere Ubu - Nonalignment Pact

Nonalignment Pact - Pere Ubu
from The Modern Dance, 1978

Since Lin decided to start with the delicate and minor-keyed "Via Chicago," it seems fitting that I should open with a thick slab of raucous noise--Pere Ubu's "Nonalignment Pact," the first track from their 1978 debut LP, The Modern Dance. Beginning with a series of shrill, almost painful shrieks from one of Allen Ravenstine's synths before dissolving into a nearly rockabilly guitar riff and the full-throated ravings of vocalist David Thomas (one of rock's few truly unique singers), "Nonalignment Pact" picks up where Pere Ubu's handful of early singles ("30 Seconds Over Tokyo," "Final Solution") with the late, lamented Peter Laughner started--with the sub-romantic ravings of a heartbroken Thomas, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

I wanna make a deal with you, girl
get it signed by the heads of state
I wanna make a deal with you, girl
get it recognized 'round the world.

Recognizing (as any decent scholar of international relations would) that the status of love depends upon the recognition of the community (isn't it obvious that Ubu would be constructivists?), Thomas begins and ends this song with the simple request that his ex-girl engage in a credible commitment to leave him the hell alone. The song careens on from there, at one point featuring Thomas's trademarked unhinged warble as he half scat-sings her "thousand other names." Naturally, these entreaties leave him winded, confused, and alone, barking out into the chaos and screaming again for her to just leave him alone. It's also fairly dance-able, in a spazzy, pogo and swing your arms around kind of way.

Ubu are a major touchstone for me, and not only because they're Ohio's number one all-time rock band. Back when I was young, impressionable, and still trying to figure out what punk rock was, David Thomas and Peter Laughner (who died before Ubu could record this record, but who will be making a return appearance in a later post) were among the first to show me that what I thought punk had to sound like was wrong, narrow, and no fun at all. The Modern Dance, along with Ubu's first singles (collected on the Terminal Tower compilation) were post-punk before there was punk, pushing boundaries that the NYC types didn't even realize existed. More than anything else, the joy I still get bopping up and down to this song late at night (and, in one memorable instance, tried to make up for my lack of interest in more conventional forms of parter dancing by urging my then-girlfriend, now-wife to join in) is the joy of knowing that we can make anything into punk, as long as we sing it with enough feeling.

-Brandon

#100: Wilco - Via Chicago

Wilco - Via Chicago
from Summerteeth, 1999

The last few tracks added to my top 100 list were amazingly difficult but the choice ultimately came down to what I thought was more important for this project: the songs I've loved longer or the songs I love more now. I picked the former, though I can't really say way. All I know is that if I had made this list 9 years ago, Via Chicago would be in the top 20, and that was good enough for me to make sure it made it in.

I don't care what it's actually about; the opening lines

I dreamed about killing you again last night
And it felt alright to me
Dying on the banks of Embarcadero skies
I sat and watched you bleed

and the wikipedia article can lead to an interpretation of a mangle relationship. For me, this is a song about homesickness, occupying the same emotional place as I'll Be Home for Christmas but without being a crappy song about Christmas.

And literally: I grew up out west and my family still lived there when I moved to the midwest for college and stayed for nearly a decade, living between 3 and 5 hours from Chicago. Nearly every trip back to the family involved a connecting flight through O'Hare. But the song invokes more the return trip, the sense of loss of something good. Every leaving -- to go back to the place without family, the place that for better or worse, was my real home -- came with a dose of sadness and thinking about the roads not taken. The hardest choices are not between good and evil or bad and worse but between good and good.

In that way, it's also cleanly associated in my mind with the process of growing up or the even more ineffable realization that we're responsible for our decisions and their consequences.

I printed my name on the back of a leaf
And I watched it float away
The hope I had in a notebook full of white dry pages
Was all I tried to save

Via Chicago has this melancholy and slight confusion to it. The prominent minor keys do the heavy work, but it's all the little touches, too. The short piano break starting at about 2:55. The feedback present throughout the song, providing an almost unnoticed sense of unease, which becomes more and more pronounced towards the end of the song, until it threatens to derail everything a minute early. But then everything drops and it's just an acoustic guitar and Tweedy singing, "I'm coming home. I'm coming hone."

-Lin

Top 100 Songs: Introduction (Part 2)

What Lin said.

Well, not exactly. Like Lin, I'm looking forward to a writing project that lets me reflect on a set of songs that I already feel like I know from the inside out. Rather than focusing passing judgement, I'm looking forward to being able to think again about why these songs are still so important to me, in most cases years after I first heard them. As an assistant professor still trying to find his feet (and get his tenure), I rarely have the time to sit and enjoy listening to music without some sort of ulterior motive--background noise when I read or write, to entertain, or to take the edge off a long walk to work. Despite the fact that I'll almost certainly have to turn in my music snob card for admitting it, I'd rather spend that time contemplating the grace, power, and perfection of these 100 songs than off on a search for the next new sound.

I've made lists like this before. Somewhere, it's possible that my friend Liz Mathews still has a CD of my "twenty favorite songs" circa 2003--a list heavy on The Lemonheads, and light on songs longer than 3 and a half minutes. I can't say that my process was as rigorous or systematic as Lin's. I don't really have data on what I listen to most often, or a rating system that's anything more than an ad hoc testament to how I feel sometimes at 1 AM and still flipping though old songs. Like with my own research, I made my list inductively, by pulling together a short list of my 15 or 20 absolute favorites and listening to them in epic late night sessions, seeing what they make me want to hear next.

The list is mostly guitar music, and I regret that I've not been able to get more, genre-wise, out of my dedicated Pitchfork reading from 2003-7. But it also reflects my efforts to get deeper into musics the indie set had left behind in the early 2000s--old blues, country, and soul songs, and the wonderful, half-forgotten bits and pieces I found there. My songs are, at first glance, older and more temporally disbursed than Lin's, reflecting that I was always better at digging music up after the fact than I was at following it when it was coming out.

When I finally got 100 songs in to some sort of rough order, I was surprised by what I saw. Old favorites from college were gone, replaced in some instances by deeper cuts on the same albums. When I read the list to Kim over the phone, she was at turns surprised by my revisionism (the songs that ended up making the cut by some of our favorite artists surpised me as much as they did her) and by my fidelity (my top ten has changed a lot less over the last decade then I expected). Ultimately, I found that what makes a good song for me hasn't changed all that much--I just know a lot more songs.

--brandon

Top 100 Songs: Introduction

One of the big realizations that the "listen to every critically acclaimed and personal desired album from 2010" project gave us was that neither Brandon nor I are particularly good at creating new content on a consistent basis. Personally, I blame a life that exists outside the internet, so I'm not too worried. We're going to do this new project, though, and it'll work much better. As I mentioned quite a few times, the hardest albums to review were the middling ones, the okay-but-not-great, the ones that weren't actually bad enough to pan.

Here, though, we're going to each go through our top 100 songs. So we've agonized over our lists and checked them multiple times and I think we're good to go.

And a thanks to our devoted readers, willing to put up not only with months of nothingness, but also the complete navel-gazing that is a project like this. These are not the 100 best songs out there. They're not necessarily "100 songs I think you should know." They are 100 songs each that mean something to us. We are connoisseurs of music and have spent years and many dollars in pursuit of knowledge of the subject. In that there may be some value to you, if only that it may introduce you to songs you don't already know. But no guarantees: one of the things that I learned in making my list is that I leaned very heavy on my formative years of music geekdom -- high school and college. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising.

Which means, you might already know all the songs on my list. (I'm not sure what's up with the outliers in 1970 and 1975 except that each year has one album represented twice. I also find it interesting that while the highest concentration is in the high school and college years, there are no songs from the year I graduated the former and started the latter.)

Very early on, Brandon suggested that we limit the list two only two songs per artist, otherwise our lists would be heavily skewed to our favorites and three quarters of the list would be from a half dozen artists. This wasn't a "hard" ceiling, as there were allowances for post-breakup bands, guest spots, and things like this. Essentially we just went with what made sense. This was my working definition:

* Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, and Son Volt count as three separate bands.
* CSN&Y is the same as CSN, but solo Young is different, even if the CSN&Y song is a Young song.

Quibble if you want, but it's the spirit that counts. Besides, I don't think there are any edge cases on my list.

I have a lot of tracks: one hundred songs counts as less than one-third of one percent of all tracks I have rated. I've been diligent for the last two years to rate every song I listen to -- which made compiling my list somewhat easier. So I queried my collection for everything with the highest rating. After culling the duplicates, I was left with 1651 songs. I went through this list, dividing them into four categories:

1) YES -- the songs that have to be included
2) PROBABLY -- the songs that should be included
3) MAYBE -- the songs that should be included, if I have room
4) NO -- the songs that aren't in the top 100

I took artist discographies as a whole and made sure that I only marked up to two tracks per artist yes, probably, or maybe. Even doing this, I was left with 157 YESs alone. Then, through this list, I marked "the ones that absolutely have to be included or else this entire project is a sham"...which gave me 81. Then I spent a few days agonizing over choosing 19 tracks from 76.

So, yeah, here we are. While the top 100 may be slightly different on a different day, I think it's as accurate as it possibly could be. I'm a little sad that it doesn't show a great deal of diversity: the only two pre-1960 songs are both classical works; country, blues, and rap are all under-represented. There's no reggae or jazz. There are artists I love that aren't represented at all (Old 97's, Leonard Cohen) but there are artists that I think have only one non-crap song (Xzibit). But it is what it is.

-- Lin

2010: M.I.A., Male Bonding

M.I.A.
/\/\ /\ Y /\ (Maya)
Released July 13, 2010

Short Notes: Or: On The Value of Lowered Expectations



Brandon: B-

It’s not at all surprising that critics were wildly divided over this record. It’s a radical departure from her quirky but club-ready sound on her first two (outstanding) records, more abrasive, processed, and artificial. I’ve only followed parts of the story of M.I.A. the artist, who’s global fame has put her artistic decisions under a new, intense kind of critical scrutiny. And like Kanye, she’s responded by pulling into herself, with tinny beats and processed vocals evoking a new distance between her and the listener. Mainstream critical outlets have responded much as they did for Kanye--heaping praise on this record as the statement of a more mature artist. But with the exception of the AV Club and Bob Christgau (who draws the comparison explicitly in his favorable review, suggesting that, as an insular, fuck-up record, Maya accomplishes its goals with “rather more success than Kanye West on 808s and Heartbreak) , the indie press that brought M.I.A. her first attention were rather brutal (Pitchfork calls it a “shambling mess.”)

As always, the truth is closest to Christgau. /\/\ /\ Y /\ is neither shambolic nor a masterwork. It’s not a fun record (no “Sunshowers” here), without much of the humor that made her so endearing on Arular, but the industrial crunch of tracks like “Meds and Feds” is reasonably interesting in its own right, as is the synthy “XXXO.” Even if half the songs here are duds, she’s still making challenging, original music that’s clearly aiming for capital-A Art, with all that comes with being that kind of pop musician. For better or worse, I’d rather hear M.I.A.’s take on krautrock (“Illygirl”) than the second half of the Lucky Soul record, which tells you something.

Lin: B-

For me, M.I.A. is in the same category as pre-Dark Fantasy Kanye: a popularly loved and critically respected artist that I just don't get. I mean, "Paper Planes" is a burner in every sense of the word, but easily my favorite version of it is the Diplo Remix with Bun B and Rich Boy which minimizes M.I.A.'s own input. I've not been impressed with any of her previous work; the albums are good enough to throw on for background noise or, presumably, dancefloor grinding but even the relatively intricate beats rarely force attention. /\/\ /\ Y /\, for all the comparisons to Kanye, is no My Beautiful Dark Twisted Family. It seems like more of the same, though those with more familiarity to her back catalog could probably point out the differences.

My favorite track here is "Lovalot," eschewing the bang of everything else with a more subdued, tense and paranoid beat the slithers it way through a story of terrorism or freedom fighting or whatever. "Believer" comes close to the same, but lacks any payoff -- all tension with no release. The rest of the album isn't a mess (as Brandon points out) but it's a chore to get through. Only "XXXO" and, to a lesser extent, "Tell Me Why" work in the more club-friendly format that most of her work trades in.

---

Male Bonding
Nothing Hurts
Released May 10, 2010

Short Notes: More shoegaze/lo-fi pop that doesn’t reach the heights of other shoegaze/lo-fi of 2010



Brandon: B

Fitting right in with the noise-pop of bands (I don’t like all that much) like Vivian Girls and No Age, Nothing Hurts is a stomping, echo-y barnburner that veers between the nearly Husker Du/early Dinosaur jr /first Nirvana record (“Your Contact,” “Crooked Scene,” “Paradise Vendors”) and the more plodding drone of their contemporaries (“Franklin”). I’m not particularly into shoegaze when it’s not cut with equal or better parts of pop sensibility, and for the most part, this album holds my attention with solid riffs that overcome the affected, echo-chamber vocals. At 29 minutes, the shoegazy parts of this record I find less compelling never really subsume the punk I like much more. Not my favorite fuzzed-out record of the year (Dum Dum Girls and Ariel Pink write better songs, and balance their fidelity affects with more compelling pop), but not bad.

Lin: C

Like Brandon, I’m not particularly into shoegaze -- except when it’s an accent to a heaping pile of metal. And since I have this growing, well, ‘hatred’ is the right word, I guess, of muddied lo-fi pop music, my favorite thing about this album is its short short length. This strikes me as far more generic than the albums Brandon mentions (Ariel Pink, etc.) which also makes it worse, committing the dual sins of being bad and uninteresting. “Pirate Key” almost piqued my interest there for a second, making it my favorite track on the album, but the rest of it is like driving through Western Nebraska, trying to find a radio station with a strong enough signal.

2010: Los Campesinos!, Lucky Soul

Los Campesinos!
Romance is Boring
Released January 26 (Wichita Recordings)

Short Notes: Scotland’s answer to Vampire Weekend?



LIN: C+

I think the Budweiser commercial using the opening of Los Campesinos!'s "You! Me! Dancing!" is brilliant. (I tried to find a copy of the ad online, but couldn't. If any readers can find it, post in the comments, please?) The build-up has just the right amount of tension that when it breaks it releases a flood of endorphins. Unfortunately, the song is six minutes long and goes downhill from there -- so I like imagine that the Bud commercial is simply a video for the song.

Which has little to do with this album before us, which I found really quite boring. (Cue headlines: Romance isn't boring, but Romance Is Boring is boring!) Nothing here comes close to the opening 90 seconds of "You! Me! Dancing!"... or, really, to the rest of that song, which I don't even much care for. I generally have more tolerance for music that is interesting or novel even if it fails. Even shit I hated (c.f. Girl Talk/Joanna Newsom) I have more respect for since it was 'good' enough to elicit an emotion at least. For whatever reason, I think the melodramatic song title "I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed. Just So You Know." pretty much sums it up.



BRANDON: B+

Not surprisingly, I’m a Los Campesinos fan. This kind of literate (with the big words and such), half-spoken, sunny pop has always been my stock-in-trade, the third strand of my core musical identity along with alt.country and old-time blues and country. I listened to their first record, the jittery, manic, and surprisingly angry Hold On Now, Youngster on repeat during my “lost” year of graduate school in 2008, screaming out the opening track, “Death to Los Campesinos!” with the windows down in the van on the way to Woodman’s.

Romance is Boring is a bigger, sonically fuller record. Los Campesinos are getting weirder, closer to Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart guests), and further from the bands I was hearing in them in 2008--Frightened Rabbits and Vampire Weekend, for starters. The more conventionally structured songs--”Romance is Boring” and the too-clever-by-half but still pretty great “Straight in at 101”--are the most successful, though, as lead singer/frontman Gareth Campesinos! (yes, they’re that kind of band) channels a prep-school version of Craig Finn or (perhaps more aptly) Eddie Argos from Art Brut, ranting about the failures of hipster love. “Straight in at 101” in particular really works for me, the story of a fumbling love played out by a kid who plays at hipsterdom, camouflaging his adolescent assholery (and love for a good chorus) with tight pants, mussy hair, and picky eating:

I think we need more post-coital
and less post-rock
feels like the build-up takes forever
but you never get me off.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s why no one has sex while listening to Tortoise.

Unfortunately, too much of this record is given over to the very boring drone and repetition he’s criticizing--songs that lack the hooky vitality of this band’s best work. I still love it, but songs like “Coda: A Burn Scar int he Shape of the Sooner State” and “I Just Sighed, I Just Sighed, Just So You Know” are eminently skippable, which isn’t what you want from a taut pop record.

---

Lucky Soul
A Coming of Age
Released April 15 (Elefant)

Short Notes: British retro-pop that occasionally overcomes its genre trappings



BRANDON: B-

I love a good genre exercise as much as the next guy, and tamborine-heavy girl-group-baiting pop isn’t a bad genre to play with. It’s heavy on convention, offering a tight format that, with the slightest tweaking or transgression, can easily become something much more. And when Lucky Soul go straight for the hand-clapping, cliched sweet spot, these songs overcome the fairly ordinary songwriting to become something fairly compelling, if slight--like a less punky, British Detroit Cobras. The first four tracks on this record do this very well, mixing lilting “whoa-oh” choruses (“Whoa Billy”) with driving mid-tempo numbers that sound like Northern Soul outtakes (“Love 3”) and the lovely, string-laden “Up in Flames.” But when the songs tray too much from the faux-Northern Soul format, the record is mostly forgettable. Such is the danger in plying “retro-pop,” as Lin has often noted: why would you put on new derivatives when you can listen to the real thing?



LIN: B

Which is amusing, since I like the first half of this album a great deal. Part of it is assuredly a reaction against the muddied lo-fi of the indie-acclaimed best-of pop albums of the year that I continue to rail on. The two released singles ("Whoa Billy" and "White Russian Doll") captures the raw joy of the best late 60's girl groups, making it perfect for summer listening. "Love 3" is fits in nicely, a lean two minute slice of tightly constructed soul pop. In many ways, this tracks are what I've always wanted from Belle and Sebastian but never got. But Brandon's right: outside of the title track, nothing on the second half of the album distinguishes itself from its sources or its contemporaries. But 3 pretty great and 2 pretty good tracks is enough for a 'B' and a qualified recommendation, if you like this sort of thing.