Hooch, by Melvins

2020 began with a deep dive of these perennial dino-slackers in anticipation of their February show at Sweet Springs Saloon, the one where I caught Covid-19, Variant-1. Hard drinking middle class backyard doom metal. No dive needed, unless you count the liquid vat of suspended moisture hanging above the 200 or so rejects crammed into about 800 square feet of bar space. They never got much better than their debut, but when you rock this hard on the low end at least once, why bother going any higher.

Key Lyrics:

Cause I can ford a red reed
Only street wide, a reed land
Diamond make a mid-evil bike
A sake like a reed caste

Life in Vain, by Daniel Johnston as performed by Built to Spill

The most cheerful song of the year. When they rolled out the rolling shutdowns, I put this on to feel optimistic about the different ways we might stay connected through analog means, or at least without overreliance on corporate digiforms. Boy was I wrong. None of those daydreams about a return to 2007 panned out. The digerati disappeared me like a rocket ship waving goodbye to a pinprick planet. Daniel Johnston was a permanent twelve year old locked in the failing mind of a manic depressive. I miss knowing he was still here.

Key Lyrics:

Don’t wanna be free of hope
And I’m at the end of my rope
It’s so tough just to be alive
When I feel like the living dead

April, by Beach Bunny

In the same breath we monetize young talent, we discount their wisdom as too inexperienced to count. Even though she’s only singing about her crushes, Lili Trifilo reminds us that the language of our virgin voyage translates to every successive relationship ad infinitum, even to those beyond the realm of people. While we eventually discover that every feeling we’ve ever had is universal, it doesn’t discount the fact that intense feelings are unique unto us the moment we first have them. I imagine giving this record to my 13 year old and saying, “this probably won’t cheer you up, not a bit, but the songs reminded me of something you said, plus it’s really good.”

Key Lyrics:

Sometimes I just want somebody
Someone who reminds that they’ll always love me
Sick of counting tears
Wishing you were here
I wanna be everything you wanted
But often, times I just get forgotten

Git in there, by Betty Davis

In May I was doing a lot of birding. One morning I was finishing up at the Damon Garcia Fields, a big telephoto lens around my neck. When I was finishing up, a random civilian thought I was up to no good, and he started accusing me of spying on the credit union where I was forced to park due to shutdown. Then he started taking pictures of me and my car, compiling a dossier should I strike again in the future. After swallowing my pride and stifling the urge to eviscerate my false accuser, I drove home and read about the Central Park birder.

It was perfect timing. Earlier that day before my assailant came at me with no assumptions of charity, I met a black birder at Damon Garcia. We had the same camera. We talked about Barn Owlets and Blue Grosbeaks before going our merry ways. After reading the news about the Central Park birder, I read about Ahmaud Arbery, and how he was killed for defending his right to jog without having to explain himself to white people. Then I wept. If I was so humiliated by just one instance of unfounded suspicion, I realized what people of color (and the black birder I met) endure every day. Then of course George Floyd was killed.

In our attempts to be good allies, before we patronize black people as a monolith only capable of attaining a subjective version of equality through the levers of Democratic Socialism, we would be wise to first steep ourselves in the Blues, and then, and only then, try both of the following:

1.) Shut the fuck up and listen
2.) Speak the fuck up and try

Laura and I had dinner one night with our friend, a lawyer specializing in racial bias. He’s 40, white, kind, indefatigable, and data minded. When I put this Betty Davis record on, he asked us, “What is Funk, and is there a difference between funk and disco?” We weren’t ’t prepared for such a blatantly square question from someone with a PhD, let alone someone with a PhD in racial bias in the Supreme Court, but we did our best.

Our ensuing conversation made me think about the relationship between white allyship and black culture. If educated white allies fail to voluntarily experience one iota of the Blues, what conception of black culture can we have beyond the hyper granular data of our own research, or the virtue signaling polemics of digital conformity?

This piece by Davis is incredible. You can dance your back out to it, which nobody does anymore because they’re too yellow to get together, let alone trust the rhythm of their bodily fluids. As good as anything from Sly Stone but passed over for being too strange and raunchy for a woman. Worse yet, a black woman with the nerve to construct a daring persona at odds with her shy self. A persona deconstructing and reinventing the stereotypes she wasn’t allowed to be, nor was she allowed to escape.

Key Lyrics:

Music man, wherever when
Grab your ass, don’t you stop playin’
Git funky, like a skunk, do you hear what Betty’s sayin’?
Play anything that you wanna
Long as you git down, down, down, down, down
Git in there!

Mary Had a Little Drug Problem, by Scratch Acid

Christ I’m old, and this one proves it. I can’t let go of the Albini adjacent punk rock-o-sphere. But it moves me. If ever I need to cast off the prudes, the sickos, the rhythmless drones. If ever things get too straight, I can always go here, this one in particular, to get back the wall crawlies. My source opens up like the cradle of an atom breathing life into the core of a red dwarf. Then I’m at home again with my evacuating rage, my glorious flash where small people are supplanted by ecstatic gyrations.

Key Lyrics:

You smile
Your oxy smile
Drain drain drain your smile
Your smile
You don’t oxy smile
You don’t know it now let me go

From Home, by The Troggs

If ever there was a year to revisit the primal yet all too recent misogyny of British invasion proto punk, this was it. Like the Rolling Stones in Under My Thumb, these songs epitomize the old standard by which men who pursued uninterested girls were labeled tireless romantics instead of unjailed stalkers. You really want to sympathize with the narrative out of respect for the hypnotic pulse, but the guy is basically crying foul that the girl who doesn’t want him has the nerve to go out and meet someone else. On top of that she’s gaslighted for having the nerve to get upset when he follows her around to gather evidence of her second class habits. Oh, I almost forgot, this was the year to revisit glorified misogyny because sexism wrapped up in 2019 in favor of the wholesale race wars of infinity.

Key Lyrics:

You’re always out in fancy clothes
Down in clubs, the late night shows
Where you get your money no one knows
From home, girl, from home, girl

Forget It, by Rodriguez

If you haven’t seen the documentary about Rodriguez, “Searching for Sugarman,” get on it. It seems like we’re always coming across obscure musicians who for whatever reason never got their amazing stuff heard, but Rodriguez is somebody who not only got himself heard by the millions, he unwittingly soundtracked a generation of activists fighting for freedom. The expression, “You can’t make this stuff up,” is an understatement compared to the joy of seeing Rodriguez finally perform in front of the adoring fans he never knew he had.

Key Lyrics:

If there was a word
But magic’s absurd
I’d make one dream come true.

It didn’t work out
But don’t ever doubt
How I felt about you.

But thanks for your time
Then you can thank me for mine
And after that’s said
Forget it.

If Love is Overrated, by Gregory Porter

Let’s hear it for the radio, and for that matter anything that brings us new music outside the increasingly soul sucking albeit amazingly spot on algorithm of Spotify. Whether it’s just buying a record on a hunch, turning on your public radio station on the weekend, or seeking out a genre you haven’t tried in years, that’s the kind of soul seeking that keeps us clean.

On a dreary Sunday afternoon in August, I turned on KCRW to find a composition bathing me in the grace of its airwaves. It was a pop song made of classical, jazz, R&B, and gospel. I never would’ve sought this out on my own. It sounded like healing, the type of song to help you forgive the people who hurt you the most. Gregory Porter’s voice is the deep mahogany smooth of angels engraved underneath the ruins of Mississippi plantations. He repeats a witty aphorism, each time ringing truer than the next. If love is overrated, let me be the one that is naïve…

During an artist talk this year with George Saunders, he was trying to describe the way love appears to us, the way it provides clarity and relief but splits before we can take its vitals. After it’s gone we lack the ability to decipher what the hell it was, and more importantly how to get it back. According to my friend George, after Mr. L goes bye-bye, we simply reanimate our prefrontal dragon scales of thou shalt forget about the whole thing before his next three second drop in.

When George delivered the punchline, that “love” is what he was talking about, everybody in the audience – including myself – puckered in unrecognition about what the heck he was talking about? How could he say something so silly and trite? I realized later that even the squishiest literary types are so blocked up against love, so afraid of love as the silver bullet, that we can’t remain open to the possibility for even four seconds.

Key Lyrics:

If love is overrated
Let me be the one that is naïve
If love is overrated
Let me be the one that is deceived

Let me find that your hands that are touching me
Is not the hand that’s supposed to be
Your lips, an illusion
Let me be the only fool for your embrace
Let me fall upon my face
I like this strange illusion

If love is overrated
Why is it the only thing I serve?
If love is overrated
Why is the one I’m in the one that I deserve?

Center of Asia, by Paul Pena

I saw the Paul Pena doc, “Genghis Blues,” twenty-one years ago when it first came out. I was floored by his improvised guitar song in the midst of all the Tuvan throat singing. It’s so sad, so deeply driven by the Blues, so sympathetic in despair and self-loathing. He couldn’t get his meds all the way out in the center of Asia, so he started having a mental breakdown. The thing about the Blues is that they make the listener feel joy through the public service of creation. The artist conjures – then reverses – the directional conduit of misery away from the heart out into the universe where it belongs. At least for the time being.

Key Lyrics:

There should never be
Anyone happier than me
Here I sit in the middle of Asia
Feel like I wanna cry
I can’t find a way to say
What I need and why

All my little friends are here with me
I love them
God knows, they love me

Here I sit in Kyzyl
They’d help me if they could
I can’t tell ’em what I want
’cause I just can’t talk too good

It’s a hard life when you’re stupid
It’s a hard life when you’re blind

Both Sides Now, by Joni Mitchell

On the drive to the doctor’s office to find out if it was medically advisable to induce the birth of our first child, I put this on to calm us down. We ended up listening again during active labor. The perfect tonic for mitigating the panic caused by lawyers who try to muck up the common sense of the modern day medical establishment.

Key Lyrics:

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

Young and Beautiful/ (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care, by Elvis Presley

During my first week as a father, I was sitting up at 3am with the baby while watching Jailhouse Rock on TCM. I was so taken with these two songs that over the next few days I started singing both of them to my child. The first one is just pretty and true. The other sums up my sentiment for the emerging world around me. Nobody drinks, dances, or goes hotrod racing anymore, and on most days that’s fine. I’ll just keep being the bigger person who forgives, the one who has a good time anyway, the King of all Kicks.

Key Lyrics:

Oh, take this heart I offer you
And never set me free
Then you’ll be forever young
And beautiful to me

/

You don’t like crazy music
You don’t like rockin’ bands
You just wanna go to a movie show
And sit there holdin’ hands
You’re so square
Baby, I don’t care

A Good Time, by John Prine

For those of us whom life had already taken a giant bite, the question of how to weather this year’s isolation was an equation easily ignored. Everything we needed to know was in the work of John Prine. In a way that was both closer to the bone and somehow more poetic than his verbose contemporaries, he wrote about the fractured yet resilient nature of the human heart. When he sings that old trees just grow stronger, your toes submerge into roots, your arms ascend into branches. When he sings that old rivers grow wilder every day, your tears create the raging rapids below. When he sings that an apple will spoil if it’s been abused, you are confident in your decision to never speak again. He showed us that to move beyond hardship we must accept its permanence before discovering the serenity of its embrace.

Key Lyrics:

And you know that I could have me a million more friends
And all I’d have to lose is my point of view
But I had no idea what a good time would cost
Till last night when I sat and talked with you.

An apple will spoil if it’s been abused
A candle disappears when its been used
A rainbow may follow up a hurricane
And I can’t leave forever on a train

And you know that I’d survive if I never spoke again
And all I’d have to lose is my vanity
But I had no idea what a good time would cost
Till last night when you sat and talked with me.