Christmas songs are the bane of retail workers everywhere. It’s not that they’re bad—some are quite good!—but they are relentless.
And, to be honest, the worse rather than the better ones do tend to be played on repeat over a store’s speakers: the more gimmicky, cheesy, and bouncy, it seems, the more likely is some corporate manager to favor it. The better ones don’t go so well with sales, and the best songs?
The best Christmas songs are religious.
There are bad religious songs, of course, but the truly good approach the sublime: this is the music which twines the joyous and the somber together in recognition of a momentous event.
I am no longer awe-struck by that event, as such awe requires a faith I no longer have. But I can see—hear—that faith and awe in notes pouring out of and surrounding us before waving away nto the yonder blue.
My voice is still wobbly, but I remember what it felt like to sail it over that long O. It was a good feeling.
May you sail wherever you are, and wherever you may go.
Apparently, a show I never watched and have no opinion about featured a Waterboys tune in their finale.
Which is as good a reason as any to showcase that Waterboys tune.
It is, like so many Waterboys songs, too too much.
The relative restraint of Fisherman’s Blues arguably made for a better record, but there is something so wonderfully everywhere-and-everything to This Is The Sea.
I’m not a hipster, although I do admit to sharing the annoying trait of establishing my bona fides that I listened to something before it became cool.
Not liking something once it gets popular? Not me at all: I’m thrilled that others can confirm my good taste.
Still, it is the case that with some long-running bands or authors, I just get sort of tired of following them. It’s not even that they get bad or boring—although they sometimes do—but that I’ve just had my fill.
With U2, it’s both that I’ve had my fill and that I just fuckin’ loved their early stuff. Boy, October, and War never fail to yank me by the short-hairs, even today, as does Wide Awake in America and “Under a Blood Red Sky”. I really liked Unforgettable Fire when it came it, thought Rattle & Hum was okay, and while I think Joshua Tree is amazing and, like the early work, still listen to it, it was also the end for me.
They changed their sound and focus, which, honestly, if you’re gonna stick around, is better than just revisiting the same old shit. But as they moved hither, I went yon, and the messy, raging, joyous U2 I adored then and now is the one they left behind.
Anyone, the song that gave the title to October:
Overwrought? Maybe, but sincerely so, which was part of the beauty of U2 back then.
It’s been a cool June so far in NYC, but you know that by July the weather will be filthy and by August, murderous.
So, in “honor” of the worst of the four seasons, some sun and summer songs.
From back in me college days:
This got a lot of play when I was living in the apartment on Breese Terrace (right across from Camp Randall stadium). I don’t know that I yet hated summer—I was probably still operating under the delusion of fellow northerners that one should be glad that summer’s here, as it least it’s not winter—but regardless, I liked this one. Still do.
This one’s a throwback to the seventies:
I didn’t have this album—this came out before my album-buying days—but my older sister had a copy of Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy that I listened to, up in our shared bedroom, so I tend to associate all songs of this era with the seventies, even if I didn’t actually listen to them back then.
As to that first album I bought? Foreigner, Double Vision. I was mad for Foreigner, and at twelve or thirteen, when I started really paying attention to music, this. . . this is what I wanted.
I still listen to old Elton John. Foreigner? Not so much.
I fuckin’ love this song, still:
In fact, I hopped out of my chair and lip-synced to this as it played on my tinny computer speakers.
This would make a great song for a chorus, don’t you think? So many ways to take this.
Man, I fuckin’ loved all of early U2, and while I don’t hate them now, at some point getting their new music was no longer necessary. But this song reminds me of when it was.
This is kind of a trash song, but I do love me some Be Good Tanyas:
A friend of mine who, well, kinda of worked music festivals (as in, he had a job that mostly had nothing to do with music but sometimes did), once booked the Be Good Tanyas. They fought like hell offstage, he told me.
But the show was fine.
This one was included on a mixtape sent to me in grad school by my friend L:
I don’t know this artist well, or, really, at all, but apparently Eddie Vedder later covered the song.
Anyway, I listened to this song on my walkman on the number 2 bus taking me down Franklin, heading toward and away home.
And, of course, this is the song that’s counts as hopeful for mopes like me:
God, what a great song.
The Police was one of those bands I was introduced to by MTV. I don’t know what anyone thinks about MTV these days, but back in the ’80s they played all kinds of shit I couldn’t get on the radio.
Falls is between Green Bay and Milwaukee, so I’d listen to stations out of there (mostly Milwaukee, honestly, 93.9 (?) WQXR! and a station at 97-point-something), the relevant ones of which were either Top-40 (which I, a cool teenager, disdained) and hard rock. I was into the latter in my early teens, but once I heard post-punk and New Wave, it was all over.
Anyway, the Milwaukee School of Engineering was rumored to have a great indie station, but the signal was weak and we almost never got it up in Sheb county.
So MTV was it. It was terribly white, back in those days, which I might have tutted about, but honestly, I dug the Police and the Eurythmics and the B-52’s and the Femmes and BoDeans and on and on, so Music TeleVision fed me what I needed.
There are many, many, many, MANY more summer/sun songs, but here’s one on how to deal with the heat:
I mean, who watches a Pink Floyd concert film sober?
JT and his roommate took me and maybe some of the other freshmen from our floor in Sellery over to the Humanities building, where they showed free films in lecture halls (Harold and Maude was regularly featured). JT & roommate were both sophomores, way into music, and likely to be high whenever it seemed like a good time to be high—and in a classroom watching Pink Floyd play long trippy songs in an empty amphitheater would seem to be a very good time to be high.
I knew Pink Floyd well enough—had a couple of albums, knew songs from a couple more—but was never a super fan. I learned that night in Humanities, for example, that they had a song called “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”, which I thought (then and now) was a great title. And I learned that young David Gilmour was beautiful, and that whatever drug he had taken had turned his pupils into teeny-tiny dots amidst a startling blue.
Anyway, there’s a semi-amusing countdown of Pink Floyd songs over at Vulture penned by someone who seems to hate that he’s a Pink Floyd fan. I didn’t click on the links to the songs themselves (on Spotify, which I haven’t joined), but did watch a number of the vids, many of which were live.
And, oh man, look at those concerts! I never saw Pink Floyd live, and most of the big shows I did see were either at Alpine Valley or at Summerfest, but that concert footage—guys mostly standing around, a few women ahhhhh-ing off to the side, and LASERS! and NONSENSE ANIMATION!—that. was. a concert!
I haven’t seen an arena show in. . . huh, ever, so, again, I can only go by what flashes across my computer, but it seems like most of the big acts touring today put on A SHOW. Plenty of music, yes, but dancing and more dancing and, oh look, another dancing routine. I can’t really say if this is better or worse than the old standing-around-noodling model, but it is a distinct change.
Guessing (again): the Grateful Dead were the premier stand-around-noodling band. Yeah, yeah, the Dead (and their ilk) are called “jam bands”, which, okay, is cooler than “noodling” band, but either way, not my thing. The Dead were still touring when I was in college, and you couldn’t swing a bong in Madison without hitting a Deadhead, but, nope, didn’t do it for me.
Didn’t hate ’em, didn’t love ’em; just thought, Okay.
But Pink Floyd? Yeah, they were all right. Biting, angry, inscrutable lyrics, and long (so very long) songs to play when you got in from a night out and needed to float back to somewhere in the vicinity of sobriety before falling asleep. What more could a teenager want?
One final memory: At one point while hospitalized, J and I were allowed out of the ward for a few hours. We walked down Lakeshore path over to State Street, where some kind of construction was going on outside of Memorial Library, the zone bounded by plywood sheets.
These sheets were, of course, a canvas, and on one, someone had spray-painted shine on you crazy diamond.
Both J and I, day-passed from a psych ward, thought this was pretty great, and I took a picture of her in front of it. J had a lot of bad days, but that was a good day, for both of us.
And not just, y’know, the regular U-RAH-RAH anthem—not We Will Rock You—but the slow build/propulsive/rip-your-heart-out-only-the-music-can-save-us anthem.
U2 seems the obvious go-to band for this, and it’s true, those boys could be mighty anthemic, but they were always too eager, never desperate enough. And while David Gray can do both the build and the desperation, he tends to crash through too soon, breaking the wave rather than letting it break over him.
No, for the properly-calibrated desperation, you gotta go to the women.
Stevie Nicks knew how to do the propulsive/rip-your-heart out bit:
Trying, failing, trying to point myself in some kind of direction.
I think I need music. Yeah, I need my music.
Ach, I don’t know if I need music, but not listening to music hasn’t worked, so why not, why not.
Tonight: 10,000 Maniacs, U2, Mojave 3.
The 10,000 Maniacs cd is, well, first off, I hear it as an album: when “Peace Train” comes on I think, B-side. Anyway, it’s a bit dicey, because of all the music I listened to when I was on the psych ward, I remember this one. Don’t know why.
I’ve listened to it plenty since then—I was in a short time a long time ago—but I hear the first notes of “What’s the Matter Here?” and bam, there I am, in that chair, facing the window.
But I don’t stay there. And tonight, listening to In My Tribe, I think, Jesus Christ, this was a best-seller? Not because it’s not a great pop album—it is!—but what kind of pop album goes double-platinum with songs about child abuse, alcoholism, depression, illiteracy (illiteracy?!), and homelessness. And, oh, yeah, a song ripping on a brother for joining the military.
Man, the late ’80s were weird.
Still, this song makes me grin every time I hear it:
That was my first Leonard Cohen song, although I didn’t quite know it.
I’d gotten the Jennifer Warnes’s album, Jenny Sings Lenny, and First We Take Manhattan was the first cut on the first side. It’s a great song—probably why I bought the album—but I had no idea who Leonard Cohen was.
Oh, I got that he was a singer—he did his thing in a duet with Warnes—. . .
. . . but I didn’t really know him.
I don’t know when I thought he might be worth knowing—at some point in grad school, I think, relatively late, I think—and I can’t say that I know all there is to know about him. But oh, yes, I think he is worth knowing.
(An aside: of the singers who can’t sing, I’ll take Cohen and Reed over Dylan and Waits every time. They’re all killer songwriters, though, so I’d want ’em all for that.)
Anyway, a coupla’ more, of just him, singing songs I mention often on this blog:
and, for that one beautiful, heartbreaking line:
Happy 82nd birthday, Old Man. May you live to be Ancient.
I mean, I liked his music, had a few records, and generally enjoyed his work, but I was never a super-fan, and never had a full-on Bowie fever.
So why am I so sad today? And why can’t I stop reading about him?
~~~
David Bowie is actually associated with one of my worst memories from high school.
I wanted to be the yearbook editor my senior year. I’d started working on the yearbook staff when I was a freshman (which frosh usually didn’t do), was generally acknowledged to be ‘the writer’ in my class (not that hard, really, in a class of 150), and fully expected that the adviser, Ms. G., would appoint me.
She did not.*
L. and T. were appointed instead, and I’d be pissed about it to this today had they not a) put together a kick-ass yearbook; and b) treated me really, really well, allowing me to contribute in all kinds of way. They were champs.
Anyway, my idea was to create a yearbook around the lyrics to “Changes”—which is how Bowie gets dragged into this bad memory.
I have no idea whether or not this would have worked: it could have been amazing, it could have sucked, it could have been Eh.
Woulda liked the chance to have found out.
(*She had her reasons, which were legit. Still. . . .)
~~~
I’ve said “Under Pressure” is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, but today I’ve read all kinds of pieces holding that song out as some kind of genius.
I don’t think it’s genius, but yeah, it is a good pop song, undeserving of the guilty-pleasure label.
~~~
One good thing that’s come from all this reading today is that I found, courtesy of the Huffington Post, a couple of videos of Bowie playing with Arcade Fire.
First I saw this one, one of Bowie’s songs:
Then one of Arcade Fire’s:
I like Arcade Fire’s cds just fine, but watching them live, man, I realllly want to see them live.
What it would have been like to see them live with Bowie.
~~~
I think the main reason I considered “Under Pressure” a guilty pleasure is that every time I hear it I tear up.
I cannot handle my own tears, cannot handle that I am moved to tears.
~~~
It’s kind of astonishing how amazing a singer Bowie was, given that he didn’t have much of a voice.
He’s not like Leonard Cohen, who can’t sing at all, but if I were asked for the best straight-up voices in pop, I wouldn’t name Bowie.
But oh, could he sing, so many different types of songs, with so many different types of singers. Some of these collaborations (Arcade Fire) work better than others (Mick Jagger), it wasn’t down to him.
Something about that thin reed, stretched across the universe.
~~~
“Space Oddity” reminds me of John Lennon. I don’t know why. Maybe I heard it while thinking about Lennon’s death.
Or maybe it just reminds me of high school.
It’s not every time I hear the song I’m reeled back, but sometimes, sometimes I’m in the parking lot at Sheboygan Falls High School, Bowie on the car radio, singing And I’m sitting in my tin can. . . .
~~~
“Under Pressure” is about love, after all.
And love, I don’t know what to do with love.
Thus my chagrin over my tears, my chagrin over love.
~~~
And all of the work he’s done, all of the chances he took, all he gave and all he withheld, all he hid and all he revealed.
David Bowie, 1947-2016, was a Starman, a man who fell to earth, an alien, an artist, but most of all, most of all, David Bowie was a human being.
Back when we had a stereo she’d load up that little thingamabob in the turntable with, I dunno, 5, 6, albums and let ‘er rip. Nowadays, she loads up the cd player and lets ‘er rip.
When I was little I loved the music and then I got older and teen-crabby and hated it and now that I’m not forced to listen to it I’m kind Eh about the whole thing.
AbsurdBeats 