Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad.

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"Should anyone ask you,
'who composed this song?'
Should anyone ask you,
'who composed this song?'
Say, 'It was I! and
I sing it all day long.'"

Nice verse summing up the idea of folk music/all popular music from Worried Man Blues. You are the author of these thoughts, whether you know it or not.

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Interesting joke from John Lennon here. He mockingly refers to this song as being from 1822, deriding its old fashioned sound. But Johnny Burnette recorded the original in 1957, and I think this session is 1963 at the latest. Did the early 60s change the musical landscape THAT much? I can't imagine someone joking about a Girls Aloud song from 6 years ago like that.


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Here's a selection of songs which are the only songs that I like by the artist that made them, if you get me. This actually means I have an unusually strong attachment to them; isolation increases passion.






I've talked about this one before and will continue to for a while. Easily in my top five videos ever. It was around the time of myspaces and full of myspace photo poses, which for a song about a fat girl being insecure is so great.



I feel like I should be ashamed of this one but that's not the way I do things like this.



I think the sentiment in this song is confused and poorly expressed, but the voice redeems it spectacularly.



I of course like Jay-Z, but this is the only time I like MOP's style of butch, macho cunt-rap. And it's all cos of that female vocal sample, which is spectacular. MOP rap clumsily and violently over the top, whilst the feminine quivers and squirms underneath the overbearing masculine, trying to seep up between the cracks of this charmless veneer with the faltering 'oh no' and 'do you believe' prayers which are offered not up to MOP, but higher still: to the listener.

"I don't claim to be no philosopher,
but I sure know, this isn't life."

A brief snippet of beauty at the start then MOP obliterate and ruin it, ignorant of the fragile distress underneath them.

Jay-Z is also on it and he is ok I guess.

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"I'll take my chances,
for romance is,
so important to me."

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Let's look at Wanda Jackson.



So that was amazing. And then:



"We think this is one of the most beautiful love songs that's ever been written"!!!!!

So, we're clearly in the presence of greatness. Wanda Jackson is exceptional for a number of reasons not least because she's absolutely fine about being completely removed of sex appeal (this will be a theme of this blog, btw nice article in the guardian recently about Polly Styrene's deliberate removal of herself from feminine sexuality) and female romantic platitude.

So:



To sing about love in a voice like that! I have two theories about it. It's either:

1) Meant to be a chain-smoker's voice; the sound of 3am end-of-a-twenty-deck heartbroken calls to no one.

or

2) Just deliberately ugly to remove oneself from emotional cliché.


They're of course not mutually exclusive, but I'm more tempted towards the second because of this:



25 seconds in, Wanda lets slip that plaintive, tender 'I love you' at the end of her shoegazings mumblings before a brutal sandpapered 'YEAHHH' comes in to affirm it. Wanda has moments of romantic normalcy bubbling underneath the surface, but covers it up with this anti-sexual voice. Which is great!

It's also assured by the fact that all her plain-singing songs about love are pretty much unexceptional and dull:



You can tell she'd rather be singing her voice in funnel of love here. The voice of battery acid, wasps and vinegar.

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'I Bid You Goodnight' by Any Old Time String Band (find it on spotify or buy it for 79p on amazon, I did both) is my favourite song right now. Here are the lyrics:

Lay down my dear sister
Won't you lay and take your rest
Won't you lay your head upon your saviours breast
And I love you but Jesus loves you the best
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.
One of these mornings bright and early and fine.
Goodnight, goodnight
Not a cricket not a spirit going to shout me on
Goodnight, goodnight
I go walking in the valley of the shadow of death
Goodnight, goodnight
And his rod and his staff shall comfort me
Goodnight, goodnight
Oh John the wine he saw the sign
Goodnight, goodnight
Oh John say I seen a number of signs
Goodnight, goodnight
Tell A for the ark that wonderful boat
Goodnight, goodnight
You know they built it on the land getting water to float
Goodnight, goodnight
Tell B for the beast at the ending of the wood
Goodnight, goodnight
You know it ate all the children when they wouldn't be good
Goodnight, goodnight
I remember quite well, I remember quite well
Goodnight, goodnight
I was walking in Jerusalem just like John
Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.



Ain't nothing I like more than Christianity for my pseudo-profundity (at a philosophy conference in Edinburgh recently I said that profundity and pseudo-profundity are the same thing when put to music and I could feel the collective intake of breath across the room).

I like it because it's about removing yourself from romantic and possibly sexual love in the aim of a higher cause (the jesus loves you the best couplet is one of my favs), which is nice. Then it's just a set of abstract, barely connected phrases which as we all know I'm very fond of as they're ripe for misinterpretation, which is where I come alive.

These aren't the exact lyrics on the original and I do recommend you seek it out but I got them from here which has some excellent poetry either end of them, which is mysterious but great.
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Gavin chastised me for liking Waugh, saying that he idealised the aristocracy that he claimed to lampoon. Martin Amis said something similar, saying Brideshead Revisited set egalitarianism as its target and unrelentingly gunned it down for 400 pages.

But I think they both miss the point and one of the reasons I really like Brideshead is it's about the idea that if you really want something, you to some extent already have/are that thing. Charles wants to be Sebastian, and when he gets his chance, he is better at being Sebastian than Sebastian ever can be. Some people, both in and out of the novel, accuse Charles of being cool and soulless, but in reality he is just calm and methodical in his acting out a life he's internally rehearsed thousands of times. Charles can seem ruthless but in reality is endeavouring to close the gulf between our private and public persona.

This song expresses a similar thing. A sexy song from the least sexy band ever. It reminds me of the Knife at points in its astonishing level of self-assurance. Fox knows what she is. Inside, we're all exactly what we want. Fox in this song is Charles around the time of his divorce: things are beginning to come apart in his plan, the world is not perfect and instead of getting upset he transcends himself to a yet higher realm, marrying Julia, and going for a more perfect union.

You know what, it comes back to I Bid You Goodnight, as everything in my life does at this moment. You spend an evening drinking and the whole world as you want it is laid out before your eyes, and you pull back and out, cos internal wranglings of the mind are better than anything he has to offer.

Internal sexual superiority and general, non-sexual romantic fantasy remains pure and intact when it's not put into use or practice.




"You thought it'd be great,
You thought it'd be great,
But a good mind does not a good fuck make"

-The Fall




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Just do not need this kind of song in my life at the moment. AND YET IT MOVES.

Complex simplicity

Driving your pedigree dog across the country for it to have sex with another dog for money.

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Two songs which are commonly misunderstood and/or barely listened to properly.



It's a song about ringing up every guy you know and begging them for sex. Which is a great thing to write a song about. Complete, wanton, all-encompassing desperation. But people dance to this at weddings!



The Fully Monty made it a comedy song, which is so unfortunate, as it's surely one of the best disco hits. Those opening chords, sounding just like the tide coming in and out, then consolidated with that guitar, the one cohesive constant as pitch-shifted bongos drip and drop behind.

But listen! to the lyrics. Because in what way is sex the main theme here? Just saying 'you sexy thing' does not make it an anthem for impregnation.

'Yesterday,
I was one of the lonely people,
But now you're lying close to me,
Making love to me.'

Akin to:

'Wow, I can't believe yesterday morning I was trying to jerk off over Toni's answer-phone message, and this morning...!'

In both these quotes, the sex is the secondary consideration but you, you, you think otherwise, cos you don't care do you! The primary emotion, overriding all else, is the surprise and shock that someone wants you. A miracle. It's a reversal of 'Yesterday', with the same central message: nothing in the world makes sense when someone stops loving you, but when they start it is equally incomprehensible but we forget.

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You know when you really think about it, I mean really think about it, Thomas the Tank Engine is about the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonic flourishing in both animate and inanimate objects. Think about it. Think it through.

I first noticed it when watching this which I was watching because I really like the song. I'm not sure why it exists.




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Some recent reviews:


Tropics - Soft Vision

James Blake - Klavierwerke

Glasser - Ring

Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights

I like my ever-growing habit of putting links to reviews of recent music in posts where I talk about songs that are 30 years old, don't you? Eh? Mate? Eh mate?

You're not God's, you're one of mine.

Rufus Wainwright has appeared a lot doing excessively good songs on the soundtracks of reasonably bad films. Here's a quick guide.



Apparently this was for a film called Meet the Robinsons, which as far as I can tell is a pixar/psuedopixar cartoon thing. The use of extremely mature ideas of love in a kids' film is interesting. What could a child get from this other than beauty? And, as such, why did pixar/wannabepixar commission it?

'With arm pointing and the other arm holding your hand'- nice. Echoes of 'Love is not looking inwardly to one another, but looking outward in the same direction' whoever it was that said that.



This, my favourite version of Hallelujah ever, was commissioned for, of all things, a Shrek film. I haven't seen the film where it's used, but judging from the first Shrek film, which I have seen, they like to make strong use of kitschy cultural allusions to bolster the timelessness of the fairytales which they're all about. Still, it seems odd to have such a subversive version of such a subversise song for a project which involves Mike Myers.

Incidentally, 'Michael Myers Resplendent' was a Mountain Goats song title I adored when I thought it was about Mike Myers, and liked a lot less when I learnt that Michael Myers is the name of the serial killer from the Halloween series of horror films. It seems much less witty now, because it is.



This is from the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. Rufus has a way with opening couplets, see the 'I pray for the power to stay/ in love with you' from Low Grade Happiness as a celestially perfect example. And this is another good example.



Silly fantasy dress-up from the soundtrack to a Howard Hughes biopic. Seems a bit trivial but consider:

"I got the blues,
And up above it's so fair,
Shoes,
Come and and carry me there."

Not dissimilar to My Sweet Lord in its cry for heaven. Or 'where is my mind' in its combination of the highest metaphysical with the lowest common experience. To bring the listener up to heaven's door, then drag them down as low as possible with the word 'shoes' in all its ludicrous, everyday tawdriness.

For a long time when I was young I thought the Beach Boys lyric, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we were older/Then we wouldn't have to wait so long?' meant wait so long to die. Which says many things.



This song as sung by Rufus wasn't in the History Boys, so I don't know what it's doing on the soundtrack. The song is in the film; Posner sings it to Dakin in a moment of all-too-often emotional honesty across a room full of sneering adolescent condescension. Later in the play, we learn that Posner eventually turns into a new and not-improved version of Hector, and thus such pathetically dogged, lowly moments like this represent the absolute high points of his entire romantic life as he prepares to spend the rest of his years continuing to stare at boys across the classroom.

"I'm not happy, but I'm not unhappy about that." says Posner, summing up Rufus' corpus of work well.