150favoritesongs

[150favoritesongs]

#6: "Sir Greendown" by Janelle Monáe

Propelled by a sense of guilt at having neglected this blog for so long, here is song #6 on the heels of #5 – “Sir Greendown” by Janelle Monáe, released on her masterful The ArchAndroid in 2010.  Janelle Monáe is one of my top female artists and a personal hero of mine, whose work is incredibly complex and informed by a well-documented range of influences.  Monáe is known for playing the character of Cindi Mayweather, an android on the run for the crime of falling in love with a human, in the tradition of Sun Ra claiming to be an angel child from Saturn.

“Sir Greendown” is two minutes of tranquility in between the sweet despair of “Locked Inside” and the impassioned call to arms of “Cold War”.  Rock Genius summarizes it thusly: “…a love song from Cyndi [sic] Mayweather to her human lover Anthony Greendown.�� This song, lyrically and musically, takes its cues from medieval romance adventures, plucking deliberate symbols to evoke notions of chivalry and storybook love.”  I will be ignoring the rest of the Rock Genius commentary.

The lush instrumentation reminds me of the Wall of Sound girl groups, but unlike Phil Spector’s willful excess this seems almost effortless and minimalist.  The synth-organ thing delivers a simple riff supported by dainty percussion and a guitar that sounds delicate enough to be a lute, while the background vocals sound truly otherworldly.  “Sir Greendown,” Janelle coos.  “Come wake me in the night.  The dragon wants a bite of our love.”  Here the traditional menace of medieval lore is subverted – rather than wanting to devour any maidens (I’m thinking of the legend of St. George), the dragon is complicit in Cindi’s romance.  This subversion is made especially clear with the parallel melodies of the first line and the second line up until the rhyme of “bite” with “night”, creating a sort of ellipsis until the sentence is completed: “The dragon wants a bite…of our love”.

The key shifts to a darker B flat minor and the background vocals open up into eerie, disjointed aaaahh’s while the organ becomes much more complicated, and Janelle begins to talk in dreamlike symbols: “The flower and the golden hand, wooden wings and clouds of sand.”  The first pair of images seems to evoke the joy of Cindi and Anthony’s forbidden love, conjuring up the image of a hand offering a flower to one’s beloved.  There is also the idea of a golden hand literally being a golden hand – the metallic hand of our android protagonist.  The second pair of images is more desolate: wings denote the idea of escaping, but that they are “wooden” has connotations of falseness, calling to mind the metaphorical use of the word “wooden” to mean stiff or unmoving.  One might also think of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wants to be a real boy – which ties in with Cindi Mayweather’s dilemma of being an android.  The “clouds of sand”, meanwhile, are reminiscent of bleak, parched landscapes.

We go back to the honeyed verses: “Sir Greendown, let’s leave in an hour.  Meet me at the tower, ride your horse.”  The terseness of these commands are at odds with the continued meditativeness of the piece, and it becomes even more apparent that Cindi is merely daydreaming about her absent lover coming to rescue her in the surreal images that follow with the shift to the minor key: “Here the dolphins walk like men, here the cyborgs have a plan”.  In other words, Cindi wishes that Anthony would take her away to a place and time when she will no longer be persecuted, and she pleads: “Sir Greendown, I need your shining light”.  A pause for a couple of bars before she pleads again: “Let’s leave in an hour.  Meet me at the tower,” adding candidly “I’m in love”.  The minor part starts up again, with just the eerie harmonies, before the song ends on a major key, as if Cindi is clinging to hope as she waits to see Anthony again.

“Sir Greendown” is the first characterization we get of the inner Cindi Mayweather, where the crime that she is being persecuted for is shown for what it is, a mere romance.  The medieval/fantasy imagery lends Cindi’s longing for Anthony a quality of childlike innocence, which in turn amplifies the evil of those who would punish her for it.  It is 2:21 a.m. in London and I am too tired to write a concluding sentence.  Something about the well-known connections between Janelle’s android thing and the oppressed everywhere, and how the song shows that it is human nature (no pun intended) for sweet, simple emotions like romantic love to come about even in the worst of circumstances.

The song:

[150favoritesongs]

#5: "Touch" by the Outsiders, covered by the Thanes

After an extended absence fueled by a rather hectic September (I am beginning to doubt my ability to reach 150!), today’s song is “Touch” by the Outsiders, a Dutch product of the garage/freakbeat boom of the 1960s (not to be confused with the American band of the same name).  I actually first heard the song as a cover version by the Thanes of Edinburgh, Scotland, released on their Hey Girl + 3 EP in 1987.  I am usually rather snobbish about covers and will often migrate to the original after getting into a cover, but I think this faster, harsher-sounding cover is as good as the original and deserves equal attention.

I became obsessed with this song at roughly 1:30-2:00 a.m. one day following a lengthy Nardwuar binge, having seen his interview with the Thanes’ Glaswegian contemporaries, the Vaselines.   He presents them with a Thanes LP, and they mention sharing a studio with the Thanes during the recording of Dum-Dum.  I did a quick YouTube search and found this treasure of a song, listening to it probably about 10 times that night, and I probably listened to it a few hundred more times since then (I wrote earlier about my addictive personality) before listening to the original probably a few dozen times.  This song is particularly illustrative of why I enjoy garage rock so much.

We are first introduced to the riff, a basic I-IV-bvii-biii.  The chords are embellished with little bits before each chord that are a step lower.  (customary napkin disclaimer: I am hopelessly musically illiterate and if you could tell me what this device is called that would be nice).  The riff becomes more syncopated as the thumping percussion joins it, based on a pattern that I found out is called a habanera.  I have heard variations in several 1960s psych/garage drumbeats, usually involving the interspersing of a habanera in the middle of something else (e.g. the Monks’ “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy” [boom-habanera-sixteenths] and that part 1:37 into Captain Beefheart’s “Autumn’s Child” [boom-boom-habanera]; both songs will have their own entry at some point I DIGRESS).  The Outsiders have a gentler, cymbal-heavy approach, while The Thanes have a more snare-heavy approach (or perhaps better mixing.)  A wailing harmonica joins in, never to be seen again in the song.  This reminds me of the harmonica solo near the end of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators’ iconic “You’re Gonna Miss Me”, which also happens to boast a catchy four-chord riff taking up the entire song (except for the bridge).

Before the vocals, we hear a V and then a IV, echoing the tail end of a twelve-bar blues, and the central topic is established:

Well touch

Yeah I touched your hand

By accident

So touch

I didn't understand to touch you

But I touched her hand

These are the lyrics of the original – the Thanes seem to have somewhat adapted the Outsiders’ clunky English to that of a native speaker.  While Wally Tax’s sly, mercurial vocal gives the sense of a happy accident, Lenny Helsing’s even more impassioned delivery brings the sexual frustration of the protagonist who cannot move beyond touching his girl’s hand to the fore.

The verse is ended with the same V-IV pattern as he mentions that she “looked at me/Oh I could see her eyes” and we return to the main riff, where she may be giving in after all – “Were just as I hoped/Just as I hoped they would be”, before the conflict is established again: “I said touch baby/I didn't mean to touch you/But I didn't stop your hand.”  Again, that V-IV as the protagonist does not lose hope: “Well she looks so understanding/Try to look so recommanding and” where the Outsiders seem to have confused “recommending” with its Dutch equivalent, recommanderen, and the Thanes retain this malapropism for the rhyme’s sake.

This is followed by the song’s highlight, the “chorus” where the harsh chords break down, the percussion is reduced to a soft patter that gradually fades out, and a rock and roll song about sex becomes a wistful folk air.  As eBay seller freakbeatfuzz puts it: “Essential Dutch beat! This is the epitome of Nederbeat! Switches from folky to freakbeatbeat [sic] over and over again!”  This part I believe the Outsiders carry off better; the percussion is subtler and the vocal is either superior or just mixed better.  The lyrics concurrently romanticize the conflict a bit more:

She held my hand so tight

We didn't speak a word

And I stayed right by her side

That's how we spend the night

A quiet bass drum on the first and last beats of each measure signals the buildup to the freakbeat/garage phase again, and here the original lyrics and the Thanes’ adaptation amusingly diverge from each other.

I held her hand in mine

Made me feel so fine down there [Thanes: “inside”]

While poring over an original Outsiders 45 at In Your Ear in Boston recently, I asked the clerk, who was a huge fan of the Outsiders and Nederbeat in general, whether Messrs. Splinter and Tax had actually meant “down there” or whether they simply had a poor grasp of English.  The clerk contended that Wally Tax had a pretty decent grasp of English and was probably just being crude.  I hadn’t thought to ask him why, then, the Thanes felt the need to change the lyric.  Whether the Outsiders did indeed write a precursor to Next’s “Too Close” is a question that is probably best left to a native Dutch speaker who would be able to identify an unfortunately imported idiom. 

We then go right back to a repetition of the first verse, sung with more urgency in both versions.  As if to add to this renewed intensity,  the bit after the twelve-bar tail end is changed to the second person, directly addressing the companion: “Yeah you look at me/That I could see your eyes/Were just as I hoped/As I hoped they would be”.  After this rehashing of the main conflict, we re-enter the folky phase:

I've been with her all night long

Sharing a feeling that grew strong

We found ourselves a love

That couldn't possibly go wrong

I still hold her hand in mine

And it still makes me feel so fine

As it was

These lines suggest that the relationship has been fully consummated – after the feeling “grew strong”, a love was found.  I am inclined to think that the phrase “couldn’t possibly go wrong” is somewhat ironic and well-suited to this pensive, quiet part.  The song ends with an assurance that holding her hand is just as exciting as it was at the beginning of the song, while the phrase “as it was” is suggestive of a transition of sorts having occurred.  Interestingly, The Thanes have truncated this line, perhaps in the interest of a suitable final chord for their more guitar-heavy version.

I had said earlier that “Touch” illustrates why I love garage rock so much, and this is because it is sophisticated in its simplicity; while taking us through various emotions (lust, frustration, nostalgia, charming glimmers of romantic love) we never leave the same basic hook for the entire duration of the song.  I suspect that this is much of what rock and roll is about.

Outsiders original:

Thanes cover:

[150favoritesongs]

#4: "Love Can Be Cruel" by the Chantays

After a long delay (apologies to my millions of zealous fans; my agent is currently contacting TMZ to dispel rumors that I have overdosed and entered rehab), today’s song is by the Chantays, one of the great surf bands of the 1960s known for their instrumental “Pipeline” and for proving that electric pianos belong in surf music.  Unlike the Pipeline album (1963), Two Sides of the Chantays (1964), the album containing today’s song, has a sprinkling of songs with vocals among the usual assortment of arresting instrumentals.  Most of these are fairly bland, generically early-to-mid 1960s drivel (in my opinion) except for “Only if You Care” (to some extent) and “Love Can Be Cruel”.  In fact I feel slightly guilty that I am writing about this Chantays song first and not one of their remarkable instrumentals.  Anyway, I am especially partial to “Love Can Be Cruel” for reasons I will attempt to dissect below.

The drums are the loudest that they will ever be and the guitars announce themselves with a single chord each before the vocals kick in.  The vocals are very heavily emphasized to the detriment of the instruments, as if this band whose biggest hit was an instrumental is a little overzealous about showing that they do songs with words too.  To be fair, the vocals are at the core of this song, while the lyrics are the sort a sixth grader would write about a failed schoolyard fling (but still highly effective!):

When you find out that he doesn’t:

Want you

Care

Love you

The vocals are endearingly off-key, and the background vocals are rich, unrefined awooooo’s matching the first note of each line.  The harmonies slowly and beautifully split apart for the last line in the verse, “He’ll be waiting there.”  Then comes the chorus with another schoolyard (but valid!) insight: “’Cause love (love), love (love), love (love), love (love), love can be cruel when your love doesn’t love you.”  The chorus transitions from G# minor to B major during the “love”’s, while the background “love”’s remain in G# minor; then after the line “Love can be cruel” we transition back to G# minor in time for the second verse:

Now I really know that I:

Really love you

Really care

Can’t live without you

After the next chorus comes the bridge, where the lead vocal is sung in B major and the background vocals sort of remain in G# major: “My heart’s full of pain when someone says your name.  I sit home all alone waiting for you to phone.”  The sound is a bit more gloomy and wistful than your standard surf rock love song, and this effect continues with the electric piano solo.  Technical skill is not really a priority with Chantays keyboard solos – this one simply repeats the melody of the verses – but the impact is there, as with every other Chantays song with keyboards.  Perhaps it’s the hollow cleanness of the piano among the dirty, growling guitars.  The bridge is repeated once again, possibly betraying that they knew this was the most impressive section, and the song ends with a recap of the second verse, where “He’ll be waiting there” is sung twice with no harmony, the harmony being delayed until the last repetition.

“Love Can Be Cruel” is not the Chantays’ most proficient track, but it is the best with vocals that they can muster on this album.  The intense, dark harmonies and quintessential piano are emblematic of their ability to elaborate upon the surf rock genre in very distinctive ways.

The song:

[150favoritesongs]

#3: "Bedlam on the Mezzanine" by the Siddeleys

I have somewhat recovered from the Mothers wiping the floor with my brain (FZ will be wiping the floor with my brain several more times over the course of this project), and today I will write about a fairly straightforward indie pop number: “Bedlam on the Mezzanine” by the Siddeleys, first released in 1987.

I have a very addictive personality, so when I first got into this song I listened to it several times in a row every day.  I was at a job that was a 20-minute walk from where I live, and I would listen to this song roughly ten times walking there in the morning and ten more times walking back, and probably listen to it several times in a row whilst working.

Before I start talking about notes and chords and stuff, allow me to reiterate that I have no music theory background.  Now that I’ve gotten the disclaimer equivalent of Steven Spielberg’s napkin prenup out of the way, let us proceed.

We are first introduced to the riff, which at its base is E-D-F#.  The lead guitar lavishes little melodies within the key of each chord on this riff in a way that leaves the song’s key somewhat ambiguous until the lead vocals begin in E minor, ushered in by the first of the ethereal oohs that bob along through the verses.  The vocals maintain that sort of key ambiguity, with various points at which it sounds like it could be in B minor and F minor.  I have no idea what to say about that music theory-wise but it’s a cool thing.

A note before I begin analyzing lyrics: here is what I found on the band’s website in the “Lyrics” section:

Johnny was reluctant for lyrics to be put up on the site. Here's what she had to say about this questionable practice.

"I don't approve of song lyrics written down. It's like cutting up a mouse in a school biology class - once you've slit it open and investigated its innards you know how it moves and how it breaths, but once you've done it, the mouse can neither move nor breath - it's a dead thing. Sometimes it's better just to believe…

Sorry, boo.  (To be fair, she acknowledges the necessity of posting the lyrics on the basis of their being “a historical document” since they were written so long ago.  Thanks, boo.)

 Johnny Johnson opens in medias res on a night out, nudging us on with a string of rhymed admonitions: “Crash the gate, don’t be late, the boys at the Mecca [some nightclub, I suppose] will not wait.”  The next line continues in this vein, but there is a decided turn for the poetic after “It’s half past nine, the bus is on time”; the nightclub is now marked by the personified “coloured bulbs” which “beckon to the shrine.”  This line, along with some others in the song, at first struck me as the work of a literary try-hard, but much of the song is driven by the way in which Johnson switches registers with such facility between the earnest teenager and the poetic observer.

Johnson continues to piece together the scene with various details presented one after the other in sharp focus: “The high heel place with the chewing gum face, beer and hairspray, the thrill of the chase.”  Switching registers again, the fumbling sexual encounters of adolescence are charmingly described with the ingenuous euphemism “desperate love stuff in the dark.”

Then that pre-chorus/chorus (depending on how you view the structure of the song) comes in with a key change and a basic G#-F# riff changing to E at the last line.  The change in the riff coincides with Johnson’s plunge into heady, callow emotions: “I hope tomorrow never comes/Every moment should be like this/I hope tomorrow never comes/I want to go in a blaze of bliss.”  What is interesting here is that the chords and background vocals at first establish the new key as G# major, while each line of the lead vocal is in G# minor, G# major, G# major, and B major respectively.

The next verse appears to continue in the “teenage” register in the first line “Mary for Paul on the concrete wall” before Johnson extrapolates on this simple image in the “poetic observer” register.  The young lovers’ graffiti becomes a protective spell as the instructive tone of the song’s first lines is taken up once again: “write it large and no harm will befall this boy/girl dream”.  The song then takes a dark turn as we are shown a dismal flash-forward of what happens when tomorrow comes, as “dream” is quickly rhymed with “silent scream,” which itself is rhymed with “means all’s not as perfect as it seems”.  This technique of rhymes quickly strung together that served the excitement of the first verse so well is now manipulated to pile future woes upon the revelers as efficiently as possible.  Johnson continues with the theme of superstition in relating the lovers’ misery, this time focusing on a bad omen rather than a good-luck spell: a “smashed compact mirror” (adapting the superstition to an item found in the purse of many a girl-about-town) that sentences them to “seven years of high-rise nothing and endless tears.”  They have traded their “beer and hairspray, the thrill of the chase” in the first verse for the mundane “washing lines, TV times, petty rows and petty crimes.”

The pre-chorus/chorus reaffirms “I hope tomorrow never comes,” this time with the very dexterously phrased sentiment “I need to crawl into a kiss.”  This conveys a sort of vulnerability in the face of time’s ruthlessness.  I am not sure whether to read the line “Six months may be half a year, but it’s forever when it’s spent like this” in light of the first verse or of the second – whether the good times or the bad times are what seems to drag on.  Or perhaps it’s meant to be read both ways?

The bridge part has a basic two-chord riff (F#-E), and Johnson manages to sound mournful in a major key (F#) as she repeats the phrase “Tied-up trust” four times; on the last two, she exquisitely veers toward B major, where she stays for the chorus-chorus where the song’s title appears.  Here there is another two-chord riff (B-E) as Johnson gives the glum verdict, again in a major key: “It just leads to monstrous scenes/Bedlam on the mezzanine/It just leads to monstrous scenes/Better then to sob in silence.”  Here, the image of a weekend brawl is used as a microcosm for the grief that young love can lead to.  Nevertheless it’s right back to the giddy rush of “Crash the gate, don’t be late, the boys at the Mecca will not wait” and we return to square one, until the verse ends and we skip the youthful future-shunning straight to the central problem of “tied-up trust.”  This is made to directly follow “desperate love-stuff in the dark”, almost as if conveying that the latter leads to the former.  We hear the verdict twice more before the end of the song, with the last repetition specifying that it is love that leads to monstrous scenes, and “better then to sob in silence” repeated three times just in case we still thought the song was optimistic.

“Bedlam on the Mezzanine” is an expert play on poppy themes of youth and romance.  Johnson’s unflappable delivery breezily illustrates the pitfalls of both, while the constant push and pull between different keys almost reflects the titular bedlam; the guitar, bass and drums, meanwhile, stay as brisk and effervescent as any catchy pop tune.  Sorry, Johnny, your mouse is pretty dead now.

The song:

[150favoritesongs]

#2: (That time I wrote 2,500 words about) "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" by the Mothers of Invention

Those of you who know me well are smiling because they know that I am incapable of blogging about my 150 favorite songs without mentioning Frank Zappa.

A slightly off-topic preface: At a party a few months ago, I found myself in a deep conversation with my dear friend A. about how I haven’t been that pleased with my gap year.  A. is fond of Ani diFranco and has a bottomless vault of Ani diFranco quotations in his head for any life situation, and so he recited:

“Maybe you don't like your job

Maybe you didn't get enough sleep

Well, nobody likes their job

Nobody got enough sleep

Maybe you just had

The worst day of your life

But, you know, there's no escape

And there's no excuse

So just suck up and be nice”

I replied with a pertinent quote from today’s song:

“BE A LO—YAL—PLAS—TIC—RO—BOT—FOR—A—WORLD—THAT—DOES—N’T—CAAAAAAARE!”

This line cuts to the heart of “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”, a critique of mainstream society and its adherents; this critique runs through Zappa’s prodigious discography, especially during the Mothers of Invention era.

(NOTE: I am doing this song a disservice by isolating it from the context of the “M.O.I. American Pageant” suite on side two of the Absolutely Free LP (1967) for the purposes of analysis.  To this I will merely say that I promise to analyze the rest of the suite, which is equally engaging, as one “song” at a later date.)

Despite the fact that I do not agree with everything he did (this parenthetical was going to be a laundry list of things he did that I am not a fan of before I realized I lacked the space), Frank Zappa is one of the most intellectually challenging and engaging composers that I have encountered in my meager twenty-two years of existence.  His work has touched me (Been In Me, might we say?) and will always have a place in my heart.  “Brown Shoes” to me is a microcosm of everything I love, do not love and feel guilty about loving about this man—notoriously, at the core of this song is a rather vivid description of hebephilia/child molestation (see how I worked a trigger warning in there? so clever).

His secretary during that era, Pauline Butcher, questioned this aspect of “Brown Shoes” after being made to transcribe the lyrics of Absolutely Free for a mail-order libretto as her first assignment.  As related in her memoir, Freak Out!: My Life with Frank Zappa, a book which I highly recommend, he begins to rationalize the entire album, track by track, as Butcher jots down his words in shorthand.  According to Butcher, he offers this explanation: “‘“Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” is a song about the unfortunate people who manufacture inequitable laws and ordinances, perhaps unaware of the fact that the restrictions they place on the young people in a society are the result of their own sexual frustrations.  Dirty old men have no business running your country.’” (p.22)  A textbook example of Zappa’s curious ideas about various aspects of society, which he would collate into The Real Frank Zappa Book around twenty years later.

“Brown Shoes” begins with a bluesy rock romp somewhat reminiscent of “Why Don’t’cha Do Me Right?”, a song recorded in the same period and unceremoniously dropped between the two sides of the album in the CD reissue.   I will admit that I have no idea what they mean when they begin to sing “Brown shoes don’t make it!”  The other line in this section, “Quit school!  Why fake it?” is pretty self-explanatory, falling into place with Zappa’s well-known stance on formal education, as laid out in the liner notes for the first Mothers of Invention album, Freak Out! (1966): “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read…”

There is then a quick transition to the next section.  In order to properly describe what is going on musically, I will cite the heroic Kasper Sloot, whose remarkably extensive documentation of Zappa’s every musical move can be found on http://www.zappa-analysis.com.  Thank you, Mr. Sloot.  He describes this next section thusly: “The riff changes overnight into a section with straight rhythms in a 4/4 movement. It starts with a sequence that is chromatically repeated instead of within a key. Thus the key changes with every bar using a different scale…The scales, when taken as major, are in following order C, D flat, C, B flat and A.”  Despite this relative complexity, enhanced by the roleplay seen in the varying voices of each Mother, the lines are innocently straightforward in their simple trochaic structure, giving a fragmented description of the life of a young member of mainstream society: “TV dinner by the pool” – dining on that iconic symbol of convenience and mass consumption while enjoying the centerpiece of a bourgeois suburban household; “Watch your brother grow a beard” – passively observing the impact of contemporary counterculture while remaining unaffected by it; “Got another year of school” – better to pay attention to your own priorities; “You’re okay, he’s too weird” – again, stubbornly remaining unaffected by the counterculture.  Before I go on to the plumber bit, I just realized that this is a sort of call-and-response quatrain with an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme, and each A line reflects life in mainstream society and each B line reflects mainstream society’s removal from the counterculture and insistence on normalcy, the same insistence on normalcy that will lead our protagonist down depraved paths.

At any rate, then comes a couplet marked by its boneheaded internal rhyme, both giving society’s expectations and once again singling out the bearded brother for criticism: “Be a plumber, he’s a bummer/He’s a bummer every summer”.  This couplet builds up to the vehemently plaintive line that I quoted at the beginning of this post: “Be a loyal plastic robot for a world that doesn’t care.”  The didactic tone continues but with an added tinge of frivolity, in the jingle-like “Smile at every ugly!” (mockingly echoed by the accompaniment in a different key) followed by “Shine on your shoes and cut your hair!”, which ends the second section.  I doubt that the similarity of the melody of this line to the ending of the Looney Tunes theme is at all coincidental; it highlights the Mothers’ disdain for conformity.

We re-enter the bluesy-rocky bit, where our protagonist embarks on adulthood after shining on his shoes and cutting his hair.  Societal expectations take the form of blunt call-and-response chants, here in a caricatured working-class New York accent (it is worth noting that Zappa by contrast was based in southern California), conveying the bustle of a large city filled with busy people: “Be a joik!  (Go to woik!)…Do your job and do it right!”  The emptiness of such a life is evident in the irony of “Life’s a ball!  TV tonight!” and the fatalism of “Do ya love it, do ya hate it, there it is, the way you made it.”  The section ends with a “Waaaaaaaahhhhh” and an elaborate boom-crash before the next section.

This section is nightmarish.  The music slows into an ominous 3/4 piano with a minimal guitar riff as we are re-introduced to the protagonist as the pervy politician.  The Mothers take up the role of a Greek chorus, singing the exposition with dour theatricality: “A world of secret hungers/Perverting the men who make your laws/Every desire is hidden away/In a drawer, in a desk by a Naugahyde chair/On a rug where they walk…and drool!  Past the girls in the office!”  Sloot points out that this passage gets more and more atonal.  I would say that this reflects how animal-like these politicians and their desires are beneath their shined shoes and cut hair, as does the next passage of foul-sounding, flatulent panting.

This panting brings us to a case study of “the back of the City Hall mind”, accompanied by a sparse, tense orchestral bit which Sloot helpfully characterizes as an “intermezzo”.  And what is in the back of the City Hall mind?  “A dream…of a girl…about…thirteen!”  The stakes have been raised – the mention of the “girls in the office” has up to this point led us to believe that the objects of these politicians’ lust are their secretaries, who would be at least in their late teens.  But instead we have launched right into the sex offender theme in more graphic terms – “Off with her clothes and into a bed” – and even more graphic terms, sung in a deranged voice: “where she tickles his fancy all night long”.

I am now somewhat uncomfortable analyzing this song in the context of a blog about my favorite songs.  Perhaps there is a difference between being fascinated by a song and the song being your favorite.  While I take a break, as a side note it is worth mentioning that coincidentally one of the Mothers at the time of Absolutely Free, Roy Estrada, is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for child molestation that is not even his first conviction.  As another side note, we can draw a parallel between how Zappa here uses shocking images of child molestation to attack moralizing politicians and how Zappa elsewhere uses shocking images of rape to attack American ideals of masculinity (“Would you go all the way for the USO?�� Lift up your dress if the answer is no.”)

I think I’m ready to continue.  So there is this lazy, foot-dragging swingy section where in a nasal monotone our Greek chorus explains: “His wife’s attending an orchid show.  She squealed for a week to get him to go.”  A saxophone mimes the wife’s squealing with a protracted yelp.  And then, in a lighter tone, reflecting the husband’s bliss at having opted out – “But back in the bed, his teenage queen” – a honeyed strings section sets a romantic scene – “is rocking and rolling and acting obscene!”  We then hear a one-dimensional, pantomimic aural representation of sex, a feminine voice chanting “Baby!  Baby!” followed by a faster version of the flatulent panting heard earlier, then again “Baby!  Baby!”, then again flatulent panting.  The girl, being coerced into the act with the help of the politician’s age and authority, robotically enacts her role as “lover”, calling him “baby” while experiencing no pleasure; the politician, meanwhile, is enjoying himself like the animal he is.

The panting continues before another transition to a little starry-eyed doo-wop bit that spares no irony.  This is first made clear in the first few lines, where the romantic medium of doo-wop is used to call attention to the animalistic, physical reactions of this man’s unappealing body: “Oh, he loves it, he loves it, it curls up his toes/She bites his fat neck and it lights up his nose”.  I wonder if the next line, “But he cannot be fooled, old City Hall Fred” might mean that she is trying to hurt him to get away but he is interpreting her bites as erotic?  And then the foul “She’s nasty, she’s nasty, she digs it in bed.”  Then another one of these intermezzo things, where trumpets blast out some sort of twisted fanfare, before a disconcertingly sentimental lounge bit on the piano: “Do it again, and do it some more/That does it, by golly/It’s nasty for sure/Nasty, nasty, nasty”.  And, again reminding us that she is thirteen, you can almost see the vile City Hall Fred wiping a proud tear as he enthuses “Only thirteen, and she knows how to nasty.”  The Greek chorus joins in as the upbeat melody continues, taking up City Hall Fred’s viewpoint that the decidedly underage girl is simply “A dirty young mind, corrupt and corroded!  Well she’s thirteen today, and I hear she gets loaded!”  City Hall Fred seems to approve with complacent humming in the background.

The next section is one of the most disturbing, so I am going to go get a snack and think about puppies and rainbows and collect my thoughts.  So it gets sparse and nightmarish again, this time with weird synthy noises.  “If she were my daughter, I’d uh…” someone, presumably Fred, intones, decisively at first before trailing off.  The stakes are raised again when the voice of an even younger girl (I read somewhere that the daughter of Zappa’s manager Herb Cohen did the voice at seven) responds “What would you do, Daddy?”  He repeats “If she were my daughter, I’d…” a few more times, and each time he repeats it he disconcertingly seems to warm up more and more to the idea of molesting his own daughter.  Meanwhile, the same innocent “What would you do, Daddy?”

And then the Greek chorus launches right into a blithe swing ditty that is also most troubling section of the song: “Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup and strap her on again, oh baby!  Smother that girl in chocolate syrup and strap her on again!  She’s a teenage baby, and she turns me on!  I’d like to make her do a nasty on the White House lawn!  Gonna smother my daughter in chocolate syrup and boogie till the cows come home!”  I confess that I have often gigglecringed at this part because it is so terrible and so well-executed – we think the worst possible line has been crossed with such a vivid depiction of a grave sexual taboo and that this is as far as “Brown Shoes” will venture, and that incest would give our legislator pause.  But no, our pervy politician is willing to commit underage incest and is into food kink and would commit underage incest in public at the seat of the United States government.

It is here that we are called back to reality from these unnerving scenes with a slow, bare-bones lounge tune sung by a single voice: “Time to go home, Madge [a name often used in Zappa’s work for frumpy wives; see the Zappa Wiki Jawaka entry] is on the phone.”  And, as if he were the choragos of this piece, our Greek chorus clarifies: “Gotta meet the Gurneys and a dozen grey attorneys.”  Of course.  Then the motif of “TV dinner by the pool” returns, this time rhymed with “I’m so glad I finished school.”  This represents a regression to the desires of the suburban kid who didn’t want to be like his bearded weirdo brother.  This suburban kid is now self-actualized as a powerful adult, abominable sexual preferences and all, and however much these politicians might be “dirty old men” who “have no business running your country”:

“LIFE—

IS—

SUCH—

A—

BALL—

I—

RUN—

THE—

WORLD—

FROM—

CI—TY—

HALL!”

Then that frenzied 5/8 coda before the album closes out with “America Drinks and Goes Home”.

You know, I thought yesterday that doing a song as simple as “52 Girls” was like squeezing blood from stones and that doing a Zappa piece would give me more to comment on, but it just gave me the opposite problem.  If I’m not still fatigued tomorrow, I will do a simpler song for #3.

The song:

[150favoritesongs]

#1: "52 Girls" by the B-52s

My inaugural post is about “52 Girls” by the B-52s, the second track on their Eponymous Debut Album released in 1979.  According to common lore, the B-52s of Athens, Georgia were formed following a drunken jam session, and it is almost with a jam session mentality that this song opens – Keith Strickland leading with a rousing drumbeat before the rhythm guitar enters with the preliminary rumblings of a two-chord riff.  (I have long felt that this is the real beginning of the album, rather than the menacing secret-agent strut of “Planet Claire”.)  Ricky Wilson overlays this with something more melodious, as the equally melodious Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson display their well-documented supernatural ability to sing in complete unison; true to the song’s title, they begin to list the names of (not all) fifty-two girls: “Effie, Madge, Mabel, Biddie, see them on the beach or in New York City!  Tina, Louise, and Hazel and Mavis…”  The two guitars then reconcile into a single sweeping riff while Kate and Cindy finally split into harmony as the chorus asks: “Can you name, na-ame, na-a-ame, name them today?”

While the guitars split up again, Kate and Cindy re-synchronize in the second verse, taking up a slightly different, somewhat more urgent melody while continuing to name the girls: Wanda and Janet and Ronnie and “Reeeeeeeebaaaaaaa oooohhooohhhoooohhhh”.  The guitars rejoin each other for another sweeping riff (SIDE NOTE: that riff, I-iiib-IV [plus a negligible V at the tail], is very familiar in popular music, although the only other example I can think of is the verse section of Boney M’s “Wanna Go Home” whose potency was sampled for Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand” but Boney M borrowed heavily from “Hallo Bimmelbahn” I DIGRESS) telling us that Kate and Cindy are once again going to tell us something very important: that these are the girls of the USA, the principal girls of the USA.  And can we name them today?

After we hear Ricky’s amazing riff by itself, Kate and Cindy assert their presence again.  This time they are gleefully self-referential, beginning with “Kate!  Kate, Cindy…”  And lest we forget: Crystal, and Candy, Mercedes, and Joan.  Two pairs, “Betty and Brenda” and “Susie and Anita”, merit a nod from Keith on the drums, while Kate and Cindy take up their urgency once again as they wail about Bebe and “Jaaaaaack, Jackiiiiieee Ooooooooo”.

As you see, the general trend in “52 Girls” is that, for all of the energy of the drums and the dynamic guitars and Kate and Cindy’s passionate vocals, it is about precisely nothing, a quality well-suited to a song that also happens to be one of the greatest rock and roll songs ever recorded – I say this with no intention of hyperbole.  This is one of my favorite songs ever, and I will never get tired of it.

The song:

An engaging demo version is also somewhere on YouTube.