too much typing—since 2003

12.24.2007

2007 listening diary - part B

Continuing with my mix of tracks I listened to often during 2007, here's part B, "Drunken Clinch":

20. National Lampoon "Magical Misery Tour"
21. Harry Nilsson "You Can't Do That"
22. Wammo "Lowriders on the Storm"
23. The Jennifers "Good Morning, Starshine"
24. The Field "From Here We Go Sublime"
25. The Lichens "Vevor of Agassou"
26. Boy in Static "Violet"
27. Coltrane Motion "Twenty-Seven"
28. Salem 66 "Pony Song"
29. New Young Pony Club "Hiding on the Staircase"
30. Machine Go Boom "All the Way to PA"
31. Bishop Allen "Flight 180"
32. Hazeldine "Tarmac"
33. Jackson 5 "I'll Bet You"
34. Scissors for Lefty "Marsha"
35. Southerly "Soldiers"
36. Don Lennon "John Cale"
37. The Holy Modal Rounders "Give the Fiddler a Dram"
38. Panda Bear "Bros"
39. Pterodactyl "Three Succeed"
40. Ulrich Schnauss "Stars"

Thots: The National Lampoon track is notable in being a Lennon parody whose lyrics are almost entirely written by...John Lennon. That is, they're drawn from the infamous 1970 interview with Jann Wenner, later published in Rolling Stone (and, I believe, as a book). Lennon was at a rather confused and confusing moment in his career and life, and believing at the time in utter honesty and emotional blurt, made a complete ass of himself. Such an eruption of bile, pettiness, envy, and general emotional retardation...so much that Lennon ended up apologizing for and repudiating much of what he said here. So how is it that I end up actually admiring Lennon more after all that? Because I'm guessing that most people, committing themselves to a course of holding back nothing, would still hold back quite a bit, for fear of, well, making a complete ass of oneself. Not John Lennon: in fact, I'd say he made at least an ass and a half here. The music is brilliant: a dead-on impersonation of Lennon's singing and writing style circa 1970-71, complete with "primal scream" ending and imitation Yoko.

The next couple tracks are sort of mashups without being mashups. Nilsson here weaves together quotations both musical and lyrical from several different Beatle songs in his cover of "You Can't Do That." Wammo, rather than sample the tracks he weaves in here, re-plays them instead, for a slightly more organic take on the concept. The Jennifers disprove the adage that you can't polish a turd: taking one of the worst songs ever, stripping it of its mind-bogglingly stupid wordless chorus, and crossbreeding it with Stereolab's "Crest" and the Byrds' "So You Wanna Be a Rock'n'Roll Star" result in a new song that is...shiny and not at all turdesque. The Field deconstruct one of the greatest pop records ever (The Flamingos' version of "I Only Have Eyes for You") into a series of isolated moments, and somehow pull a similar sense of wonder out of what begins as a disorienting buffeting of sound.

A couple sequences of tracks here illustrate something I do fairly often in mixes: juxtapose tracks based on language rather than sound (if they sound like crap next to one another, though, I'll change it). It was, in fact, a total coincidence that the 27th track in this mix was titled "Twenty-Seven."

The rather hilarious Batman reference in the Hazeldine song reminds me of something I should have said last time: many songs in this mix (and particularly the comedy bits) use the sort of language that still makes censors squeamish, so if your house has children whom you'd prefer to remain innocent of such blunt usage of our native tongue, well, you've been warned.

I heard this Jackson 5 tune on a local public radio station late one night...and had a really hard time believing at first that it was a Jackson 5 song. In a sense, it's not: Funkadelic wrote it and recorded and released their version a little bit later.

I like the cute gambit in the Scissors for Lefty track of first naming the chords of the little break section, and then renaming the chords with women's names. Might help young (female-attracted) guitarists learn chords more quickly...

Congratulate Don Lennon: he's used sleighbells in a track without evoking either Christmas or the Beach Boys. (Oops - now I've ruined it.) He does evoke John Cale, his titular subject, rather amusingly (I love the line about the "double-l").

Once again, check the comments for el linko. (For the first batch of tracks, see here.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to sound ungrateful, but the Jennifers track was missing from the zip file I downloaded. Sorry!

The Jackson 5 track is great, and I'm pretty sure the Beasties Boys and the Dust Brothers sampled the killer opening guitar riff somewhere on Paul's Botique. (That's where I first heard the riff; I didn't get to hear the entire record until I bought the Soulsation! J5 box set a few years later).

Speaking of hybrids, have you heard Sloan's graftjob of Canned Heat's "On The Road Again" and Stereolab's "Transona 5"? It's on the fake "live" record they recorded a few years ago.* It's brilliant.

(*fake in the sense that Sloan was paying tribute to the deceptively fake "live" albums of the 60's, but letting their fans know this one was recorded in the studio).

2fs said...

James: Are you sure it's not there? I just downloaded the file myself, and it's there - it's definitely in the source for the zip file also. Perhaps it merely failed to load into iTunes. At any rate, try downloading it again - that track's a good one!

Anonymous said...

It's definitely missing from the zip file I downloaded, as I extracted all of the contents to a new folder. I'll download the zip file again tonight and try again.

Anonymous said...

BTW -

I just started listening to the mix. That Wammo track made me laugh out loud. The Stand/Louie Louie/La Bamba hybrid pushed me over the edge. Thank you!

Anonymous said...

well, I did it the easy way and downloaded "Good Morning Starshine" from the Jennifers' website.