song of the week

I should be more embarrassed to admit that my first exposure to this song was Bette Midler’s version in the movie Hocus Pocus. About a decade later my high school English teacher played that scene from Stanger Than Paradise in class for reasons I no longer remember. But Eszter Balint was swaying around the kitchen in a turtleneck, rejecting dresses, smoking too much while Screamin’ Jay cackled like a madman …

Back in high school, my friend asked for Depeche Mode’s Strange Too for her birthday, a VHS collection of music videos directed by Anton Corbijn. The songs were from Violator, arguably one of the band’s best albums, if not the best.

We did a lot of things together that felt risqué. We watched disturbing films like Strange Days, wrote erotica for fun and compared notes. Sitting in her basement and watching …

Hip-hop has always done self-aggrandizement well, and hip-hop from the mid-90’s may have had it perfected (I’m thinking of Biggie’s “Hypnotize” video and basically everything ever put out by No Limit Records). In their heyday, the Wu-Tang Clan bragged and boasted along with the best of them, and the Killa Bees give us no better example than “4th Chamber.” Here we happen upon Ghostface “sipping wine …

Warm chords. “Have you seen him?
Have you seen him? Have you seen
him?” Brass horns. Then the voice,
her voice a yellow tobacco field
wide & dry deep summer deep South.
In Florida, in the backseat of
a taxi, she wrote the first notes
during a three-hour drive, an epic
eighteen-minute acoustic tune she
pared then amplified—it sounds
finest on vinyl—, I have listened
(no exaggeration) at least once
every day since 2006. And you can
hear the …

I’ve never forgotten Husker Du’s “I’ll Never Forget You,” when Bob Mould’s vocals ripped the title lyric eight times through vinyl fabric and into my bloodstream.  Like everyone else I loved hardcore, but this song was about emotion unleashed—both anger at a friend’s betrayal and agonizing remorse at the friendship’s loss.  Looking at the lyrics by themselves over the past couple of days, I’ve come to believe the song was …

My family moved to Los Angeles when I was five and I left when I was a teenager.  1980’s Los Angeles and I were never a good fit, and I generally dislike songs about L.A.  They too often romanticize a glossiness I can’t stand, even when they are trying to get to the grit of things.  I rarely miss Los Angeles (although there are people there I miss quite a …

I knew what a weasel was, and I knew what a woman was, but what was a weasel woman? Billy Joel knew, I thought, and it seemed taboo, maybe even weirdly sexual. Of course I was mishearing “She’s Always a Woman.” The song played often on the soft rock radio station my mother liked, its piano opening quieting me, getting me to focus my attention for clues that might give …

Does anyone else miss the 90s?  Maybe it’s not fair to write an ode to a song for what it represents as opposed to its innate characteristics, but how to separate a song from the emotions it triggers? Buffalo Tom peaked a bit before my high school years, but to me, everything about “Late at Night” recalls growing up—the noisiness we use to fill the unknown, the way the tempo seems to …

When Melody A.M. came out in 2001, I thought it merely a lightweight refresher. A decade later, it feels like a classic. Most memorable is “Poor Leno”, a well-balanced track of catchy lyrics combined with diverse arrangement of beat and sound. The music video is sweetly touching: a sad little… what? Panda bear? Child? Leno is his own species. He escapes his cage by drawing a mountain and walking through. He …

It could be about elegant melody, the why-didn’t-I-think-of-that feeling. It could be about the supposedly short lifespan of true genius. Or the fear that we’ll never again burn as wild as we did just a minute ago.

When Jeff Mangum returns to the stage, the theater floods with some mixture of disbelief and gratitude. It’s cautious at first, as if he could, at any moment, be frightened right …