Bruce Springsteen: "Thunder Road" (1975)

"Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen is the greatest song of all time.  U-S-A!

Bruce Springsteen the man has always been interesting to me, but I've found Bruce Springsteen the musician to be somewhat disappointing.  Excepting the prog-rock-fusion-folk fun of the excellent Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, he seems a remarkably simple-minded songwriter.  The guy is praised for his romanticism and his ambitions and his devil-may-care attitude, but take away that (awesome) voice, and, sorry, you got a pretty conservative set of verse-chorus-verse songs.  Even his supposedly "dark" records-- Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska, aka the ones a jaded fuck like me is supposed to like--- are based around the most basic of major-key chord progressions, talky melodies with big, Bowie-style choruses, and, to be perfectly honest, obvious rhymes.

(Which reminds me... everyone talks about "Badlands" like it's this creepy and evil song, or whatever.  Why?  Because it has the word "bad" in its title?  Because Terrence Malick made a very dark film with the same name?  It's got the EXACT SAME sentiment contained in "Born to Run."  OK... there's that one part where he talks about the poor man and the rich man and stuff, and I suppose it suggests that no one is innocent, but c'mon: every single writer ever of note has said this a hundred times before.)

The Boss's best songs-- like "Thunder Road," and most of the tracks on the aforementioned Wild, the Innocent-- are those where his romantic sentiment breaks free of its three-chord shackles and roams.  Because the Boss is not a great melody writer, and because the E Street band never really "rocks" in the conventional Led Zeppelin sense, verse-chorus-verse doesn't work for him, or them.  Bruce and Co. need time and space to make it happen.  "Thunder Road"-- five minutes long, but always seeming twice that length to me, what with all the words and emotions-- offers plenty of both.  It's a song whose loose, barely there structure mirrors the freewheeling mind of its narrator.  So while the scene is set...

Screen door slams, Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays

We just hear a piano.  In fact, we don't start "rocking" at all until the song's hero starts making his case for the open road.

You can hide neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses for your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets

OR, you can...

Roll down the window and let the wind roll back your hair!
The night's busting open these two lanes will take us anywhere!

There's nothing particularly relevatory about that sentiment.  It's not even one that I relate to.  But I do find it hard to resist the Boss, now yelling, now with guitars and drums and stuff.  He's seducing me!  AH!

And it keeps getting better and better, see... Because the narrator keeps on spicing up his argument for freedom with these super-cool lines ("Oh come take my hand" and "I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk"), and his band just keeps driving away.  Constant motion, no lines revisited, just more and more persuasion, until finally, the clincher:

It's a town full of losers... I'm pulling outta here to WINNNNNNNNNNNNNN

GAH!  PERFECT!

The only thing that's a bummer is, well, the final saxophone "jam" has always struck me as incredibly dopey, a weak way to follow-up Bruce's climactic wail.  But I guess that's America: freedom, fun, and cheese.

And I guess that's why, warts and all, "Thunder Road" is the greatest song of all time.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMB3M43AEpc

Embrace: "Building" (1987)

"Building" by Embrace is the greatest song of all time.  Positively.

This is the emo song to make all others obsolete.

"Ha," you think, "Like I need any emo song, even a good one, to make the rest of the genre look completely pointless."

Well, hold on a second, mister.  "Emo" used to be a noble word.  It used to refer to a strain of underground music that was heavy, guitar-based, challenging, and, yes, emotional, but not in any wimpy sense.  The first emo peop-o were hardcore folks, folks.  They weren't writing about girlies breakin' hearts (punks have a terrible track record with that, by the way: underground types are just as sexist and reactionary as their mainstream forebears when it comes to "bitches"), they were talkin' society, man.  And they were setting their words not to lame, boring, acoustic open chords, but to complex, post-punk influenced electric guitar riffage.

They weren't above self-loathing, though.  Case in point: the only verse of "Building."

I can't get what I want, I'm a failure
Nothing seems to turn out quite the way I planned
But I can't express the way I feel, the way I feel
Without fucking up something else
I'm a failure

If I were singing these words, they wouldn't mean much, because, well, I kind of am a failure.  OK, maybe not, but I'm certainly not Ian MacKaye, who in the mid-80s was probably the most important punk rocker in America.  When Ian MacKaye-- who founded Minor Threat, the greatest hardcore punk band in history, as well as Dischord records, the most storied label of the Washington D.C. scene, and later went on to form Fugazi, one of the all time great rock and roll bands-- when HE sings these words, they take on a new meaning.  Why should Ian feel like a failure?  The dude's had nothing but success his whole life!  And yet, there's no irony here: Ian sings the words like they were his damn mantra.

Such is the appeal of punk, the appeal of DIY, the appeal of the underground.  Ian comes at you not as a hero, but as a person.  He feels what you feel, and he feels as deeply as you feel.  He puts it all on the table, just like you and me.  Only... not.  The dark secret of Ian MacKaye is that he's a musical genius, well beyond the singing and songwriting powers of his peers, a king of the populist punk movement, a kind of demi-god.  He is NOT like you and me.  And "Building," real and/or genuine as it might be, is also a brilliant piece of pop art.

The song is nothing without that verse, and nothing without MacKaye singing it, but its arrangement is what makes it stand out, to me, what makes it the greatest song of all time.  This is a song with the intensity of hardcore, but it's built around a scruffy, skittery, non-hardcore arrangement.  The harmonic-laden guitar part owes as much to U2 and the Smiths as it does to Minor Threat.  It is not a verse/chorus/verse song, and its quiet/loud dynamic is rather unusual, laying in wait for 7/8ths of the song, then exploding into bitterness and distortion in the final verse.  This is a song all about "building"... about emotions stacking on top of each other, higher and higher and more precariously, until they, at last, topple over.

EMO!

"Building" is the greatest song of all time.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA-SX3An_bc

The Flaming Lips: "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" (1999)

"Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" by the Flaming Lips is the greatest song of all time.  Got it?

I have a lot to say about this band.  First of all, they are a great band.  I don't know of a band that had a better track record in the 90's (I count five classic albums-- In A Priest Driven Ambulance, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, Clouds Taste Metallic, Zaireeka, and the Soft Bulletin-- and one very-near classic-- Hit to Death in the Future Head) and their discography before and after that decade is less consistent but full of gems (most notably 2009's Embryonic, a radical shift to the Dark Side (probably explains why they covered Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety shortly afterward)).  More than our generation's Pink Floyd, they are our generation's Beatles: always interesting, always experimental, and, perhaps most importantly, always entertaining.

It's weird, though... Without lead singer and guru Wayne Coyne, I'm convinced this band-- from Zaireeka on, anyway-- would be all but insufferable.  Michael Ivins (bass guy) and Stephen Drozd (everything guy) are obviously talented, creative dudes, but the realms in which they dwell are by and large synth-driven, electronic, and pretentious as all get out.  The early-and-middle Lips, who were ambitious and not above weird instruments (and are unbelievably underappreciated by the critical establishment), are ridiculously easy for me to love.  Their songs were based around guitars, for the most part-- loud, distorted (aka "the best") guitars.  But the Lips of Zaireeka, the Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi, etc use the guitar sparingly, if at all.  Keyboards-- the kinds that stand on their own, and the kinds hooked to computers-- are the stars here... which, normally, I don't dig.  And the Lips are not using computers in a cool, hip-hop way, no... They're using them the way Stevie Wonder used them, with emphasis on massive sweeping sonics, fake stringy sounds, elaborate, proggy synth patterns, and tugging your heartstrings all over the damn world.

But just as Stevie Wonder brings his sound to earth with a tender, heartbreaking voice, Wayne Coyne grounds the Lips with his... err... less accomplished set of pipes.  The guy can't really sing... but he can.  He's technically limited, but capable of hitting you in places that 99% of rock singers cannot.  He can do optimism-- which, as I mentioned in my Paul McCartney piece, is rarely acceptable in rock-- and he can do defeat.  "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," with its timeless Lips themes of love and death, allows Wayne to do both in the same song.  This duality is not unique to The Soft Bulletin, contrary to the public's general idea of the Lips-- it's in every single song on Clouds Taste Metallic-- but it's blown up to astronomical proportions here, and turns "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" into something kinda quintessential.

Wayne frequently crosses another kind of binary: that distinguishing "love" in the universal sense (see "All is Full of Love" by Bjork) and "love" in the intimate, personal sense (see "She Loves You" by I forget).  "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate's" sound would be pure Disney, purely "love" in the perverse forms of either sense, if not for Wayne bleating away.  Well, maybe not pure Disney-- as I said before, these guys are accomplished musicians; Drozd's jangly guitar line is a thing of beauty-- but still, I cannot imagine this song working without Wayne.  His voice is just so warm and inviting... when he speaks of love, it's not a cold, political ideal, but a living, bleeding thing.  His voice makes the whole idea of "feeling yourself disintegrate" kind of gorgeous... And that takes a lot.

Hence, "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" is the greatest song of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8IP3S8dxU8

Slint: "Good Morning Captain" (1991)

"Good Morning Captain" by Slint is the greatest song of all time.  Yesssssiree.

I find it difficult to use words to describe what a "hook" does to me, but I find it equally difficult to describe a song like "Good Morning Captain," which contains no hooks of note, yet is still the greatest song of all time.

Slint are "indie rock legends," in a way, but I doubt many contemporary "indie rockers" listen to Spiderland.  Contemporary indie rockers want "hooks"... and almost nothing else.  For a while now, the "independent" music scene-- the scene covered by Pitchfork, anyway-- seems to have forgotten-- nay, spat upon-- the very things which make Slint, and "Good Morning Captain," so timeless.  Namely...


Darkness: "Good Morning Captain," from its trebley, unsettling intro, to its brutal conclusion, is un-apologetically bleak.

Difficulty: Again, there's no hooks here, and Slint asks you to be patient for a bit... This is a long song, with no chorus.  Make no mistake, though, there is definitely catharsis.

Guitar Interplay: Spiderland is an unconventional guitar record, sure, but it's still a guitar record.  Riffs and solos have been replaced by harmonics, feedback screeches, and sudden explosions into distorted chordage.

The modern indie rock band, focused on whimsy and brightness and mass appeal, has forgotten the amount of power one can derive from darkness, difficulty, and guitar interplay.  So I wouldn't expect modern indie rockers to love "Good Morning Captain" immediately.  But that makes me wonder... Does anyone like "Good Morning Captain," or Spiderland, immediately?  And if, for some strange reason, some guy really does, can that person really be trusted to not be a serial killer?  I mean, you gotta be real fucked up to dig this song from the get go.  Like, in a real fucking bad way.


This is a harsh song.  But-- if you're good-- you'll come around to it.  And you'll start to realize that, hooks be damned, the song has a rather compelling structure to it.  And you'll start to feel that bass and drums pattern in your bones, and when that little mushroom cloud of feedback first blows up, you'll start to kind of like this crushing, all-encompassing depression, and when that second, much bigger burst of feedback erupts, and Brian McMahan starts screaming--for like the first time on the record-- and you start hearing the words "I MISS YOU" in the din, and the guitars riff on, and the rhythm slays for a moment, you'll wonder why you ever thought this thing was offputting at all, and you'll see that-- brutal as it is-- "Good Morning Captain" is kinda like "Stairway to Heaven," all buildup and buildup and buildup and CLIMAX, and you'll realize, wiping a tear from your eye, that

"Good Morning Captain" is the greatest song of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoH5MPIgM7c 

Paul McCartney: "Every Night" (1970)

"Every Night" by Paul McCartney is the greatest song of all time.  Believe me, mama.

Question: Are we as a society man enough to face down Paul's immense body of work with a motive that's not completely mean-spirited?  Have we finally gotten over the whole McCartney drools, Lennon rules thing?  Is the world ready to face the fact that the man is the greatest songwriter to ever walk the earth?

The warm critical reception for the Ram re-release could indicate something... that was an album that Rolling Stone gave only THREE STARS as recently as their 2006 album guide.  Yes, that's right, THREE stars.  For an album with "Uncle Albert" and like ten other songs that are just as wonderful.  IDIOTS!

I want to posit a theory-- and I think it's new-- for the near-constant disrespect shown to Sir Paul since he first appended his name to Lennon's.  ("Disrespect" is different from "lack of love"-- obviously, Paul has many fans, probably more than any other living musician (aside from Pitbull), but I'm willing to bet that many of those people think of him as mere fluff, too.)  Here goes: Paul is cheerful.  Paul is whimsical.  And, but for a few notable and awesome occasions, Paul is never melancholy.  In its opposition to melancholy, Paul's genius is a kind of revolution, one that critics have not been able to handle for five decades.  Hence, "Paul sucks."

McCartney has his dark moments, of course.  I'd wager you could make a CD called "Dark Paul" to stand alongside Joy Division and the Cure, even (featuring "Eleanor Rigby," "Monkberry Moon Delight," "Junk," heck, "Yesterday," etc).  But while these are memorable and beautiful songs, they do not represent, for most folks, the essence of Paul.  Now, Paul is a multifaceted person.  As has been noted countless times, he can write all kinds of songs in all kinds of styles-- there's an "infinite variety" to his musicality.  Still, generally speaking, the dude is happy.  He embraces the world, and he writes quirky character studies about the people in it.  He rocks out in his solo career-- far more than George and maybe even John-- and, you better believe, GEORGE, asks us to tap our toe once or twice and have fun.

Paul's joy makes him an anomaly in the history of genius.  Look at the rock stars we revere.  Lennon was bitter, so of course, the critics love him.  Dylan was bitter and mysterious and cold, so he might as well be a god.  Kurt Cobain was a great melody writer, a la McCartney, but he was also depressed, so he's good.  Brian Wilson's pre-Pet Sounds music never gets the acclaim of Pet Sounds itself, most likely because of songs like "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" that show what a melancholy genius sadsack sandbox head was.

Is it bad to be, err, sad?  Nein, nein, nein.  Lennon, Dylan, Cobain, and Wilson are fine, fine musicians.  But McCartney might be better than all of 'em, and in a totally different way.  I'm not a huge fan of the whole "equating the Beatles with peace and love" fad (they wanted to meet girls, you fools), but even I have to admit that their music has a kind of "childlike innocence" to it.  This feeling, I'd argue, comes mostly from Paul, who basically willed forth the entire second half of the Beatles.  He was their captain, for better or worse-- it was he who was most responsible for the "artist" tag they get today.  And his Beatles songs, by and large, dealt with good cheer.  (The only analogue he has in this respect is Stevie Wonder, which is probably why they collaborated on that profound dissertation on American race relations, "Ebony and Ivory.")

So what does all this have to do with "Every Night"?  Well, "Every Night" isn't exactly a deep song.  There's no philosophical ruminating here, no Dylan-ish allusiveness, and not even much of the artful wordplay that Paul is (or should be) known for.  There's not much here at all, really.  Like the other songs on Paul's first album, "Every Night" is built on spare instrumentation, and everything's played by the man himself.

What makes the song something is the feel, the melody, Paul's voice-- the supreme understanding Paul has of how to write a spellbinding love song.  The guy can take a cliche-- most of the lyrics in "Every Night" have been written a hundred times before-- twist it up, and make it heavenly.  Here, the verses are actually kind of pensive... that guitar line seems like it belongs in one of Paul's "fantasy" songs.  But once we get to the chorus, built on the oldest cliches of all-- a super-long "OOH"-- everything is assured.  That "ooh" says everything that words cannot.  It makes the whole world okay.  Paul does that a lot in his songs.

"Every Night" is the greatest song of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ-GKOe_vXY

Stevie Wonder: Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away (1974)

"Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" by Stevie Wonder is the greatest song of all time.  God, yes.

This song makes me wish I was a Christian.  If I believed in heaven, if I believed in feelin' his spirit, JESUS, this song would be...

Well, it already is the greatest song of all time, so... I don't know.  I guess it would take me to damn heaven.

Only a genius could make such a bunch of loose spiritual ramblings not only completely palatable to secular audiences but FUCKING BEAUTIFUL and melodic in every way.

I'm drunk.  But still... "Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" is the greatest song of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIE6unjkXmc

The Four Tops: Reach Out I'll Be There (1966)

"Reach Out (I'll Be There)" by the Four Tops is the greatest song of all time.  Best believe it, buddy.

Motown is the ideal of capitalism.  Here is a record label motivated by profit, churning out hit after hit after hit, shrewd and ruthless in its marketing schemes... that just happened to make some of the best music ever.  Music that was technically sound, exquisitely produced, and, most importantly, emotionally engaging.  It is this last part that has been forgotten by today's Top 40 folks.  Motown made party songs, a la "Party Rock Anthem" (I'd argue Motown's were a little, umm, better), but they also made melancholy songs, and gorgeous songs, and life affirming songs, and experimental songs.  "Reach Out" is like some freaky amalgam of all these styles-- including the party style-- and it rules mightily.

I was surprised to see that it was released in 1966.  It sounds a little more futuristic than that, doesn't it?  It sounds, to me, like a Motown Altamont jam or something.  It's heavy as fuck, with James Jamerson bringing his signature funk, and it's weird, too.  The verses are a screamed rant-- Levi Stubbs is RELENTLESS...

Now if you feel that you can't go on
Because all of your hope is gone
And your life is filled with much confusion
Until happiness is just an illusion 

It's not exactly "catchy," and yet it's impossible to sit indifferently to... It's a cascade of sound and fury...

But the chorus is totally hopeful...

I'll be there
With a love that will shelter you
And I'll be there
With a love that will see you through...

Love survives the apocalypse!

Who else was making music like this?  Who else can today?  I mean, music that is dark, dark, pitch black... but not cynical.  Music that acknowledges pain and hardship and chaos... but also keeps an eye on the prize.

"Reach Out I'll Be There" is the greatest song of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnDm3qr1Knk