I woke up in bed, buried in the warm light of my blankets and the green reflected light from the building across the way, banana trees. I wasn't hungover, but I was aware that perhaps a normal person would be hungover, and so I tried to count how many drinks I had last night: a half-shot (drank from a straw) of some expensive whiskey while I was at work. Then I went to the Bowery. First I had a Guinness, then I had a La Fin Du Monde (the end of the world), then Dimitri gave me a shot of Powell's (or Powers, not sure). Then I ordered a PBR. Then they closed down the Bowery, and afterhours I drank a PBR and another shot of Powell's. That means I basically had six-and-a-half drinks in about two hours. Leaving the Bowery, I took a cab about two blocks to Stout, but I didn't find anyone there, and didn't remember why I wanted to go there in the first place, so I walked up to 7-11, bought a pizza, walked home, threw the pizza on the floor, and fell asleep. In the morning, after recapping the events of the night to myself vis-a-vis how many drinks I drank, I fell into the vacuum of facebook and stumbled on to Tao Lin's description of his recent arrest for trespassing at a coffeeshop, published in Gawker. As I read the Gawker essay, I was struck by Tao Lin's awareness of social and internal dynamics, in terms of both attentiveness and insight. Also, his memory seemed excellent. Though I do-not/would-not practice his particular philosophical project in the way that he practices it (his project seems excessively anti-poetical, or anti-rhetorical, possibly reductionist, though without a loss of cogency, but with the possible corollary diminution of the construction of piquancy, if this makes sense), I do think of Tao's project as excellent, with the Gawker essay standing to me as proof of the excellence of his life and the quality of his mind. Of course, I was and remain most impressed by his work ethic. This last may seem like faint praise indeed, but, from my perspective (that of laziness, a kind of idle melancholy, the pursuit of one low-level distraction after another [each pursued so as to kill a kind of deeper frustration/loneliness/dissatisfaction]), Tao Lin's practice of awareness seems quite valuable and impressive. Especially interesting to me is Tao Lin's focus, which contrasts with my own in that I think we are both extremely interested in the practice of awareness of the minutiae of our daily lives, especially regarding our lives in the world of people—except that while I simply let my awareness run through me, like water through a paper filter, Lin seems to actively codify and denote his observations, wrapping things up into narrative form constantly, which must serve to make his awareness more complete and also acts to render his life more real. I have made so many thousands of pointless, unwritten, idle observations, that it seems I no longer have the capacity to bring the value of life 'home' to myself. In many ways, especially recently, I am worried that I perhaps do not have as much attentiveness as I am thought to have / claim to have. I think Tao contrasts favorably with myself in this way. I thought about all this while making coffee, sitting at my windowsill smoking a cigarette, thinking about the fact that I had to go to work for a meeting, some “coaching” or some other soul-deadening thing.
At the end of Tao Lin's description of his arrest, numerous Gawker “commenters” appended scathing, putatively witty, (and to me wrong-headed) attacks on Tao's writing style—attacks which were, by extension, attacks on Tao's life at large. I was irritated by this, given my positive response to Lin's essay, though I didn't feel the need to make some kind of comment. I went to Tao Lin's facebook and blog, checking to see if he made any public comment on the viciousness or wrong-headedness of these “comment” attacks. He did not, though someone alluded to the attacks in a comment thread that sprang from Tao Lin's link to the Gawker essay on his facebook wall. It occurred to me that if I were him, I would have definitely wanted to address these detractors, because I am insecure and would hope to get some positive affirmation of the essay's value if it were being attacked. From there, idly browsing, I came upon Lin's Richard Yates gimmick/promotion/book give-away. It occurred to me that I would like to write something in the style of Lin's commentariat-panned essay, in terms of the concrete description of banal but valuable interpersonal things, and I knew that such a project, though professionally worthless, would be fun for me, also, would give me some focus, which might (I reasoned) lead to more focus in my life later on. I was thinking, again, of the night before, the night which was and is at the time of this writing, “last night.”
Last night, The Station was mostly dead, i.e. not busy. (it is a “lounge,” i.e. an open-air club). I work in the French restaurant attached to the Station, and had to stay late to help them with the end of the night food orders. It has been occurring to me lately, because I am lonely, and for other reasons, that I would like to know more about the people who work in The Station. In fact, it seems insane to me that I am so totally disconnected from their lives, that I have isolated myself / been isolated from the not-insignificant human lives that are being lived parallel to mine. Almost without exception, my colleagues in The Station are attractive, charismatic, young, and stuck in-the-middle-of-eventual-failure in their careers as actors/models. But I know very little about them: Nick, the bartender, went to law school and posts extremely conservative links on his facebook, usually sneering our-triumph-is-imminent conservative puff pieces. Justin, the prototypical masculine bar-back is definitely fucking one of the bartenders, but I don't remember her name. I think it is Courtney, but, that could be wrong. Melissa Tiano, an extremely attractive bartender, showed up to the Station on her night off with Jessica, an extremely small-bodied cocktail waitress. Jessica somehow reminds me of a flying squirrel, (or perhaps it is some other rodent, I'm not sure), inasmuch as she has a pinched aspect to her face and large eyes. This in no way makes her unattractive, but she has a kind of idiotic lack of awareness in her eyes, which is not to say that I dislike her or actually believe she is stupid—I have no feelings and cannot make any final assessments about her one way or the other. It is important for me to remember and highlight here that I am sure she lives a complex and wonderful internal life, full of the small tragedies and small victories that mark all of our lives. Besides, it is extremely dangerous to think of other people as stupid or unaware—this is almost always an observation that is seated in resentment, and is usually derived from the stupid mistake of judging with insufficient information. It is important for me to remember and highlight here that if you know someone well, they almost always offer more depth than is apparent on the surface, and really the only thing that matters if is you have a feeling of emotional engagement with them, which, if you have it, demands that you see their idiosyncrasies and patterns of thought and feeling in a way that highlights their value and complexity. Still, it is hard to avoid judging people. To continue the story: these two girls were there with two extremely large Armenian-looking guys. The guys looked like they had money. I said to Jessica, Are you going up to Drai's? She pointed to one of the Armenian guys and said something about they were just out for the night, and then kinda ignored the question, and kinda started talking to someone else in her little circle. For some reason, I felt it was obvious that they were going up to Drai's. I didn't really think about the fact that Jessica ignored my question, because it seemed fully possible that she didn't really hear me, and in any case was with a date and I didn't want her to feel strange by imposing an unwanted conversation on her. I kinda walked in a circle around the people, and asked someone else a question, maybe “what did you do tonight” or “how are you guys doing” or “it looks like you're having fun” or something like that. In any case, whoever I directed these words to did not give me an answer that engaged me on even a basic human level. So, I started talking to Nick and his date, because he is comfortable. He immediately invited me to join them at Drai's, which was, after all, where they were all going. I thought I sensed a stiffening in the aspect of the girls, as if they did not want me to know they were going to Drai's, or, more specifically, did not want me to join them. This didn't surprise me: they must think I'm a crazy asshole, though of course it hurt, somewhat, even as I believe in my mind that they had no thoughts about me the entire time, as I'm ludicrously paranoid, over-sensitive, and over-engaged, and constantly have to dial-down my wounded feelings and thoughts on account of my intellectual awareness that people really do not think about me one way or the other. I am, I think, some kind of creature whose thoughts and social behaviors are so constantly intricate and self-involved, that it is as if all I do is simply hollow myself out entirely, as if I am some kind of spherical fruit and am doing nothing but scraping the surface of my life clean from the inside. The entire time, the large Armenian-looking guys did not say or do anything. They must have been talking to the girls, but, all I sensed was that they were doing nothing and simply standing around numbly. Nick invited me to go with them to Drai's and at first I said no, but, then I realized that I had never been up to Drai's and wanted on some level to see what it looks like. I said this to Nick and he insisted that I join them: he is extremely inviting and sociable. I said that I would enjoy going. Then I realized that I didn't have my wallet with me. I said that they would not let me in, and hung around the edges of the group for a minute longer, Nick saying “well, we should just give it a try!” But by this time my awkwardness and my feeling of being placated or being seen as a 2nd-class social citizen had wormed its way into my brain, so I simply left. I went to the Bowery.
It was dead. Mack, the GM, was sitting in front of the Bowery smoking, drinking Guinness, and talking to his friend, the pop-culture obsessed graphic novelist, Josh. I shook their hands and walked inside. I heard Josh say, “He's more of a germanic character,” probably talking about some actor. Inside, Rick was talking to the bartender, Natalie. Besides this, there were two people sitting at the bar finishing up their late dinner. I started talking to Rick about my feeling that I wish to have more intimacy in my life, approaching the subject through an analysis of the question: “How are you doing?” I would like it if people were more interested in actually describing their internal states, and wish that the performance of banal social niceties could be displaced by aggressive, emotionally not-diffident, actively engaged conversations. I tried to segue from this to an actual conversation about our actual states of being, but, no one wished to make any disclosures beyond Natalie's announcement that she was tired. Rick said that he answers the question “How are you doing” with the response “good” because he is generally a happy person: he enjoys his job, and he enjoys his life. He said something to me about his afternoon, spent drinking beers at a barbeque and eating meat, “tons and tons and tons of meat.” I was thinking about the loneliness that I feel sure he must feel, sitting in the Bowery by himself after midnight on a Sunday night, talking to the young, attractive female bartender, and being ineligible to her as a sexual object. I have seen him “appear online” on facebook chat after 2AM on nights after drinking, and remain on there, online, looking at facebook, clearly looking for some kind of social stimuli or the appearance of something wonderful. It seems clear to me that he is lonely, though I knew I couldn't announce to him that I thought of him as a lonely person. It is strange and amazing to “appear online” on facebook after two AM on a weekend and watch all the people who appear there, clearly looking for happiness, waiting for a message, or a comment, or thinking about the clunky practice of e-seduction, treading water there for a few minutes, reading their newsfeed, and then disappearing into the gray nothing of offline and sleep. I believe there is a lot of loneliness in the world, though this may just be projection. Anyways, after Rick left, Natalie and I talked about our experiences of swimming in the ocean, the nature of fear when you're a passenger versus when you're driving, and experiences of exhilaration we had felt in our lives. Then she talked about a short film she was in. At this point, Dimitri came in with one of the guys from Jackass and was talking about the new Jackass movie. The night disintegrated at that point, and eventually, I went home.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
More About Being On Drugs
When I took mushrooms recently I enjoyed articulating aspects of social interaction that usually remain silent. I have to admit, some paranoia crept in, which meshed with my deep understanding that people “want things.” Unfortunately, when I said that “people want things,” it was taken to mean that I believed there was some sort of overarching “plot” perpetuated by others, when of course I meant nothing of the sort, I was simply articulating the fact that we are doing these things with people because we enjoy people, and there are things we want, social things, which manifest in our behavior, and if you don't want to be here, you can just leave. Another barrier to communication was the fact that I was laughing so hysterically it was hard to keep all of the threads of my conversation cogent in the minds of those with whom I was speaking; I was insanely distracted. Anyways, it went like this: I was aware of people's various desires, particularly their social desires, needs and insecurities, and wished to articulate the constituent aspects of their internal components as I perceived them, as these components manifested in their behavior. When the people doing cocaine returned to the apartment, I was annoyed that I was now required to conform to a pattern of social behavior that is considered appropriate, i.e. silence, listening, courtesy, feigned interest, responding to stupid statements with judicious generosity, generally participating in the insane construction of “group building.” (Much of my night was concerned with analyzing and destroying pointless instances of “group building”). Still, with the cocaine-people, I conformed because I was aware of the consequences of acting in line with my true desires, (my desires being to converse about intelligent and subtle things that interest me), and not the inane things that occupy the minds of your average normal-person/lunatic. There was a man who had done a lot of drugs that evening; it seemed to me that he did not need a lot of reasons to want to punch me in the face; I was aware of my preference to not be face-punched, so I did not attack and analyze the stupidity of his statements. I was forced by convention to stand with arms crossed mildly interrogating the appropriate fringes of whatever inane thing people were saying, a stupid man telling the party that “red, white, and black” are the “true colors of strength,” and in his band and all his art, he prefers to use these colors exclusively, but he also believes that there are “true colors” that are beyond human perception. I was so annoyed by this conversation it was almost beyond words, but, I forced myself to stand there and keep my aggressive comments to myself. Perhaps, in the future, I'll be more active in articulating the things I like to articulate. It seems to me that people often think they can get away with quite a lot of nonsense. I think I would like to simply say the things that I think, instead of not saying them. Also, I'm aware that, for a certain class of person, encountering an unencumbered articulation/destruction-of the unspoken underpinnings of our social nonsense is actually quite respectable and valuable, which would be a bonus for me above and beyond the joy found when one says the things one would like to say. I lay on the bedroom floor in the lurid red light smoking cigarettes and looking at the ceiling while a bunch of very stupid and suggestible people had a pointless conversation about how “serenity” is the opposite of “certainty,” repeating the words over and over as if there were some philological truth to be discovered in the act of re-re-re-articulating them. I was actively making fun of these conversationalists; other people in the bedroom were listening to my comments and laughing. I did not know if the people in the bedroom were “on my side” or even if they agreed with the substance of what I was saying, but, I did not think they would do anything drastic, so, I continued my announcements.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Top 100 songs: Unnecessary Prolixity
I had a whole essay outlining my metric for choosing these songs, but, this is long enough already, so, let's skip it. Suffice it to say, I'm sentimental and intricately self-involved, and this list does not pretend to be historically definitive, or, even personally definitive (cause that stuff changes y'know).
Brandon thinks this list is "boorish and untimely"
And, on to the not-awaited, completely unrequested epic redux. Download links at bottom.
1.Bon Iver – Re-Stacks
As I've noted many a time, the last line in this song, Your love will be / safe with me is probably my favorite lyric of all time, the way I want to be when I'm most fully my ideal self. This song balances itself with infinite gentleness on the tip of a pyramid, never quite resolving, a phone lifted subtly in the silence of the track's very end. This song has everything a favorite song needs: obscurity, beauty, accessibility. It's just ephemeral enough to let you in immediately, without gorging to the point of saturation.
2.Third Eye Blind – Semi-Charmed Life (album version)
The velvet it rips / in the city we tripped / on the urge to feel alive. I can't listen to this song if I'm not drinking with my little sister. Luckily, we drink together on a regular base, and when the urge to manufacture some enthusiastic nostalgia strikes, nothing suffices as effectively as this piece of adrenaline-laced art for children of the nineties. The four right chords could make me cry, you know. We'll scream it out; we'll wake the upstairs neighbors and the downstairs neighbors from jumping up and down. There isn't a bad lyric here. I'm not listening when you say goodbye.
3.LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends
No song gives me such a simultaneous rush of enervating sadness and happiness. Even though half of the lyrics don't make any sense, somehow this song contains the potential ecstasies of being in the world with people. That's saying a lot. The galloping multi-tracked piano beat and the nostalgia-laced poetry hits me on every level. I wish I weren't as nostalgia-prone / regret-scarred as I am, but I still aspire to James Murphy's I wouldn't trade one stupid decision / for another five years of life.
4.The Beatles – Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight – The End
It's probably a cheat to collapse these songs into one, but, no one ever listens to only of them at a time, and they lead directly in to each other, and are (tenuously, I'll admit) linked lyrically, and most importantly, I get to make the rules. The muscular call for sleep against a pervasive homelessness on Golden Slumbers sets the tone; the regret-inflected Carry That Weight bursts into The End's frantic jam and tempo increase. If we're homeless by definition from which the only respite is sleep; the question: Are you going to be in my dreams? emerges naturally. The End, featuring arguably the finest drum solo, riff, and guitar solo of the Beatles' career, finally dissolves into the diaphanous final message, and ultimate philosophy of the Beatles, if only ever loosely implemented: the love you take is equal to the love you make.
5.Josh Ritter – To The Dogs or Whoever
There aren't many songs that inspire in me such confidence of the goodness of life, the inevitability of beauty's return in the face of the failure that undermines everything. Though half of the lyrics reference pointlessly obscure Americana & whatnot (such as Joan of Arc), the other half is pure poetry. A boat that could love the rocks and the shore / could you love me like the crosses love the nape of neck. And who can resist yelling the chorus—I thought I heard somebody calling. In the dark I thought I heard somebody call—no one!!!!
6.Azure Ray – Rise
There aren't many iterations of love that I find compelling. In the face of failure, death, the dissipation of desire, every mechanism (and there are plenty) that steadily tears us apart, somehow this song patches over the sadness, takes responsibility, and emerges with acceptance of loss. Rise is perfectly gentle, resigned, as ethereal as love itself. As everyone knows, romance is tied by necessity to the possibility or the inevitability of failure; somehow, when I'm hearing this song, I don't mind what is lost or the losses to come.
7.Jens Lekman – Black Cab
Loneliness in its purest distillation. The solipsism, arrogance, insecurity, semi-suicidal recklessness, and self-absorption of loneliness. I love every lyric in this song. If I could get away with it, I'd put this on every mixtape I'll ever make. You don't know anything / so don't ask me questions / you don't know anything / so turn the music up / and keep your mouth shut.
8.The National – Fake Empire
Bluebirds on our shoulders. The National's 3rd album, Boxer, is one of the best albums to come out in the last ten years, and the first track is worth the price of the whole CD. A lot is made of the National's curious mix of mythic imagery and personal evocations, and this song brings them together perfectly, a clanging piano melody, the tintinnabulation to end the song, the beat-anticipating drums. No other song so perfectly evokes winter to me, the loss of love.
9.M Ward – Here Comes the Sun Again
Another perfect blend of battle-scarred optimism and serene melancholy. M Ward doesn't say much, talking about weather and driving. This is one of those simple songs I want to play first when I meet someone new.
10.Wilco – Poor Places
This song is a perfect example of what made mid-career Wilco great: meticulous, with a painstaking commitment to concentrated production, a deconstructed melody. Beginning in what seems to be a hospital, over the steady beep of a life-support machine; through four successive changes of modulation and instrumentation, pianos and guitars trading the melody; a hot dissonant fourth carried through the first two minutes of the song, building to the climax two minutes in (which never does exactly resolve), dissolving finally without resolution in a wave of electronic noise.
11.Townes Van Zandt – To Live is to Fly
This song isn't very interesting musically. But is philosophically perfect. I subscribe to every lyric, even if taken line by line it's nothing more than a mess of cliché. Van Zandt's delivery is world-weary and worn-out, and has the unvarnished feeling of hard-earned truth. Risky, inimitable; somehow, I love it.
12.Third Eye Blind – Jumper
I break eardrums singing this. Who doesn't?
13.Bob Dylan – Simple Twist of Fate
Of all the paucity-of-love songs in the world, this has to be one of the purest distillations. Dylan recaps the entire relationship (one night), and this encapsulation, this mix of idealizing memory, instant-and-then-gone expectation, thwarted communication and the temporal nature of desire—ah, it's beautiful. He told himself he didn't care / pushed the window open wide / felt that emptiness inside. I've been there; fuck it, sometimes I think I live there.
14.The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations
Massive. So epic, it's heroic. She was a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend. And twenty other one-liners. As big as all of classic rock and fully literate.
15.Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Everybody's heard it, everybody's cried to it.
16.Belle & Sebastian – The Fox in the Snow
Who doesn't dig the pure adolescent existential infuriated lassitude of this song? Even now, from time to time, I completely empathize with the boy on the bike: As you cycle round the town / you're going up / you're going down / you're going nowhere. It's not as if they're paying you / it's not as if it's fun / at least not anymore. Not to mention that the melody is achingly beautiful, laid down with fingerpicked guitars, pianos and violins.
17.Jenny Lewis – It Wasn't Me
Guilt is a motherfucker, and Jenny Lewis's lullaby description-of/critique-of/skewering-of her body of self-destructiveness and regret resonates fully with me. It wasn't me / I wasn't there / I was stone drunk / it isn't clear / and it doesn't count / cause I don't care. But of course everyone knows you do. It's still nice to hear someone sing about, though.
18.The Mountain Goats – No Children
It's rare that a song this unvarnished is ironic and bemused. Pure hilarity and unstinting reality all at once. I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow / I hope it bleeds all day long. When you've been squeezed dry of every last drop of concern, and you don't give a fuck anymore, the only thing left is sarcasm and blunt dissociation. Darnielle's classic track is designed to make disaster seem aggressively fun.
19.The Shins – Those to Come
Apparently, I'm drawn to songs that make reference to relaxed morning-after underwear-lounging. Something bad inside me / went away. I could do without the wide-lens existential ruminations on the ongoing nature of human life that serve to close the song, but, really, this is a perfectly beautiful track. The bearers of all good things arrive. Not to mention the melody is Cat-Stevens perfect.
20.The Eels – Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues
Acceptance is hard. Getting thrilled about the state of the world is even harder. Especially when you're reciting a laundry list of desolation, waste, dissociation, insanity, regrets, and failure. But E somehow makes it happen. I like juxtapositions like this. I like feeling grim with the uncompromising truth and excited about the beauty of life at the same time. Goddamn right / It's a beautiful day.
21.Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day
Sufjan is annoyingly sincere. Still, no song reminds me of growing up more than this—probably the most tragic and intricately literary of any song I know. Ergo, no song has made me cry harder (with the exception of Verdi's Requiem, and that was a long time ago), and that counts as a lot in my book. The fact that I have to respect the music, and that it's unambiguously beautiful—well, that's just bonus.
22.The New Pornographers – From Blown Speakers
This song, less than three minutes long, culminates in one explosive, ecstatic moment 2/3rds of the way through. I bang enthusiastically on my air-snares and double-kick air drums. A perfect illustration of tension and release. I can't really recommend it for any other reason: I don't really know what they're talking about, though I've sang the lyrics many a time.
23.Wilco – Jesus Etc.
The definitive Wilco track; a triumph of old-fashioned songwriting. The stars are alternately rising and setting. You were right in both cases. At this moment, genius is the art of taking the unsaid obvious and making it heartrending: Our love is all we have.
24.Cat Power – (Can't Get No) Satisfaction
The funny thing about this Rolling Stones cover is that Chan never actually sings the famous chorus. Quite literally, the listener gets no satisfaction. There is no rock-and-roll in this track: one hears an empty room and a sad woman with her guitar. But this subtraction only highlights the brilliance of Jagger's lyrics, the cynical emptiness at the heart of the rock star experience. Beautiful.
25.Wilco – Handshake Drugs
Best lyric ever: If I ever was myself / I wasn't that night.
26.Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
Shoegaze love song. Everyone not bored or offended was rocked into a stationary frenzy of Borgesian nostalgia-for-the-present by the conclusion of Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and, as with so many poetry-vulnerable filmgoers, those trawling Tokyo shots are linked indelibly with Just Like Honey's regret-laced evocations. As with Nietzsche and his friends, my love for this song rests in my inability to qualify it. So I'll stop with the trying.
27.Alexi Murdoch – Orange Sky (EP version)
I prefer the super-slow percussion-and-piano-free EP version of this song (almost impossible to find at this point, though it was featured on a few soundtracks in the early double-oughts) to the over-produced souped-up easy-listening adult-top-40 album version. My heart's been broken / sometimes my mind is too strong. Even if your heart's not broken, when you're soaking in this song, it is. Chalk one up to mirror neurons. Mirror neurons make life worth living.
28.Etta James – Stormy Weather
Etta's voice is too triumphant to let any song wallow in depression, misery-riddled lyrics be damned; a doo-wop piano and sashaying orchestrations lift the track further. I sense a pattern emerging: I like exultant expressions of disappointment.
29.Regina Spektor – Fidelity
I don't participate in the mass-hysteria Regina Spektor lovefest with your average simian-smart neu-indie Grey's Anatomy-viewer, but, if you concentrate when you listen, you'll love this song's perfect demonstration of the craft of meta-love-song, mercifully free from most of the cutesy lyrical ephemera that mar most of Spektor's tracks. The pizzicato strings that comprise most of the musical backings behind warm (if synthesized) horn sections make for a flawless combination of levity and warmth, meshing exactly with Spektor's pitch-and-tempo perfect stairstepping chorus.
30.My Morning Jacket - Golden
A song about driving and wasting time. And being in bars, dreams, feelings, heaven, and other things. If you like driving at night (my favorite thing), along deserted highways (favorite squared), while sinking into self-satisfied nostalgia (cubed), this song is perfect. Reverb'd to the max, and a steel guitar, which aren't recipes for easy-access joy, when hitched to the pitter-patter car-tire beat and Jones' soaring vocal instrument, well, it works.
31.The Mountain Goats – This Year
Ready for the bad things to come. My nostalgia alone would demand the inclusion of this song. But beyond this is a triumphal future-tense assertion of the value of life. My broken house behind me / and good things ahead / a girl named Kathy wants a little of my time. I know of no more uncompromisingly anticipation-oriented articulation of self-determination. And the denouement: There will be feasting / and dancing / in Jerusalem next year. Fuck yeah. One of the most-quoted-by-me and inspiring songs I know.
32.The Strokes – The End Has No End
Not the best Strokes song, maybe, but, it's a long-time favorite for reasons that remain obscure to me. Casablancas delivers subtle insults, that's always appealing. It's got the requisite detached Strokes delivery and the frantic shouting and fuzzed-out guitar solo, too. The source of my “I'm relaxed” mantra: I can do a lot of things / but I can't do that. I recall clearly at 18, listening to this song for ten consecutive hours, and I still dig it when it comes on.
33.Spoon – Black Like Me
Spoon's minimalistic acoustic-symphony aesthetic culminated on the completely effective Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga album. Black Like Me, the album's closer, is a minor masterpiece of the effective culmination of ten thousand minute production decisions: the rotating strings, indescribable interplay of clattering piano and droopy horns, the simple riffs and the tension built, stretched, tattered, and finally resolved in a Day in the Life crashing orchestral melisma. And, for reasons that I don't want to understand, All the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want is a personally incisive lyric.
34.Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come
Essential.
35.Weezer – El Scorcho
From the perspective of “Rock History” maybe the Sweater Song is more necessary, less contingent (and at least equally ass-kicking) but, this whining, shouting, garbled track is the epitome of a successful pre-emo personal-general description-of, plea-for and consideration-of a frontman's adolescent love, with enough whimsy to avoid the ponderousness and self-seriousness of “love” as commonly construed, while retaining an unparalleled heartfelt shriek.
36.Scissor Sisters – I Can't Decide
This song isn't representative of my tastes at-large in the slightest: a dance-y, angry, bitter, enthusiastic tumultuous-love murder-fantasy. But, you have to dig this ironic takedown of desire, the almost impossible balance of bemused indifference and hysterical mania. And when the chorus comes on, with a big anticipatory inhalation, circus-clown percussive asterisks, fuzzed out voice effects and frantically picked banjos: it's damned catchy and hilarious, the perfect antidote to heartbreak. I won't deny I'm going to miss you when you're gone. Indeed.
37.Shearwater – The Hunter's Star
An underrated contemporary classic of piano-rock mopery. Unabashedly saturated in big emotions, simultaneously sad and lifted, as necessary to me as the Raindrop prelude or the 2nd movement of the Sonata Pathetique. Jonathan Meiburg's eccentric vocal modulations lend a purely musical effect here, deliciously balancing against the warm woodwinds and swirling piano chords.
38.Radiohead – No Surprises
Probably Radiohead will be remembered for their bleak vision of contemporary capitalistic dissociation (and No Surprises' theme of suicidal alienation-resignation certainly participates in that project), but they are equally profound musically, picking out a soaringly beautiful melody from a huge empty space. Strictly to be played after midnight.
39.Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger
A nine-and-a-half minute utterly heartbreaking acoustic ode to lost love, the passage of time, the shambling elegance of life in the world, objects filled with angles of brown twilight. Dylanesque in its melodic repetitiveness, a scale moving endlessly downward, but expanded with the constant addition of subtle instrumental complications: a doubled tambourine here, a walking upright bassline there, untuned box pianos, an entire mad palate of run-down layered gothic noises. Pays huge dividends case of preexisting latent sentiment.
40.Vampire Weekend – Ottoman
The pizzicato chamber strings epiphanies of Walcott appear here in my favorite form, without the annoying piano clanging. Yes, every infuriating bourgeoisie ballroom upperclass reflex is in full jerk here, but, it's so sweet and seamless, full of the confidence of craftsmanship, you can't resist.
41.Tom Waits – Mr. Siegal
Take the violent nihilism of swordfishtrombones-era Waits and mix with the biggest Howlin' Wolf-style bluesy-Americana rollick around the blue guitar and piano, and you've got Mr. Siegal. When it comes on, I can't help but grin, then leer, then conduct the air-orchestra, punching the air. Hearing this song live inspires an irresistible joy, a mandated saunter. If you were me, you sing along like you're really curious: Why are the wicked so strong?—taking up the mantle of unrepentant evil for a walk around the block, feeling the perfect power of unabashed wickedness for yourself.
42.Nick Drake – At the Chime of A City Clock
Weird little beautiful song. Punctuated by saxophones and a full string section. Obscure ruminations on the nature of beauty, urban isolation, death, a blurry protagonist's psychological disorders. The chorus is a brilliant chord progression: ; the entire song is infused with a piquant, resigned inevitability. In the light of a city sky / find a face that's fair / and keep it by your side. Nice, right?
43.Rilo Kiley – Science vs. Romance
Early-period Jenny Lewis was obsessed with the constituent aspects of love, ruminations delivered with a kind of exaggerated vulnerability and self-conscious world-weariness. The cutesy vocal stylings are maybe too twee for some palates, but, her delivery of it's cold out there / but I'm telling you / I'm lonely too, broken chord, minor sixth whole tone scale, is perfect.
44.Mason Jennings – Nothing
No song lends itself to postmodern critiques of meaninglessness and a turning against silence quite like Mason Jennings' pre-Jack Johnson-ing stab at comprehensibility in the face of the every kind of failure, from things unsaid to brown tap water. Jennings here turns to the simplicity of his broken heart, a “new place” that “seems strange,” an unabashed embarrassment. Please know what I mean / When I say / Nothing. Perfect. Plus you can sing along and feel pure happiness.
45.The Hold Steady – Your Little Hoodrat Friend
The Hold Steady's work pre-Boys And Girls In America is challenging and (somewhat) abrasive. A huge bar band (complete with two-headed guitar and honky-tonk organ) blasting Thin Lizzy-style jams. And the Craig Finn doesn't sing so much as he slur-preaches. And the songs are convoluted multi-page mythologized poems about adolescent parties, fantasy-images of lost loves, where the fucked-forever mentally unbalanced lunatics and wannabe-hard suburban kids just wading into voyeuristic drug addictions meet. But this shit is just profound, I just fucking love it, even when the mythology would take too much work to figure out. It burns being broke / and hurts to be heartbroken / and always being both must be a drag.
46.Modest Mouse – The World At Large
Did I want love? Did I need to know? Perfect philosophy for your dissociated po-mo-obsessed non-achievement-striving inveterate starter-over. Even if starting over's not what life's about.
47.Neko Case – Star Witness
Star Witness is a perfect piece of songwriting, featuring a definitive and effortless and soaring vocal performance by Case. Definitive understated pop music, unwrapping a tragic love story line by line. A rough causality of destruction is allayed, finding the universe itself at fault: Trees break the sidewalk / the sidewalk skims my knees.
48.Fleet Foxes – Meadowlarks
On an album of perfectly crafted acoustic artifacts, Meadowlarks finds the Fleet Foxes pushes into open spaces, a more straightforward chamber pop elegance. Every movement in this song is crafted to nudge this cloud of arched sound forward: the sweeping hums of the chorus, the modulation in the third verse, the rising arpeggios of guitar at the end. Robin Pecknold's imagery is characteristically pastoral and archaic, punctuated by existential lamentations. What's here is essential: anything else would be gratuitous.
49.The Shins – New Slang
I'm looking in on the good life / I might be doomed never to find. The common and abominable practice of naming the song after the least-defensible lyrical abstraction contained therein so as to lend said abstraction some nascent symbolic heft or generosity is in full effect here. But that doesn't even rise to the level of quibble. New Slang is too perfect to me to bear conversation, so I'll quote it: If you took to me / like a gull takes to the wind. The regret—the fact that she didn't—well, so what? The rest of our lives will fare well anyway.
50.Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks
Layers of indomitable pinking piano pop with all the spaciousness and harmonic intertextuality we've come to expect from Grizzly Bear make for a delightful and almost necessary construction.
51.Panda Bear – Take Pills
Half of this song is a drawn out introduction; the other half is an exultant lullaby on top of a collection of looped sounds, skateboards, bubbling water, washing machines, a subway arrives and leaves. Over before it begins. The sound in this song bounces around a huge open space, as if Lennox set up his microphones in the back of an airplane hanger and sang top-of-lungs across the open space; made to be heard above shafts of light and empty concrete floors.
52.Stars – Your Ex-Lover is Dead
This conceit behind this song has fail written all over it. Duets are miserable; relationships long-since-over are boring; I-win and you-lose lyrics are annoying; salvaging something serendipitous from the larger wastes is some combination of infuriating arrogance and cloyingly simplistics. Plus there's these lavish romantic orchestrations and Sarah Records guitar lines: a turn-off. But, actually, this song is fucking awesome, even if it takes a few listens to groove with the somewhat herky-jerky melody. And the final verse is the purest expression of sane acceptance in the face of the failure of love. I gave what I gave / I'm not sorry I met you / I'm not sorry it's over. You just have to listen to it.
53.Andrew Bird – Tables and Chairs
Songs are good for launching obvious truths to the space of emotional engagement. Tables and Chairs performs this function for me. The lyric Just don't let the human factor / fail to be a factor has always dropped on my ears with the weight of revealed truth, even if it only means that we must be wide in our vision. As I've grown older I've come to appreciate the rest of this song, too. Even the whimsical utopia/dystopia description of a post-financial landscape in the song's second act is refreshingly light.
54.Titus Andronicus – My Time Outside the Womb
You'll spend the rest of your life trying to forget / that you met the world naked and screaming / and that's how you'll leave it. New Jersey garage rock delivered in Conor Oberst's tremulous tones. A three-minute autobiography heavy with epigrammatic existentialism and fear-saturated street-smarts. One mistake is all that it takes.
55.The Eels – Grace Kelly Blues
The actress gave up all her old dreams / and traded up. The Eels are preoccupied with articulated affirmations of happiness to the point that one understands viscerally the shadow of loss behind their surface-level affirmations of happiness. Grace Kelly Blues recovers the ambiguity and disaster, the tragedy of regular life in a series of keenly observed set pieces. When E describes himself: I think you know / I'll be okay it's impossible to ignore his skepticism about the nature of happiness. Yes, but what does being okay look like, in a world this demanding of melancholy?
56.The Beatles – Here There and Everywhere
The Beatles are known as purveyors of love songs, but this is the only one I'd ever play and believe and feel with the same part of my mind that believes in a slow, strong constant iteration of love. That it espouses codependency is secondary: these harmonies are pure love.
57.The Doors – Riders on the Storm
Pretend with me that you've never heard this song before. That's not easy: like Fur Elise or the Moonlight sonata, so ubiquitous, obvious, and saturating, its slick genius is easy to ignore, and that it is weirdly definitive (just of what, I'm not quite sure) is clear to me. A masterpiece of atmospherics, with Morrison's flat baritone (and hidden whispery hissing double voice), noodling keyboards & bass, washed out rain & thunder effects, crazed keyboard solo, glockenspiels; and that riff, fast and controlled and rotating, and then the sinister hi-hats: hyperactive tic tic tic tic tic as fast as rain, the brain-squirming actualized in the track. Imagine George W Bush, bourbon in hand, riding in the back of a huge open-air SUV into a flat hot Texas thunderstorm, while god blasts this track from a height of two-hundred feet. Not to be all crazie-go-nutz or anything.
58.Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – Insistor
Running through this song is a fine wire of high tension. Galloping drums, torn acoustic noodles on guitar, surf baselines, hollowed out, crazed, nonsensical vocals. The chorus demands a fit of shouting, bailbonds, Harvard Square, holding hips, all that. But it's the bridge, whispered and rushed, then muttered, then shouted, yips, shouts, then the vocals are doubled, and it's all over. An infuriated paean to the end of irresistible love.
59.My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes
Washed-out loops of white-noise-distorted electric guitars beneath a simple strummed acoustic line create a canvas of slow-moving sonic textures, achingly slow, adrift. Keven Shields's buried ruminations on love, waiting, hiding, being alone, floors, up and down, are simply countermelodic spikes in the equalizer.
60.The Magnetic Fields – Strange Powers
Stephen Merritt has a genius for love, and an amazing literary talent for setting the scene of love, displaying a flair of feeling. When we kiss it feels / like a flying saucer landing. The basso-profundo of Merrit's reverberations juxtaposes beautifully with the drum machine and jangly guitar, but, the magic of Strange Powers rests in the Merrit's portrayal of the anticipation of love (so superior to whatever might be construed as the real thing)—a world-weary set of cultural considerations and the sweet self-conscious openness of the good things to come.
61.JJ – Things Will Never Be The Same Again
This song seems to exist on a higher plane, a higher register, not deigning to even approach the earth. Clouds of sparkling violins lead us in and out of each verse, vague hiccuping tribal drums, 32nd shakers, a sashaying piano bridge, and a voice that seems to be beamed from clouds, singing about the passage of time. This ship will still sail on / long after I'm gone. I can't resist this kind of thing.
62.Man Man – Whalebones
Hold a tenor sax note for seven seconds, aaaaand, in a split-second, a minor seventh chord broken doing down: BAM: a slow lope of weaving mitzvah-vaude-rock and Honus Honus's 3-pack-a-day croak. But this song transcends its mazey instrumentalizations, offering up a poignant narrative about love & dependency, the bizarre spaces of human need. In a repeated chant above the final verse, a light soprano counterpoint offers: Who are we / to love at all escaping the narrative, implicating everyone in a global frailty.
63.Emily Haines – Winning
Haines in her solo efforts puts together surprisingly a unfeted lyrical portrait of the bizarre little internal spaces that make up much of consciousness, describing complaints, conditions of satisfaction, conclusions, and categories of approaches to experience, if that makes sense. In other terms, this is non-cute slow romantic-era classical solo piano with impressionistic vocals.
64.My Morning Jacket – I Will Be There When You Die
Apocryphally said to have been recorded in an East-Kentucky grain silo, with noticeable tape-hiss and almost painful sudden increases in volume when Jim James supports the high notes. The one-off feel of this recording, the atmosphere, well, that's nothing more than a feature of what would be a great song recorded in any pro studio. But somehow essential; the sparse fragility of these tones are a strange, delicate gift.
65.Regina Spektor – On the Radio
Spektor is so sincere that even when she's singing pure blended nonsense we let it slide, and when she's singing about stuff that seems to mean something, it comes down with the weight of revealed heartbreaking truth. Besides, she knows her songcraft, breezing past the bullshit and lingering on the good stuff, with a simple arrangement that privileges the beauty of the melody without the baggage of mainstream pop's bulky histrionics.
66.Conor Oberst & Gillian Welch – Lua
I'm choosing the 2009 duet re-recording to represent this song. In it, Oberst has excised his voice-cracking crying-into-my-guitar affectations, and the result brings the focus back to the songwriting, which is nothing short of brilliant, a compelling narrative of closely-observed mutually-assured personal and relationship destruction. The poetry is transparent and moving, too: When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend / get a coffee and the paper / have my own conversations / the sidewalk and the pigeons and my window reflections. In my ideal world, the closing recapitulation wouldn't be so re-, but I always thought Mozart used too many codas too.
67.Bonnie Prince Billy – I'll Be Glad
Undoubtedly Will Oldham will go down in music history as a purveyor of death-flecked earthy acoustics. But in this unironic prayer for guidance Oldham gives himself over to god in a moment of earnest purity, and it's the most strictly beautiful thing he's allowed himself to write. The church-organs and steel guitars in the instrumental breaks foreshadow the choral “amen” at the end, a full-throated embrace through the song's final fifteen seconds, a peaceful moment of holy thrall.
68.Imogen Heap – Hide & Seek
Any song this huge and gorgeous demands inclusion, authorial solipsism, overwrought evocations, the sense one is being manipulated, a slew of nonsensical lyrical legerdemains, tear-jerking montages on bad television and legions of appalling fans be damned.
69.The White Stripes – Hello Operator
A duet between Jack and his guitar. Straight-up electric-guitar genius.
70.Rogue Wave – Eyes
Another acoustic solitary-contemplation-of-love jam with requisite fetishization of the other and a distinct sense of interiority. I respond-to and empathize-with renderings of interiority. This comment isn't in any critical, but, for reasons I don't understand, this song makes me think of Christmas. That's important to me.
71.Liars – The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack
Simplicity itself.
72.Portishead – Wandering Star
The bass on this song is so huge and so filthy, I can throw this on at any moment and dig. Also, the record scratches are sui generis.
73.My Morning Jacket – Into the Woods
A good shower head / and my right hand / the two best lovers / I ever had. The song starts with the echoy sounds of children in an aviary, a bouncing organ, and Jim James's trademarked reverb-hollow vocals talking about a “kitten on fire” and a “baby in a blender.” Probably one of my favorite songs in terms of performance poetry, this is staid and straightfaced high-irony deliberate dissociation, laid down above a perfect circus march oompa-oompa . As the narrator invites the wolf into his bed and disappears into the woods, a Russian-thick choir comes on to bade him farewell, cymbals crashing. Just perfect.
74.Talking Heads – Burning Down the House
What really establishes the Talking Heads to me is the lean and muscular nature of their production; though there's no shortage of frantic bongos, flat-80's style drums and impossibly jumpy bass; the sound is sparse and intricate, a light bridge thrown over a open space. The emphatic yelping punch of Bryne's delivery almost compels fist-pumping singalongs; no easy feat over the trampolining instrumentalization.
75.Muse – Starlight
If you put this on repeat it's a song that never seems to end, with these ostionato circular riffs that cap the song on both ends, and that's the way to dig this song. Bellamy's melodramatic vocal tics—usually overweening and syrupy—are here the perfect counterpoint to the saw-steady to-the-point-of-danceable riffs.
76.Nick Cave – Dig, Lazarus, Dig
This frankly crazy scholarly punk about a contemporary Lazarus will knock your head back. It's abrasive, aggressive as unforgivable 1, reductive, with one jagged riff played over and over and over, (with requisite subtle production modifications). Cave describes the best lunatic villain in rock history, trumping even Tom Waits' notable circus of crazies.
77.Ben Folds – Late
Ben Folds' tribute to Elliot Smith somehow carries the plaintive presence of Elliot Smith's project than any specific Elliot Smith song to me. Ben Folds' pop instincts are always honed; and even here, in the middle of an indulgent dab of pure sentiment, they do not disappoint. The line about “your hard-earned peace of mind” has one of the most effective switch-up harmonies I've ever heard.
78.Emily Haines – Telethon
More or less the model of songs I'm guaranteed to love and be slightly embarrassed for loving. Super-slow, thoroughly schmaltz, beautiful, obscure, with a profound little lyric at the center and a chorus that takes you by the throat. I'm going to take my time / night by night. So am I. (Almost falls off the list for referencing Billy Joel, though.)
79.The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Maybe this song is too weird and perverted and literary (does Molloy feel empathy for his Billy Liar? I don't think so.)—but in the same moment a general ecstasy of disaster-laced love appears. There's no desire as piquant as that borne from hopelessness, incompetence and loneliness. But to enjoy this song, you don't have to dig Billy Liar's lyrics (in point of fact, maybe it'd be better to ignore them), you just have to want to hear a good-time good-cheer bit of summery indie pop. And the chorus is eminently singable: that's important to me.
80.Pulp – Common People
Probably too obviously written on a typewriter, this short-story length fantasy about transgressing low vs. upper-class caste barriers via theft and sex is off-putting, obvious, and annoying. And, passionate, existential, frantic, resigned, hopeful, with a lyrical motif that gains momentum like a drunk-driven late-model used truck going down a hill. If you aren't a person who feels the urge to learn lyrics and sing along, it'll probably skip off your atmosphere. Recommended for the oppressed politically-conscious post-emo kids; and me.
81.Madeleine Peyroux – Don’t Wait Too Long
Most optimism is over the top—it's too loud, too bright, it doth insist too much. Not so with this straightforward iteration of a future happiness. These strings of good-faith self-help platitudes may not have any critical mass, but, this understated jazz-pop makes up for its obviousness with an unblemished acceptance of the things to come. I've loved it since the turn-of-the-century Dockers commercial.
82.Beirut – After the Curtain
Certainly one of the more subtle songs that I love, if you can even call it a song. More of an epilogue than anything else. A veiled consideration of habit and freedom. But in all truth, I love it because it's beautiful to me. And there's all those people cheering and clapping. It moves.
83.Madonna – Ray of Light
I can't decide if it's the chorus (And I feel / like I just got home / and I feel / and I feel), or the propelled 64th note tremulous arcs, sirens, crickets, squawks, tweets, and jet-engines that lead the beat, Madonna's wheeling performance, or the mixing—which grabs and skews the track back and forth between the speakers—that make this song so compelling. It's a just fast as fuck, and puts in me in a hyper-manic tight-focus zone. My two fastest minesweeper times have been occurred when this song was playing, and that's no joke to me.
84.Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat
You're living for nothing now / I hope you're keeping some kind of record / yes. I'm not sure if this interpretation is borne out in established rock criticism, but I can't help but see Cohen's variously damaged characters/auters as exploring some kind of ideational apocalypse, the endgame of a bizarre bohemian experiment, its damaged narrator's flattened monotone reflecting his stunted traumatized internal states. The dirgelike quavering backup singers set the song up perfectly, too: here is a frozen motionless blasted madness.
85.Franz Ferdinand – The Fallen
Probably the loudest song on this list. Lyrically, a bunch of Jesus-in-Manhattan party-animal romanticized self-destruction tropes and random lines thrown in there as filler or to buttress some incomprehensible symbolic paradigm. I yell all the lyrics I can understand, I mumble the rest. So they say you're troubled boy / just because you like to destroy / all the things that bring the idiots joy. How could someone like me not appreciate that level of deluded self-protecting arrogance?
86.Aimee Mann – Save Me
I loved this song before the lyrics actually applied to my life. I loved this song when I was in high school, when I didn't know my ass from my heart, and would have announced my studied boredom and superiority over any considered study of the complex length of adult life, the minor emotional mazes that are simply built-in with the passage of time, the incredibly fraught oddity of living more than a few years as a person without the excuse of ignorance. If that makes any sense. Plus, it's a really good song.
87.Donovan – Colours (long version)
Beautiful. Featured prominently in Rules of Attraction. (You remember....the scene where the girl and the guy are getting ready for class, meeting serendipitously in the hall, falling in love, all that). As in every case, I prefer the slower, more sentimental version. If you don't know, now you know.
88.Dr. Dog – The Breeze
Songs like this one often come in to my life and burn out just as quickly. Unremarkable dust-in-the-wind existentialism on Crosby-Stills-and-Nash classicism. But I like the lyrics completely, the advice-for-the-weary, a balanced combination of hopelessness, awareness and acceptance, so rarely linked in life or music; like one of those poems or a life-changing essay: you just have to revisit, reify it to yourself, every now and then.
89.Serge Gainsbourg – Cargo Culte
I don't speak French, and I have scarcely a clue of what Serge Gainsbourg is talking about in this song (yes, talking: there are barely ten sung phrases on the whole album) beyond his love for Melodie Nelson and ritual tribal fantasies. What is clear includes grimy electric guitars, layered chromatic scales, grinding baselines, a full chorus shrieking open syllables. Too much slow-burn fun to bemoan the loss of any meaning in translation.
90.Tony Bennett – The Good Life
The most irony-saturated song I've ever heard—not bad for appearing fifty years before our oft-lamented contemporary golden age of irony. All the more heartbreaking for its world-weary awareness. A sly elegy for isolating freedom.
91.MGMT – Kids
I don't know how the lyric take only what you need from me can sound so victorious. Get up, y'all.
92.Elini Mandell – Moonglow, Lamp Low
Required: the bourgeois apparatus of relaxation: tea, a day off from work, a deckchair outside, music on-demand. This song is a dose of a simple mood; in fact, is so simple and earnest anyone could write it. But that's what I like about it. If Sinatra had sang it, it'd be a “performance” buried beneath an orchestra, but who wants that? This is music for a stripped down mood; execrable “soft jazz,” demanding of cool air and a refrigerator full of drinks through the glass doors in the house waiting.
93.Norah Jones – The Nearness of You
A classic rendition of a gold standard.
94.Underworld f. Radiohead – 8 Ball
This song isn't going to end up as part of the official Radiohead canon. That's okay. The lyrics don't add up to anything that even remotely hints at meaning. It's pretty much a chill-out house track: not your usual recipe for preferred heartbreaking moments of crystalline beauty. Somehow, though, it works to create an awareness of the goodness of life, a hyper-lit bit of fascinated hope. Proust's meditation on the madeleine this is not, but, a similar first-person access to happiness is constructed here. Going on and on with this nonsense description of random people on the city street. A subtle build-up over eight minutes, guitars coming in like rain, the chords resolving and the beat drops, and suddenly the whole is more than the sum, access to the immediate.
95.Coldplay – Clocks
It's probably not fair that Coldplay is as huge as they are, but the reverbed piano in this song is like light breaking through clouds, wind through rolled-down windows.
96.O.P.M. – Heaven is a Halfpipe
In large part, you can count on the songs on this list to provoke one or another specific emotional response in its purest distillation. Usually I enjoy the ideal forms of contemplativeness, outright despondency, or tenderness, as I find these experiences most fraught with bubbles of unlabeled meaning. Only rarely do I dig a song like this one, whose sole purpose is getting dumb, straight rocking, twisting-out mad happiness. I don't skateboard and rarely smoke drugs; I don't care about “the man” when he “fucks” with the “shit” I want to do; and I don't condone skipping biology. But I'll stand out a sunroof going down Main shouting joy when this comes on my itunes clone.
97.Jason Mraz – I'm Yours
To complete the irresistible-irritating trilogy I present: Jason Mraz's mega-ubiquitous I'm Yours. In contrast with other songs I hate to love (on account of the company I'd share, or those evil little popsong tics that drive me crazy), here the lyrics are front and center of my ambiguity. For starts, Mraz sings the word “scootch,” as in scootch on over closer dear. Ugh. Nor would I follow that ghastly phrase with the equally cloying and let me nibble your ear. Cringe-inducing. But! Beyond that, I'm Yours is a trenchant plea for immediate love, built on nimble wordplay and an overdose of truisms, which are always fun when set to music that seems to animate.
98.Green Day – Warning
I get why it's easy to sneer at Green Day's uncomplicated pop offerings. I sneer, all the time. I sneer while I'm getting down and grinning like some kind of glue-sniffing idiot. The hummingbird part of my mind wants to hear this song at least once a year: three chords, a rhythm straight out a punk-obvious drum machine and all a sudden I want to shout. On the line between desultory adolescent anthems and heavy-handed postured political statements, Warning is almost meaningful, only slightly self-righteous, 100% everything that's wrong with convenient language of pseudo-intellectualism. What? I can't justify it. This song is crap. It's infuriatingly bad. Such good infuriatingly bad crap, though.
99.The Eagles – Desperado
I know where the Eagles stand in the continuum of artistic merit: somewhere narrowly in front of the Backstreet Boys and a critical light-year behind the Beatles. I'm not proud of having committed the sin of soft-rock. Like so many songs on this list, I enjoy this song for what it tries to be, for pretending to stand-alone, irrespective of history, for flailing pathetically toward sincerity. (Even if it is an easy mass-communicable sincerity). I get that it's played out, (except that it's not played out to me). Sometimes I'm moved by it. That's it.
100.Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe
This song probably doesn't deserve a spot on this list when you consider the fact that every time I turn it on, I'm trying to decide whether or not I hate it or love it. The singer's voice is annoying in full emo-rock mode, and the lyrics that aren't inept make no sense. (Or, rather: they're so scattered so as to obviate any careful parsing). But it's really passionate. Really, really passionate. I'm always won over by this approach: even if you're out of your g-d g, as long as you say it with conviction, really commit, you know, you can't fail completely. How do I not give props to that?
http://www.mediafire.com/?zqgzjzjzymm
http://www.mediafire.com/?xnmdngildwm
http://www.mediafire.com/?ohzlfn2myde
http://www.mediafire.com/?kndantlzx4z
http://www.mediafire.com/?djoomw40zeu
http://www.mediafire.com/?tnm3zug4nzm
http://www.mediafire.com/?ljjdyzttdfn
[102 tracks; 597 MB; compressed in .zip]
Brandon thinks this list is "boorish and untimely"
And, on to the not-awaited, completely unrequested epic redux. Download links at bottom.
1.Bon Iver – Re-Stacks
As I've noted many a time, the last line in this song, Your love will be / safe with me is probably my favorite lyric of all time, the way I want to be when I'm most fully my ideal self. This song balances itself with infinite gentleness on the tip of a pyramid, never quite resolving, a phone lifted subtly in the silence of the track's very end. This song has everything a favorite song needs: obscurity, beauty, accessibility. It's just ephemeral enough to let you in immediately, without gorging to the point of saturation.
2.Third Eye Blind – Semi-Charmed Life (album version)
The velvet it rips / in the city we tripped / on the urge to feel alive. I can't listen to this song if I'm not drinking with my little sister. Luckily, we drink together on a regular base, and when the urge to manufacture some enthusiastic nostalgia strikes, nothing suffices as effectively as this piece of adrenaline-laced art for children of the nineties. The four right chords could make me cry, you know. We'll scream it out; we'll wake the upstairs neighbors and the downstairs neighbors from jumping up and down. There isn't a bad lyric here. I'm not listening when you say goodbye.
3.LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends
No song gives me such a simultaneous rush of enervating sadness and happiness. Even though half of the lyrics don't make any sense, somehow this song contains the potential ecstasies of being in the world with people. That's saying a lot. The galloping multi-tracked piano beat and the nostalgia-laced poetry hits me on every level. I wish I weren't as nostalgia-prone / regret-scarred as I am, but I still aspire to James Murphy's I wouldn't trade one stupid decision / for another five years of life.
4.The Beatles – Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight – The End
It's probably a cheat to collapse these songs into one, but, no one ever listens to only of them at a time, and they lead directly in to each other, and are (tenuously, I'll admit) linked lyrically, and most importantly, I get to make the rules. The muscular call for sleep against a pervasive homelessness on Golden Slumbers sets the tone; the regret-inflected Carry That Weight bursts into The End's frantic jam and tempo increase. If we're homeless by definition from which the only respite is sleep; the question: Are you going to be in my dreams? emerges naturally. The End, featuring arguably the finest drum solo, riff, and guitar solo of the Beatles' career, finally dissolves into the diaphanous final message, and ultimate philosophy of the Beatles, if only ever loosely implemented: the love you take is equal to the love you make.
5.Josh Ritter – To The Dogs or Whoever
There aren't many songs that inspire in me such confidence of the goodness of life, the inevitability of beauty's return in the face of the failure that undermines everything. Though half of the lyrics reference pointlessly obscure Americana & whatnot (such as Joan of Arc), the other half is pure poetry. A boat that could love the rocks and the shore / could you love me like the crosses love the nape of neck. And who can resist yelling the chorus—I thought I heard somebody calling. In the dark I thought I heard somebody call—no one!!!!
6.Azure Ray – Rise
There aren't many iterations of love that I find compelling. In the face of failure, death, the dissipation of desire, every mechanism (and there are plenty) that steadily tears us apart, somehow this song patches over the sadness, takes responsibility, and emerges with acceptance of loss. Rise is perfectly gentle, resigned, as ethereal as love itself. As everyone knows, romance is tied by necessity to the possibility or the inevitability of failure; somehow, when I'm hearing this song, I don't mind what is lost or the losses to come.
7.Jens Lekman – Black Cab
Loneliness in its purest distillation. The solipsism, arrogance, insecurity, semi-suicidal recklessness, and self-absorption of loneliness. I love every lyric in this song. If I could get away with it, I'd put this on every mixtape I'll ever make. You don't know anything / so don't ask me questions / you don't know anything / so turn the music up / and keep your mouth shut.
8.The National – Fake Empire
Bluebirds on our shoulders. The National's 3rd album, Boxer, is one of the best albums to come out in the last ten years, and the first track is worth the price of the whole CD. A lot is made of the National's curious mix of mythic imagery and personal evocations, and this song brings them together perfectly, a clanging piano melody, the tintinnabulation to end the song, the beat-anticipating drums. No other song so perfectly evokes winter to me, the loss of love.
9.M Ward – Here Comes the Sun Again
Another perfect blend of battle-scarred optimism and serene melancholy. M Ward doesn't say much, talking about weather and driving. This is one of those simple songs I want to play first when I meet someone new.
10.Wilco – Poor Places
This song is a perfect example of what made mid-career Wilco great: meticulous, with a painstaking commitment to concentrated production, a deconstructed melody. Beginning in what seems to be a hospital, over the steady beep of a life-support machine; through four successive changes of modulation and instrumentation, pianos and guitars trading the melody; a hot dissonant fourth carried through the first two minutes of the song, building to the climax two minutes in (which never does exactly resolve), dissolving finally without resolution in a wave of electronic noise.
11.Townes Van Zandt – To Live is to Fly
This song isn't very interesting musically. But is philosophically perfect. I subscribe to every lyric, even if taken line by line it's nothing more than a mess of cliché. Van Zandt's delivery is world-weary and worn-out, and has the unvarnished feeling of hard-earned truth. Risky, inimitable; somehow, I love it.
12.Third Eye Blind – Jumper
I break eardrums singing this. Who doesn't?
13.Bob Dylan – Simple Twist of Fate
Of all the paucity-of-love songs in the world, this has to be one of the purest distillations. Dylan recaps the entire relationship (one night), and this encapsulation, this mix of idealizing memory, instant-and-then-gone expectation, thwarted communication and the temporal nature of desire—ah, it's beautiful. He told himself he didn't care / pushed the window open wide / felt that emptiness inside. I've been there; fuck it, sometimes I think I live there.
14.The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations
Massive. So epic, it's heroic. She was a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend. And twenty other one-liners. As big as all of classic rock and fully literate.
15.Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Everybody's heard it, everybody's cried to it.
16.Belle & Sebastian – The Fox in the Snow
Who doesn't dig the pure adolescent existential infuriated lassitude of this song? Even now, from time to time, I completely empathize with the boy on the bike: As you cycle round the town / you're going up / you're going down / you're going nowhere. It's not as if they're paying you / it's not as if it's fun / at least not anymore. Not to mention that the melody is achingly beautiful, laid down with fingerpicked guitars, pianos and violins.
17.Jenny Lewis – It Wasn't Me
Guilt is a motherfucker, and Jenny Lewis's lullaby description-of/critique-of/skewering-of her body of self-destructiveness and regret resonates fully with me. It wasn't me / I wasn't there / I was stone drunk / it isn't clear / and it doesn't count / cause I don't care. But of course everyone knows you do. It's still nice to hear someone sing about, though.
18.The Mountain Goats – No Children
It's rare that a song this unvarnished is ironic and bemused. Pure hilarity and unstinting reality all at once. I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow / I hope it bleeds all day long. When you've been squeezed dry of every last drop of concern, and you don't give a fuck anymore, the only thing left is sarcasm and blunt dissociation. Darnielle's classic track is designed to make disaster seem aggressively fun.
19.The Shins – Those to Come
Apparently, I'm drawn to songs that make reference to relaxed morning-after underwear-lounging. Something bad inside me / went away. I could do without the wide-lens existential ruminations on the ongoing nature of human life that serve to close the song, but, really, this is a perfectly beautiful track. The bearers of all good things arrive. Not to mention the melody is Cat-Stevens perfect.
20.The Eels – Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues
Acceptance is hard. Getting thrilled about the state of the world is even harder. Especially when you're reciting a laundry list of desolation, waste, dissociation, insanity, regrets, and failure. But E somehow makes it happen. I like juxtapositions like this. I like feeling grim with the uncompromising truth and excited about the beauty of life at the same time. Goddamn right / It's a beautiful day.
21.Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day
Sufjan is annoyingly sincere. Still, no song reminds me of growing up more than this—probably the most tragic and intricately literary of any song I know. Ergo, no song has made me cry harder (with the exception of Verdi's Requiem, and that was a long time ago), and that counts as a lot in my book. The fact that I have to respect the music, and that it's unambiguously beautiful—well, that's just bonus.
22.The New Pornographers – From Blown Speakers
This song, less than three minutes long, culminates in one explosive, ecstatic moment 2/3rds of the way through. I bang enthusiastically on my air-snares and double-kick air drums. A perfect illustration of tension and release. I can't really recommend it for any other reason: I don't really know what they're talking about, though I've sang the lyrics many a time.
23.Wilco – Jesus Etc.
The definitive Wilco track; a triumph of old-fashioned songwriting. The stars are alternately rising and setting. You were right in both cases. At this moment, genius is the art of taking the unsaid obvious and making it heartrending: Our love is all we have.
24.Cat Power – (Can't Get No) Satisfaction
The funny thing about this Rolling Stones cover is that Chan never actually sings the famous chorus. Quite literally, the listener gets no satisfaction. There is no rock-and-roll in this track: one hears an empty room and a sad woman with her guitar. But this subtraction only highlights the brilliance of Jagger's lyrics, the cynical emptiness at the heart of the rock star experience. Beautiful.
25.Wilco – Handshake Drugs
Best lyric ever: If I ever was myself / I wasn't that night.
26.Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
Shoegaze love song. Everyone not bored or offended was rocked into a stationary frenzy of Borgesian nostalgia-for-the-present by the conclusion of Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and, as with so many poetry-vulnerable filmgoers, those trawling Tokyo shots are linked indelibly with Just Like Honey's regret-laced evocations. As with Nietzsche and his friends, my love for this song rests in my inability to qualify it. So I'll stop with the trying.
27.Alexi Murdoch – Orange Sky (EP version)
I prefer the super-slow percussion-and-piano-free EP version of this song (almost impossible to find at this point, though it was featured on a few soundtracks in the early double-oughts) to the over-produced souped-up easy-listening adult-top-40 album version. My heart's been broken / sometimes my mind is too strong. Even if your heart's not broken, when you're soaking in this song, it is. Chalk one up to mirror neurons. Mirror neurons make life worth living.
28.Etta James – Stormy Weather
Etta's voice is too triumphant to let any song wallow in depression, misery-riddled lyrics be damned; a doo-wop piano and sashaying orchestrations lift the track further. I sense a pattern emerging: I like exultant expressions of disappointment.
29.Regina Spektor – Fidelity
I don't participate in the mass-hysteria Regina Spektor lovefest with your average simian-smart neu-indie Grey's Anatomy-viewer, but, if you concentrate when you listen, you'll love this song's perfect demonstration of the craft of meta-love-song, mercifully free from most of the cutesy lyrical ephemera that mar most of Spektor's tracks. The pizzicato strings that comprise most of the musical backings behind warm (if synthesized) horn sections make for a flawless combination of levity and warmth, meshing exactly with Spektor's pitch-and-tempo perfect stairstepping chorus.
30.My Morning Jacket - Golden
A song about driving and wasting time. And being in bars, dreams, feelings, heaven, and other things. If you like driving at night (my favorite thing), along deserted highways (favorite squared), while sinking into self-satisfied nostalgia (cubed), this song is perfect. Reverb'd to the max, and a steel guitar, which aren't recipes for easy-access joy, when hitched to the pitter-patter car-tire beat and Jones' soaring vocal instrument, well, it works.
31.The Mountain Goats – This Year
Ready for the bad things to come. My nostalgia alone would demand the inclusion of this song. But beyond this is a triumphal future-tense assertion of the value of life. My broken house behind me / and good things ahead / a girl named Kathy wants a little of my time. I know of no more uncompromisingly anticipation-oriented articulation of self-determination. And the denouement: There will be feasting / and dancing / in Jerusalem next year. Fuck yeah. One of the most-quoted-by-me and inspiring songs I know.
32.The Strokes – The End Has No End
Not the best Strokes song, maybe, but, it's a long-time favorite for reasons that remain obscure to me. Casablancas delivers subtle insults, that's always appealing. It's got the requisite detached Strokes delivery and the frantic shouting and fuzzed-out guitar solo, too. The source of my “I'm relaxed” mantra: I can do a lot of things / but I can't do that. I recall clearly at 18, listening to this song for ten consecutive hours, and I still dig it when it comes on.
33.Spoon – Black Like Me
Spoon's minimalistic acoustic-symphony aesthetic culminated on the completely effective Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga album. Black Like Me, the album's closer, is a minor masterpiece of the effective culmination of ten thousand minute production decisions: the rotating strings, indescribable interplay of clattering piano and droopy horns, the simple riffs and the tension built, stretched, tattered, and finally resolved in a Day in the Life crashing orchestral melisma. And, for reasons that I don't want to understand, All the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want is a personally incisive lyric.
34.Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come
Essential.
35.Weezer – El Scorcho
From the perspective of “Rock History” maybe the Sweater Song is more necessary, less contingent (and at least equally ass-kicking) but, this whining, shouting, garbled track is the epitome of a successful pre-emo personal-general description-of, plea-for and consideration-of a frontman's adolescent love, with enough whimsy to avoid the ponderousness and self-seriousness of “love” as commonly construed, while retaining an unparalleled heartfelt shriek.
36.Scissor Sisters – I Can't Decide
This song isn't representative of my tastes at-large in the slightest: a dance-y, angry, bitter, enthusiastic tumultuous-love murder-fantasy. But, you have to dig this ironic takedown of desire, the almost impossible balance of bemused indifference and hysterical mania. And when the chorus comes on, with a big anticipatory inhalation, circus-clown percussive asterisks, fuzzed out voice effects and frantically picked banjos: it's damned catchy and hilarious, the perfect antidote to heartbreak. I won't deny I'm going to miss you when you're gone. Indeed.
37.Shearwater – The Hunter's Star
An underrated contemporary classic of piano-rock mopery. Unabashedly saturated in big emotions, simultaneously sad and lifted, as necessary to me as the Raindrop prelude or the 2nd movement of the Sonata Pathetique. Jonathan Meiburg's eccentric vocal modulations lend a purely musical effect here, deliciously balancing against the warm woodwinds and swirling piano chords.
38.Radiohead – No Surprises
Probably Radiohead will be remembered for their bleak vision of contemporary capitalistic dissociation (and No Surprises' theme of suicidal alienation-resignation certainly participates in that project), but they are equally profound musically, picking out a soaringly beautiful melody from a huge empty space. Strictly to be played after midnight.
39.Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger
A nine-and-a-half minute utterly heartbreaking acoustic ode to lost love, the passage of time, the shambling elegance of life in the world, objects filled with angles of brown twilight. Dylanesque in its melodic repetitiveness, a scale moving endlessly downward, but expanded with the constant addition of subtle instrumental complications: a doubled tambourine here, a walking upright bassline there, untuned box pianos, an entire mad palate of run-down layered gothic noises. Pays huge dividends case of preexisting latent sentiment.
40.Vampire Weekend – Ottoman
The pizzicato chamber strings epiphanies of Walcott appear here in my favorite form, without the annoying piano clanging. Yes, every infuriating bourgeoisie ballroom upperclass reflex is in full jerk here, but, it's so sweet and seamless, full of the confidence of craftsmanship, you can't resist.
41.Tom Waits – Mr. Siegal
Take the violent nihilism of swordfishtrombones-era Waits and mix with the biggest Howlin' Wolf-style bluesy-Americana rollick around the blue guitar and piano, and you've got Mr. Siegal. When it comes on, I can't help but grin, then leer, then conduct the air-orchestra, punching the air. Hearing this song live inspires an irresistible joy, a mandated saunter. If you were me, you sing along like you're really curious: Why are the wicked so strong?—taking up the mantle of unrepentant evil for a walk around the block, feeling the perfect power of unabashed wickedness for yourself.
42.Nick Drake – At the Chime of A City Clock
Weird little beautiful song. Punctuated by saxophones and a full string section. Obscure ruminations on the nature of beauty, urban isolation, death, a blurry protagonist's psychological disorders. The chorus is a brilliant chord progression: ; the entire song is infused with a piquant, resigned inevitability. In the light of a city sky / find a face that's fair / and keep it by your side. Nice, right?
43.Rilo Kiley – Science vs. Romance
Early-period Jenny Lewis was obsessed with the constituent aspects of love, ruminations delivered with a kind of exaggerated vulnerability and self-conscious world-weariness. The cutesy vocal stylings are maybe too twee for some palates, but, her delivery of it's cold out there / but I'm telling you / I'm lonely too, broken chord, minor sixth whole tone scale, is perfect.
44.Mason Jennings – Nothing
No song lends itself to postmodern critiques of meaninglessness and a turning against silence quite like Mason Jennings' pre-Jack Johnson-ing stab at comprehensibility in the face of the every kind of failure, from things unsaid to brown tap water. Jennings here turns to the simplicity of his broken heart, a “new place” that “seems strange,” an unabashed embarrassment. Please know what I mean / When I say / Nothing. Perfect. Plus you can sing along and feel pure happiness.
45.The Hold Steady – Your Little Hoodrat Friend
The Hold Steady's work pre-Boys And Girls In America is challenging and (somewhat) abrasive. A huge bar band (complete with two-headed guitar and honky-tonk organ) blasting Thin Lizzy-style jams. And the Craig Finn doesn't sing so much as he slur-preaches. And the songs are convoluted multi-page mythologized poems about adolescent parties, fantasy-images of lost loves, where the fucked-forever mentally unbalanced lunatics and wannabe-hard suburban kids just wading into voyeuristic drug addictions meet. But this shit is just profound, I just fucking love it, even when the mythology would take too much work to figure out. It burns being broke / and hurts to be heartbroken / and always being both must be a drag.
46.Modest Mouse – The World At Large
Did I want love? Did I need to know? Perfect philosophy for your dissociated po-mo-obsessed non-achievement-striving inveterate starter-over. Even if starting over's not what life's about.
47.Neko Case – Star Witness
Star Witness is a perfect piece of songwriting, featuring a definitive and effortless and soaring vocal performance by Case. Definitive understated pop music, unwrapping a tragic love story line by line. A rough causality of destruction is allayed, finding the universe itself at fault: Trees break the sidewalk / the sidewalk skims my knees.
48.Fleet Foxes – Meadowlarks
On an album of perfectly crafted acoustic artifacts, Meadowlarks finds the Fleet Foxes pushes into open spaces, a more straightforward chamber pop elegance. Every movement in this song is crafted to nudge this cloud of arched sound forward: the sweeping hums of the chorus, the modulation in the third verse, the rising arpeggios of guitar at the end. Robin Pecknold's imagery is characteristically pastoral and archaic, punctuated by existential lamentations. What's here is essential: anything else would be gratuitous.
49.The Shins – New Slang
I'm looking in on the good life / I might be doomed never to find. The common and abominable practice of naming the song after the least-defensible lyrical abstraction contained therein so as to lend said abstraction some nascent symbolic heft or generosity is in full effect here. But that doesn't even rise to the level of quibble. New Slang is too perfect to me to bear conversation, so I'll quote it: If you took to me / like a gull takes to the wind. The regret—the fact that she didn't—well, so what? The rest of our lives will fare well anyway.
50.Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks
Layers of indomitable pinking piano pop with all the spaciousness and harmonic intertextuality we've come to expect from Grizzly Bear make for a delightful and almost necessary construction.
51.Panda Bear – Take Pills
Half of this song is a drawn out introduction; the other half is an exultant lullaby on top of a collection of looped sounds, skateboards, bubbling water, washing machines, a subway arrives and leaves. Over before it begins. The sound in this song bounces around a huge open space, as if Lennox set up his microphones in the back of an airplane hanger and sang top-of-lungs across the open space; made to be heard above shafts of light and empty concrete floors.
52.Stars – Your Ex-Lover is Dead
This conceit behind this song has fail written all over it. Duets are miserable; relationships long-since-over are boring; I-win and you-lose lyrics are annoying; salvaging something serendipitous from the larger wastes is some combination of infuriating arrogance and cloyingly simplistics. Plus there's these lavish romantic orchestrations and Sarah Records guitar lines: a turn-off. But, actually, this song is fucking awesome, even if it takes a few listens to groove with the somewhat herky-jerky melody. And the final verse is the purest expression of sane acceptance in the face of the failure of love. I gave what I gave / I'm not sorry I met you / I'm not sorry it's over. You just have to listen to it.
53.Andrew Bird – Tables and Chairs
Songs are good for launching obvious truths to the space of emotional engagement. Tables and Chairs performs this function for me. The lyric Just don't let the human factor / fail to be a factor has always dropped on my ears with the weight of revealed truth, even if it only means that we must be wide in our vision. As I've grown older I've come to appreciate the rest of this song, too. Even the whimsical utopia/dystopia description of a post-financial landscape in the song's second act is refreshingly light.
54.Titus Andronicus – My Time Outside the Womb
You'll spend the rest of your life trying to forget / that you met the world naked and screaming / and that's how you'll leave it. New Jersey garage rock delivered in Conor Oberst's tremulous tones. A three-minute autobiography heavy with epigrammatic existentialism and fear-saturated street-smarts. One mistake is all that it takes.
55.The Eels – Grace Kelly Blues
The actress gave up all her old dreams / and traded up. The Eels are preoccupied with articulated affirmations of happiness to the point that one understands viscerally the shadow of loss behind their surface-level affirmations of happiness. Grace Kelly Blues recovers the ambiguity and disaster, the tragedy of regular life in a series of keenly observed set pieces. When E describes himself: I think you know / I'll be okay it's impossible to ignore his skepticism about the nature of happiness. Yes, but what does being okay look like, in a world this demanding of melancholy?
56.The Beatles – Here There and Everywhere
The Beatles are known as purveyors of love songs, but this is the only one I'd ever play and believe and feel with the same part of my mind that believes in a slow, strong constant iteration of love. That it espouses codependency is secondary: these harmonies are pure love.
57.The Doors – Riders on the Storm
Pretend with me that you've never heard this song before. That's not easy: like Fur Elise or the Moonlight sonata, so ubiquitous, obvious, and saturating, its slick genius is easy to ignore, and that it is weirdly definitive (just of what, I'm not quite sure) is clear to me. A masterpiece of atmospherics, with Morrison's flat baritone (and hidden whispery hissing double voice), noodling keyboards & bass, washed out rain & thunder effects, crazed keyboard solo, glockenspiels; and that riff, fast and controlled and rotating, and then the sinister hi-hats: hyperactive tic tic tic tic tic as fast as rain, the brain-squirming actualized in the track. Imagine George W Bush, bourbon in hand, riding in the back of a huge open-air SUV into a flat hot Texas thunderstorm, while god blasts this track from a height of two-hundred feet. Not to be all crazie-go-nutz or anything.
58.Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – Insistor
Running through this song is a fine wire of high tension. Galloping drums, torn acoustic noodles on guitar, surf baselines, hollowed out, crazed, nonsensical vocals. The chorus demands a fit of shouting, bailbonds, Harvard Square, holding hips, all that. But it's the bridge, whispered and rushed, then muttered, then shouted, yips, shouts, then the vocals are doubled, and it's all over. An infuriated paean to the end of irresistible love.
59.My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes
Washed-out loops of white-noise-distorted electric guitars beneath a simple strummed acoustic line create a canvas of slow-moving sonic textures, achingly slow, adrift. Keven Shields's buried ruminations on love, waiting, hiding, being alone, floors, up and down, are simply countermelodic spikes in the equalizer.
60.The Magnetic Fields – Strange Powers
Stephen Merritt has a genius for love, and an amazing literary talent for setting the scene of love, displaying a flair of feeling. When we kiss it feels / like a flying saucer landing. The basso-profundo of Merrit's reverberations juxtaposes beautifully with the drum machine and jangly guitar, but, the magic of Strange Powers rests in the Merrit's portrayal of the anticipation of love (so superior to whatever might be construed as the real thing)—a world-weary set of cultural considerations and the sweet self-conscious openness of the good things to come.
61.JJ – Things Will Never Be The Same Again
This song seems to exist on a higher plane, a higher register, not deigning to even approach the earth. Clouds of sparkling violins lead us in and out of each verse, vague hiccuping tribal drums, 32nd shakers, a sashaying piano bridge, and a voice that seems to be beamed from clouds, singing about the passage of time. This ship will still sail on / long after I'm gone. I can't resist this kind of thing.
62.Man Man – Whalebones
Hold a tenor sax note for seven seconds, aaaaand, in a split-second, a minor seventh chord broken doing down: BAM: a slow lope of weaving mitzvah-vaude-rock and Honus Honus's 3-pack-a-day croak. But this song transcends its mazey instrumentalizations, offering up a poignant narrative about love & dependency, the bizarre spaces of human need. In a repeated chant above the final verse, a light soprano counterpoint offers: Who are we / to love at all escaping the narrative, implicating everyone in a global frailty.
63.Emily Haines – Winning
Haines in her solo efforts puts together surprisingly a unfeted lyrical portrait of the bizarre little internal spaces that make up much of consciousness, describing complaints, conditions of satisfaction, conclusions, and categories of approaches to experience, if that makes sense. In other terms, this is non-cute slow romantic-era classical solo piano with impressionistic vocals.
64.My Morning Jacket – I Will Be There When You Die
Apocryphally said to have been recorded in an East-Kentucky grain silo, with noticeable tape-hiss and almost painful sudden increases in volume when Jim James supports the high notes. The one-off feel of this recording, the atmosphere, well, that's nothing more than a feature of what would be a great song recorded in any pro studio. But somehow essential; the sparse fragility of these tones are a strange, delicate gift.
65.Regina Spektor – On the Radio
Spektor is so sincere that even when she's singing pure blended nonsense we let it slide, and when she's singing about stuff that seems to mean something, it comes down with the weight of revealed heartbreaking truth. Besides, she knows her songcraft, breezing past the bullshit and lingering on the good stuff, with a simple arrangement that privileges the beauty of the melody without the baggage of mainstream pop's bulky histrionics.
66.Conor Oberst & Gillian Welch – Lua
I'm choosing the 2009 duet re-recording to represent this song. In it, Oberst has excised his voice-cracking crying-into-my-guitar affectations, and the result brings the focus back to the songwriting, which is nothing short of brilliant, a compelling narrative of closely-observed mutually-assured personal and relationship destruction. The poetry is transparent and moving, too: When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend / get a coffee and the paper / have my own conversations / the sidewalk and the pigeons and my window reflections. In my ideal world, the closing recapitulation wouldn't be so re-, but I always thought Mozart used too many codas too.
67.Bonnie Prince Billy – I'll Be Glad
Undoubtedly Will Oldham will go down in music history as a purveyor of death-flecked earthy acoustics. But in this unironic prayer for guidance Oldham gives himself over to god in a moment of earnest purity, and it's the most strictly beautiful thing he's allowed himself to write. The church-organs and steel guitars in the instrumental breaks foreshadow the choral “amen” at the end, a full-throated embrace through the song's final fifteen seconds, a peaceful moment of holy thrall.
68.Imogen Heap – Hide & Seek
Any song this huge and gorgeous demands inclusion, authorial solipsism, overwrought evocations, the sense one is being manipulated, a slew of nonsensical lyrical legerdemains, tear-jerking montages on bad television and legions of appalling fans be damned.
69.The White Stripes – Hello Operator
A duet between Jack and his guitar. Straight-up electric-guitar genius.
70.Rogue Wave – Eyes
Another acoustic solitary-contemplation-of-love jam with requisite fetishization of the other and a distinct sense of interiority. I respond-to and empathize-with renderings of interiority. This comment isn't in any critical, but, for reasons I don't understand, this song makes me think of Christmas. That's important to me.
71.Liars – The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack
Simplicity itself.
72.Portishead – Wandering Star
The bass on this song is so huge and so filthy, I can throw this on at any moment and dig. Also, the record scratches are sui generis.
73.My Morning Jacket – Into the Woods
A good shower head / and my right hand / the two best lovers / I ever had. The song starts with the echoy sounds of children in an aviary, a bouncing organ, and Jim James's trademarked reverb-hollow vocals talking about a “kitten on fire” and a “baby in a blender.” Probably one of my favorite songs in terms of performance poetry, this is staid and straightfaced high-irony deliberate dissociation, laid down above a perfect circus march oompa-oompa . As the narrator invites the wolf into his bed and disappears into the woods, a Russian-thick choir comes on to bade him farewell, cymbals crashing. Just perfect.
74.Talking Heads – Burning Down the House
What really establishes the Talking Heads to me is the lean and muscular nature of their production; though there's no shortage of frantic bongos, flat-80's style drums and impossibly jumpy bass; the sound is sparse and intricate, a light bridge thrown over a open space. The emphatic yelping punch of Bryne's delivery almost compels fist-pumping singalongs; no easy feat over the trampolining instrumentalization.
75.Muse – Starlight
If you put this on repeat it's a song that never seems to end, with these ostionato circular riffs that cap the song on both ends, and that's the way to dig this song. Bellamy's melodramatic vocal tics—usually overweening and syrupy—are here the perfect counterpoint to the saw-steady to-the-point-of-danceable riffs.
76.Nick Cave – Dig, Lazarus, Dig
This frankly crazy scholarly punk about a contemporary Lazarus will knock your head back. It's abrasive, aggressive as unforgivable 1, reductive, with one jagged riff played over and over and over, (with requisite subtle production modifications). Cave describes the best lunatic villain in rock history, trumping even Tom Waits' notable circus of crazies.
77.Ben Folds – Late
Ben Folds' tribute to Elliot Smith somehow carries the plaintive presence of Elliot Smith's project than any specific Elliot Smith song to me. Ben Folds' pop instincts are always honed; and even here, in the middle of an indulgent dab of pure sentiment, they do not disappoint. The line about “your hard-earned peace of mind” has one of the most effective switch-up harmonies I've ever heard.
78.Emily Haines – Telethon
More or less the model of songs I'm guaranteed to love and be slightly embarrassed for loving. Super-slow, thoroughly schmaltz, beautiful, obscure, with a profound little lyric at the center and a chorus that takes you by the throat. I'm going to take my time / night by night. So am I. (Almost falls off the list for referencing Billy Joel, though.)
79.The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Maybe this song is too weird and perverted and literary (does Molloy feel empathy for his Billy Liar? I don't think so.)—but in the same moment a general ecstasy of disaster-laced love appears. There's no desire as piquant as that borne from hopelessness, incompetence and loneliness. But to enjoy this song, you don't have to dig Billy Liar's lyrics (in point of fact, maybe it'd be better to ignore them), you just have to want to hear a good-time good-cheer bit of summery indie pop. And the chorus is eminently singable: that's important to me.
80.Pulp – Common People
Probably too obviously written on a typewriter, this short-story length fantasy about transgressing low vs. upper-class caste barriers via theft and sex is off-putting, obvious, and annoying. And, passionate, existential, frantic, resigned, hopeful, with a lyrical motif that gains momentum like a drunk-driven late-model used truck going down a hill. If you aren't a person who feels the urge to learn lyrics and sing along, it'll probably skip off your atmosphere. Recommended for the oppressed politically-conscious post-emo kids; and me.
81.Madeleine Peyroux – Don’t Wait Too Long
Most optimism is over the top—it's too loud, too bright, it doth insist too much. Not so with this straightforward iteration of a future happiness. These strings of good-faith self-help platitudes may not have any critical mass, but, this understated jazz-pop makes up for its obviousness with an unblemished acceptance of the things to come. I've loved it since the turn-of-the-century Dockers commercial.
82.Beirut – After the Curtain
Certainly one of the more subtle songs that I love, if you can even call it a song. More of an epilogue than anything else. A veiled consideration of habit and freedom. But in all truth, I love it because it's beautiful to me. And there's all those people cheering and clapping. It moves.
83.Madonna – Ray of Light
I can't decide if it's the chorus (And I feel / like I just got home / and I feel / and I feel), or the propelled 64th note tremulous arcs, sirens, crickets, squawks, tweets, and jet-engines that lead the beat, Madonna's wheeling performance, or the mixing—which grabs and skews the track back and forth between the speakers—that make this song so compelling. It's a just fast as fuck, and puts in me in a hyper-manic tight-focus zone. My two fastest minesweeper times have been occurred when this song was playing, and that's no joke to me.
84.Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat
You're living for nothing now / I hope you're keeping some kind of record / yes. I'm not sure if this interpretation is borne out in established rock criticism, but I can't help but see Cohen's variously damaged characters/auters as exploring some kind of ideational apocalypse, the endgame of a bizarre bohemian experiment, its damaged narrator's flattened monotone reflecting his stunted traumatized internal states. The dirgelike quavering backup singers set the song up perfectly, too: here is a frozen motionless blasted madness.
85.Franz Ferdinand – The Fallen
Probably the loudest song on this list. Lyrically, a bunch of Jesus-in-Manhattan party-animal romanticized self-destruction tropes and random lines thrown in there as filler or to buttress some incomprehensible symbolic paradigm. I yell all the lyrics I can understand, I mumble the rest. So they say you're troubled boy / just because you like to destroy / all the things that bring the idiots joy. How could someone like me not appreciate that level of deluded self-protecting arrogance?
86.Aimee Mann – Save Me
I loved this song before the lyrics actually applied to my life. I loved this song when I was in high school, when I didn't know my ass from my heart, and would have announced my studied boredom and superiority over any considered study of the complex length of adult life, the minor emotional mazes that are simply built-in with the passage of time, the incredibly fraught oddity of living more than a few years as a person without the excuse of ignorance. If that makes any sense. Plus, it's a really good song.
87.Donovan – Colours (long version)
Beautiful. Featured prominently in Rules of Attraction. (You remember....the scene where the girl and the guy are getting ready for class, meeting serendipitously in the hall, falling in love, all that). As in every case, I prefer the slower, more sentimental version. If you don't know, now you know.
88.Dr. Dog – The Breeze
Songs like this one often come in to my life and burn out just as quickly. Unremarkable dust-in-the-wind existentialism on Crosby-Stills-and-Nash classicism. But I like the lyrics completely, the advice-for-the-weary, a balanced combination of hopelessness, awareness and acceptance, so rarely linked in life or music; like one of those poems or a life-changing essay: you just have to revisit, reify it to yourself, every now and then.
89.Serge Gainsbourg – Cargo Culte
I don't speak French, and I have scarcely a clue of what Serge Gainsbourg is talking about in this song (yes, talking: there are barely ten sung phrases on the whole album) beyond his love for Melodie Nelson and ritual tribal fantasies. What is clear includes grimy electric guitars, layered chromatic scales, grinding baselines, a full chorus shrieking open syllables. Too much slow-burn fun to bemoan the loss of any meaning in translation.
90.Tony Bennett – The Good Life
The most irony-saturated song I've ever heard—not bad for appearing fifty years before our oft-lamented contemporary golden age of irony. All the more heartbreaking for its world-weary awareness. A sly elegy for isolating freedom.
91.MGMT – Kids
I don't know how the lyric take only what you need from me can sound so victorious. Get up, y'all.
92.Elini Mandell – Moonglow, Lamp Low
Required: the bourgeois apparatus of relaxation: tea, a day off from work, a deckchair outside, music on-demand. This song is a dose of a simple mood; in fact, is so simple and earnest anyone could write it. But that's what I like about it. If Sinatra had sang it, it'd be a “performance” buried beneath an orchestra, but who wants that? This is music for a stripped down mood; execrable “soft jazz,” demanding of cool air and a refrigerator full of drinks through the glass doors in the house waiting.
93.Norah Jones – The Nearness of You
A classic rendition of a gold standard.
94.Underworld f. Radiohead – 8 Ball
This song isn't going to end up as part of the official Radiohead canon. That's okay. The lyrics don't add up to anything that even remotely hints at meaning. It's pretty much a chill-out house track: not your usual recipe for preferred heartbreaking moments of crystalline beauty. Somehow, though, it works to create an awareness of the goodness of life, a hyper-lit bit of fascinated hope. Proust's meditation on the madeleine this is not, but, a similar first-person access to happiness is constructed here. Going on and on with this nonsense description of random people on the city street. A subtle build-up over eight minutes, guitars coming in like rain, the chords resolving and the beat drops, and suddenly the whole is more than the sum, access to the immediate.
95.Coldplay – Clocks
It's probably not fair that Coldplay is as huge as they are, but the reverbed piano in this song is like light breaking through clouds, wind through rolled-down windows.
96.O.P.M. – Heaven is a Halfpipe
In large part, you can count on the songs on this list to provoke one or another specific emotional response in its purest distillation. Usually I enjoy the ideal forms of contemplativeness, outright despondency, or tenderness, as I find these experiences most fraught with bubbles of unlabeled meaning. Only rarely do I dig a song like this one, whose sole purpose is getting dumb, straight rocking, twisting-out mad happiness. I don't skateboard and rarely smoke drugs; I don't care about “the man” when he “fucks” with the “shit” I want to do; and I don't condone skipping biology. But I'll stand out a sunroof going down Main shouting joy when this comes on my itunes clone.
97.Jason Mraz – I'm Yours
To complete the irresistible-irritating trilogy I present: Jason Mraz's mega-ubiquitous I'm Yours. In contrast with other songs I hate to love (on account of the company I'd share, or those evil little popsong tics that drive me crazy), here the lyrics are front and center of my ambiguity. For starts, Mraz sings the word “scootch,” as in scootch on over closer dear. Ugh. Nor would I follow that ghastly phrase with the equally cloying and let me nibble your ear. Cringe-inducing. But! Beyond that, I'm Yours is a trenchant plea for immediate love, built on nimble wordplay and an overdose of truisms, which are always fun when set to music that seems to animate.
98.Green Day – Warning
I get why it's easy to sneer at Green Day's uncomplicated pop offerings. I sneer, all the time. I sneer while I'm getting down and grinning like some kind of glue-sniffing idiot. The hummingbird part of my mind wants to hear this song at least once a year: three chords, a rhythm straight out a punk-obvious drum machine and all a sudden I want to shout. On the line between desultory adolescent anthems and heavy-handed postured political statements, Warning is almost meaningful, only slightly self-righteous, 100% everything that's wrong with convenient language of pseudo-intellectualism. What? I can't justify it. This song is crap. It's infuriatingly bad. Such good infuriatingly bad crap, though.
99.The Eagles – Desperado
I know where the Eagles stand in the continuum of artistic merit: somewhere narrowly in front of the Backstreet Boys and a critical light-year behind the Beatles. I'm not proud of having committed the sin of soft-rock. Like so many songs on this list, I enjoy this song for what it tries to be, for pretending to stand-alone, irrespective of history, for flailing pathetically toward sincerity. (Even if it is an easy mass-communicable sincerity). I get that it's played out, (except that it's not played out to me). Sometimes I'm moved by it. That's it.
100.Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe
This song probably doesn't deserve a spot on this list when you consider the fact that every time I turn it on, I'm trying to decide whether or not I hate it or love it. The singer's voice is annoying in full emo-rock mode, and the lyrics that aren't inept make no sense. (Or, rather: they're so scattered so as to obviate any careful parsing). But it's really passionate. Really, really passionate. I'm always won over by this approach: even if you're out of your g-d g, as long as you say it with conviction, really commit, you know, you can't fail completely. How do I not give props to that?
http://www.mediafire.com/?zqgzjzjzymm
http://www.mediafire.com/?xnmdngildwm
http://www.mediafire.com/?ohzlfn2myde
http://www.mediafire.com/?kndantlzx4z
http://www.mediafire.com/?djoomw40zeu
http://www.mediafire.com/?tnm3zug4nzm
http://www.mediafire.com/?ljjdyzttdfn
[102 tracks; 597 MB; compressed in .zip]
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Boston: A retrospective
Things I didn't like about being in Boston:
not writing anything substantial
not getting a job
not successfully procuring a new copy of my driver's license
eating low-quality processed foods
not meeting anyone in the spirit of human equality
wasting hundreds of hours watching internet-tv
fighting with darla
having the world's craziest 28-hour-day jet-lag vampire narcoleptic schedule
stooping to embarrassing lows in order to smoke cigarettes
living in a house full of cats and getting cathair on my clothes
living in a house without scissors and not being able to trim my bangs
Things I liked about being in Boston:
the weather (I always like the weather no matter where I go)
the crowds of hot girls on Newbury Street
learning the subway
watching all of House and Star Trek: Voyager
sitting on the patio
writing my droll post-hopelessness blog
starting to play the piano again
the makeshift coffeepot
walking in the street late at night
the Boston Public Library
the pleasure of smoking em when you got em
the top 100 song list
staying up until you pass out from exhaustion
walking down the block and around the corner to sit on the sidewalk in the dark orange light to steal wi-fi
Somerville
Darla and Elena and I stayed up late tonight. Most of the conversation was a rehashing of our summertime talks about philosophy, touching on the anti-postmodern argument, dissing the multivalent theories of truth, reaffirming the “Deep Background” of external reality and sense-making, the value of living insofar as it is possible in the “desert of the real,” despite the various failures of knowing and the ultimate meaninglessness of any edifice built to support a life. I praised Elena's steadiness, her mostly un-idealized approach to living in the world: work, school, friends, consistent romance, pets, steadiness. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. The cat at the screened-in window paced the sill and mewed insistently, conveying its impotent feline irritation at our incomprehension of its demands.
Finally, after talking for several hours in the close dark of the patio, we took a walk in the street. The night was pure velvet, warm, with layers of moving air passing through the branches and up the asphalt. I walked into the night barefoot, carrying my laptop as a portable boombox, chasing and being followed by one of Elena's escaped cats. We listened to sentimental music, hoping to experience the always-unexpected profoundity of emergent nostalgia, the thrill of specific iterations of beauty, that rising of directionless happiness, washed by submerged waves of deep feeling. Following along with the music, Darla and I occasionally lapsed into meandering accompanying harmonies. I stepped on a slug and screamed in an undignified manner. Passing the houses, we looked at and talked about the grainy dull of orange mercury lights and black dapples from summertime-heavy trees.
At the end of our walk, we stopped in the street and played an ad hoc game in which we picked up broken crabapples with our toes and tried to fling them down the street. It was fun, and we weren't even drunk.
Finally, after talking for several hours in the close dark of the patio, we took a walk in the street. The night was pure velvet, warm, with layers of moving air passing through the branches and up the asphalt. I walked into the night barefoot, carrying my laptop as a portable boombox, chasing and being followed by one of Elena's escaped cats. We listened to sentimental music, hoping to experience the always-unexpected profoundity of emergent nostalgia, the thrill of specific iterations of beauty, that rising of directionless happiness, washed by submerged waves of deep feeling. Following along with the music, Darla and I occasionally lapsed into meandering accompanying harmonies. I stepped on a slug and screamed in an undignified manner. Passing the houses, we looked at and talked about the grainy dull of orange mercury lights and black dapples from summertime-heavy trees.
At the end of our walk, we stopped in the street and played an ad hoc game in which we picked up broken crabapples with our toes and tried to fling them down the street. It was fun, and we weren't even drunk.
In the Train Station
A large public bathroom. Shiny tile floor: a slick, seminal sheen; black and white tiles in ugly symmetries. The middle urinal is covered with Caution Do Not Use sashes, bright swathes of wide yellow tape. The floor is covered with a thin skin of puddle but there is no sound of splashing as I step across the room. Sighing, I release my piss. The water boils in the bottom of the urinal. Invisible flicks of launched urinewater splash on the floor, rippling in specks on the floor. This is art, I think, thirty percent ironic, thirty percent sincere, and forty percent drunk. In particular I enjoy the caution-taped urinal, the contrast of bright yellow tape in a long, dull, empty Manichean bathroom.
Orderly arrangements all over in this train station. Long rows of chandeliers. Tiles in the floor, connect-the-dot angles of red squares in a sea of gray. Benches: human-oiled, gouged walnut, endlessly smoothed, pews with armrests.
Train stations in small metropolises are devastated and overlit. Everyone is tragic, desperate, heightened antiglamor, staring at old arcade machines, rows of pamphlets for local casinos and support-groups meeting in churches.
Ostentatious 1980s-era security cameras are perched in every corner of the room. A fat man in a large t-shirt pushes a stroller, walking in circles around the station. A woman with a massively beaten face—an exalted slew of bruises—sits beside her man, their raised cones of hair lopsiding the symmetry of the long benches. Even the prosperous-looking elderly couple who sit (relaxed in their chairs, flipping through real-estate all-ad newspapers) may be sneaking cheaters, casual in a lifetime of lies. Why not?
People move slowly down long staircases. The escalators are abandoned, blocked off with more plastic caution tape, permanently undergoing maintenance. A cheerful ticketsalesman in a uniform, telling lies about his children—a young doctor and a young professor, of course—smiling and making mild comments. What astonishes is the banality of these human people; they wear drab colors, or neon, they're fat, or skinny, they look entirely normal, hideously unfamiliar, moving into the train station, carrying bags on tiny wheels, wearing dirty white hats, thin pink plaid blouses, grey t-shirts and baggy blue jeans, utterly normal, with sharp little jutting pharonic beards and close-cropped hair.
The elderly couple engages the fat stroller-pusher in a brief dialogue about his child. They compliment its cuteness, its docility and patience. My mood is even. I'm listening to the new Electric President album, drinking rum and coke in an aluminum can, looking at the long shards of reflected chandelier light in the dented woodstain of the pew-benches. If I may be honest, it seems that the last eight years have been marked with disquiet; with an anxious inauthenticity. I'm tired of being the way I've been; I'm tired. I'm ready for what's next. I'm ready for what's next.
Orderly arrangements all over in this train station. Long rows of chandeliers. Tiles in the floor, connect-the-dot angles of red squares in a sea of gray. Benches: human-oiled, gouged walnut, endlessly smoothed, pews with armrests.
Train stations in small metropolises are devastated and overlit. Everyone is tragic, desperate, heightened antiglamor, staring at old arcade machines, rows of pamphlets for local casinos and support-groups meeting in churches.
Ostentatious 1980s-era security cameras are perched in every corner of the room. A fat man in a large t-shirt pushes a stroller, walking in circles around the station. A woman with a massively beaten face—an exalted slew of bruises—sits beside her man, their raised cones of hair lopsiding the symmetry of the long benches. Even the prosperous-looking elderly couple who sit (relaxed in their chairs, flipping through real-estate all-ad newspapers) may be sneaking cheaters, casual in a lifetime of lies. Why not?
People move slowly down long staircases. The escalators are abandoned, blocked off with more plastic caution tape, permanently undergoing maintenance. A cheerful ticketsalesman in a uniform, telling lies about his children—a young doctor and a young professor, of course—smiling and making mild comments. What astonishes is the banality of these human people; they wear drab colors, or neon, they're fat, or skinny, they look entirely normal, hideously unfamiliar, moving into the train station, carrying bags on tiny wheels, wearing dirty white hats, thin pink plaid blouses, grey t-shirts and baggy blue jeans, utterly normal, with sharp little jutting pharonic beards and close-cropped hair.
The elderly couple engages the fat stroller-pusher in a brief dialogue about his child. They compliment its cuteness, its docility and patience. My mood is even. I'm listening to the new Electric President album, drinking rum and coke in an aluminum can, looking at the long shards of reflected chandelier light in the dented woodstain of the pew-benches. If I may be honest, it seems that the last eight years have been marked with disquiet; with an anxious inauthenticity. I'm tired of being the way I've been; I'm tired. I'm ready for what's next. I'm ready for what's next.
On Drugs
this is a thing that happens inside theoretical things. Cops THEORETICALLY come through the door,
I force the others to leave. But yet I wish to get others. I cannot use big words now. That annoys me. At least I can say that I am annoyed. Insanely, I correct the typing mistakes that I make now. That is insane. It GOES AGAINST THE BODY. I used those words for emphasis. I have to plug in my computer, not because the battery is dying, but because I am obsessed with plugging in my computer. This focusing that I am making myself doing is very interesting. Why do I focus the way I want to focus
after nonsensical ramblings of this so
I want to laugh hysterically.
I cannot focus. I theorize this is because.....
my essential nature: I wish to understand things. I feel desire, i.e. I laugh,
and I want to CONTROL this laughter
personally historically, this would be a thing
I feel my desires manifest phsycially.
Similarly, music hits me and I feel it ina physical way. My previously “mental” appreciation is become physical..
I like the smoke.
I am smoking. I like to describe the things that are happening. Somehow typing and smoking are easier than typing alone.
I am waiting for the cigarette to die out because it pleases me to sit here, in the warmth, TO SIT
clearly, in the future, the value of this document is IN WHOLE, to document my insane feelings of being on this trip. I do not want to be meta, but I am meta. Insert here HILARIOUS LAUGHTER AND SO ON. I am really out of control with this laughing.
I like this music a lot and I wish that other people could hear this music with me.
This is why I like writing: I wish to share the things I enjoy about life with others. In this case, music.
I am glad to be on these drugs. I enjoy in a shameful way the way I will be faced with these 'ARTIFACTS' of my doings and typings tomorrow. I am laughing about this.
Writing is about editing. I believe that. 'the state I am in' by Belle and Sebastian.
That idiot told me that “i bring a whole new energy to this place.”
those two girls go into the room to have sex. I wish to talk, so I call grace, putatively to answer her query about wherther I am going to fuck buttons on sunday, but, truly, to communicate with her in some circular and hilarious fashion as I find now approrpatie.
Girls from the next room are yelling at me. They are saying “yes” and so on in response to this laughter. Presumably they are therese and alex. (who I wish to call “that girl”)
wow, I am also feeling visuals. I think the word 'WOW” is less of a mental approach to the world. It is, instead, a word that is amenable to 'guttural' or 'visceral' or whatever. Maybe that's why we say it.
I am struck by an urge to make a phone call to brandon. I pick up the phone and then set it back down because I could just as soon sit here IN MY OWN metaphorical feces. The people in the next room are being very “physical”. They seem to be hitting the wall with open palms. They are being noisy.
I am like the character in Borges
thank god I do not have the internet on this laptop because then I would disappear into the internet, randomly wiki'ing one thing after the other.
I am suspicious that the other people, in the other room, are not having sex, but are instead engaged in some social activity....i understand that this is paranoid, and demonstrates my deep need to 'FIGURE SHIT OUT' and
yes. That said it. I giggled, re-rereading that line and understood that my....
wait.
There is something about other people. Am I interested in them, or not? I seem to be trying to form some “universal” theory about myself, access some
people come from the next room. I am distracted from my earlier task of changing the music which annoyed me. “take my breath away”
I get up and put on a song by the beatles. The people disappear because they are annoyed with my incessant and arrogant solipsistic questions. I badger them.
Let me describe this experience: there are people here, and I tell them to change the music, and they do it. I do not think this 'MEANs' anything....they simply “want things' from me.
“i am exremely suspicious,” I say to the red-girl
“it shows,” she says, looking at me as if I am insane.
Therese has disappeared. “are you having fun?” I ask. She thinks that I am displeased with her efforts.
A few minutes pass. Thesere kisses the red-girl.
“i do not want things,” I say.
My Year in "Realizations": Nihilistic Sententiousness Edition
1. Nobody likes to admit that they are a bad person. Somehow, even as one's failings are being described with a tedious Socratic inexorability, in the absence of mysterious self-condemnation, it's easy to think: I can't be all that bad, and in fact, I'm not that bad. There are two reasons for this: first, and most obvious, you simply can't give up on yourself; even suicide is an expression of a perverse self-interest. And beyond that, the whole concept of “bad” and its corollary implied framework is nothing more than vague nonsense. On some intuitive level, we comprehend the flexibility of moral concepts. As for me, I shake my head, tell myself that I'm an idiot, tell myself that in the future, when things change, I won't make the same mistakes, that's all, they're just mistakes, not an expression of a deeper and more inevitable problem, some moral hideousness. It's just a few lapses in judgment here and there, bad habits, forgetfulness, non-problematic humanity, even at its worst, nothing more than the pitiful eruption of stupidity at the junction of desire and frailty, perspectivelessness and headlong motion.
2. a harvard education is ornamental
3. Life will never be solved. How deeply do I wish it were, somehow, a problem, a puzzle, something amenable to understanding and contemplation. Instead, understanding and contemplation are merely beautiful within themselves, hobbies (in a sense), lovely little habits, but, in themselves with nothing to do with the larger thing, because nothing has anything to do with the larger thing, there is no larger thing, nothing to be done, nothing to be said (with the possible exception of do your work, but, still, workers aren't guaranteed anything).
4. me: you know what I realized?
the people on seinfeld often
Brandon: what's that?
me: should lie
they should lie.
Brandon: they should lie to whom?
me: but they don't.
5. i just realized that it is destructive to your typing score to backspace and change the mistakes you make.
lowers your score, and it still counts it as a mistake.
i'd say my normal typing speed is something like 50 or even as low as 40
i can crank it up, you know, but,
typically i don't.
6. while postmodern critiques are very important, they aren’t salient to the point that everyone should throw everything out the window. postmodernism is like the last and least important thing that a person really needs to know about.
7. most critical decisions one makes in life are made a). without real comprehension of the import of the decision on the part of the decision-maker, and, b). without a real interest-in or an awareness-of the complex variables that motivate the decision.
8. realized that a life lived for oneself would end up with hopelessness, or even more meaninglessness, above and beyond the baseline level of ontological meaninglessness that everyone has to deal with. But at this point, I can't remember my actual reasoning behind that conclusion, if there was any.
9. Satisfaction is ephemeral at least, and irritatingly glutting in large doses. But dissatisfaction chafes; you must balance a view of your life between regrets-averted and dreams-yet-to-be-fulfilled. It's not easy. Post-ironic happiness is an exceedingly rare bird.
10. if you're ignorant, your ignorance annihilates even the possibility of awareness of not-ignorance, the strange pleasures of complexity and distance at the end of a pursuit of awareness.
11. Laziness precedes hopelessness; not vice-versa.
12. The most important "realization" I've realized, the truest truth I think I know: Change—be it for good or bad—is the seat of feeling. Written here, it seems small and tautological and pointless and possibly insane, if not obviously incorrect. In my mind, though, with an elaborated, almost infinite definition of "change," it looms over life and mind as both axiomatic and practical.
13. Realization-I-had-years-ago-and-also-now: everyone is more or less childlike in their essential psychological simplicity; even apparently powerful "individuals" are powerless, that is, determined etiologically.
14. Crappy realization about myself: my urge to listen to new music directly correlates to the existence of other people for whom I can play this music. When there's no one in my life I wish to impress or educate, when there's no one with whom I wish to share special things, I don't tend to seek out new, socially useful stimuli. When in absence of people-I-wish-to-cultivate, I don't feel the artistic impulse to self-expansion. I'm crap.
15. No life is static; even lives oriented actively against the flash and crumble of change are pushed inexorably. The bare fact of change is met with the flexibility of mind on every level: researchers probe the mental mechanisms that enable us to differentiate between our family pet and a thousand junkyard dogs; things retain their continuity in our minds, if seen or imagined, if standing or walking, in the afternoon light or the morning, when the dog is a pup and after it attains its majority. Contemporary philosophers, these virtuosi of the self, are similar, interrogating their experience, sorting through stimuli, mapping memories as they are formed, charting their minor mental earthquakes; weighing epiphanies as they occur, trying to find common-denominators for incidents of wonder and beauty.
16. The inevitability of motion is the identified culprit for many deep pains, manifesting in tragedies as a longing for the past. We are wrenched as our constructions crumble; we feel dread, the tearing of the roots of the mind from thousands of days packed hard underfoot. The obverse is equally apparent: the inevitability of transformation is the last hope when life goes awry; when the momentum of everything that we cannot or did not control heads us off the road and into various ravines; the possibility of escape remains; the inevitability of failure is balmed, if temporarily—the sky is glimpsed through prison bars. The mind lurches against the flat facts: remembering the limitless freedom of childhood, returning to the thoughtless contentedness of lolling dogs laying in the living-room sun; we remember love and moments of unfolding possibility, in a floating twilight of vague fantasies and an amazing foreknowledge of future success and the unlimited freedom that we have, our own, for one or two moments.
17. The highest expression of the dynamism of life is the urge to freedom. In America on a Saturday night, streets dry and wide between buildings, the kids stream from bar to bar to hot dog stands and taxi cabs, young and attractive, looking at their friends, stunned that they’ve come this far, happy or at least available to life's wonderful possibilities.
18. Paltry realization #1: we're in the real world. STDs and meth teeth. If you don't believe in causality, you don't believe in anything.
19. We are all very deeply within our own lives. This means that we aren't capable of seeing with our emotional eyes, so to speak, the ultimate emptiness of most of our concerns. “How good we have it” is the least accessible “true” "fact," 99.99% of moments. Most of the time, we are just people. Living our our lives. I understand this.
20. Two parts: 1.I had a strong sense of shame about myself and my life.
2.I was had paranoiac delusions and/or philosophic beliefs about myself and others to the effect that I “knew” “immediately” that “everyone is alone in life” and is “floating” on a “sea of pointless desire.”
21. Annoying realization about myself: I have been capable in my life of an astonishing paranoia, hyper-vigilance, which I'm constantly controlling, the way one contains some kind of animal, a beast, an opponent in a wrestling match, an abnormally large industrial dump-truck, a wheelbarrow full of bags of cement dust going down a hill, a boat with waterskiers behind it in a crowded lake. I wish to seem off-hand, breezy, and indifferent, and in fact am, most of the time, and have succeeded via indifference and exuberance and a kind of intellectual condescension about decorum to occupy this blessed state of indifference most of the time, except for moments when I'm not breezily indifferent, but in such moments especially I work to remain socially indifferent, which doesn't work: I'm sure I'm widely understood as sensitive and easily slighted and, by way of consequence, am known as weirdly insecure: another one of those smash-mouth judgmental lunatic pussies.
22.Am always presenting schema or vague proofs or entire new vocabularies by which I intend to show that the concept of “friendship” or "love" or any social term as it is used shorthand is hoopla, fallacy, weakness, nonsense. And the interesting irony of this is that at the same time I want deeply to love everyone and express this love: I have a deep joy before them, I want to possess them, want to understand them, want to abuse them, cajole, argue, watch, dominate, ignore, leave unexpectedly; I want to convert them, play them music, take them into locked buildings, drink alcohol, share cigarettes, dance, create out-groups, analyze out-groups, destroy out-groups, moonwalk on the fringes of out-groups, articulate our vast mutual superiority over these out-groups.
23.I don't think about them when I'm gone.
24. realize that if I don't finish Swann's Way by the time I'm old, I can safely say that I wasted my life. Not that I won't waste my life on many levels. Practically everyone wastes their life on the level of risk and art and time. That's fine, kinda: things being what they are, ontologically, everything is wasted inasmuch as everything is arbitrary, or inasmuch as everything passes away. But, unfortunately, I've wasted my life on the level of basic human interaction, which is different from any grand collapse or Van Gogh ear slicing or small-business bankruptcy, a happenstance much more tragic, because the failure is so banal, because everyone should have happiness in the world of people, everyone should have the habit of vulnerability and fun and time and mutuality, which I never have, and never have had, mutuality, I mean, and by that I simply mean: I never seem to be with people equally in the same place feeling the same things. Or something.
25. Imagine the saddest and most profound novel, with a collection of phenomenally brilliant and tragic characters, a thousand poems, fragments, sheaves of thoughts, observations. Well, what's even better than that superlative collation of distilled beauty, is that it all came from one person in the world, a writer, one who struggles in the world, through weeks and hours, arranging, collecting, considering, making money and spending money, yearning, within the world of desire, power, hierarchies, reading book reviews, saturated in the world, inescapably one's own self.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
My Year in Wasting Time
google chat
chain rxn
lurking on comment threads
reading about politics
Watching TV on my Laptop
Drinking Unnecessarily
Darla and I compare our guilt
Darla's guilt:
Being an American
Environmental Issues
Her class ranking in the world
Her health
Political apathy
Taking more than she gives
Not respecting her friends
Not doing the dishes if someone makes dinner
Wasting time
Sleeping in
Drinking too much
[regret] Not talking to more people
My Guilt:
Being in relationships where I have the power
Letting people down
Not calling or writing / Not wishing people happy birthday on facebook
Wasting time / wasting my life / not writing
When cars stop for you at crosswalks in cases when it would have been better for everyone if they would have just gone on and let you cross right behind them.
Being an American
Environmental Issues
Her class ranking in the world
Her health
Political apathy
Taking more than she gives
Not respecting her friends
Not doing the dishes if someone makes dinner
Wasting time
Sleeping in
Drinking too much
[regret] Not talking to more people
My Guilt:
Being in relationships where I have the power
Letting people down
Not calling or writing / Not wishing people happy birthday on facebook
Wasting time / wasting my life / not writing
When cars stop for you at crosswalks in cases when it would have been better for everyone if they would have just gone on and let you cross right behind them.
Energy
This morning, a washed-out high-altitude blue summer sky. I'm sitting outside the coffeeshop beneath an arbor, birch and cottonwoods offering shade, little bits of cotton floating in the air around me, tumbling back and forth on the flagstone pavings, rising and falling in a thousand tiny directionless drafts, moving like slow fireflies, bits of ash from a bonfire, rising and falling very slowly, describing circles and spirals, back and forth. Listening to the Field cover of “Everybody's got to Learn Sometime.” It makes me feel as if whatever had been bothering me is already safely ensconced in the past; as if I've “learned” something critical about being in the world. But of course I haven't learned anything, and nothing really has changed; epiphanies are still simply disconnected emotional artifacts, entertaining, pleasurable, but, worthless. When good things happen, there's no real way to make those good things mean anything, there's no way to get the good to continue; I have no method for the creation and sustenance of actual good feelings. I'm talking with my sister:
—I appreciate religious people, I say. —They have something I lack, a little less clarity, a little more magic. I appreciate that, you know, their ongoing expectation of mysterious transformations, magical occurrences, using words that don't mean anything but which somehow contain a whole host of things, possibilities, you know?
—Sure.
—The question is, as I see it, should I start taking anti-depressants?
—Well, Brian did say that you have 'bad energy' and that you're a negative person, possibly the most negative person he's ever met.
—He said that? Hmm.
—Yeah.
—I've been too hard on him.
Durango is a small town framed on all sides with the tops of mountains. Crowds of badly-dressed hippies, bicyclists and off-road customized Jeeps, Ralph Nader bumperstickers on Subaru wagons, recycling bins, solar panels, backyard greenhouses, compost gardens. Here, lights are turned off in empty rooms, people are self-conscious consumers of organic, free-range foods; “sustainability” is on everyone's lips, alongside an omnipresent discussion of “energy”—good energy, bad energy, coal, solar, the sustained existence of energy, this last a contemporary neo-religious causal catchall, a vaguely scientific religion, the physics principle of the Conservation of Energy having been somehow transmuted into a justification for the continuation of our lives as we know them, something to cling to, death-defying. I inevitably reply:
—Who cares if the energy in the universe remains constant? If I die, my identity will be utterly dispersed, which is the only thing that matters, because I won't be around at that point to take comfort in the conservation of energy in the universe.
Somehow, no one accepts this point. The universe takes on the qualities of your typical deity: dispensing mysterious justice in the form of karma; maneuvering people toward some putatively purposeful end, because everything happens for a reason, of course. Then these proponents of the universe begin in with hysterical anti-Christian rhetoric. It's embarrassing for everyone involved. I feel deep embarrassment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)