NO GENRE

The very solipsistic countdown continues with the penultimate five in the list.

For the uninitiated, I’ve been trying over the past week to decide (i.e. write about) my favorite Beatles songs to celebrate iTunes’ (not really) historic acquisition of the band’s catalog.  Honestly, it’s a chance for me to codify my favorite songs of theirs and create a venue where I can write about them.  Check out Parts 1, 2, and 3 in the series so far.  And check back, of course, in the next couple of days as I finish up the list with my 5 favorite Beatles songs.  Obvious picks and heretic dark horses will abound.  I promise.

10.  And Your Bird Can Sing – Lennon dismissively called this song “fancy paper around an empty box.”  I’m not sure what his hang-up was, but I’ve always loved the warm and fuzzy tones of those Rickenbackers singing.  It’s obvious that Lennon thought it was a throwaway; he couldn’t figure out how to end the thing.  The song abruptly cuts before Lennon has figured out how to treat such a gem-like melody.  But the song, for me, is a testament that even in the midst of a troubled composition, Lennon and McCartney could dash off an unforgettable song.  

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9.  Helter Skelter – An illustrated definition of irony:  The Beatles’ resident sweetheart also happened to compose the band’s most devastatingly loud fuck-all; a song written by visionary love children becomes the rallying cry of a sociopathic cult leader.  

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8.  We Can Work It Out – It’s all too easy to make too much of Lennon and McCartney’s duet here.  On the surface, yes, McCartney plays the eternal optimist to Lennon’s clear-eyed realist.  McCartney’s snappy verses contrast sharply with Lennon’s mournful harmonium in the middle sections.  But Lennon yearns to be more cooperative: “There’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.”  And McCartney is more prickly than he initially appears: he keeps on insisting that his audience listen to him.  Lennon and McCartney were always a balanced study in contrast blah blah blah.  ”We Can Work It Out” is the most balanced composition in The Beatles’ catalog blah blah blah.  But any band that sneaks in a pessimistic waltz section in the middle of an A side written in sturdy 4/4 is a band obviously ahead of its time.  

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7.  Rocky Raccoon – A couple of months ago, I got into a relatively heated argument with a co-worker about “Rocky Raccoon.”  I tried to convince him that that song was my favorite Beatles song ever.  I contended that it was their most narratively satisfying song and that the Old West heroics pastiche was clever and charming.  I still think all of this is true, but the real reason that I love “Rocky Raccoon” is that my college roommate and I convinced an entire floor of our dorm to adore this song.  There were at least a dozen times when our room was filled with drunk college kids singing about poor Rocky’s revenge tragedy.  

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6.  Eleanor Rigby – The quiet existential lament for the inevitability of death.  That’s heavy stuff from the mop-tops who just a few years before sang about wanting to holing some girl’s hand.  The band managed to turn their most desolate ballad into their most humane song.  Essentially, “Eleanor Rigby” is a two minute distillation of the entire corpus of Samuel Beckett, from the howling loneliness of Krapp’s Last Tape to the abject bleakness of Endgame. But instead of allowing poor Eleanor to stand in for the futility of the human condition, McCartney keeps us grounded in the character.  The life of quiet desperation is Eleanor’s entirely; it just happens to reflect our lives.  

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The handful of songs that David Lynch has released over the years have sounded like miniature versions of his films: haunting Americana blues that throb with surrealistic menace.  Inland Empire’s signature song, ”Ghost of Love,” in particular, was a smoky eight bar blues without the flourish, without the history.  It was a song stripped of its historical swing, ghosted with metallic rushes and hisses.  And along with Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch helped create among the most memorable television themes in Twin Peaks.  There, too, Lynch rested on a vague, abstract sense of fear and hope to guide those maudlin, heart-breaking chord progressions.

This week, courtesy of Sunday Best, Lynch releases his most unlikely song to date, the sparkling “Good Day Today.”  While the AutoTune and the jaunty beat will catch some off guard, the song still fits his overall aesthetic, which marries the horrific with the gentle, the nightmarish with the comical.  And if AutoTune’s voice warping abilities wasn’t built for Lynch, then I’m not sure what technology is.  Much like Blue Velvet ends with that baffling image of the obviously mechanical robin tweeting in an idyllic branch, the lyrics of “Good Day Today” give voice to  banal pleasantries that feel oddly moving:  ”Send me an angel/I want to have a good day today.”  On paper they don’t look profound so much as saccharine and ineffectual.  But when Lynch’s robotic voice purrs them, you get the sense that the man means every syllable.

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From everything I can tell, “Allez Vous Faire Influencer” is an enormous change for Pas Chic Chic, a French outfit updating the confines of Francophone pop.  Here, thankfully, bouyant yé-yé is replaced with a heart-racing motorik beat that hosts a variety of organs and synthesizers and laser-like affects.  This is more Neu! than Francoise Hardy, more Kraftwerk than France Gall.  And even though the band contains members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, there isn’t even a hint of mournfully self-serious musical narcotics.  No, this thing is nearly 9 minutes of acceleration.  As the song speeds along, you expect it to reach a crescendo, a point at which everything converges in a devastating moment.  But that moment never arrives because the band has stretched out that moment for the length of the entire song, constantly peaking in increasingly pitched durée. Serge Gainsbourg wouldn’t recognize this aesthetic approach, but you can bet that Henri Bergson surely would.

[via the always reliable Needle Drop]

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Before heading out on a brief tour, Wolf Parade have released a new single this week, “Semi-Precious Stone” b/w “Agent of Change.”  In Wolf Paradic democracy, the single features one contribution from Krug and one from Boeckner.  The A side is Krug’s “Semi-Precious Stone,” a bluesy take on Wolf Parade’s warped classic rock.  The song begins normally enough, but soon Krug and company have thrown everything into high gear:  the guitars shoot like comets across the dome of the song and Krug introduces a nasty little gospel organ.  When the band recorded Expo 86, they evidently put enough songs on tape for two full albums, so we should fully expect these singles to continue rolling out over the next few months.

And here’s the next five in what is No Genre’s quest to determine once and for all his (its?) favorite Beatles songs.

15.  Tell Me Why – I love The Beatles’ early material because of this nacent punk rock attitude that seems to simmer right below the surface of some of their songs.  ”Tell Me Why” borrows the structure of girl group doo-wop but subverts it with Lennon’s wounded/angry rasp.  

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14.  A Hard Day’s Night – This is a classic example of the lyrical content of The Beatles’ early material being completely incidental to the song’s greatness.  The sound of Lennon and McCartney trading gritty vocals never gets old.  But what really sells the song is Ringo’s frantic percussion: bongos, snare, kick drum, cowbell, and more cymbals than you could ever need.  This thing stomps so hard at the lower end that Ringo threatens to blow the bottom out of the song.  Plus, the song opens with the most widely debated chord in all of rock n roll and behind the ending chord of “A Day in the Life” the second most famous chord in The Beatles’ career.  

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13.  When I’m Sixty-Four – Another one of McCartney’s cutesy valentines.  But you’d have to be astoundingly hard-hearted not to be touched by this little charmer.  

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12.  Help! – One of the earliest instances of a superstar complaining about his or her fame.  But the trick of “Help!” is that Lennon is able to sell his meteoric rise as a burden that doesn’t just alienate, it hollows him out.  In a sense, this is the most honest song Lennon ever wrote, no small feat considering his bracingly candid output.  

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11.  Rain – There’s something about beautiful wall of sound of “Rain” that gets me every time.  There were a ton of radical production techniques used on the track: backwards vocals, varying recording speeds, a host of overdubs, tricky tempo changes.  The song never sounds like an production experiment, though.  McCartney’s bass is dancing wildly around the mix and Ringo’s drumming is inventive and Harrison’s snaky lead weaves between everything stealthily.  

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I think I can be forgiven for not being able to keep up with Blackbird Blackbird’s output.  Since reviewing his self-released debut a couple of months ago, Mikey Sanders has put out a couple of additional EPs worth of material.  But checking up on Sanders every now and then is a good idea because he always something worthwhile on the stove.  This week it’s “Fade to White,” a 7” single out this week on Fire Talk.

There’s a lot of folks out there doing something similar to Blackbird Blackbird and deciding who was doing what first is a pointless exercise.  But let it be said that Sanders is one of the best practitioners of this kind of sunny, hazy experimental pop.  Unlike artists like Neon Indian or Washed Out or Teen Daze, Blackbird Blackbird doesn’t necessarily trade in received sounds.  These aren’t beats that could have come from a forgotten disco record.  In fact, none of the music sound intentionally dated.  If anything, it sounds remembered, like a melody kicking around your head.  The layers of aural gauze hanging over the beat—Emily Reo’s beautiful voice, a wavy synth wash, a shimmering guitar figure—adds to this sense of recovered melodies.  They’re sort of there, but not quite.  And this ability to create a melodic tease is Sanders’ greatest strength as a self-producer.

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Pop music as practiced by personalities like Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus and even Katy Perry requires more than a passing knowledge of postmodern theory.  The delicate play between surface and depth, between character and performer, is so complicated and subtle that Jean Baudrillard himself could hardly explain the rules of the game here.  One minute Miley Cyrus is herself, which is a creation of a record company, and the next minute she is Hannah Montana, which is a creation of a television network in conjunction with a record company.  And Katy Perry’s plasticity is dazzling:  her ability to scrub every trace of humanity from her eyes is nothing short of miraculous.  There’s no discernable reason that pop music in the 21st century should suffer from a constant identity crisis.  Rockism is dead; the poptimists won.  There’s nothing to be ashamed of.  Pop music doesn’t have to be dressed up in postmodern identity politics to validate its existence.  A solid 4/4 kickdrum and a sparkling synthesizer will do just fine.

This is why Robyn is the best thing going in pop music right now.  Her pop sense is more refined than almost any other songwriter working right now.  Sure, Katy Perry may have a team of song engineers working tirelessly on constructing the catchiest choruses a brain can handle, but they’re essentially soulless because Perry herself appears soulless.  Robyn, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of crafting an anthemic chorus and delivering it through an identifiable human being.  And this human being happens to be weird and brave and smart.  Here is a woman who is more empowered than any faux-feminist pop star could ever hope to be.  All of her excellent Body Talk EPs have been released on Robyn’s own label, Konichiwa.  Until Lady Gaga owns the means of production, she will just be another exploitable commodity.  And now she has collected the best of her recent EPs into a record that feels more like a greatest hits package than a studio album.  Body Talk is unquestionably the best pop album of the year: it’s literate, funky, catchy, and intelligent.  But beyond all of those qualities, Body Talk is simply a fun record that is as colorful as pop music gets.

Ranging between the touching “Hang With Me” to the tough “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do,” Body Talk collects the best of this year’s extended plays.  In 15 tracks, Robyn presents a succinct overview of 21st century pop and its influences: dub, house, techno, electro.  The album is firmly grounded by a number of excellent would-be singles:  ”Dancing On My Own,” “Indestructible,” and “Call Your Girlfriend.”  Each of these tracks has the kind of booming, anthemic chorus that is more or less a pop prerequisite these days.  But what separates Robyn’s bangers from the crowd is their emotional sophistication.  These aren’t simple club fodder that proclaims love for an unnamed subject or the dancefloor or a bottle of middle-shelf liquor.  No, these are nuanced anthems that trade more in confusion and pain.  In many of these songs, Robyn fulfills the role of a woman wronged by the machinations of love.  In “Indestructible,” Robyn plays the wounded women aching to give her heart away again, and on “Dancing on My Own” she doesn’t let her heartbreak prevent her from dancing her ass off with tears in her eyes.  And there’s some intangible aspect to her voice that lends an almost imperceptible amount of hurt to it.  She actually sounds like she’s been hurt in the past.  Compare any of these tracks with Katy Perry’s dead-eyed zombies and it’s obvious that Robyn has injected honest-to-god soul and humanity in her work.

While those songs are fantastic, I’ve always been a little more drawn to Robyn’s more experimental side.  From the sublime “Konichiwa Bitches,” Robyn has always been most engaging when she’s working in elaborate metaphorical conceits.  Take “Fembot” for example.  The song presents Robyn as a sex-robot: “I’m a very scientifically advanced hot mama/Artificially discreet no drama/Digitally chic, titanium armor.”  Read that over once more.  The lines scan perfectly; they’re so grammatically tight (adverb + adjective + noun clause).  But this sexbot also has feelings: there’s a surprising pathos embedded in her line about being ready for demolition.  Then there’s “Don’t Fucking Tell What To Do,” a song that take the idiom “killing me” to surprising heights.  And both “None of Dem” and “Dancehall Queen” create a kind of Scandinavian dub courtesy of some heavy hitting producers, Röyksopp and Diplo, respectively.  It’s in these moments that Robyn seems like Sweden’s answer to Missy Elliott.  And that’s not an incidental analogy: at her best, Robyn is more akin to a rap star in her verbal and musical adventurousness.

Considering that it took Robyn 5 years to follow up her previous album, I suspect that 2011 will be the beginning of a significant hibernation period of her.  But 3 albums worth of material meticulously collected and arranged on Body Talk should be more than enough for anyone for a while.

Rating: 8.5 / 10

UPDATE: Evidently, Robyn does plan to release new music in 2011.  This is great news.  Thanks, Max, for the update.

And we continue our march toward our favorite Beatles song.

20.  Hello, Goodbye – The psychedelic Beatles are certainly my least favorite aspect of their career.  I’m generally allergic to any pantheistic one-world group hugs by any band, but when the Beatles fakes the ending of this song and come storming back with an absolutely gigantic coda I’m filled with indescribable sense of species consciousness.  If only all hippie psychedelia was this cogent . . .  

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19.  Revolution – While the slower, horn-blasted version on The White Album has its charms, it’s the scorched-earth version released as a single that is justifiably lauded.  Between that nasty, gnarled lead guitar line and Ringo’s oddly muted drumming, the song is a swaggering monk looking for an congregation.  Lennon, of course, towers above it all from his perch on his high horse, a righteous prince of peace hollering about hellfire and brimstone and mutual understanding between everyone.  Peace never sounded so badass.  

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18.  Happiness is a Warm Gun – When Trainspotting was released in 1996, there were fears that the film glorified the desperation of heroin addiction.  Danny Boyle had nothing on “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” a song that makes shooting horse sound like taking a warm bath.  The wild three-part structure of complicated polyrhythms (at some point Ringo falls back into 4/4 while the rest of the boys cruise along at 6/8) crams everything from a nightmarish search for a fix to a doo-wop send-up.  

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17.  Something – For a tender love song, there sure is a lot of doubt that bubbles up in the tumbling middle section:  ”You’re asking me will my love grow/I don’t know/I don’t know.”  Harrison doesn’t sound any more confident in the next line: “If you stick around, it may show/I don’t know/I don’t know.”  The evolution of the Beatles was always toward increasing sophistication and nuance, and “Something” complicates the love song paradigm that they mastered earlier in the decade.  

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16.  Dear Prudence – The story behind “Dear Prudence” sounds like something out of the Belle and Sebastian backstory.  Prudence, the fanatical sister of Mia Farrow, who accompanied The Beatles to India, spent her time in near constant meditation and Lennon wrote the song to coax her out of her spiritual reverie.  He wanted to remind her that there was still a world beyond the inner one she was getting in touch with.  But what makes the song is the fantastic back tracking that accompanies Lennon’s gentle plea to Prudence.  Between McCartney’s insistent bass work and heavy percussion and the complimentary guitar duel between Lennon and Harrison, “Dear Prudence” is a formally inventive song that never sounds dated.  

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To celebrate iTunes’ acquisition of The Beatles’ catalog, I thought I’d share my favorite (not best or most important) songs by the Fab Four.  I’ve capped myself at a manageable twenty-five, and I will present them in 5 short installments over the next week or so.  As always, comments and complaints are welcome

Caveat Emptor:  You’ll notice pretty quickly that I’m predominantly a McCartney man.  To my ear, he had the best sense of melody and narrative and emotional nuance.  While Harrison could be lovely and disquieting and Lennon could move primal parts deep inside of you, McCartney has always most closely resembled my sentimental heart.  In a lot of ways, Lennon was the braver songwriter in that he could tap into something really deep within himself to express his anguish or his confusion, but McCartney’s formal sophistication has always held my attention longer than Lennon’s guttural yearnings.  That is to say, if you’re a Lennon acolyte, you’re likely to be a bit irritated by the list.

Let’s get started, shall we?

25.  Baby, You’re a Rich Man – So many contradictory touches in this song:  Lennon’s soft falsetto erupting into his blaring yowl, the clavioline snaking its way around the song, the fat, matter-of-fact piano chords.  If this song we’re so convincing about the power of counterpointing and juxtaposition, it might be a mess of failed experiments.  

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24.  Dig a Pony – The confident swagger that just radiates off this thing is unbelievable.  Lennon is content to let it stutter and stop and break into a tumbling avalanche of cymbals and then halt the whole goddam thing in its tracks again.  

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23.  Long, Long, Long – Coming on the heels of the scorching “Helter Skelter,” “Long, Long, Long” is a welcome respite from the noise: a ambient organ quietly accompanies Harrison’s preternaturally soothing voice.  A vastly underrated song.  

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22.  Got to Get You Into My Life – A sizzling Stax tribute to weed that features some of McCartney’s finest vocals.  For as many times as McCartney has been arrested for possession, it’s not surprising that one of his best pure pop songs is about seriously jonesing for some dank.  

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21.  Don’t Pass Me By – Far and away Ringo’s best contribution to the band’s catalog.  Poor guy.  Always relegated to the goofiest, corniest songs.  But “Don’t Pass Me By” is a beaut:  a hairy, loose-limbed country jaunt featuring a wonderful fiddle hot-stepping all over the place.

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Truthfully, the Worth the Weight: Bristol Dubstep Classics is merely a serviceable compilation.  The relentless wet-concrete walls aesthetic of blighted post-industrial England is exhausting after a while.  The bright spot, though, on the record is Smith and Mighty’s strangely sunny “B Line Fi Flow.”  I had never heard of the pair, and their back catalog doesn’t interest me much after a quick spin on YouTube.  But goddam if this song hasn’t captured me in the past couple of days.  There’s such a weird interplay between Ray Mighty’s merry toast bouncing all over Rob Smith’s crystalline beat:  Mighty’s round baritone is such a wonderful compliment to Smith’s grinding bass.  Plus, it’s nice to hear a grimy dubstep track not take itself so seriously, which only lends credence my theory that dubstep works best as a means to an end.