…But What’s That Song?: Remembering Alex Chilton

This Saint Patrick’s Day, Alex Chilton died.  I sit here right now as I watch American Idol feeling a little pissed off that no one knows who he is, so I’ll do my best to correct that by writing an article.  The first contestant tonight, Lee DeWyze, sang a song made famous by The Box Tops, who Alex Chilton sang for at age sixteen, entitled “The Letter”, but while I thought this would make a fitting tribute to the recently deceased, the show was somehow ignorant of Chilton’s death.  I guess that I’d expect about as much from a show that blessed its contestants with what Seacrest described as “the tutelage of Miley Cyrus”.

Along with his less spoken-of career with The Box Tops, Alex Chilton was the backbone of cult favorites Big Star.  Despite never finding commercial success like The Box Tops did with their aforementioned number one jam, Big Star quickly became critical darlings.  However, after their first masterpiece in their set of three, 1972’s #1 Record, Chilton’s songwriting colleague Chris Bell left the band, frustrated with their lack of commercial success.  However, listening to #1 Record, you might find it hard to believe that it wasn’t a huge hit.  Along with power pop progenitors like  the Paul Simonesque“Thirteen” and the uplifting “The Ballad Of El Goodo”, “In The Streets” shows up in the third slot, and it might be the most famous song that Alex Chilton has ever written thanks to Cheap Trick’s cover of the track in the intro of That ‘70s Show.  The show, which launched the careers of now-stars Topher Grace, Ashton Kutcher, and Mila Kunis, was jokingly referred to as “That $70 Show” by Chilton, thanks to the seventy dollars in royalties that he receives each time the show airs, which, thanks to its cable syndication, would amount to a lot of money.

Two years later, Chilton returned with an album that’s as twisted as it is catchy, ‘74’s Radio City.  With Bell gone, Chilton’s gift for melody was allowed to blossom even further, but for some reason this collection that spans less than forty minutes feels like it’s going to collapse.  On the legendary song “September Gurls”, the chorus goes “December boys got it bad”, and on the frankest song of all time, one that you might remember Kristen Stewart’s character spinning on her vinyl player in the teenage romance Adventureland, Chilton declares “I’m in love with a girl/Finest girl in the world/I didn’t know/This could happen to me”.  Songs as boldly honest as “I’m In Love With A Girl” are few and far between, and the track captures the essence of why Alex Chilton was so remarkable.

Big Star’s third and final album, alternately titled Third or Sister Lovers, was released after a few years of the record company stalling release in correct anticipating of its commercial failure.  To make matters more difficult, Chilton wanted it to be a nineteen song double album.  Only in 1992, with its Rykodisc re-release would Third/Sister Lovers see eye to eye with Chilton’s vision, but its first release in 1978 cut off the final five songs to fit it on one slab of vinyl.  If Radio City sounded like everything in the studio was slowly collapsing, Third/Sister Lovers sounded like everything was broken, including Chilton.  Among other covers, Chilton covers The Velvet Underground’s Nico-sung, 1967 song “Femme Fatale” like a more sorrowed and beaten Lou Reed may have sung it if it were 1969, and tracks like “Kangaroo” and “Holocaust” find him completely destroyed.  If you want to wallow in your own desperation, turn on Third/Sister Lovers.

After Big Star was finished, Chilton took unremarkable cracks at forming a solo career, but even a few critically well-regarded EPs couldn’t save that route from implosion.  Despite Chilton being sometimes regarded as the master of the EP, his career, for most purposes, ends with Third/Sister Lovers, even with a 2005 attempt to resurrect Big Star with the album In Space.

Another appearance of Chilton in popular culture is in The Replacements’ 1987 power pop song bearing his name.  “Alex Chilton” can be found as an in-game song on Rock Band 2.    So next time you’re playing the world’s best party game, find this one and play it.  It’s a blast, I promise.  Paul Westerberg, to whom Alex Chilton was something of a mentor, perfectly expressed that feeling you get when listening to any Big Star song with “I’m in love/But what’s that song?/I’m in love with that song”.  Then Westerberg, the smug little bastard that he is, drops “I never travel far without a little Big Star” on the bridge.  Thanks to Rock Band 2, children by the millions actually are singing for Alex Chilton.

As the guitarist of the now-defunct chick punk band Sleater-Kinney, Carrie Brownstein, put it, Big Star is like a secret handshake among musicians and fans.  If you find out that someone hasn’t heard of them (and who really has?) you become excited to show them the band that everyone has to love.  If “I’m In Love With A Girl” was for anyone in particular, I’m sure she reciprocated the feelings that were so simply expressed in song.  Rest in peace, Al.  You deserve a better tribute than American Idol providing you an unmarked tomb.

Plastic Beach – Gorillaz (March 2010)

After five long years, Gorillaz, the most popular virtual band of all time barring only Alvin And The Chipmunks, return with mastermind Damon Albarn’s most interesting, though not greatest, work.  Plastic Beach has so many collaborators, and that’s the reason that the album is as entrancing and sonically varied as it is.  Snoop Dogg and Mos Def perform backed by something called “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble” that sounds like it could be horrifying, and Bashy and Kano joke about the peaceful nature of a perpetually waved white flag while an orchestra for oriental Arabic music plays beneath them.  Damon Albarn’s first-its-a-lullaby-now-it’s-not vocals in “Rhinestone Eyes” whisper “Your Rhinestone eyes look like factories far away”.  Despite Albarn’s limited appearances on this album under the guise of the virtual 2D, each appearance of his is to be cherished thanks to his vocal inspiration, Ray Davies’s “Waterloo Sunset”.

It’s astonishing how little this feels like a Gorillaz album.  With Mos Def and Bobby Womack showing up twice each, Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals doing a song with De La Soul, Lou Reed singing a song that I think he must have written, and The Clash’s Mick Jones and Paul Simonon playing guitar and bass in such a way that you’ll only know it’s them thanks to the credit, 2D, Murdock, and the gang don’t do a lot here, but who cares?  The contributors to this album are often at the best they’ve been in their careers.  On the lead single “Stylo”, Mos Def contributes some of his best rapping, and Bobby Womack belts out some of his best singing.  The obligatory song featuring De La Soul after Feel Good Inc.’s success, “Superfast Jellyfish”, becomes more of a delight with each listen thanks to its bizarre shared themes of excitation for breakfast food and the wonderful world of the sea.  “All hail King Neptune and his water-breathers!” commands De La Soul in their second wonderful appearance in a Gorillaz song.

Despite the variety, the album jells perfectly, perhaps even better than the superior Demon Days.  The over-the-top “Superfast Jellyfish” feels perfectly natural following the badass “Stylo”, and “Pirate Jet”, which has the band leaving the taps on for a hundred years, feels like a proper resolution to our confusing trip to the Plastic Beach.  Considering that Damon Albarn started his success in the shitty, but maybe not all that shitty, Britpop band Blur, it’s almost disturbing to see how he’s mastered the art of hip hop perhaps more than anyone else.  You want the true guru of hip hop?  Look no further than the skinny white rocker from Britain.

B+

Broken Bells – Broken Bells (March 2010)

So when it was revealed to us that half of Gnarls Barkley would be playing drums and producing a side project of James Mercer of The Shins, the best The Velvet Underground copycat this side of the third millennium, we expected something different than the atmospheric ten song collection that wavers from anthemic to poppy and back.  The self-titled album Broken Bells echoes The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead in its mood while also bringing out Mercer’s best-seen vocals, and Broken Bells is the best album he’s been involved in since 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow, The Shins’ call-back to The VU’s Loaded, and Danger Mouse’s beats are as impressive as they were on Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere.  Broken Bells is a treat because of the duo’s unexpected chemistry; Danger Mouse works better with Mercer than he worked with Cee-Lo Green.

Despite the formidable discographies of each artist, especially with Danger Mouse having done work on the 2006 smash hit “Crazy”, the leading track “The High Road” is the best song that either party has worked on.  “The High Road” works both as a story of apocalypse, which worked wonders when I first listened to the song while reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and as a metaphor for morality and taking the road.  Two whispered verses that detail “The dawn to end all nights/That’s all we hoped it was” and two triumphant then choral choruses that finish with a choir singing “’Cause they know and so do I/The high road is hard to find/A detour in your new life/Tell all of your friends goodbye” are followed by a brief but beautiful acoustic guitar interlude that leads into the repeated ending lyrics.  “It’s too late to change your mind/You let law be your guide” is astonishing not because of the lyric itself, but because Mercer abstains from singing it mockingly or pitifully and instead chooses to evoke fond admiration.  You might have not found the high road, and there’s little you can do to fix that now, but Mercer respects that you tried.

Despite “The High Road” being the best song by a wide margin, each song has something enjoyable to revel in.  Whether it’s the cheerful progressions of the guitar and bass on “Vaporize”, Mercer’s falsetto in “The Ghost Inside”, or the doomed feeling of the final track “The Mall And Misery”, each song might be your favorite.  The aforementioned finale booms of our city, our culture, and our suffering mother, and Mercer’s final words of the album, “So what if/I love it?/I can’t help it/That’s all”, leave the listener in a slightly startled state of mind.

There are just about no flaws that I can find in Broken Bells, though the best material outshines the lesser songs by a significant amount.  It feels odd to criticize these two artists for lack of ambition, but I think that if they reached for the stars as they did on the first on final tracks, they could have produced something exceptional rather than something that’s merely great.

B+

Top Ten Songs Of The Nineties

Despite my typical derision of the nineties as the worst decade for music since modern music exploded, its inferiority to the surrounding decades does not prevent it from yielding its share of classic albums (to be visited at a later date) and songs.  Today, we look at the ten greatest songs of the nineteen nineties, most of which aren’t exactly known by your average person.

10. Absolutely Cuckoo – The Magnetic Fields (From 1999’s 69 Love Songs)

So Stephen Merritt decided to write nearly three hours of love songs, the first of which, “Absolutely Cuckoo”, would wind up as the greatest song that he’s ever written.  Instead of going into why the song is so great, I’ll present the entirety of the song’s lyrics, which are repeated once.  “Don’t fall in love with me yet/We only recently met/True, I’m in love with you, but/You might decide I’m a nut/Give me a week or two to/Go absolutely cuckoo/And when you see your error/Then you can flee in terror/Like everybody else does/I only tell you this ‘cause/I’m easy to get rid of/But not if you fall in love/Know now that I’m on the make/And if you make a mistake/My heart will certainly break/I’ll have to jump in a lake/And all my friends will blame you/There’s no telling what they’ll do/It’s only fair to tell you/I’m absolutely cuckoo”.  It’s silly, but my, it’s perfect.

9. When I Come Around – Green Day (From 1994’s Dookie)

I considered a few songs from Green Day’s Dookie for this list.  There’s the masturbatory anthem “Longview”, the angsty “Basket Case”, and a contender for the sweetest song ever written, “She”, but I decided to go with the song that made Billie Joe Armstrong’s then-girlfriend marry him, “When I Come Around”.  Green Day’s aforementioned teenage angst works in their favor rather than against them, and the best lyric in the bunch seems to go against the theme until you remember how the story played out: “You can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right”.

8. Mama Said Knock You Out – LL Cool J (From 1990’s Mama Said Knock You Out)

By 1990, we’d already seen our fair share of great hip hop.  Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back was two years old, and Run-DMC were already acknowledged, maybe improperly, as “The Beatles of hip hop”.  LL Cool J, after coming off of an album dismissed for being overly cheesy, decided to rap about being rich for the duration of his glorious return to form Mama Said Knock You Out, but the true gem on the album was the titular track, which was a fight song that displayed a level of vigor never before seen from a rapper.

7. November Rain – Guns N’ Roses (From 1991’s Use Your Illusion I)

Guns N’ Roses have always taken themselves to seriously, but this is the only time when their pretensions have flat-out transformed into sincerity.  “November Rain” is the musical equivalent of the word “gorgeous”.  It’s a power ballad where you stop thinking that it’s cheesy and start actually feeling something.  Of particular note are Slash’s guitar solos, all three (!) of them.  Slash’s guitar virtuoso surpasses the usual Steve Vai level of “wow” to actually, you know, sound good.

6. Paranoid Android – Radiohead (From 1997’s OK Computer)

From the acoustic guitar intro of “Paranoid Android” to the noisy ending, the song is grand on a scale that it’s humorous title, a reference to Marvin The Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, barely allows.  Having been the first Radiohead song that I had ever heard maybe four years ago, I simply said “Thom Yorke sounds like a bitch” and didn’t have the opportunity to hear it again for years to come.  Had I kept listening, I would have been taken with his change in voice when he declares “ambition makes you look pretty ugly!”  Not you, Mr. Yorke.  Not you.

5. Losing My Religion – R.E.M. (From 1991’s Out Of Time)

The tone of R.E.M.’s best song, “Losing My Religion” (sorry “Radio Free Europe”, “The One I Love”, and “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”), has always reminded me of The Who’s 1971 classic “Behind Blue Eyes”.  It’s confessional, it’s solemn, and it doesn’t really hold back.  You might think that Peter Buck is losing his faith in religion, his faith in music, or simply his faith in himself, but in the end it’s just a song about losing your temper?  Or is it?  Associate with it what you will.

4. Cut Your Hair – Pavement (From 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain)

Along with Beck’s smash hit “Loser”, Pavements “Cut Your Hair” partially launched independent music into the mainstream.  It starts out with a half-hearted vocal harmony that sounds like The Beach Boys being lazy, and then it launches into a song about cutting your hair, escaping from the hokiness of the eighties and moving into the hipness of the nineties.  As Stephen Malkmus proclaims along with “songs mean a lot when songs are bought”, “no BIG HAIR!”

3. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana (From 1991’s Nevermind)

In 1972, David Bowie wrote Mott The Hoople’s generation-defining anthem “All The Young Dudes”.  In 1991, Kurt Cobain did the same for Nirvana with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.  The song defined grunge-era angst with lyrics like “I’m worse at what I do best, and for this gift I feel blessed” and “here we are, now entertain us”.  Some of the best songs define their era, and this is one of them.

2. Race For The Prize – The Flaming Lips (From 1999’s The Soft Bulletin)

“Race For The Prize”, undoubtedly The Flaming Lips’ best song, tells a story of two scientists searching for a cure, even if it kills them.  Musically, the song is so grand that it propels the chorus “Theirs is to win/If it kills them/They’re just humans/With wives and children” to take on a deeper meaning.  It’s difficult to explain exactly why “Race For The Prize” is such a gem, but its tale of ambition and humanity is probably a part of it.

1. Gold Soundz – Pavement (From 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain)

I didn’t understand all the Pavement hype until I gave Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain a try.  Seven songs in, while I’m fading in and out of listening to the music, I hear “You’re the kind of girl that I like/Because you’re empty/And I’m empty/And you can never quarantine the past”.  At that moment, I fell in love with the band, and the reason is because they wrote one of the sweetest songs ever made.  Every listener connects differently with the song, but it’s always on a very, very deep level.

American VI: Ain’t No Grave (February 2010)

After I found a way to get my mitts on the second posthumous entry in Johnny Cash’s American series, I realized that I wasn’t all that familiar with the series.  After a quick listen through it, thanks to my use of Lala.com to listen to the middle four, I was taken aback at how little Cash’s death has changed the two most recent entries.  Let’s talk about Rick Rubin.

Rick Rubin is a producer whose fame approaches that of and whose talent far exceeds that of Phil Spector.  If you’ve listened to a famous album by a classic rock act or a famous rap artist, there’s a great chance that it was produced by Rick Rubin.  To simply list a select few of his most famous contributions would be to belittle his hysterically expansive discography.  Since the mid-‘80s he has produced roughly five albums per year, and this year his credits thus far include this album and Transcontinental Hustle, gypsy punk rock act Gogol Bordello’s follow-up to 2007’s incredible Super Taranta! While American V: A Hundred Highways may have been Cash’s first posthumous American entry, Rubin had already constructed 2003’s sublime Streetcore, the last leavings of punk rock legend and my personal hero Joe Strummer.

Back to the topic at hand, Rubin and Cash’s American series consists of six albums, each of which span less than an hour and consist of few Cash originals among many quiet covers of famous songs.  Throughout the first five, Cash took on the obvious (Lennon/McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen) to the interesting (Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, Beck) to the just plain strange (Trent Reznor, Chris Cornell, U2).  Here, the nine covers and one original, the latter of which slides in at the fourth position slyly enough to prevent casual listeners from identifying which of these things is not like the others, all come from lower profile songs and less than surprising sources, but nevertheless amount to what is probably the most interesting and cohesive work of the American series.  From miles away you can sniff out that the album is going to be about death and rising from the grave throughout, but the anticipation doesn’t undo its affectation.  The repeated “ain’t no grave can hold my body down” on the leading and title track, which features contributions from the brothers Avett, never fails to haunt, and then the Sheryl Crowe cover (what?!) keeps that feeling alive.

Aside from his second Kristofferson cover and Rick’s decision to end the album with “Aloha Oe”, the only other thing worth noting is the original, whose Biblical title, “I Corinthians 15:55”, had me suspecting that Rubin had titled an old Cash recording as an homage to John Darnielle’s 2009 opus The Life Of The World To Come.  The verse, the first two lines of the chorus, is answered by Cash’s next three lines: “O Death, where is thy sting?/O Grave, where is they victory?/O Life, you are a shining path/And hope springs eternal just over the rise/When I see my redeemer beckoning me”.  Johnny Cash is right in his failure to fear death.  Even after it came, Cash blessed the world with a small treasure of evocative material.  O Death, where is thy sting?

B+

Odd Blood – Yeasayer (February 2010)

After coming off of 2007’s strange, and I mean really, really strange, All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer decides to broaden the appeal of their psychedelia.  Think Merriweather Post Pavilion, except with more over-the-top and infectious beats reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall or Bad.  However, for how agreeable the album is, a few people take beef with some of its less interesting lyrics.  The penultimate song, “Mondegreen”, has a lyric that cynics like to bring up.  It goes “everybody’s talking ‘bout me and my baby making love to the morning light”, but I’m still not sure what they’re talking about.  Sure, written down the line is pretty unremarkable, but it’s not like it came out of Owl City.

Oh, and then the lyric makes the vocal so grabbing.  The reason that simple choruses like “you’re stuck in my mind/all of the time” and “stick up for yourself son/never mind what anybody else done” work is because Keating can sing them so convincingly.  His voice sounds like a more controlled David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors).

The main song to discuss here is the ruthlessly catchy “Ambling Alp”, which is dominating some of the hipper radio stations out there.  Like Animal Collective’s “Brother Sport”, “Ambling Alp” gleefully tackles topics relating to youth.  Also like “Brother Sport”, “Ambling Alp” makes you need to dance.  The dance songs don’t stop with “Ambling Alp”, though.  Songs like “ONE” and “Love Me Girl”, two of the songs on the album that remind me most of The King Of Pop, might actually make a dance floor friendly to indie weirdness.

Each of the ten songs has a masterfully crafted hook, making for an album that you won’t soon tire of.  Considering how poppy their music has become on only their sophomore album, expect Yeasayer to attempt to achieve even broader appeal on the next outing.  Yeasayer’s psychedelic dance album Odd Blood is hard to resist.  So don’t.

A-

A Badly Broken Code – Dessa (January 2010)

Last week, I took a good amount of time briefing everyone on one of the most exciting January’s in music ever (I checked it compared to other years, and I don’t see anything that touches it), but I hadn’t yet discovered January’s best release.  If the name Dessa doesn’t mean anything to you, perhaps the name Doomtree might.  If it doesn’t, Doomtree is Minnesota’s version of Wu-Tang Clan, a collective of rappers who alternate between releasing solo works and working with their fellow tribesmen.  While rapper P.O.S. is the Doomtree of Ghostface Killah in that he is the member with the most renowned solo career, Dessa should think about becoming Doomtree’s Raekwon.  Dessa’s first full album, A Badly Broken Code, certainly resembles either of Raekwon’s albums in his Only Built 4 Cuban Linx series in that it evokes feelings of noir and doom, if it is more contemplative and less intense, and while Raekwon had Ghostface Killah backing him up every other track, Dessa needs no help for P.O.S.  While Wu-Tang Clan always moved together, the members of Doomtree seem much more comfortable branching out.

I love P.O.S., and he’s a phenomenal rapper, but Dessa is clearly the superior rapper.  The album opens with “Children’s Work”, in which Dessa confidently but quietly declares “my father was a paper plane/my mother was a wind-swept tree/my little brother’s nearly twice my age/he taught me how to meditate, I taught him how to read”.  My Raekwon comparisons don’t stop there.  Last September, Raekwon sent us through his house of flying daggers while making sure that he kept everything real, and Dessa seems even better at that than he was.

Like any respectable rap artist, Dessa knows how to brag.  In a number where she drops the name of the Chicago Manual of Style, she gloats “I’m the book that beat the speed-reader/I’m the card that the dealers won’t touch/and it’s just not true I’m a man-eater/all the same, we should probably go Dutch/refrain”.  Dessa doesn’t spend a lot of the album assuring us how great she is, but of convincing us how strong she has to be, and that’s why she seems more human, and therefore relatable, than most other rappers, including P.O.S.  You believe every word she says as she brings out her unique rhyme schemes and precise and slow but ever-so-complex flow.  She even breaks a few rules in the process, breaking out into singing every once in a while just to keep us on our toes.  I listen for it every time.  Her voice is as lovely as her persona is honest.

Sometimes we don’t realize the little complexities of life.  Making assumptions makes our lives easier, and that’s fair, but Dessa gives us the casual reminder that other people are going through the same things that we are.  On the chorus to the aforementioned “Children’s Work”, Dessa chants “I’ve learned how to paint my face/how to earn my keep/how to clean my kill/some nights I still can’t sleep/the past rolls back/I can see us still/you’ve learned how to hold your own/how to stack your stones/but the history’s thick/children aren’t as simple/as we’d like to think”.  What may seem to be a lesson in the hardships of maturity is actually a reminder to never underestimate how human your fellow man is.  Dessa doesn’t teach us any lessons about humanity.  She just pops in to simply tell us that everything is complicated.

A-