51. William Bell, “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday”
A Stax/Volt guy who doesn’t get nearly the deserved level of attention. Luckily, it appears he’s still with us, rockin’ one of those splashy/undercopyedited web sites you often see attached to mid-level music stars and to evangelical megachurches.* May he collect massive royalties for much longer than the biblical threescore and ten. This song is golden.
*Not that I can complain, what with my wanky-ass blog.
52. Camper Van Beethoven, “Sweethearts”
This song has that nice late-in-the-dance, tired-people-draped-woozily-around-someone-they-just-met vibe, and it totally disses Ronald Reagan. Put that in my celebration of love, please.
53. Television Personalities, “World of Pauline Lewis”
I remember being like fourteen and reading about this band in an issue of Spin or RayGun or … what was that other thing called … Spectrum? Orbit? Something vaguely scientific, and it wasn’t Magnet, because that didn’t exist yet, and neither (so far as the general public was concerned) did the Internet. Whatever magazine it was, it was no hipper than the hippest thing you’d find at the imaginatively-named Book Shoppe in Alma, Michigan, which is pretty non-hip. And, even at that level of non-hipness, I’m sure my parents didn’t want me reading it. Anyway, they sounded like a fascinating band, but I wasn’t able to follow up until last year. This song is bouncy, tuneful punk rock with a strong undertow of melancholy. Really great.
54. Tom Zé, “Ui! (Voce inventa)”
TZ is Brazillian, he pissed off the military dictatorship during the ’70s, he used to hang out with Caetano Veloso and Os Mutantes, he once made an album where the cover looked like a person’s eye but it was actually a butt with a marble in the middle of it (take that, US-backed thug government!). He writes operettas and mock advertising jingles and songs based on instruction manuals. He is, in short, at least a minor subdeity. Imagine Captain Beefheart crossed with a really great disco band and then pasted with scraps of old newspaper everywhere.
55. The Cure, “Just Like Heaven”
Well, duh.
56. Tom Waits, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up”
For my nephews, especially. Ian has loved this one from the age of six. I feel like I’ve done a good thing there.
57. Yo La Tengo, “You Can Have it All”
That’s one of my favorite album covers of all time, which is a good thing, because that’s pretty much all this person’s homemade video has got.
58. Annie, “Heartbeat”
I feel like I have to explain how I even know this song, because it seems incongruous for someone so square/stuck in the ’80s/not that into illegal downloading/too poor to buy recent CDs. My friend Andrew put it on a mix for me in 2005 and it got lodged in my heart (no pun intended). I was gonna point at Andrew in a jocky “It’s-all-you-bro” kind of gesture when this song came on, but it never got played, and Andrew lost his wedding invitation, and so much for that.
59. Michael Jackson, “Girlfriend”
This is the blazingly talented Michael Jackson I was sad to lose, and not the Howard Hughes-meets-Humbert Humbert model we all grew so dismayingly familiar with over the past fifteen years. When I first listened to Off the Wall straight through (which took me an embarrassingly long time; I wasn’t allowed to listen to rock as a child, remember, and in my teenage years it was all punk/new wave, to the point where I was totally shocked to realize that Talking Heads were essentially a disco group with guitars and glasses), I thought it was possibly the greatest album of the 1970s. I still think maybe so.
60. The Bats, “Treason”
If I believed in Jung’s concept of daimons, I might say that mine would be a Criminally-Underheard-Poppy-New-Zealand-Postpunk-Performer daimon.
61. The Smashing Pumpkins, “1979″
By the time Melon Collie came along, I had come to royally hate alterna-radio. (Too much canned rage; not enough melody.) The first single was “Bat Out of My Bullet Brain” or “Carrot With Bulletin Wings” or “Man, I Am Angsty,” or whatever the fuck it was called: “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a caaaaaayyyyge.” That just made me hate Smashing Pumpkins too. But the next single was “Tonight Tonight,” which had that Victorian-storybook quality (and how many pop singles are in F-sharp-major?), and then they brought out this, and I could not even pretend to be above them anymore. To paraphrase what Pauline Kael said about the country music in Nashville, this song makes me nostalgic for experiences I never actually had. I think that feeling may not be terribly far from the sehnsucht that the German Romantics (and C.S. Lewis) talked about. Or maye it’s a commercialized bastardization of same, damned if I can tell. But it sure is intense.
62. Chico Buarque, “Caçada”
Yeah, sit there and try to sit still. I dare you.
63. The Pogues, “The Broad Majestic Shannon”
Now it can be told: I am the one who illicitly borrowed the mixtape from my sister’s tape case in 1991 that had this song on it and whose crappy tape player then broke the tape. I am also the one who clumsily spooled the evidence back into its Memorex casing and replaced the tape, surreptitiously, in the case next to my sister’s bed. I am sorry. But man, that tape was crucial to my education: it got me into this, the Clash, Yaz, INXS, English Beat, the Specials and Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode.
Passing thought: It’s really sad nowadays that when Shane MacGowan laughs his teeth and gullet are so messed up that he goes gkhee-khee-khee-khee-khee like Ernie.
64. Gladys Knight and the Pips, “It’s Time to Go Now”
Get it? See, ’cause, the dance was going to be ending, and—well, you know, the song says “It’s time to go now.” It’s funny because it’s true.
65. Big Star, “September Gurls”
PS: There was also a gonna be a brunch playlist. It had the Go-Betweens, Antonin Dvorak, Sarah Vaughan, john r. williamson, Television, the JPS Experience, a jazz cover of Tears For Fears, and my wife performing a really funny Georgian drinking song with the Yale Russian Chorus. And Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster, trying to teach Gussie Fink-Nottle to sing.
