Friday, April 29, 2016

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#194) “Cherry Pie” by Warrant – Yeah, I know, I know, this is not a good song. It’s not clever, musically complex or emotionally complicated…it’s pretty much just the jarring noises that rattle inside the head of a teenage boy whose hyper-driven libido has caused his brain to dry out and break into jagged pieces. And that’s not something anyone (including the boy) wants to be stuck listening to for too long. I might go so far as to suggest that even as ‘hair metal’ songs go, this one’s a turkey.

But for all its wall-pounding loudness and brainless bluster, it is still a memorable jam for me. "Cherry Pie" and its musical brethren brightly reflect the days when I was that horned-up teenage boy (er, you know...), my head half-full of jagged pieces that I could feel scraping the inside of my skull whenever I so much as moved. My adolescence transpired at the height of hair metal, and so, for better or worse, it was that glammy, mascara-smeared world of ratted out hair and spandex that, at least in part, trimmed my path to adulthood.

To that end, the song is probably most memorable for its video, which one night when I was seventeen left me speechless in the break room of the McDonald’s where I worked. Someone had left the television on MTV, and that video just happened to come on while I was taking my break (back when the ‘M’ stood for music). I'm not going to lie: I sat at the break table more than a little agog as it played. The only thing that could tear me away from that hormonal trance was a co-worker, an adult, a woman, walking in for her break and taking a seat across from me. I rushed to change the channel on the television, actually jumping up from the table guiltily, as though I'd been doing something gross underneath it.

I assure you, I hadn't been, but twenty-five years later, I must say the video is still virtually impossible to turn away from. I don't think that makes me sexist or misogynistic...I think that proves I still have a heartbeat. And for my part, I should add that these days the compulsion to watch it is a little more nuanced than it was when I was seventeen.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, well into adulthood by then, I actually got into an argument with a guy over who was hotter, the chick in the Whitesnake video (Tawny Kitaen), or the chick in the "Cherry Pie" video (Bobbie Brown). A pathetic thing to waste time debating, surely, but in fairness, the debate was really about which of these video vixens was more emblematic to the times. We were drinking though, so in the end, we just dumbly distilled our arguments down to body parts, using language that probably would have turned our mothers' heads white.

But we weren't the only ones. I’ve heard this debate before, and I seem to remember it wound up on some VH-1 nostalgia show once, which makes perfect sense, because both women are emblematic to the hedonistic 80s, to the birth of image first, and certainly to the hair metal era of rock and roll I came of age in, which had to rely heavily on image, since most of the music sucked.

But now as a more mature (and more intelligent, hopefully) 40-something male, I think I’ve worked out an answer to this long-running argument that makes sense.

Of the two, in their respective video roles (and putting aside for a moment all the typical complaints some might have, that the videos are sexist, objectify women, perpetuate unrealistic standards for beauty...all that may be true, but it's a discussion for another time), Bobbie Brown is infinitely more attractive, far sexier, than Tawny Kitaen.

And it has nothing to do with her physical appearance, or the fact that she’s scantily dressed (ay, thar be the nuance!). These are factors, certainly, I won't deny it.  Why would I? I DO have a heartbeat, and a penis. And I don’t think there’s anyone, male or female, who couldn’t admit they are both exceptionally beautiful women, equally 'emblematic'. Unrealistic perhaps, but representations of an ideal, all the same. Arguing over who is “hotter” in simplistic terms would seem almost fatuous.

It’s the way Brown comes across in her video that gives her the edge, and what I’d say was actually mesmerizing me in the McDonald's break room so long ago, though perhaps I didn't realize it at the time. She exudes a likability, a sweetness, that Tawny Kitaen does not. Sure, she’s hot…but the world is full of that, full of beautiful people, female and male.

I think what makes Brown wildly unforgettable is how she plays it, the whole funny girl-next-door thing she seems to have on lock.  She is clearly not taking herself, or the fact that she’s hot, or the video - or the song for that matter - TOO seriously. None of them are, come to think of it, which just might make "Cherry Pie" one of the best hair metal songs, rather than worst.

Whereas Kitaen, attractive though she is, seems staged, overly poised. She makes sure she launches plenty of heady gazes in the direction of the camera, seems concerned with capturing her good side while perched in the passenger window of David Coverdale's car, and to that end seems to be carefully considering each move she makes, rather than just having fun.

I've always preferred Brown's approachable playfulness to Kitaen's contrived stares and car hood cartwheels, because at the end of the day, in the real world, among real women, what guy doesn't (or shouldn't) prefer the girl who's going to be the most fun to hang out with at Buffalo Wild Wings on a Thursday night?

The moral: sense of humor is of paramount importance. Far more important than looking like anything even close to Bobbie Brown.

"Looks so good, make a grown man cry..."






#195) "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake - Kind of the same deal as above, as far as being a hair metal jam, only "Here I Go Again" is a much better song. So much so, that the video with Tawny Kitaen was the last thing on my mind back in the day. This song's oddly heady message about self-reliance really stoked the fires of my imagination back when I thought being a loner was cool. I modeled myself after it to some extent, as I dabbed on my Clearasil each morning, donned my beret and trench coat, and headed off to school.

Laughable now, but a big deal when I was fifteen and trying to figure things out, starting with myself.

These days, I go out of my way to do the opposite, to not lose touch with friends and family (and not wear berets and trench coats). As I age, I have no interest whatsoever in being a "loner". Insofar as it's anyone's game, or should be (which is barely at all) it's definitely a young man's game...and as time passes, it's revealed to be no one's game. It stops being romantic, starts leading nowhere. Middle age has taught me that, at least.

I do, however, still have to dab on Clearasil sometimes. ;-)

"Like a drifter I was born to walk alone..."




#196) "Still of the Night" by Whitesnake - This song is great actually, no sheepishness here, whatsoever.  Although the sight of John Sykes bowing his guitar in the video, seemingly being forced to do his best Jimmy Page impersonation, is pretty hilarious, the song in general rocks. Actually, I'd go so far as to say that it's among the best metal songs ever, 'hair' or otherwise.

On 1/48/50, I may just air guitar my myself into a ditch.

"In the still of the night, in the cool moonlight..."







Friday, April 22, 2016

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#193) Prince - So there were a few Prince songs further down this list that I'd have gotten to eventually, but given his sudden and shocking death yesterday, I figured I'd pay homage to the Purple One with my Top 5 picks from his incredible body of work, much like I did with Smokey Robinson a few months back.

I must confess, I was never a HUGE fan of Prince (primarily because it was hard to relate; as a young man I nurtured a cinematic vision in my mind of my own existence, and I never felt quite as closely acquainted with God or sex as Prince's screeching and wailing seemed to suggest he was...;-), but it can be said honestly that I never failed to acknowledge his talent, and I am now gripped by a strong posthumous impulse to recognize it openly.

In the studio, the guy was pretty much the sum of creative energy. He did it all, played virtually every instrument (starting with his outstanding voice) on every album, produced and mixed himself, and over time carefully (some would say jealously) guarded his image and his music, a practice that couldn't help but become confrontational as society entered the age of the Internet and social media, and copyright slowly (lamentably) became a gray area....and in doing so successfully branded himself. He was "Prince", and there were few who didn't know who that was, or what that was.

And yet, what that was, exactly, in his vast, trans-genre music, was kind of hard to define.

Okay, for a while he was "The Artist Formerly Known As...", but he came back eventually, and that contrived protest against his record label - though it lasted nearly a decade - never appeared to hurt him, or his legacy. For any artist of lesser greatness, lesser identity, it might have proven laughably fatal to change your name to an unpronounceable symbol and still expect to be taken seriously (some 80s has-been trying to stay in the limelight). But when he came back, he was still "Prince"...still as deserving of one-word name recognition as any artist who has ever grabbed our attention for even ten minutes.

Honestly (and I don't mean this in a mocking way at all), I barely thought of him as male or female, much less black or white. To me, artistically speaking, he really WAS just "Prince" - trans-everything - MORE than worthy, in the music world, of the sense of royalty inherent in his name. Not to mention the color purple.  He was simply good...very, very good...at what he did. I guess it didn't really matter if I could specifically relate to what he was screeching and wailing about in his music, or what he happened to be calling himself that day.  I listened. You can't not listen to Prince.

"When Doves Cry" is, for my money, the greatest pop song ever recorded. It's not even a pop song, really, it's something else all-together. It's in a class by itself, like the artist who created it, and listening to it is an experience. Really, who on God's green Earth could "When Doves Cry" BE, other than Prince?  And by all accounts, the artist really did create it...put the whole damn thing together on his own. "Produced, arranged, composed and performed by..." Un-fucking-believable, if you really sit and think about it...really sit and listen to it.

Often with icons of Prince's caliber, you hear people say, "Forget the radio hits, seek out deep tracks and you'll REALLY be impressed!" Indeed, there's plenty of deep trackage worthy of exploration in the musical plane of existence Prince left behind, but for brilliance - musical iconography of the highest order - you needn't dig much deeper than what he put out on the radio.

Any one of these (and others) I'll be proud to jam to while I drive 14,000 miles. To be clear, it's just a small sampling, but I think it accurately represents the incredible range and talent of The Artist Forever Known as Prince.

"When Doves Cry"

"Kiss"

"Peach"

"The Beautiful Ones"

"Sexy MF"


"It's not about the body it's about the mind / Sexy motherfucker shaking that ass, shaking that ass, shaking that ass..."



Friday, April 15, 2016

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#191) "Come Sail Away" by Styx - It was a bright afternoon in March 1989, and I had made the decision midway through the morning to skip school after lunch. Yeah, sure, I wasn't supposed to be cutting class (children of America...), but it was a beautiful spring day, the first in several weeks to hoist itself above 30 degrees. The high March sun was causing the crusted drifts of snow to dissolve into glistening wet stains on the newly exposed pavement, which if you looked really close you could tell were on the move, tiny rivulets busily working their way to Lake Superior.

Bright. Cloudless. Full of promise for the summer to come, the first summer that I would have my driver's license. There was no way I could spend the rest of the day inside; it was a real Ferris Bueller moment.

And so I lurked as inconspicuously as possible in a back hallway, holding my own against the swarm of students, waiting for the exact right moment to dip out through the big double doors without being stopped and asked for a pass by good ol' Mr. B.  How I managed to have my parents' car on a school day I don't recall, it was our only family vehicle. But I saw my chance and sprinted across the parking lot, hastily keying into that 1988 Dodge Omni (nope, no Ferrari). I peeled out onto the street and went speeding out into the country like a bat out of hell.

It may as well have been a Ferrari for how I felt.

I'd only had my driver's license a month or two, but I'd already charted what I believed to be the perfect drive - a glorious 10-mile circle tour of the hills just west of town, that indeed would come to play a major role in my life over the next several years (but that's another blog post).

Near the end of the run was a pronounced rise in the land, from the top of which the whole of my world at the time could be seen in one splendorous eyeful - my hometown in the distance, splayed along the shoreline, tracing the edge of Lake Superior as it curved its way east toward Michigan. It was like a grand amphitheater where my childhood had been performed, and out of which I was sure, quite sure, I would eventually fly at breakneck speed toward untold glory.

Yes, that drive was a pretty big deal. It was a little road trip I could take at a moment's notice. I thought I knew what freedom was cruising along that trusty route. In fact, I was never more sure of anything than when I was driving those two-lane country roads at the very beginning of my adult life.

I must confess, sometimes I miss taking that drive, and being that age. It was a time of anticipation and expectation as pure, unbridled and uninterrupted as could be imagined, and what better anthem for such idealism than the distilled-down certainty that hope springs eternal found in "Come Sail Away"?  Almost fairy-tale in its earnestness, not yet besmirched by jadedness or cynicism, realism or fatalism...all unavoidable by-product of spending too much time in the adult world.

"Come Sail Away" is another one of those songs that I have a very specific version of in mind.  I'm not a fan of the studio version, from the 1977 album Equinox. It has to be the band's live version from 1984's Caught in the Act.  Some songs benefit from the urgency of a live performance.

Some road trips do as well.

"I look to the sea, reflections in the waves spark my memories..."

#192) "Suite Madame Blue"  by Styx - Not exactly a song about freedom on the road, instead, 1975's "Suite Madame Blue" is in the same camp as Mellencamp's "Pink Houses" or Springsteen's "Born in the USA", an indictment of America. To be sure, it doesn't pack quite the punch of those other songs, but for the time period in which it was released, it comes across accurately somber-sounding, emotionally deflated. Much like America in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era.

More of a lament than an indictment, really (which might be the reason for its lack of "punch"), "Suite Madame Blue" nevertheless has a few musically dramatic moments that I never get tired of hearing. It starts out slow, but builds in intensity, and at the end offers a fine opportunity to drum on the steering wheel and chant along as you drive. "America!...America!..."  ;-)

"Once long ago, a word from your lips, and the world turned around..."


  

Friday, April 8, 2016

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#189) "American Woman" by The Guess Who - I've always held a place in my heart for The Guess Who. There is a certain energized hostility folded into much of their music that I find compelling. It's not quite as easy to pick up on as it would be in "hard rock" songs in years to come, but it's all the more effective for this subtlety, well suited to singer Burton Cumming's agitated vocal style. Always gets me keyed up.

"American Woman" is a 1970 indictment of, well, America in the thick of the Vietnam era, but it stands the test of time, because it's calling out more, I think, than just America's involvement in Southeast Asia.

I'm patriotic for the most part. I don't think America is to blame for all the world's ills or that every move this country makes around the world is inherently wrong, nor do I fail to acknowledge certain aspects of our Constitution that the Founders got right that are very much a reason to celebrate each July Fourth.  But I'm nothing if not reasonable, and open-minded, and some of what The Guess Who were talking about in this song, I'd say, is still going on today, and has only gotten worse. Like the aforementioned "hostility", what exactly is being said is not blatantly obvious. You have to really listen to the lyrics and be willing and able to interpret.

That The Guess Who are a Canadian band makes it somehow more compelling, not less. I'm not sure why.

"Don't come a-knocking around my door, don't want to see your shadow no more / Colored lights can hypnotize / Sparkle someone else's eyes..."

#190) "One for My Baby" by Frank Sinatra - I remember reading an article about Frank Sinatra written by the late David Halberstam, appearing in a 1998 issue of Playboy shortly before the singer's passing. Halberstam wrote that what he enjoyed most about Sinatra was not the finger snapping, ringa-dinga-ling Rat Pack period, nor was it the very early days when he crooned and bobby-soxers swooned. Sinatra's finest work, Halberstam wrote, was in the 1950s:

"His audience was by then predominantly white, male, and middle to upper class. There is no small amount of irony here. In a few years, with the coming of the women's movement, those of us who constituted Sinatra's core audience would be viewed as an empowered male elite who dominated and determined the lives of the women of our generation. But we hardly felt empowered when we were young. More often than not, we felt some form of rejection or heartbreak, and certainly a great deal of awkwardness. Sinatra's attraction was that he seemed to share that same pain. No wonder he was so fond of a story that made the rounds in those days: It is very late at night in a bar, and a bunch of single guys are drowning their sorrows. One of them points to the jukebox, which is playing Sinatra's One For My Baby. 'I wonder who he listens to?' the man says."

There is really nothing I can add to that.  And some songs don't need to be talked about anyway, or interpreted, just listened to.

"So set 'em up Joe, I got a little story I think you should know / We're drinking my friend, to the end of a brief episode..."






Friday, April 1, 2016

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#187) "The Heart of the Matter" by Don Henley - A candidate for the "They Don't Write 'Em Like This Anymore" Hall of Fame (at least not with any hope of scoring a Top 40 hit), "The Heart of the Matter" might in some ways be considered the swan song to Henley's career (at least the commercially successful portion of it). But in my opinion, outside of perhaps "The Boys of Summer" (which it could be said is in a class by itself), it's also the most shining example of his contribution to pop music overall, a deserving paradigm for the whole Eagles/Don Henley/California rock vibe.

Inasmuch as any of us bother to cobble together music on playlists in hopes of creating the soundtrack of our lives, to whatever extent we assign certain songs a vaunted status and believe we very well could have written them ourselves, the message of this song is the universally held last word for all people everywhere. When the dust has settled from our trials and tribulations, our grand gestures and bitter disappointments, our hey days and hurt feelings, our back stabbing and stabs at glory, it is forgiveness - rather than love - that holds, and will hold, the universe together.

"I've been trying to get down to the heart of the matter / Because the flesh will get weak, and the ashes will scatter..."

#188) "Tush" by ZZ Top - On the other hand, there is a certain "last word" evident in this song too. In the end, each and every one of us is searching for, and/or craving, the profound emotional and psychological depths made accessible by physical contact with others, which, make no mistake, are present - the driving force - in even the seediest one night stand. In other words, every sexual encounter, even the dirty ones, and whether we realize it, is as much a matter of psychological gratification as it is physical.

In any case, I MUCH prefer this version of ZZ Top (from 1975) to the half-baked ZZ Top I grew up with in the early days of MTV. "Legs" (for instance) is for my money among the lamest rock songs (and dumbest videos) ever.

Whereas "Tush" still tears it up, all these years later. Not a lot of this on Top 40 radio anymore either, and that's too bad.

"I've been bad, I've been good / Dallas, Texas, Hollywood / I ain't asking for much..."

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Seriously, "Legs" might one day kick off the list of Top 100 songs I absolutely will NOT be taking with me on 1/48/50...;-)