Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#260) Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day - One of Green Day's best was written for front man Billy Joe Armstrong's father, who passed away when he was ten, but the song is so good at collecting emotional fragments and assembling a larger sense of loss, it oddly makes the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. If that's not an apt description of art, I don't know what is. The poetic lyrics do a nice job of intriguing rather than explaining, almost as if they're holding something back, not revealing everything they know. At least not right away.

The video, which draws heavily from the anxious, war-torn 2000s, is a bit over-wrought at moments, but there lies a dreaminess within it that lends itself to the "art", doing the music and lyrics justice. It's in the way it's shot, and the way it's acted.

To that end, I love the look of the kids in the video; I always have. Actors Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood were excellent choices to represent average kids, looking and acting (and speaking) exactly as average kids would if they found themselves torn apart by the sense of duty and equally potent sense of futility that war evokes.

No doubt plenty of "average kids" actually did find themselves torn apart back in 2005, just as they did in 1968.

And 1952. And 1943. And 1917....




"Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last / Wake me up when September ends..."

#261)"Uneasy Rider" by The Charlie Daniels Band - Charlie Daniels is one of the greatest country musicians - greatest musicians of any genre - of all time. "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", his most famous song, with its tight (as in circulation restricting) sound was innovative (as in Earth shattering) for the time, and it's actually only the beginning. Some of the greatest country songs of all time are CDB deep tracks.

That being said, Charlie Daniels is not the same person he was when he started out. Over his long, illustrious career he has undergone a dramatic sea change, the once "long haired country boy" becoming (like a lot of "elder statesman" country singers) a staunchly right-wing conservative, driven by his faith and a balls-to-the-wall (and for this, unavoidably self-righteous) brand of patriotism. He's entitled to his opinions of course, and he's certainly never failed to use his music to express them (in other words, it shouldn't be all that surprising), and mind you, I do not have a problem with patriotism or ALL right-wing thinking.

But I don't know, man...I've been going through a kind of divorce from country music the last few years, as it's become more aligned with the far right in this country. Not the right, not normal conservative/Republican, but the ideology that gave us President Trump. I just can't get there the same way anymore.

Perhaps that's because I too have gone through a sea change over time. As I've aged, I've gotten less conservative. Not MORE liberal, exactly, just less conservative. I support the military (certainly the vets), I support cops, I'm for law and order, and ultimately I just want it to be fucking quiet in my neighborhood and my midst at any given hour of the day. I support gun ownership, but do I think those rights should be left unrestricted? No. I'm a mid-western, middle-aged heterosexual male, but do I care if gays get married? Nope. Do I think pot should be legal? Yup. Do I think we should gut out every last bit of green space to, as Joni Mitchell sang, "put up a parking lot"?  Nope. We have enough parking lots. Enough opportunities to consume.

I'm a middle-of-the-roader on just about everything. I refuse to take a cartoonish stance on one side or another of the brewing culture war in this country.

At the end of the day, it should only ever be about the music, and to that end, everyone should be able to groove to whatever they want - together, ideally. Music really should be, to quote Longfellow, the "universal language of mankind".

It's just that Charlie makes it about much more than the music. A song like "Uneasy Rider", which in 1973 satirized (if not mocked) the south, southern culture, and the very type of "redneck" people that he now identifies so staunchly with, would never, ever be recorded by 2017's CDB.  And that's too bad.

Charlie must have realized his sea change early on, because there is a 1988 "update" to "Uneasy Rider" (on the album Hometown Heroes) in which Charlie and a buddy find their way into a gay bar...in this incarnation, he's the redneck, laughing with a predictable roll of his eyes at all the funny queens and the "orange haired feller" on the stage "singing about suicide". It's meant to be funny...but it isn't. It tries way too hard, its premise makes HIM the one with the issues, and in the current agitated political climate, it's even less funny than it was 30 years ago.

I still enjoy the original "Uneasy Rider" though. Not because it's "liberal" or "Democrat", because honestly it wasn't actually those things in 1973 either (Charlie Daniels was never those things entirely...he was always a maverick, hard to figure out...good for him), but because it is funny...it's clever. It tells the story of a situation you'd never want to find yourself in, but also depicts the exact way you fantasize that you would handle it.

"I couldn't resist the fun of chasing them just once around the parking lot..."

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

#101) "Time For Me To Fly" by REO Speedwagon - There's something about Kevin Cronin's voice when he's not warbling a diabetic love song that appeals to me. 1978's Time For Me To Fly has a distant, restless sound that suits not just the subject matter, but his thin vocal quality and featureless Midwestern drawl, and the middle 8 guitar section sounds a lot like a long, helpless sigh.

If you really think about it, there aren't a lot of songs like this on the radio anymore. When was the last time you heard a heavily barbed break-up song in the Top 40? Plenty of songs about self esteem, about eternal love, about sex ratcheting the frequency of body and soul up into the stratosphere, lots of songs about friendship and drinking and clubbing, some cheating songs, and in country music the usual complement of redneck puns...

No songs about two people at an impasse, and the long helpless - and a little sarcastic - sigh it engenders. 

"I make you laugh and you make me cry..."

#102) "Little Jeannie" by Elton John - This is one of Sir Elton's under-appreciated songs. Released in May 1980, to me it would seem to serve as a bridge between his wacky sunglasses/Donald Duck costume days and the more staid and matured performer he became in the 1980s. Staid, I guess, until he put on the powdered wig for his Australia concert in '86. By then it clearly was not as shocking (or interesting) a thing to do as it once was, more a caricature.  He was looking a lot like a middle aged man dressed like George Washington, even if the songs he was singing were already well on their way to becoming 'classics'.

Little Jeannie is one of them. Nothing flashy, nothing dramatic, it falls like gentle rain through the time and space of a time and place in history.

"And I want you to be my acrobat / I want you to be my lover..."

#103) "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day - What haunts me about this song isn't the lyrics or Billie Joe's boyish vocals delivering them, it's the string section, notably the viola, the way it seems to seep up from the ground, how it drives the sentiment home with a bittersweet sandpaper edge that rubs against the grain and always draws a shiver up my spine. Reportedly never intended to become, as it has, the official anthem to every single momentous occasion in our lives - from weddings to proms to graduations to bar mitzvahs to potty training - Good Riddance is emotionally complex. It is the conjoined sorrow and relief over the passages that punctuate our lives.

'Good riddance' indeed, but I won't forget.

How could I forget...?

Still, good riddance...

"It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right..."

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

#10) 'Middle of the Road' by The Pretenders - All things musical considered, Middle of the Road might just be an incarnation of the perfect 'rock and roll' song. It's tight and energetic without becoming hysterical, angry without resorting to savagery, emotional, but never at the expense of a base logic. Lyrically it is a unique assessment of facing middle age and the attendant concessions, which for better or worse, resonates with me in a way I never imagined it would. And Chrissie Hynde is - and always will be - pretty damn hot.

'The middle of the road is trying to find me/I'm standing in the middle of life with my plans behind me..."

#11) 'Luka' by Suzanne Vega - I figure this one might raise some eyebrows. There's nothing about this song that speaks of - or to - anything even remotely associated with freedom or the open road; no sir, not much here to lift your spirits. But those elements are just part of the equation, in my eyes, to a good road song. Luka has a way of getting my mind wandering to places. It reminds me of high school, of my first love (playing on the radio, and on MTV, at the time), and like any good folk (ish) song, is designed to get the listener thinking. And what does an elongated road trip offer more than lots and lots of time to think?

Not to mention, the guitar work in this song is gorgeous, and does, in fact, always lift my spirits, in spite of the bleak subject matter. I suspect this too might be by design.

'You just don't argue anymore...'

#12) 'American Idiot' by Green Day - As For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield is inextricably linked to the 60s, to love-ins and hippies and civil unrest and Vietnam, American Idiot will forever be associated with the 2000s - the Bush White House, the rise of uber-patriotism in the wake of 9/11, the Iraq War, political polarization in a media-soaked society.  With an appropriate lack of subtly and providing more energy than four cans of Monster, this is Generation Y's foremost protest song. And no thinking person should ever dismiss any protest song outright.

Another good song with which to punish your steering wheel.

'Welcome to a new kind of tension/all across the alien nation...'

#13) 'Wanderlust' by Paul McCartney - Placing Paul McCartney on any list is never going to be a simple matter. For my money, McCartney is the greatest rock/pop performer ever...period...for his ability to shriek out (convincingly) songs like Helter Skelter, Oh Darling, Why Don't We Do it in the Road or Maybe I'm Amazed, while at the same time giving us Yesterday, Let It Be, Penny Lane, or something so oddly compelling as Let 'Em In, and doing it all fairly consistently for 50 years now. There's never appeared to be any limit to this man's ability and range in the musical realm.

'Sir Paul' indeed....

And for a man who claims he's okay with silly love longs, when he does get personal, it's a surprisingly intense affair. Much evidence of this can be found on his 1982 album Tug of War, perhaps his best post-Beatles work. It's an anguished collection of music evincing in no uncertain terms his fragile state of mind in the aftermath of the death of John Lennon and his turning 40 in a world far more uncertain than his generation once hoped.

Amidst this string of pearls, Wanderlust emerges. Dignified in its sadness, the opening piano riff is - quite literally, I think - what a goodbye sounds like in our minds as it's happening.

Or should.

'Oh where did I go wrong my love/what petty crime was I found guilty of/what better time to find a brand new day...''