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

#140) "Ms. Jackson" by OutKast - Ms. Jackson has the notable distinction of being on a short list of rap songs I can relate to on a personal level. It smartly forsakes the usual cavalcade of bitches, booties and brainless swagger that distinguishes (too) much of the genre, and actually says something, painting a legitimately moving, even haunting at times, picture of a set of circumstances I once knew well.

Yes yes, I know exactly what this song's talking about. I was young once, and entirely in over my head. I remember as though it happened yesterday what it's like to be saddled with a link to someone I can no longer relate to (or in moments stand), the exhausting dance between bitter conflict and (at best) cold civility consuming our days, those days strung together only by responsibility to a little one who is at once our biggest joy and biggest source of conflict.  I remember keenly that responsibility predating my maturity and means, doing my best to adjust for that, her doing her best to adjust, but never quite meeting in the middle, and the situation routinely frayed around the edges by the girl's mother, 'grandmother' waging war on numerous fronts. And all of this at a very young age, when the world in general seems much more daunting than it really is.

These days I'm gleefully free of such responsibilities, and I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. Whenever I spot a young couple drifting through the aisles at the grocery store with their only slightly less young ones in tow and the tension of their tumultuous day-to-day trials as plain as day on their faces, I feel a strange impulse to tell them it gets better, it balances out. Kids grow up, become adults themselves, with any luck take their place in that important roll call of 'friends and family', and all the petty stuff that matters so much now won't in ten years.

Together or apart, life will, in all likelihood, get sorted out and patched up, with mother and grandmother alike. ;-)

"And yes I will be present on the first day of school, and graduation..."

#141) "Christmas at Ground Zero" by Weird Al Yankovic - As a child of the 80s, I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, and while 'pinko' hysteria was not quite what it had been in the 50s, the Soviets were still considered a larger-than-life threat. It was still very much us against them, two superpowers locked in a life-and-death staring match, the implications and ramifications of which far transcended winning or losing the Olympics. If one of us pressed 'the button', the other would respond in kind, and humanity would be wiped out in a single stroke by the H-bomb (as opposed to the mere A-bomb...)

I grew up aware of this threat, and fearful of it. At my elementary school, in the late 70s, they were still conducting nuclear raid drills for God's sake, still instructing children on duck and cover procedure. I was made uneasy by the sound of a civil air defense siren, the sight of the hammer and sickle. I remember our 2nd grade teacher giving the wrong frigging answer to the question (posed by another kid during a post-duck and cover classroom discussion...seriously), 'What would happen [if the bomb were dropped]...?'

She replied, "There probably wouldn't be much left of anything or anyone."

These days, air raid sirens herald only the approach of a severe thunderstorm, and in some small towns, fire off when it's time for lunch, and though I don't fear intangibles the way I did when I was eight, the sound still causes the hairs on the back of my neck to trill.

Christmas at Ground Zero is typically funny, exactly what you'd expect from Weird Al Yankovic. But when I was just a little bit older, eleven/twelve/thirteen, and started to really understand the implications of nuclear holocaust more than I had in 2nd grade, it came to mean much more to me. Probably more than Yankovic could ever have imagined. It actually helped me cope with the anxiety I felt, taught me that it was possible to laugh about serious things....even deathly serious things. It lent me a kind of gallows humor I still employ today.

And will bring along with me on 1/48/50.

"You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop, or Jack Frost on your window sill / But if someone's climbing down your chimney, you better load your gun and shoot to kill..."

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

#127) "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again" by Barry Manilow - Yeah, I know what you might be thinking. There's no more memorable ambassador from the land of flaccid love songs than Barry Manilow - standing in his polyester jump suit on a darkened stage circa March 1975, microphone clutched in his hands, golden locks clutching his head like an ill-fitting helmet, staring wide-eyed - and a little pie-eyed - out at the exit signs, his thin warble leaving frumpy post-hippie era girls in brightly patched bell bottom jeans inexplicably mesmerized.

Agreed.  But a couple of things:

1) There's no way around Barry Manilow for me. For better or worse, this kind of music punctuated my early childhood, and I intend to supply myself with at least a little bit of it on 1/48/50. My parents were simply not rock and rollers. AM Gold, and classical, maybe the Beatles once in a while, was what they listened to, and thus exposed my brother and me to early on. There are still 8-track cassettes of Manilow, The Carpenters, and The Captain and Tennille stacked up somewhere in their house to this day, and whenever I sit and try to reconstruct the very first days I can remember with any clarity, it's Mandy, or Weekend in New England, or the like, playing on a little transistor radio on the sun drenched window sill of my parents' book store.

2) It's really hard to hate on Barry. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, by all accounts gracious and down-to-earth with his fans.  He's still performing to this day, and doing so with a refreshing sense of humor about everything, including himself. There's something to be admired in that. Long may he roam.

While I admit there isn't a lot to grab onto in most of Barry's music (unless you're a frumpy post-hippie era girl-turned-Long Island grandmother), I'm always stirred listening to Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again. It starts out soft as a feather, but after the second verse, the accompaniment starts to rise in intensity (achieving a fevered pitch by the end), and Barry matches his method of attack, sings with a passion you would never expect...a ferocity, even, for one explosive moment, that just might give that Long Island grandma a heart attack.

In other words, he forgets the exit signs completely, takes a step toward the edge of the stage, lowers his head and looks the audience right in the eye.

"Doctor my woman is coming back home late today / could you maybe give me something...?"

#128) "White and Nerdy" by 'Weird' Al Yankovic - Sure, there's Sinatra and McCartney, maybe Elvis, or Madonna, or Streisand, or Aretha, to fill out the list of greatest/most influential performers of the 20th Century, and I would never presume to try including Weird Al - of all people - on such an august enumeration. And yet...

When you consider all the evidence, he does emerge among the most prominent and certainly long-lasting performers we've known in our time.

Think about it: he's been going strong for more than three decades, and has managed to keep himself fresh and relevant by adapting his song parodies to changing styles and emerging genres. Over time he's parodied, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Coolio and R. Kelly, and ironically enough, his career has outlasted them all. His most recent offering, Word Crimes, a spoof of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, is proof positive that well into his fifties, he still has a finger on the pulse of something....maybe of everything.

Part of his lasting success is due to the fact that he's gotten undeniably sharper and smarter in his satire over the years. It was one thing to spoof Michael Jackson's Beat It in '83, enough to be, in those early days, merely 'weird', or silly, and Eat It was clever and cute enough, and different enough, to launch his career.

It's quite another to go after something like Chamillionaire's tightly woven Ridin', and make it work - that is, not only make it legitimately funny, but in a strange way do the original justice, while overcoming the inevitable cultural and racial divide that would seem to put any rap music as inaccessible to 'Weird Al' Yankovic as could be imagined. (On that score, Yankovic had already ran into trouble with Amish Paradise, his parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.)

A unique challenge, for sure, but Yankovic does it seamlessly. I don't think it's overstating that parody gold was spun here. White and Nerdy holds true blue to the style, sound and most impressively the complexity of Ridin', matching the original almost word for word, syllable for syllable, beat for beat, and yet remaining laugh-out-loud funny, building a fricking hilarious tension by rattling off a brilliantly-conceived list of top shelf 'white and nerdy' stereotypes, from Star Trek to Star Wars to X-Men to Monty Python...AV club and glee club and even the chess team. And then to perform it as well as he does, prompting Chamillionaire to give him props for his rap skills...

Good parody is really not an easy thing to do. Yankovic just makes it look easy, as he did with Trapped in the Drive-Thru (parody of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet) and Tacky (parody of Pharell's Happy).

The video, too, with cameos by Key and Peele (nervously locking their door and peeling away as the whitest man on earth approaches their car...lol), Seth Greene, and Donny Osmond, is uproariously funny.



"The only question I ever thought was hard, was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard...?"

#129) "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra - What can I say? The best era of Frankie, in my humble opinion, is the late 60s and early 70s, his melancholy, September of My Years phase. It Was a Very Good Year is from that album, as a matter of fact, and it's pretty much the life every man would like to be able to look back on, almost to the point of being a caricature.

Even if it hasn't played out quite as grand and manly as this (think the Dos Equis beer guy...;-), I have to say (and have many times, because I can be annoying...) I can't really complain about my own life. I look back fondly on just about all of it, good and bad, and that, more than what's in the details, is what this song is saying.  Grow old graciously, look back with dignity.

"And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs / from the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear / It was a very good year..."