Top Five Unfinished Top Fives (Music Edition)

Well, it's a new year, and time to clear a little junk out of my brain. Although considering the spectacular amount of junk that's in there, this will barely make a dent, but still.

At any given moment I've probably got a dozen or so potential Top Five lists floating around my cranium. Some are new (or newish) and need time to be fleshed out, some are essentially done except that I keep rearranging the order or swapping out also-rans, and some have been floating there, incomplete and likely never to be completed, for far too long, and I'm tired of thinking about them. Therefore, in order to get rid of a few of them, I present my

Top Five Unfinished Top Five Lists (Music Edition)

5) This one. Hah! I got all meta on your asses.

4) "Top Five Videos That Creep Me Right The Fuck Out." I'm trying to remember when this one started, and I feel like it must have been when I was writing that post about The Puddle Flick, but that was just a few months ago and I could swear this list has been around a lot longer than that. Anyway, in that post I talked about visiting my grandparents in the summer, which I, my sister, and our cousins did every year when we were kids. Nana and Pop-Pop had cable, which we did not have at home, and cable had that once-most-glorious of channels, MTV. (Insert head-shaking comment about how MTV actually used to play music videos.) Cousin B. and I, the music obsessives of the family, would set up camp in Pop-Pop's den and watch until we were bleary-eyed. In the wee hours of one particular morning, we saw for the first time Eurythmics' video for "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)", which now seems almost tame (almost--nothing that involves Annie Lennox can ever be truly tame), but at the time was easily the freakiest thing on MTV. We were so creeped out by it that we actually turned off the TV and went to bed, where I promptly had a nightmare involving a cow.

Thinking about creepy videos reminded me of Catherine Wheel's "Waydown", which I'd always thought was one of the few videos that attempted to be creepy and succeeded, and thus was the seed for this list planted. Unfortunately I couldn't really come up with anything else to add. I flirted with Dr. Dre and Snoop (Doggy) Dogg's "Deep Cover", because that was the first time I ever heard Snoop (it was his first appearance on record, actually) and his sing-song delivery--"Cuz it's one-eight-seven on the undercover cop"--did, in fact, creep me right the fuck out. But that was more the song than the video, so it didn't really fit.

3) I'm not even sure what the title for this one would be. Something to do with comeback songs or late-career hits that I liked, but there's too much dissimilarity in the items...like, it includes Duran Duran's "Ordinary World". Now, I fucking hated Duran Duran in the '80s. I hated all of those poncey British synth-pop bands, but DD was the worst because they were the biggest and therefore the hardest to avoid. So when they made a comeback in the '90s with "Ordinary World", I was rather surprised to find that I quite liked it.

On the other hand, I was a huge fan of R.E.M. at the beginning of their career, but later soured on them (and I can pinpoint the exact moment things went south: I was in a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that was full of frat boys from Columbia, and they kept playing "It's the End of the World As We Know It" on the jukebox and singing along at the top of their lungs--or attempting to sing along; it was more like, "Drunken mumble drunken mumble LEONARD BERNSTEIN!"--and I was like, wow, I kind of hate R.E.M now). I didn't pay much attention to their career after say, 1987, but in 2001 I heard their then-new single "Imitation of Life" on the radio, and found myself really moved by it for reasons I can't quite pin down. I still tear up when I hear it. It also has an excellent video.

Finally, the song that was the catalyst for this list came from the greatest vocal duo in rock music history. Known for their exquisite two-part harmonies, they had a long string of hits before enduring an acrimonious breakup. At this point, if you're thinking of Simon and Garfunkel, deduct 100 internet points, for I am speaking of Phil and Don, the Everly Brothers. My love of the Everlys was fostered by my parents--"All I Have to Do Is Dream" was their song when they started dating in high school, and they would often favor my sister and me with their rendition of that and other Everlys songs on long car trips. As I said, the Brothers had a string of hits in the late '50s and early '60s before fading away, but in the mid-'80s they attempted a comeback with a single penned by Paul McCartney. Now, I give McCartney a hard time at every opportunity, but only because he's a prodigiously gifted songwriter--as a melodist especially--who chooses to waste his talents on kitsch, schmaltz, smarm, and pastiche. (I think that was also the name of Lee Eastman's law firm.) Obviously though, he can write the fuck out of a pop song. His tune for the Everly Brothers, "On the Wings of a Nightingale", is a real thing of beauty, a two-and-a-half-minute pop miracle. And the video, featuring Phil and Don restoring a vintage car, is really sweet. (Note: the video I originally linked to has been removed. The sound quality on this one is not great, but it's all there is.)




2) "Top Five Well-Known Songs By Well-Known Bands Featuring Amazing Vocal Performances By Women Who Got Little If Any Credit And Whose Names You Probably Don't Know." Inspired by my irritation with someone who claimed that Dark Side of the Moon was his favorite album but did not know who sang on "The Great Gig in the Sky". I was forced to school him on how Clare Torry improvised her vocal during a single take. Also on the list: Ellen Foley on Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" (her vocal infamously lip-synched by Karla DeVito in the video) and Merry Clayton on the Stones' "Gimme Shelter". (Check out Merry's funked-up solo version of the song here.)

At number one was to be, at least initially, Darlene Love on the Crystals' "He's A Rebel". Now, I love the girl groups of the early '60s, and there were so many great vocalists. I love the impassioned soul shouting of Martha Reeves of Martha & the Vandellas. I love the eternally heartbroken wail of Mary Weiss of the (so awesome) Shangri-Las (there are few more nakedly emotional moments in rock than the beginning of "Leader of the Pack", when, after the hummed/spoken opening, Marge and Mary Ann Ganser ask, "By the way, where'd you meet him?" and Mary bursts in with the first sung line, "I met him at the candy store," making that simple declaration sound like the most profound words in the history of Western civilization. Chills, every time I hear it). And of course I love the throaty throb of Ronnie Spector, sounding like nothing so much as liquid sex poured into the shape of a seven-inch record on tunes like "Be My Baby", which I will forever insist is the greatest pop song ever recorded. But there's something about Darlene Love that makes her, for me, the cream of a very good crop. When I was younger I always used to fall asleep listening to the radio, and I remember once hearing "He's A Rebel" while I was in that twilight state between waking and sleeping, and thinking, "Holy fuck. Listen to her. Every syllable she sings sounds like her entire life depends on it."

So, "He's A Rebel" was going to be number one on this list, but then I thought maybe I'd swap it out for another song that featured Darlene, uncredited, on the lead vocal, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans' "Not Too Young To Get Married". The singing is just as great, but the song is even more intense--after a slow intro, it kicks right into high gear and doesn't let up until it's over, said intensity making it clear that "not too young to get married" was code for "not too young to do stuff that society deems only OK between married persons". But then I thought that neither that group nor that song were as well known as the Crystals and "He's A Rebel", so that didn't jibe with the theme of the list, and then I could never come up with a fifth entry that was satisfactory anyway, and so I'm giving up. But let's give "Not Too Young To Get Married" a spin anyway, because it fucking rocks.




1) "Top Five Videos". I know, sounds really simple, right? But that's kind of the problem. Trying to do a list as simple and straightforward as my all-time favorite music videos inevitably leads to overthinking and fatal vacillation. Do I include stuff that I love because it's hilarious (hello, "Sabotage") or just stuff that I love "seriously"? Do I include a simple performance video that for me is fraught with meaning and emotion, but for others is probably just a simple performance video?

Plus, I just read a piece--maybe on the A.V. Club?--about how the internet and sites like YouTube are allowing us to reconnect with our fuzzy memories in concrete ways, and how that can take the shine off of things we thought we loved, which, totally. I thought that Men At Work's "Overkill" was one of my faves, due mainly to its evocative entre chien et loup atmosphere, but that was when I hadn't seen it for years. It's still pretty good, but it doesn't seem as magic as it once did.

I'll tell you what, though, I knew for sure what number one would be. Let's have a look, shall we?



Just an amazing synthesis of sound and image, right there. The song is a masterpiece to begin with, the apotheosis of Mazzy Star's somnambulistic take on psychedelic folk and blues, and like much of their music it evokes (for me, at least) a soft kind of heat, and dust filtering through slanted sunlight, and the torpor of late afternoon. The flitting, bleached-out desert images of the video complement it perfectly. Those images, so evocative of the great West and all that it symbolizes in the collective American unconscious, combine with the iconic motifs of train, car, and rolling pavement to resonate through the decades and recall everything from campfire songs and hobo tales to The Grapes of Wrath and Thelma and Louise. Plus, Hope Sandoval looks really hot in that black tank top.

I also love the moody shots of the band playing, all indigo blue and dark shadows, and that one shot of the guitarist sitting and playing on the roof of the car while the train rolls past in the distance is killer. But the shot that stops my breath every time, and that I have to imagine was achieved through pure serendipity, is the two crows sitting on the telephone wire under the moon (at about two minutes and 15 seconds into the video). Something about that image stirs my soul in a way I can't put into words, and don't really want to.