Archives for March 2016

Certain Songs #492: George Harrison – “What is Life”

March 31, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: All Things Must Pass
Year: 1970

A childhood memory, probably from when I was 11 years old: it’s before dawn, and we are driving from Fresno up to a soccer tournament in the Bay Area. We’re somewhere deep in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, having just turned onto the 152, heading west towards the 5.

At that point, we were getting out of the range my beloved 1300 KYNO — because of course, I’d already commandeered the car radio — but just as the station is fading into a choppy signal, “What is Life” comes on as the first rays of the morning sun come in through the back window of our station wagon.

Certain Songs #491: Generation X – “Your Generation”

March 30, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Generation X
Year: 1977

Oi. There is so much to unpack here, so let’s start with the phenomenon of the punk rock name. Obviously, adopting an onstage psuedonym is as old as the performing arts themselves, but I would argue that it reached its popular music peak during punk rock: Johnny Rotten, Billy Zoom, Elvis Costello, Poly Styrene, the list goes on.

The weird thing, of course, is that stage names would seem to be antithetical to a music that prided itself on authenticity, but a well-chosen moniker instead actually contributed to the ethos surrounding an artist. And this is key: it also allowed them to reinvent themselves and fake it so real that they became beyond fake.

Certain Songs #490: Gary Louris – “Vagabonds”

March 28, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Vagabonds
Year: 2008

We will get to Gary Louris’s work with The Jayhawks — and my no-doubt controversial choice for their best album — in due time, but I have to confess that I love this title track from his solo debut probably as much as I love any song he’s ever written.

A big, slow, folk-rock anthem full of wailing harmonica, shimmering organ, plaintive pedal-steel and massive harmonies, “Vagabonds” fully reflects the sound and tradition of the Laurel Canyon recording studio where it was birthed.

Certain Songs #489: Garbage – “Stupid Girl”

March 27, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Garbage
Year: 1995

Man, did that first Garbage album age well. In the mid-90s, the idea of melding sampled beats, grunge guitar and impossibly cool basslines with an even impossibly cooler female lead singer felt like a whole new thing.

The fact that the mastermind was super-producer Butch Vig, who had helmed a couple of little records called Siamese Dream and Nevermind meant that the project was always going to be high-profile enough to fail miserably.
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Certain Songs #488: Gang of Four – “Damaged Goods”

March 25, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Entertainment!
Year: 1979

One of the most influential of all of the post-punk bands, Gang of Four were somehow album to weld funk music with punk rock in a way that felt both revolutionary and inevitable.

On their classic debut album, Entertainment!, song after song combined Andy Gill’s slashing guitars, Dave Allen’s lead bass, Hugo Burnham’s danceable beats, and Jon King’s rants against capitalism and love.

Certain Songs #487: Game Theory – “Throwing The Election”

March 24, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: 2 Steps From The Middle Ages
Year: 1988

Despite having seen Game Theory live a couple of times, as well as his later band, The Loud Family, my admiration and respect for the late Scott Miller’s considerable pop craft never quite tipped over into full-out love. This, despite the fact that his taste in music was pretty damn close to my taste in music.

Miller was bright, ambitious, and had a way with both words and melodies, so figure that this was my problem, and even re-listening after his untimely death has never quite solved it.

Certain Songs #486: Galaxie 500 – “Ceremony”

March 23, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Blue Thunder EP
Year: 1991

So, at the risk of being tossed out of the Middle-Aged Former Hipsters Club, I’m just going to admit straight up that I never really much liked Galaxie 500, which should surprise no one who hasn’t heard me say the exact same thing for the past 25 years.

This suspicion carried over toward Dean Wareham’s later band, Luna, right up until they released Penthouse and made me an instant fan, but it all stemmed from the near-universal (relative) hype that surrounded Galaxie 500’s second album, On Fire, which caused me to run out and buy it back in 1989.

Certain Songs #485: The Furies – “The Replacements Song”

March 19, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Fun Around The World
Year: 1987

While a project like this couldn’t really have been possible even a decade ago — part of what I think makes Certain Songs work is that I can embed a link to the actual song I’m writing about — the fact that I have listened to music in a multitude of formats over the past four decades has been a gating factor in which songs I write about.

Basically, not every song I would like to write about is available for me to listen to as I write about it. Or to share with you.

This seems especially true for 1980s indie vinyl: there are songs that I truly loved that just didn’t make the long, tumultuous journey from my turntable to the — SPOILER ALERT! Humblebrag coming! — 120,000 song, 700MB music library that I’ve got stored on multiple hard drives.

Certain Songs #484: Funkadelic – “Can You Get To That”

March 18, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Maggot Brain
Year: 1971

An improbable mix of gospel, soul and folk-rock, and featuring a vocal round-robin that both Sly Stone and Kanye West spent their entire careers trying to recreate in ways both natural and artificial, “Can You Get To That” is a departure from the normal Funkadelic sound that stands as one of the greatest songs of the 1970s.

I first heard it in the mid-1980s on a Funkadelic compilation called Best of The Early Years, Vol 1 that I snagged from the Music Library at Fresno State.

Certain Songs #483: Funkadelic – “Maggot Brain”

March 17, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Maggot Brain
Year: 1971

It starts with the sound of a broken speaker fuzzing out and a no doubt tripping George Clinton seriously “Mother Earth has become pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up,” and shortly after that, a slow guitar vamp in one speaker, like you’d hear at the beginning of a slow torch ballad.

Then Eddie Hazel gets to work in the other speaker.