SONGS
1. "Peaches," Presidents of the United States of America: Perhaps my dumbest song-of-the-year ever. There's fake country-blues at the beginning, sublime power-pop at the end, and a part in the middle that I eventually learned to like almost as much as the other two. A thousand times better than the bad Stranglers song of the same name. Greg Brady once said that summer meant three things: peaches, girls, and there was something else I can't remember.
2. "Let's Get Down," Tony! Toni! Toné!: My biggest surprise of the year. I liked "Feels Good" from a few years ago, and after that there were a couple of blah hits that made me think I'd never take much notice of Tony Toni Toné again. The last thing I would have expected from such a group is a serene, almost cerebral (this is also my trance record of the year) getting-drunk song. It's about drinking in a way that I can understand, how I used to drink: close your eyes, everything's wonderful, look at those people over there, a disembodied hello, let it all wash over you. I'd contrast this with Leaving Las Vegas, which to me was overwrought nonsense I did not understand. I think there's a sample at the beginning from "Do You Wanna Get Funky," my trance record two years ago.
3. "Jack-Ass," Beck: I found it quite jarring to go back and listen to Them's original after hearing "Jack-Ass." I've had the Them compilation on Parrot with Lester Bangs's notes for years, and I doubt if I've played it twice through--it was definitely news to me that that's who I was hearing. "I Can Only Give You Everything" is the one song from that album I sometimes tape for people, so I did recognize the sample on "Devil's Haircut" right away. The executors of long-gone record companies must give bulk discounts on sample rights--I haven't heard Odelay, but Tom Jones must be on there somewhere.
4. "Walking Contradiction," Green Day: "My wallet's fat and so is my head"--you know, I think I used to work for that guy. I changed jobs, he was still there.
5. "Woo-Hah!!! Got You All in Check," Busta Rhymes
6. "Tres Deliquentes," Delinquent Habits: This is the fifth time I've liked this song: first it was called "Jump Around," then it went under names like "Insane in the Brain," "Phonkie Melodia," and "Saturday Nite Fever." Whoever wrote it is a modern-day Richard Berry.
7. "Pretty Noose," Soundgarden: The most bracing heavy metal I've heard since at least "Sweet Child o' Mine" (with which it shares a piercing bit of echo off the top, "alright-alright-alright-alright" taking the place of "cry-iii-iii-iii") and, for all I know, all the way back to "Black Dog" or "Whole Lotta Love." The sound of it hits me as a dozen different contradictory things at once: dense, clean, chaotic, beautiful, concise, brutal, just one big wash of drone and clang and swirl. Most of all, it has what "Sick as a Dog" and Husker Du's best songs had, the thing that Metallica's kind of heavy metal never has, and what I didn't think "Black Hole Sun" had, either--some chime to it, some Byrds. I play it in the car all the time, and it effects me the same way that this kind of music, at its best, has effected me ever since I was a teenager: I look out the window at everything that's going on--a man walking his dog, someone buying a paper, kids hanging around a store--and it all looks absurd and slightly surreal. The song becomes soundtrack music, slowing the world down and turning everything on its head.
8. "How Bizarre," OMC: Radio On has a contributor from New Zealand, Andrew Palmer, who sent in a review of this a couple of months before it started getting play here. Thanks to Andrew's review, I was laughing at OMC before I'd ever heard them: "For a couple of months everyone was saying 'How bizarre' at the slightest prompting. Someone would drop a pen on the floor and you'd say 'How bizarre.' They'd bend over to pick it up and you'd say 'How bizarre.'"
9. "Lady," D'Angelo
10. "Up to No Good," Porn Kings: This isn't really one of my 10 favourite songs of the year, I'm just trying to pretend I'm right up to date and livin' phat on the flippety-floppety. Otherwise I'd end up picking somebody dull and obvious like the Butthole Surfers or Keith Sweat or the Counting Crows. I've got enough of those people already. All year I'm on an Anita Bryant-like crusade with Chuck Eddy, harassing him about fibs and exaggerations; when I want to cheat on my own list, I cheat. I've heard "Up to No Good" twice--it had munchkin vocals and sounded vaguely criminal. On Electric Circus the one time, there was a close-up of a guy who'd apparently memorized all the words, but I'm sure it was an optical illusion.
VIDEOS
1. "Buona Sera," Louis Prima, in Big Night: Outside of "That Old Black Magic" and some childhood memories of The Jungle Book, I don't know Louis Prima at all. He was one of the heroes of Big Night, the one who wasn't there; best of all was the guy who stood in for him, lip-synching "Buona Sera" as he led everyone around the room in a primitive Macarena. Hey, Buona Sera.
2. "Homerpalooza" Simpsons episode: "Who's playing with the London Symphony Orchestra? C'mon people, somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra...possibly while high...Cypress Hill, I'm looking in your direction."
3. Scorpio Rising: I saw this for the first time last winter. It's an extreme example of how I think pop music should be used in movies--when a song is on, let it play and shape the film to the music. According to a biography of Kenneth Anger I read a few months later, the guy who played Scorpio never recovered from his phantom brush with fame. He spent the rest of his life trying to convince everyone he came into contact with that they should care that he'd been in this film.
4. "Do You Believe in Magic," Lovin' Spoonful, in I Shot Andy Warhol
Perfect counterpoint, but just as obviously the way it really was.
5. Godfather sightings: I'm almost positive that Corrado Gaipa (Don Tommasino in Part 1, Michael's wheelchair-bound mentor back in Italy) plays the old uncle in Big Night; there's no mistaking Alex Rocco in That Thing You Do!, especially since he's still doing Moe Greene 25 years later. I thought for sure Rocco was going to accuse one of the Wonders of banging secretaries two at a time.
6. Dian Fossey commercial for HBO: Speaking of which, this collection of gorillas lip-synching famous movie lines finishes dramatically: "I didn't know until this day that it was Barzini all along."
7. "Devil's Haircut," Beck: Two years ago, I mentioned that I thought "Pay No Mind" borrowed from Midnight Cowboy's theme music. Here's some more of the same: guy in a cowboy hat walking centre-frame through crowded city streets, boombox in hand (Jon Voight had to make do with a radio), lots of electronic advertising boards, right down to Beck almost getting hit by a car--"Beck's walkin' here, Beck's walkin' here!" The rest, all the surveillance stuff, comes from the "Sabotage" video, as does...
8. "Walking Contradiction," Green Day
9. "1979," Smashing Pumpkins
10. SCTV parody of Crash: Doesn't exist, of course, except in my mind (and probably won't make any sense to New Zealanders)--it's the one thing that could have redeemed such a solemnly preposterous film. Johnny LaRue heads the roving band of crash fetishists, with the badly mangled Woody Tobias Jr. its readymade love object (Tobias, Koteas, they even sound alike). There's a wild sex scene between Edith Prickley and Ed Grimley in the back of an overturned shuttle bus. Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok stand by the side of the road and cheer on every bit of mayhem and carnage. The film's in 3-D, but Count Floyd seems baffled as to what's so scary about it. Fifteen years later, Bobby Bittman releases ill-advised Crash Again remake.
(Originally published in Real Groove)
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