Leading Off (2009)

One day, I'll sit down and watch Ken Burns' Baseball from beginning to end for the first time since it originally aired in 1994. It was a big event for me at the time: I didn't miss a minute, VCR at the ready the whole way. I've made great use of those tapes in class over the years, annually playing segments of varying lengths on Ruth's birthday, DiMaggio's, Williams', Robinson's, Mays', and Mantle's, plus a few other clips as the occasion warrants. Triggered by yesterday's HOF inductions, I was thinking about a long ten-minute section on Robinson's rookie year that I always play, included in which is the following recollection from Sports Illustrated's Robert Creamer, author of Ruth: The Legend Comes to Life and Stengel: His Life and Times, my two favorite baseball biographies. (I went onto YouTube assuming I'd be able to find and embed the actual clip, but, undoubtedly at Burns' request, I couldn't find anything at all from Baseball. So here's a laborious transcription.)

I saw him once, he walked--base on balls, got to first base, and he walked down to first base, didn't trot. Got to first base, just turned around with his foot on the base, didn't move--the pitcher looked over at him, looked over at him, Robinson didn't even move off the base. Pitcher started to throw, Robinson stole second. Got into second base, now the pitcher's looking back like this, looking back, looking back. Robinson was taking a lead now, the pitcher kept looking back. He walked the batter. Men on first and second, Robinson still moving back and forth, back and forth. He walked the next batter. Now Robinson's at third base, bases loaded, and he took this tremendous lead--he just walked off the base, 10, 15, 20 feet, and the pitcher was almost panicky. The third baseman came in, he threw over, Robinson got back. Robinson did the same thing, the pitcher looked over. Finally the manager came out, and he motioned to the third baseman: stand on the bag, hold Robinson on the base. I never saw that before, haven't seen it since, where the third baseman held the runner on the base. And the pitcher kept looking over, threw to the next batter, walked him, walked in the run. And Robinson walked home, and he touched the plate, and walked back. He created that run all by himself.

If you've seen the film, you'll know how much Creamer's words lose on the page; he's clearly awestruck by the time he finishes. Robinson retired after the '56 season, a few years before I was born and almost 15 years before I watched my first game. But every year when I watch Creamer tell his story, the same thought crosses my mind: I actually did get to see Jackie Robinson play, except his name was Rickey Henderson.

Inneresting (2009)

(Hell freezes over, dog bites man, etc.--I have a review of Neil Young's new box set in this week's Eye. I only had 600 words to work with, so I submitted three versions--short, medium, long--in the hopes that they'd go with the long version. No luck, but the full version is below.)

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If you’re about to shell out for Neil Young’s it’s-actually-here-for-real Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972--and forget slapdash affairs like Apocalypse Now (five years’ wait) or Chinese Democracy (15 years); the completion of Neil’s box falls somewhere between Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers (21 years) and Brian Wilson’s Smile (38 years)--here are a few numbers that may give you pause. Based on the nine discs common to all three formats (the DVD/Blu-Ray versions take their first two discs to cover what the CD version covers in one), 89 of 116 songs (more or less--I counted fast) appear on either regular-issue Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, or Neil albums, or on readily available compilations like Decade or the Springfield box set. Many are technically new, it’s true--alternate takes, unreleased mixes, live versions, etc.--so this may be even more troubling: by my count, 33 of 116 appear exactly as they did on the original studio albums. Indeed, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush are disseminated virtually intact across the middle discs (“The Losing End” from Nowhere is all that’s missing), while about half of Harvest is here in its original form. A number of songs appear three times: not just masterpieces like “Sugar Mountain,” “Tell Me Why,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” but even the pleasantly minor “Dance Dance Dance.” And, of course, two of Archive’s three live discs (Live at the Fillmore East and Live at Massey Hall) have already been released commercially. To be fair, ample warning was given at the time that they would eventually be part of the upcoming box set--here’s hoping that most Neil fans had the patience to hold off.

So superfluity is one problem; for anyone considering the DVD package, there’s also the small matter of the visuals. Remember the old Replacements video for “Bastards of Young,” the one where the guy plunked himself in front of a TV for a single static shot that lasted the duration of the song? An inspired statement in 1985, one that was also very short and very free. Neil has taken the same idea and run with it for seven of Archive’s 10 discs (you get a photo collage of live stills on the Fillmore East disc): record players spinning around, reel-to-reel machines, even an 8-track player. Sometimes there’ll be a photo of Neil propped against the hardware. As with the Replacements, there’s a kind of perverse nobility on display, and, speaking purely as a grade 6 teacher, not feeling compelled to watch allowed me to listen from a different room and keep up with all my marking. If I had just handed over $250 for the experience, though, I suspect the unexpected convenience wouldn’t have seemed so swell. I really thought there’d be more in the way of archival footage.

With so much anticipation, and such a prohibitive price tag attached, it’s important to state caveats up front. No surprise, though, that there’s enough here to justify making the plunge anyway. First of all, almost half of Archives is drawn from the years 1969 and 1970; for me, Neil’s output during those 24 months (Everybody Knows, Gold Rush, “Helpless,” “Country Girl,” and “Ohio”) is matched only by what the Beatles and Dylan put out in ‘65/66. So a lot of what’s here is sacred text, and the Massey Hall and Fillmore discs take you to the very epicenter of that singular moment of genius and mystery and vision. (Massey Hall also consists of actual concert footage, although everything’s so spectral and murky, I’m not yet convinced it all wasn’t concocted in the lab.) The first two “Early Years” discs contain important work that has either only circulated on bootleg or has never appeared anywhere: Link Wray-ish instrumentals from ’63 with the Squires, a couple of great pre-Springfield folk duets with Connie Smith (“There Goes My Babe” and “Runaround Babe”), and a beautiful Springfield instrumental called “Slowly Burning.” An impressive booklet is included, last year’s Canterbury House CD/DVD is thrown in, there’s a download card that will access mp3s of the entire box, and hidden tracks abound throughout. Some are so well hidden I haven’t yet found them, but to make up for it, I’m stumbling over hidden hidden tracks that aren’t even listed: clips of CSNY doing “Down by the River” on a Shindig!-type show in 1969 (hosted by David Steinberg!), Neil running through a “Loner”/“Cinnamon Girl” medley inside a small club in 1970 (segueing to a Madison Square Garden clip, segueing to Neil in Washington Square teaching some guy how to play “Cinnamon Girl”--“just stay modal...”), Neil and Ben Keith in 1972 goofing through “Gator Stomp.” There are two versions of “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” a Harvest-era classic, and some amazing bridges across time are revealed: 1964’s “I Wonder” is clearly the blueprint for Zuma’s “Don’t Cry No Tears,” and I was surprised how much I liked 1971’s “War Song,” a collaboration with Graham Nash, until I realized it was basically “Ocean Girl” (my favourite unknown Neil song) with different words.

Best of all, you get the first DVD appearance of Neil’s directorial debut, Journey Through the Past, an infamous 1974 vanity project that preceded Dylan’s Renaldo & Clara by four years. I loved it. It’s a mix of awesome live footage (“Rock and Roll Woman” from the Springfield--wow); Carrie Snodgrass looking on lovingly while Neil rolls a joint the size of Manitoba (actually, coming so close on the heels of Snodgrass’s affecting performance in Diary of a Mad Housewife, I found that clip kind of sad); an absolutely impenetrable Last Movie/El Topo storyline in which a bearded guy...well...he walks around a lot, until some hooded horsemen and a matronly old lady arrive at the end; and, at last, the answer to why C, S & Y needed the chirpy Englishman around--absent him, the other three’s heads would have exploded from having no one to listen to except each other.

I wish I had room enough* to convey how meaningful Neil Young has been to my own life, an attachment that goes back to high school in the mid ’70s. Part of it, I think, is a shared obsession with the past: starting as early as “On the Way Home” and “Sugar Mountain,” Neil has been looking over his shoulder since almost day one. Much as Decade was 30 years ago, Archives is the culmination of that side of him (the latest installment, anyway; more boxes are scheduled), and, faults and all, it chronicles an obsession well worth excavating.

*Obviously I have all the room in the world in this setting, but I've written a lot about Neil's importance to me elsewhere--in the record inventory and the piece on cover versions, especially--so I won't repeat all of that here.

(Originally published in Eye Weekly)

Three Willies (2009)

I haven't written about baseball on this site for ages. I don't have the energy at the moment to sort through my evolving feelings about the game over the past few years, but I'm less of a fan right now than at any time since starting university 30 years ago, when I (rather pretentiously) ignored everything from the We-Are- Family Pirates of '79 through to my discovery of Bill James and the concurrent ascension of the Jays in '83.

I sat down yesterday, though, and watched the original NBC broadcast of the '71 All-Star Game, given to me by a friend who's been transferring his VHS library onto DVD; he obtained it from a TSN rebroadcast dating back to '94, when they were running famous old games during the strike. The '71 All-Star Game was only the second one I would have watched as a kid, on the heels of the '70 game in which Pete Rose more or less shortened Ray Fosse's career by a decade. The game is still remembered for Reggie Jackson's monstrous home run off a light tower in Tiger Stadium's right-field corner; it was also the sole American League victory during a 19-1 N.L. run spanning three decades.

Before the broadcast got underway, TSN's Paul Romanuk mentioned that the game would feature 18 future Hall of Famers. I stopped the tape, grabbed a pen, and, almost without pause, jotted down 18 names: Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Kaline, Billy Williams, Yaz, Lou Brock, Reggie, Frank Robinson, Bench, McCovey, Killebrew, Stargell, Brooks Robinson, Seaver, Palmer, Hunter, and Gibson. I started in the outfield and worked my way in, doubling back once because I missed Frank Robinson, a telling indicator of how much he played in the shadow of Mays and Aaron.

By my count, Romanuk ended up being off by one--15 of my guys were there, three weren't, and I missed four, bringing the total to 19. Billy Williams, Catfish, and Gibson were absent, while Aparicio, Carew, Marichal, and Jenkins all got into the game. I shouldn't have missed Carew or Jenkins; I mistakenly thought Marichal had pretty much had it by '70 (he went on to finish 18-11 in '71, with the Giants taking the N.L. West), and Aparacio never even crossed my mind (he in fact had no real business being there, based on his in-season performance; he went into the game hitting .206, and finished the year with an offensive line that was dismal across the board). Seeing as Seaver warmed up but didn't get into the game, I assume Romanuk's number was lifted from the actual boxscore.

A few random notes:

1) Some comic relief right off the top: Sparky Anderson has Mays leading off and Aaron batting second. You'll sometimes hear about teams having power at the top of the lineup, maybe a couple of middle infielders with 15-20 home runs apiece. On this particular night, the N.L. had 1200+ home runs setting the table.

2) If you want to mark a moment in time in a particular sport, look past the Hall of Famers and take note of the second-tier stars. Willie Mays might mean 1954 and the Catch to one person, 1965 and the Roseboro incident to another, and 1973 and the sad ending to a third. But if you roll out names like Don Buford, Lee May, Glenn Beckert, Bobby Murcer, Cookie Rojas, and Rick Wise, you can only be talking about the early '70s.

3) If you blink, you'll miss Reggie's home run. He hits it six or seven pitches into the count: contact, cut to the camera attempting, unsuccessfully, to follow the flight of the ball while Curt Gowdy goes nuts (unless I've got worse eyesight than I even think I do, the camera is panning across empty space, the ball far above; you only see it on its way down, after it bounces off the light tower), and, as Reggie trots the bases, a shot of the light tower. Takes about four or five seconds. No replay, because there isn't really anything to show.

4) Has there been a great black starting pitcher since Dwight Gooden? African-American black, not Hispanic--Sabathia was born in California, but I'm not sure if his ancestry is Hispanic or not. The '71 game pitted Vida Blue (in the midst of one of the greatest seasons ever for a starting pitcher) against Dock Ellis, with Don Wilson coming on in relief.

5) Speaking of which, it was hilarious to hear Gowdy and Kubek make reference to Ellis's no-hitter from the year before, as puzzled as anyone that he walked eight and a hit a batter en route. We now know that Ellis was tripping on acid during that game.

6) Also from an alternate universe: Blue was coming off two starts in which he'd pitched 9 and 11 innings, having left the latter game with the score 0-0.

7) Most entertaining pitcher was Mike Cuellar. In the top of the 6th, he strikes out Willie Stargell on...some kind of double-reverse backup Eephus pitch; Stargell is still busy unknotting himself.

8) The players are much more businesslike. Think about all the theatrics in recent All-Star games: Johnson and Kruk, Johnson and Walker, Bonds and Tori Hunter, etc. With Brooks Robinson playing third, Bench tries to drop one down in the 7th. He misses, before singling past Robinson on the next pitch. Remember that this is only a few months removed from Robinson's acrobatics in the '70s Series, where one of his primary victims was Bench. There is no visible reaction from either player after the missed bunt, and none following the subsequent single. Rerun the same sequence with the same backstory today, and I think you'd see mugging galore from Robinson and Bench. Different game--better or worse, I'm not sure (I thought Kruk was pretty great patting down his heart against Johnson).

9) Clemente is every bit as unorthodox a hitter as legend has it: as plain as day on the replay, he hits his eighth-inning home run completely off his front foot.

10) Player I most wanted to see who was there but didn't get into the game: Sudden Sam McDowell.

My friend also gave me tapes of Games 6 and 7 from the '71 Series. I was rooting for the Orioles, so it would be the first time baseball really made me sad.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem (2009)

Until I come up with a new project for this site, I'll leave you with the world's first posted photo (outside of Facebook) of Ava Elizabeth Baines Woods, first daughter of Jacqueline and Scott, charter member of Generation "O," born Dec. 12, 2008. (Birthday compadres: Dionne Warwick, Edward G. Robinson, Edvard Munch, Madchen Amick from Twin Peaks, and, synchronicity, Ava Gardner's famous Italian husband.) Below, Uncle Phil has just been holding court on why Black Vinyl Shoes is a better LP than Big Star's Radio City, and, as you can see, Ava has been hanging on his every word.

High School, My School (2009; w/Scott Woods and Tim Powis)

A couple of years ago, I got an e-mail from a guy named Bob Mersereau soliciting a list of my favorite Canadian albums for a book he was putting together. I'm pretty much the last person you'd want such a list from--I'm a song guy with a long-standing antipathy towards my home country's pop music--but I submitted one anyway, the book came out, and Bob was nice enough to list me as one of the many voters. (I recall that I went with five or six Neil Young LPs and an Andy Kim compilation.) He's doing a follow-up volume on Canadian singles, and while the antipathy remains, it was a lot easier for me to come up with something this time. I sent him two lists: my Top 10, and a chronological Top 25.

1. "Cinnamon Girl," Neil Young (1969)

2. "How'd We Ever Get This Way," Andy Kim (1968)

3. "Get Down To," Mainline (1971)

4. "Rain Dance," Guess Who (1971)

5. "Beautiful Second Hand Man," Ginette Reno (1970)

6. "Talk It Over in the Morning," Anne Murray (1971)

7. "Africa," Thundermug (1972)

8. "Big-Town Boy," Shirley Matthews & the Big Town Girls (1964)

9. "Even Grable," Treble Charger (1996)

10. "Get Up, Get Out and Move On," Fludd (1972)

 

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"The Stroll," Diamonds (1957)

"Big-Town Boy," Shirley Matthews & the Big Town Girls (1964)

"1-2-5," Haunted (1966)

"She Ain't No Use to Me," Ugly Ducklings (1966)

"How'd We Ever Get This Way," Andy Kim (1968)

"Cinnamon Girl," Neil Young (1969)

"If You Could Read My Mind," Gordon Lightfoot (1970)

"Beautiful Second Hand Man," Ginette Reno (1970)

"Talk It Over in the Morning," Anne Murray (1971)

"Rain Dance," Guess Who (1971)

"Get Down To," Mainline (1971)

"Carey," Joni Mitchell (1971)

"Some Sing, Some Dance," Pagliaro (1971)

"Africa," Thundermug (1972)

"Get Up, Get Out and Move On," Fludd (1972)

"Sweet Thing," Goddo (1978)

"Don't You Lie," Viletones (1978)

"Tired of Waking Up Tired," Diodes (1978)

"Ain't Got No Sense," Teenage Head (1979)

"Apologies," Pointed Sticks (1980)

"Nothing on TV," Dundrells (1986)

"Out of My Head," Junkhouse (1993)

"Even Grable," Treble Charger (1996)

"Attack of the 50-Ft. Teletubbies," D.J. Shoe (1996)

"Fireworks," Tragically Hip (1998)

Same old story--wildly disproportionate emphasis on the early '70s, a decent sampling of punk, and virtually nothing from the past two decades. Kon Kan's "I Beg Your Pardon" and the New Pornographers' "Mass Romantic" came close; Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire, Buck 65, and some other things that have attracted significant critical attention beyond our borders did not. And I have to issue my standard Tragically Hip disclaimer: I recoil from just about everything they did on their first few records.

The rule was to stick to actual singles, and on my Top 10, I did. I cheated twice on the expanded list: I don't believe either "Ain't Got No Sense" or "Sweet Thing" were ever released as singles, although the latter essentially functions as one on hard-rock stations. Just to be completley inconsistent, I ruled out Leonard Cohen's "Winter Lady" (which might have made the Top 10) and Bruce Cockburn's title song for Goin' Down the Road on the basis of the singles-only rule. As I've indicated elsewhere, the Cockburn song doesn't exist on vinyl of any kind, only in the film.

I'll provide a download link for "Attack of the 50-Ft. Teletubbies," thus sparing you the whole eBay/Sotheby's route.

(Earth-shattering update: Broken Social Scene's "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" would now make the list. Not the Top 10, but pencil it in where the Pointed Sticks used to be.)

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As the economy plummets, the world consoles itself by making lists of favorite Canadian singles. Here are a couple more from Scott Woods and Tim Powis, friends from Nerve days, that are also earmarked for Bob Mersereau's upcoming book.

Scott:

1. "Some Sing, Some Dance," Pagliaro (1972)

2. "Africa," Thundermug (1972)

3. "Raised on Robbery," Joni Mitchell (1974)

4. "If You're Looking," Tranquility Base (1970)

5. "Rain Dance," Guess Who (1971)

6. "Even Grable," Treble Charger (1996)

7. "Heartbeat (It's a Lovebeat)," DeFranco Family (1973)

8. "Savin' Myself," Eria Fachin (1988)

9. "Little Darlin'," Diamonds (1957)

10. "I Beg Your Pardon," Kon Kan (1988)

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Tim:

1. "(Isn’t Love Unkind) In My Life," A Foot in Coldwater (1972)

2. "Intervention," Arcade Fire (2007)

3. "Unless You Care," Terry Black (1964)

4. "Albert Flasher," Guess Who (1971)

5. "She Ain’t No Use to Me," Ugly Ducklings (1966)

6. "Picture My Face," Teenage Head (1978)

7. "New York City," Demics (1979)

8. "You Turn Me On I'm a Radio," Joni Mitchell (1972)

9. "Lovin’ You Ain’t Easy," Pagliaro (1971)

10. "Wicked and Weird," Buck 65 (2003)

11. "Charlena," Richie Knight and the Mid-Knights (1963)

12. "Shoot 'Em Up Baby," Andy Kim (1968)

13. "Feel It," It's All Meat (1969)

14. "Africa," Thundermug (1972)

15. "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet," Bachman Turner Overdrive (1974)

16. "The Way I Walk," Jack Scott (1959)

17. "Big-Town Boy," Shirley Matthews & the Big Town Girls (1964)

18. "Don’t Walk Away Eileen," Sam Roberts (2002)

19. "Broken Hearted Me," Anne Murray (1979)

20. "Oh What a Feeling," Crowbar (1971)

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Based on us three, Thundermug's got this thing wrapped up. I imagine the Guess Who, Joni Mitchell, and Pagliaro will spread their votes around much as they have on our lists. (The Demics and the DeFranco Family will not.) Scott has duplicated what I now think is an error on my own list: I checked around, and Treble Charger's "Even Grable" appears never to have been released as a single. I'm pretty sure I've never heard It's All Meat from Tim's list (ditto the Arcade Fire track, but that has to do with my liking their first LP so little); I have heard Tranquility Base and Eria Fachin from Scott's, but I have no memory of how either one goes at the moment. M.I.A.: Mitsou, Candi & the Backbeat, Zappacosta, the Tiger, Moxy Fruvus, Gowan, the Hats (even though they technically were without them), and Wild T & the Spirit. Not fair, but there just wasn't enough space.

Patiently, Patiently (2009)

2008 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. "I Believe in Nothing," Vivian Girls: I put together my nine zillionth history-of-punk compilation for someone recently, and ended with this. I think I started anthologizing punk for other people sometime around Flipper’s “Get Away”: you can make a good argument that it’s a story that ended ages ago, but you can make an equally good argument, the Greil Marcus argument, that as long as there’s somebody out there who sounds like they heard their first punk-rock record yesterday, it’s a story that inches forward in fits and starts, across many years. I hadn’t made one of these compilations for a while, and the thing that jumped out at me this time is how virtually everything I put on there post-Nirvana was female: outside of Pavement and “Fell in Love with a Girl” (which is half-female, come to think of it), it was Scrawl, L7, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Hole, Sleater-Kinney, Ladybug, She Mob, and the Vivian Girls. That’s probably not a surprise to anyone who was following closely through the ‘90s, but some of these songs I discovered well after the fact, so I’ve just personally come to the realization that males should never be allowed to sing punk-rock again; women add beauty, sadness, reverie, and lots else that might not have worked so well for Slaughter & the Dogs, but that now seems like the only way to do it. “I Believe in Nothing” also feels elegiac, something it shares with “Get Away” and other compilation-closers along the way like “Teen Age Riot” and Dinosaur Jr. and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I’ll get into the election below, but in a year that was resoundingly about Yes, I found the Vivian Girls’ No especially poignant.

2. "Prismatic Room," Crystal Stilts: Right pretty: give punk-rock to women, and leave the mopey jingle-jangle for men.

3. "You Can Vote However You Like," Ron Clark Academy: Much more than anything McCain himself did during the campaign, it took a bunch of middle-school black kids from Atlanta to bestow upon him some of the dignity and honor that were supposed to be his currency. Simply by allowing that there was a case to be made for the wrinkly old white guy, a generosity they had no earthly reason to summon, they rescued the campaign from the slime pit of Wright, Ayers, Hannity, Limbaugh, Ferraro, Lynn Westmoreland (Mr. Uppity, in case you missed that one), Joe the Populist Prop, and all the other sundry phantasmagoria conspiring to hijack history. Discovering, via Andrew Sullivan, “You Can Vote However You Like” sometime in the waning days of October ranked right alongside Iowa and South Carolina as my purest moment of joy in an election I followed obsessively but ultimately didn’t enjoy enough because I spent too much time waiting for the bottom to fall out. These kids, seemingly oblivious to the slime pit, enjoyed the moment as much as humanly possible.

4. "I Love to Move in Here," Moby: Makes me think of those David Bronstein infomercials from the ‘90s (I had to go searching for his name), the ones where he’d be doing mad schtick inside a nightclub while surrounded by all the women who were clamoring to meet you if you just called his toll-free number. He’s a Toronto guy, so maybe they only aired up here--you couldn’t avoid them after midnight. Anyway, they were always soundtracked by stuff that sounded just like “I Love to Move in Here.” I haven’t checked, but this year’s list is quite likely the only one since I started submitting them regularly in ’91 that is without hip-hop. Obama moves in, hip-hop moves out: I’m not sure what that means, or if it means anything at all. No hip-hop, that is, unless you count “I Love to Move in Here”’s Generic Rap Guy for Hire, on loan from all those Snap and Culture Beat records of 20 years ago. He’s still talking about kicking it old-school, and he sounds just fine: if you wait long enough, what once would have been hopelessly anachronistic takes on a warm nostalgic hue.

5. "Little Bit," Lykke Li: I saw a short interview with her the other day, and she said that even though she couldn’t understand why people compare her to Bjork, that was okay, she’d much rather it be Bjork than Madonna. I’m not sure--maybe that means her album is otherwise filled with Bjork-like songs. Yikes. Luckily, the one that would fit on a Madonna LP is the one that found me.

6. "Red, White and ####," Figghole: I’m tempted to quote the lyrics in their entirety; it’s not unusual at all for me to come around to ordinary words because the accompanying music draws me in, but with Figghole playing the kind of generic metal-rap that normally makes me wince, I may well be voting for lyrics here. (Except, except...somewhere in that mysterious alchemical process whereby songs are written, the words are so good that suddenly the generic metal-rap seems exciting again.) From the very first line--“She came to us from the hills of Wasilla/The babes are hot, but the winters are a killer”--the election’s great monster from the id is transformed into a comic-book myth, Paul Bunyan in heels, shooting wolves from helicopters and drinking Miller beer. The YouTube clip has the Ted Nugent singer traipsing around town surrounded Robert-Palmer style by a trio of Palins; piling on one lurid image after another (enough so that you have to sign in now to view it), it plumbs Palin’s softcore appeal as ingeniously as Tina Fey did. On my favorite line of the year, they get all meta: “She might not know about foreign stuff/She might not know about knowin’ stuff.” Swear to god, until this song, I didn’t even know what a #### was.

7. "Please Stop Dancing," Magnetic Fields: Overall, I don’t get a lot out of this group: I’ve got three tracks from 69 Love Songs on my hard-drive, and this is the only one from Distortion I kept. (I also caught up with Get Lost this year, which on balance I like the best of the three.) When they get it right, though, they’re pretty damn great--“Sweet-Lovin’ Man” is one of my favorite songs ever, and “Please Stop Dancing” and those few others aren’t far behind. I don’t know how convincing the new album’s Jesus & Mary Chain angle is. I stumbled over a song called “Too Many Times” by somebody named Ceremony earlier this year, and that one’s so close it’s funny. “Please Stop Dancing” is in the neighborhood, sort of, but it’s also like finding out the Godard film you just saw was supposed to be his version of a musical: “Okay, if you say so...” But the mere fact that there’s somebody out there who thought a Jesus & Mary Chain tribute was a good idea in 2008--as aesthetic project, as saleable product--well, that alone makes for a good story.

8. "Miles Away," Madonna: Controversies involving the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are very much of the tree-falling-in-the-forest variety, so for anyone who missed it, the Mother of All Rogue Diva’s induction last March generated some not unexpected derision. Leonard Cohen, who also went in, generated none. I have the same question today that I did at the time: in what universe is Leonard Cohen more rock ‘n’ roll than Madonna? I love a few early Cohen songs, but I honestly do not understand the mindset that sees him as belonging but Madonna as an interloper. Elsewhere, she underscored how peripheral she’s become by backing the wrong candidate for the Democratic nomination, and when she eventually came over to Obama, she jumped in with embarrassing overkill: her concert montage linking McCain to Hitler thankfully didn’t get a lot of attention, but I’m sure I wasn’t alone among Obama supporters in thinking “please make her disappear for a few months.” And then, of course, the divorce, the genesis of which she openly addresses on “Miles Away.” Not one of Madonna’s great memory songs--the miles are actual physical distance, not metaphorical--but it feels like one anyway. The lilt in her voice when she sings “so far away” is worth any number of HOF inductions.

9. "Chemtrails," Beck: Speaking of which, Beck becomes eligible in 2018. He’s somewhere where Frank Thomas and Ken Griffey have been the past few years: he bears little resemblance to the wunderkind who did “Loser,” but he’s more than halfway home, still hanging around and piling up career numbers. “Chemtrails” ponders the so many, many people out there--where do they come from, where do they all belong? Good questions in 1966, good questions today.

10. "Fluorescent Grey," Deerhunter: The very definition of what a friend and I call “older brother music,” something that should make intuitive sense to anyone whose middle-school years trace back to the early and mid-seventies. For my friend, it was an actual older brother who got him off K-Tel and onto Roxy Music; for me, the symbolic older brothers on the senior basketball team who sang “Roll Another Number” on the bus and moved me from CHUM charts to The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. (I’m describing a phenomenon here, not making value judgements; Roxy Music had stuff sillier than Rick Dees, and trading in Al Green for Genesis is a tragedy that continues to haunt my every waking hour.) It’s about getting a secret glimpse into a mysterious world that seems so much more adult than the one you’re used to. So even though there’s a part of me that knows “Fluorescent Grey” is kind of corny, that psychic OBM door is unlocked and I give in. (Note: This came out in May of 2007, which is really past the point where anyone should be voting for it in 2008. Downloading, Jay Reatard’s cover, confusion...long story short: I messed up. But I’ll leave it on anyway.)

On the Wagon to Mexico (2008)

2007 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “You! Me! Dancing!” Los Campesinos: The first thing with live guitars that I’ve voted #1 since “Sour Girl” in 2000; I can’t tell you how proud I am to reconnect with the tradition of guitar-based rock and roll that the Stone Temple Pilots exemplified so well. High on the list of things I love about “You! Me! Dancing!” is how it feels like two songs circling around each other, and in the one it’s the girl who harbors the deep dark secret about her own leadfootedness, while in the other the guy’s off in his own stratosphere blithely frugging here, there, and everywhere. (Or maybe he’s doing the Freddie--nothing specific is ever named, but the kinetic energy here has a pronounced Freddie/frug feel to it.) It’s a subversion of expectations as gratifying as the climactic graduation dance in To Sir with Love where Sidney Poitier lurches around like the Incredible Hulk while Judy Geeson makes like Ginger Rogers. I wish I could decipher the guy’s motormouth ramblings towards the end--online lyric pages don’t provide anything. I’ve been playing this so often the last while, I’m sure I’ll wear it out before long. For now, it’s “Roadrunner,” it’s “Every Picture Tells a Story,” it’s you, it’s me, and it’s dancing.

2. “What You Do,” Imperial Teen: A few years ago in this space, just as I was catching up with Imperial Teen’s three albums, I wrote that they made a better Yo La Tengo than Yo La Tengo. It made a kind of intuitive sense at the time, now I have no idea what I meant. The two don’t sound anything alike--except here, where they’re one and the same. I hope they keep doing what they do for a long time.

3. “With Every Heartbeat,” Robyn w/Kleerup: Latest proof of Greil Marcus’s rule (by way of Satchel Paige and Bob Dylan) that it’s impossible to make a less than great record about not looking back. The strange thing about this austere don’t-look-back meditation is that, far from finding liberation from the past, the singer’s a total wreck as she picks up and starts to move forward: “Still, I’m dying with every step I take.” For the record, I never ever look back myself, not counting the six or seven hours a day I spend looking back.

4. “Crush Whatever,” Manhattan Love Suicides: Bikini Kill doing “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; a dead-end for anyone in search of the new, pure bliss for me.

5. “Upgrade U,” Lil Wayne: Snoop used to wear a Maple Leafs sweater during his “Gin and Juice” heyday, but, as far as I know, “Upgrade U”’s the first time Toronto’s resident sports institution--as mythical around here as the Yankees or Packers, the difference being we’ve been in a 40-year slump--has made it into actual hip-hop rhyme (setting up my favorite line of the year: “But I’m a champion/Where’s the fuckin’ Rocky theme?”). Every year, I revisit this same place: I continue to be fascinated with my fascination with this sludge. I’m tempted to say that with something like “Upgrade U,” hip-hop is officially into its Exile/Riot phase, all that Christgau stuff about anomie and layers of murk, except that that probably already happened 20 years ago on Schoolly-D’s first album. The layers get uglier and druggier all the time, though, and to that end, I can hear the appeal the schlocky horrorshow sample from Beyonce’s original might have had for Lil Wayne. It almost functions like Elvis’s “Let’s get real, real gone for a change,” except here the invitation reads “How low? This low.”

6. “Icky Thump,” White Stripes: “Led Zeppelin reunion” doesn’t compute: one guy remains very much dead, and while a few deaths don’t preclude a high school reunion from advertising itself as such, one in a four-piece rock group is one over the limit. I bet “Icky Thump” does a better job of honoring the original anyway--such an impressive wall of galumph that, at 46 years of age, I had to reteach myself how to air-guitar before I was fully able to commune with it. Turns out it’s not like riding a bike at all--you forget everything if you haven’t done it for a while, and my timing and mechanics were so completely off, I’m scheduled for rotator cuff surgery come May.

7. “House of Cards,” Radiohead: This is the group that did “Creep,” right? Wow--where they been? I’m 83% kidding. We reviewed “Creep” in Radio On 14 years ago (reaction was all over the place; very high controversy-rating, as I recall), and then I somehow managed not to acquire a single Radiohead album, or even hear more than a handful of Radiohead songs, between here and there. So that’s my first order of business for 2008: investigate this Radiohead phenomenon. For the longest time, I was mishearing a key line here: “forget about your house of cards” as “forget about your house and car” (comical in view of the title--duh), and from there, taking notice also of the bit about collapsing infrastructure, I figured they were warning me not to become too attached to the material possessions that fill up my life, because at any given moment they could all disappear. Seeing as that’s something I think about on a regular basis to begin with, I guess you’d call that a willfully creative misinterpretation. The words are just window dressing anyway, as they basically are on any great pop song; it’s the exquisite coloration of everything enveloping those words that draws me in, not whatever lesson may or may not be there. When Thom Yorke’s voice leaps up the register right after “forget about your house and car”--I mean, “forget about your house of cards”--I’m 12 years old again and swooning over Badfinger’s “Day After Day,” and that’s more than enough for me.

8. “Bunky,” Welcome: Or maybe it’s “Welcome” by Bunky, how should I know? (Old Chuck Eddy joke.) I’m pretty sure this is the shortest thing I’ve ever voted for in 20 years of compiling these lists--not quite Angry Samoans/Minutemen short, but it does come in at under two minutes. Obscure and disjointed for the first sixty seconds, some dreamy oohing and aahing near the end, then over, then out.

9. “I Get Money,” 50 Cent: The yin and yang of 50 Cent and Kanye West is, what--Stones/Beatles? It was Kayne who wouldn’t make nice after Katrina, though, and besides, the idea that the Beatles ever represented wholesomeness, even in 1964, is silly. Manny Farber’s termite art vs. white elephant art? 50 doesn’t make a very good termite--sells too many CDs, wears too much gold. In any event, there’s something insidiously sensuous going on in “I Get Money” that I don’t get from any of the half-dozen songs I’ve dutifully auditioned from Graduation. Kanye might look more dapper, but it’s 50 who has what I believe hardcore gangstas call the “Buddy Love Flow,” and he’s got it, like, all the time. Another Rocky reference, too, an odd hip-hop trend that requires further review.

10. “Beautiful Life,” Gui Boratto: As bright and sparkly as the wash of colours on Gui Boratto’s album cover. I like LCD Soundsystem’s “Someone Great,” too, but for a song to assume the mantle of truly great dancefloor trance, it’s important that it be by someone you’ve never heard of, on a label that sounds totally illegimate.

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I don’t know if the vagaries of technology are still a story at this point, but I love this description of something I found in a local weekly’s “Holiday Gift Guide”: “Send your iPod on a time warp with the iTube Valve Dock Carbon Edition. This vacuum-tube-based amplifier gives your digital music an analog tuneup, resulting in a warmer and more textured sound than any fancy-pants techie gadget pumps out.” Cost? $899. I’m generally Don Cheadle in Boogie Nights when it comes to this kind of gobbledy-gook, but I think I can provide translation on this one: “For a thousand dollars, we’ve found a way to make your Arcade Fire mp3s sound more like all those Wishbone Ash and Leo Sayer albums sitting down at the local Goodwill.” I would love to meet someone who purchases one of these iTube Valve Dock Carbon Editions, just so I can stand there and look at them funny.