Song of the Day: Single Mothers, "Marbles"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Like a lot of kids who watched MTV and dressed like an extra in this Ammonia video, I was in a series of not-very-good garage bands during my middle and high school years. They were all general variations on punk combos, inspired by our incessant obsessing over Green Day's Dookie and the then-hot ska revival. They undoubtedly sucked, and I never contributed to a song that I was actually proud of. But at the time, in my mind, we sounded like this kickass hardcore combo from Canada who play fast and yell really loud and say pithy things about PhD candidates in "Marbles." I've spent years trying to make my rage sound this smart and my brainy cultural observations sound this unhinged. Once again, Canada cracked the code before we even realized there was a problem. Thanks Canada! 

Song of the Day: Tricky, "Christiansands"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

When Tricky released Pre-Millennium Tension in 1996, the alternative music community was at a crossroads: Kurt Cobain had been dead two years, and the national spotlight had darted away from Seattle and its Sasquatch thud. In the wake of grunge's wheezing exit, no singular sound had moved in to replace it. Modern rock radio was littered with esoteric number one's, including blasts of Britpop (Oasis' "Wonderwall"), something I like to call the hard jangle (Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars"), vestiges of rap-rock (311's "Down"), and the occasional Lilith-era angry lady (Tracy Bonham's "Mother Mother"). 

But the top of that chart was primarily littered with bits of strange electronic ephemera like Butthole Surfers' "Pepper," Primitive Radio Gods' "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand," and eels' "Novocaine For the Soul." It's possible that the confluence of alt-rock stylings with computer bleeps was a coincidence, or the next logical step in the evolution of the form, but it probably had more to do with Spin's insistence that guitars were out and samplers were the wave of the future. 

By '96, America's Alternative Bible was beginning to go all-in on "electronica," the mainstreaming of underground dance music that had already gone somewhat stale in the United Kingdom but was still churning out well-regarded music. Bits of digital experimentation had already seeped into certain well-connected heads in American audiences, particularly in the form of Beck (his 1996 release Odelay is a cut-up king's dream), Cibo Matto (the sample-soaked Viva! La Woman), DJ Shadow (the scratch-tacular magnum opus Endtroducing...), and even the crate-digging stew of the Fugees. 

All of those albums ended up on Spin's '96 year-end best albums list, and by '97, Prodigy was on the cover. Also included in that '96 list was Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension, a gurgling bog of slurred beats, skittering drums, and haunting vocals. For computer-curious rock fans like myself, it was the first foray into trip-hop, a mix of spacey samples and druggy breakbeats that could be cinematic (Portishead) or hardcore (Massive Attack). Tricky existed somewhere in between, and the Tension single "Christiansands" acted as a groovy entry point. I never really appreciated trip-hop in the present tense—Pre-Millennium Tension was an album I often sampled at the Tower Records listening station but never actually purchased—but I've really grown to love it now (it's great music to write to, and also makes for a shockingly swell driving soundtrack). There's something special about the way "Christiansands" slinks, like it's stealthily cruising the bottom of the ocean, only occasionally looking up at the light cast by singer Martina Topley-Bird. 

One last thing: It took me years to realize that the album cover to Pre-Millennium Tension is super sexy and sort of dirty. My eye for detail remains terrible. 

Song of the Day: Jann Arden, "Run Like Mad"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

After a brief period of being unavailable on a streaming service (it vanished from Netflix about a year ago), Dawson's Creek is back in circulation, this time on Hulu. I'm trapped in a vicious cycle when it comes to this show, which is one of my five favorite television programs of all time: Whenever it seems like it has gone away, if suddenly the streaming dries up or the home video options suddenly seem scarce, I get unreasonably excited about the prospect of Dawson's Creek re-emerging in its purest, original broadcast form. 

But that's not to be, unfortunately, as the 128 episodes currently available on Hulu are the same bastardized versions I've been putting up with since the show first arrived on DVD over a decade ago, with most of the soundtrack changed for the worse. Music was a huge part of Dawson's Creek, both in the context of the show (Joey singing "On My Own" from Les Miserables is the key turning point of the first season) and in the greater cultural approach of the WB network at the time (it's the first time I can remember seeing bumpers at the end of broadcasts that let you know what songs you just heard in the show). But the bulk of those music cues are now missing. The first season kept the songs in tact, but everything thereafter is pretty bastardized. (Any time Dawson's returns in a new form, I always go to season two's "The All-Nighter" to see if they brought back the Save Ferris song in the third act; I've never been so crestfallen about not hearing a ska song.) 

The most criminal change, however, is in the show's theme song. When Dawson's Creek ran on TV, the opening theme was Paula Cole's "I Don't Want to Wait." It was a placement that became useful for both parties: The song became instantly synonymous with the show, providing it with a signature introduction. The tune also became a huge hit for Cole, who graduated from one-hit wonder (her single "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" had been in the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 in 1997) to a star big enough to headline amphitheaters in the summer of 1998. There's no question "I Don't Want to Wait" is one of Dawson's Creek's greatest cultural legacies, alongside memes of James Van Der Beek crying and the endlessly adorable friendship between Michelle Williams and Busy Phillips. 

But you won't hear "I Don't Want to Wait" when you click play on episodes of Dawson's Creek. Instead, you'll hear Jann Arden's "Run Like Mad," a song that is familiar to Creek devotees by now, as it has been the theme song we've been dealing with since the show went off the air back in 2003. It was originally used as the theme song for international broadcasts, and while it's fine on its own, it doesn't hold the same type of nostalgic weight as Cole's jam. 

It's unclear why the theme song has been changed, though the tangled web involved in music licensing is certainly to blame. Using a song on a TV show used to be easy, because it was seen as mutually beneficial to everybody involved, and it still mostly is. But when it comes to translating soundtracks to home video or streaming, everybody loses their damn mind because nobody makes any money off of music any more. There are a ton of stories out there of classic shows hung up in music licensing hell, which is why it took so long for WKRP in Cincinnati to arrive on DVD (it finally hit in the fall of 2014). Freaks & Geeks also took forever to make it to home video shelves, primarily because of all the music they had to clear (and specifically the Billy Joel songs that dotted one particular episode). Many more producers of TV box sets simply threw their hands up and released seasons without any of the original music. This is especially true of shows that ran on MTV, who used to be able to use most any song in their library—and MTV's impact was so vast that the record companies were pleased their music showed up anywhere on the channel. That's why the home video versions of Daria, The State, and The Real World are so disheartening, and why the DVD versions of Beavis & Butt-Head touted that some of the original music videos were actually preserved for release. 

Part of me thinks it doesn't matter that Dawson's Creek is lacking most of its original broadcast music—after all, there are only a handful of people out there who really remember the late '90s alt-rock music cues compared to the anonymous singer-songwriter stuff that has filled in the gaps for over a decade. But I still hold out hope that somebody takes it upon themselves to clear all the original music and restore Dawson's Creek to its original broadcast glory—or, at the very least, get us Paula Cole back. 

Song of the Day: Filter, "Hey Man Nice Shot (1/4 lb Remix)"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Filter began as an offshoot of Nine Inch Nails—Richard Patrick and Brian Liesegang were both members of Trent Reznor's live band during his band's initial ascent, and Liesegang contributed heavily to the recording of The Downward Spiral. The pair spun off in 1994 and released Short Bus in 1995. (Liesegang bolted soon after the release of Short Bus, and Patrick has kept the Filter mantle going since; the band has a fresh album arriving in April.)

"Hey Man Nice Shot" was the first single from Short Bus, and it was an instant hit on modern rock radio. It told the story of a guy in Pennsylvania who committed suicide during a press conference in 1987, but that didn't stop everybody from assuming "Hey Man Nice Shot" was a dig at the recently deceased Kurt Cobain. For reasons I've never been able to decipher, my local modern rock station (WMRQ Radio 104—still operational!) played this remix, which I loved and never owned a copy of and it haunted me for years. I somehow managed to never hear the original, which is a pretty typical mid '90s industrial tune, and when I bought Short Bus, I was disappointed to find that the remix I had heard so often on the radio was not on it. I still cranked it up, but I missed the remix, and in the pre-YouTube era I had such a hard time finding it that I had convinced myself that it didn't exist. But I found it this morning in about six seconds, which was both immensely satisfying and punishingly boring. Such is the nature of life in the digital age. 

Song of the Day: Marilyn Manson, "The Suck For Your Solution"

I haven't been on a bicycle in years, but for a brief period when I was 14, I was pretty much on it every day. My routine shook out like this: I would arrive home from school, grab a snack, and then immediately hop on my 10-speed and ride the three miles to my local mall. (Though I was using my pedal power and there were copious trails available through the ample woods surrounding my neighborhood, I was definitively an indoor kid.) With available but still-limited disposable income, most of my purchases were CDs—at less than 20 bucks a throw, they always felt like the perfect expenditure for a budding cultural elitist like myself. This was long before digital music blew the bottom out of physical record stores, so there were a shocking number of outlets in which I could buy music: the mall contained both a Sam Goody and a Strawberries, and within easy striking distance I could also visit Coconuts, Media Play, Lechmere, and Borders. Because of the density of the collection of stores, they not only offered music that was priced competitively but also had exceptionally wide selections—I was able to run across most of the indie I read about in Spin and could still get the new Pearl Jam at a reasonable rate. 

One of these after-school mall adventures led me to discover the opening of a new store called Hot Topic, which inexplicably survives today (I have been in two different Hot Topics since moving to Los Angeles). Outside of a handful of cultural touchstones (Doctor Who, Minecraft, and Benedict Cumberbatch), the Hot Topic oeuvre remains the same: Just as you could in the '90s when it first appeared before me, you can still get a wallet chain, hair dye, black light posters, and mass produced t-shirts from your favorite rock bands. 

I avoided Hot Topic initially, because I knew for a fact that I could hang with neither the regulars nor the staff of that particular emporium. Even though I had heard Jesus & Mary Chain records and was no stranger to mosh pits, I still felt like an imposter next to the over-pierced denizens of Hot Topic. But I finally got up the nerve to go in there when I realized I desperately wanted a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. Antichrist Superstar was a relatively new release, and I was fully obsessed. I took buying band T-shirts very seriously—wearing one meant an allegiance to a set of ideas that went beyond the contents of the album itself. I was a huge fan of the music on Antichrist Superstar (the singles were great, and "The Reflecting God" was my go-to mixtape deep cut), but I also was deeply seduced by Manson's control of his own image and his ability to manipulate media. He was hated by pearl-clutching parents' groups and school principals alike, and Manson used his demonization as a tool to try to extract tolerance. Plus, I was a restless Catholic who was just starting to realize a lot of what I had been taught about the world through the church was bullshit. 

So I bought a Manson shirt (in fact, it was this Manson shirt). I thought I was merely pledging my allegiance to a band I liked, but everyone else assumed I was going to inject heroin into my eyeballs and shoot up my high school. The terror that Manson traded in was real, and wearing that shirt provided my first real true counter-cultural thrill. Sure, Manson was a multi-platinum selling artist that millions of kids listened to (indeed, he was mainstream), but the stigma that came along with supporting something others felt was too transgressive was thrilling and rewarding. I don't necessarily miss Manson—dude still makes records and is pretty good at it—but the idea of fear in pop music (which I also complained about four damn years ago) is pretty much gone. Since there's no mono-culture, there are no cultural Boogiemen to condemn and/or rally around. Kanye West is probably the closest we get, and even then, the fear he spreads is more about the dangers of ego and the pitfalls of fame than anything tangible. Here's hoping Miley Cyrus encourages us to take more drugs, then burns a Bible, because fear is where the fun is. 

So listen to this Marilyn Manson song from the Private Parts soundtrack (about another oft-vilified media icon who struck fear in the hearts of PTA moms). It rules, and reminds me that the mainstream used to be deeply weird. I miss it. 

Song of the Day: Nine Inch Nails, "Wish"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I met my wife in the summer of 2006. She was not my wife then, but instead a girl I thought looked cute on an online dating profile. I knew pretty early that I wanted to spend all of my time with her (we still joke about how early I introduced her to my parents), and after moving in together at the end of the year, we took our first vacation together: to celebrate her birthday, we spent a week in February 2007 in Paris. 

It was a great trip. I had been once before but this was her first time, so we bounced around the museums, explored the catacombs, ate some delicious food and drank more than we should have. I have a lot of vivid, intense memories from that trip, but the final night stands out because we saw an incredible show.  

I was working for Spin at the time, and just before we left on our trip, I took a look through some calendars to figure out if there were any bands worth seeing while we'd be in Paris. Nine Inch Nails were in the midst of a tour that saw them play a handful of European clubs and leave sample tracks stored in flash drives from the forthcoming Year Zero album in bathrooms and on bars—a sort of real world viral marketing. I shot off a last-minute e-mail to Trent Reznor's publicist asking if I could get on the list for the band's show at a club called the Olympia, and I got confirmation literally as we were boarding the plane to jet out of JFK. 

The show was intense, essentially functioning as a palette-cleansing greatest hits run in between album releases (at the time, Reznor was bemoaning the fact that tours always seem to be tethered to the support of new albums). It was a killer setlist, opening with "Somewhat Damaged" (the same way they opened many of the shows during the tour for Fragile), with somewhat rare cuts like "Burn," "Eraser," and "Suck" dotting the evening.

But about halfway through, Reznor plowed into the Broken single "Wish." I should note that the show was a little odd, in that we were in a seated section that mostly stayed seated but would give Reznor a standing ovation at the end of each song. So I was in my seat for "Wish," finding myself overcome with the song's savagery, both in its charging speed-metal crunch and in its lyrics. "Put my faith in God and my trust in you/ There's nothing more fucked up I could do," Trent shouted, and I was brought back to my teenage bedroom, feeding my interior churn with repeated listenings of The Downward Spiral and Broken. I was always a fan of Reznor's more obtuse lyrics, but viscerally I responded best to his frank directness. One of those moments cropped up in the song's second verse, when some of the music drops out to allow Reznor to announce, "You know me, I hate everyone!" My young adulthood was dotted with that kind of misanthropy, manifesting itself in rage issues and an inability to commit to friends and lovers. 

When Reznor hit that line, I shouted along, briefly losing myself in the line's remarkable nihilism. In that instant, I lost total control, and I choked back tears and bile that threatened to escape along with the spirit of catharsis. I looked to my right and saw my future wife, also shouting along to Reznor's bellowing and banging her head. I realized in that moment of unbridled emotional lashing out that I could safely emerge from the cocoon of anger I had built for myself because there was finally somebody on the outside who understood who I was, and the safety blanket provided by Reznor's wailing was no longer a necessary part of my life. I still listen to "Wish," but now I do it because I like it and not because I need it. 

Song of the Day: Emmylou Harris, "Heaven Only Knows"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I'm in the midst of re-watching The Sopranos for probably the fourth or fifth time, and every time I make my way through the series I notice something new. This time around, one thing has snapped into focus: The Sopranos is the best binge show of all time. 

I actually watched the show live throughout the back half of its run, and though pretty much every fan and critic agreed that it was one of the best programs every put on television, that didn't stop them from complaining about it constantly.

I was annoyed by it when it was happening, but now I kind of get it because The Sopranos took its time. There are entire episodes that just kind of wander around, and that's what I liked about it. My defense always was that real life is pretty slow and often aimless, and a great TV show should reflect how things actually are. But in working through it another time, I realize that there are a lot of narrative seeds planted that don't pay off until many episodes (or even seasons) later. Those elements are deceptive, because they are mixed in with bits that don't go anywhere, and many of the bits that look like future developments (most notably, the missing Russian from season three's "Pine Barrens") turn out to be nothing. 

You can only really make the connections once you've seen the clues pay off (or in my case, four or five times), which is why The Sopranos has gotten better with age and both benefits and rewards further close reading. Today's song is from the premiere of season five (aka "The One Where the Bear Shows Up"), providing bookends to the aftermath of Tony and Carmela's marriage. I'm going back to HBO Go. 

Song of the Day: Taylor Swift, "Mean"

So Taylor Swift's 1989 won the Grammy for Album of the Year last night. That in and of itself is not entirely shocking, even considering the 11 nomination haul for Kendrick Lamar's capital-I Important and endlessly inventive To Pimp a Butterfly. Swift is a commercial juggernaut, a hero to tween girls (the only demographic that still invests a healthy amount of money in music), and a reasonably gifted songwriter, although based on the massive crew of old Swedes that accompanied her on stage last night, it's getting harder to tell where her artistic prowess ends and her ability to pay hitmakers to curate for her begins. She's an ideal person for the old-ass Grammys to tether themselves to because it's a symbiotic relationship: The Grammys get the cooperation of one of the few superstar musicians left on the planet, and Swift gets the validation she seems to endlessly crave. 

We kind of knew Kendrick was going to get hosed, right? When they gave away Best Rap Album, a category that has only ever been televised once before, it came across in that moment like a consolation prize for Lamar, who only an hour later would literally burn down the Grammys stage in a flurry of rise-up rhymes. (Alabama Shakes getting the chance to accept an award during the broadcast also signaled that they were not winning the big one at the end of the night.) So despite the fact that Kendrick's shackled rendition of "Alright" was by far the best performance of the evening and the fact that To Pimp A Butterfly was not only an idea-filled album but also a funky one, and despite the fact that Swift's performance of "Out of the Woods" was boring and ill-executed and that 1989 is as gross a celebration of whiteness as there is in the pop world, I had made my peace with the idea that Swift would walk away the big winner. And she is the first woman to win Album of the Year twice, which is nothing to sneeze at. 

But man, what a drag her acceptance speech was. She actually let the following words spill out of her mouth: "I want to say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. But if you just focus on the work, and you don't let those people sidetrack you, some day when you get where you're going, you'll look around and you will know it was you and the people who love you who put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world." 

In a word, "UGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH." My problem with fully committing to Taylor Swift over the course of her career has always been the fact that she trades on victimhood. It's one thing to write about lovers who wronged you, but it's entirely another to release a single that whines about what a critic said about your singing or how a famous rapper interrupted a television appearance. Taylor Swift is a young, rich, white, model-thin woman with famous friends—she is literally the least oppressed human on earth. Her tossing shade a Kanye West—a dude who bought her years of media sympathy that she is still cashing in on—is just the most petty, ridiculous complaint in the universe. 

A few years ago, I wrote something for MTV about how much I hated "Mean," a song that clapped back at a critic who said that Swift sounded terrible during a Grammys duet with Stevie Nicks (an adjudication that pretty much everybody agreed with). In the video, she metaphorically murders the dastardly critic and also tries to equate a professional saying something critical of a famous person to middle school kids being taunted for being gay. In her little kitten brain, I'm sure she thought that was empowering bullied kids, but in reality it belittled the genuine trauma those victims were experiencing. Your suffering is not the same as their suffering, Taylor, because nothing you do or experience is like anything anybody else does or experiences. You are no longer one of us. 

And then she has the temerity to release a single like "Shake It Off," which claims to present her as a breezy chick who lets stuff slide right off her back. But in reality she is the opposite of that! She's is actually a vindictive, power-mad lunatic who believes herself to be the target of a constant conspiracy to undermine her very existence. She's not an underdog, she's a sociopath. 

And that's OK! If Taylor Swift leaned into her heel role a little bit more, my respect for her would grow a thousand times. But she doesn't give a shit about what I think (until she does, I guess). 

Song of the Day: Primus, "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver"

Because who gives a shit? 

Song of the Day: The National, "Terrible Love"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Last night I saw the new Nicholas Sparks movie The Choice, which was undoubtedly one of the worst movies I've ever paid money to see in a theater. I ended up screening it out of morbid curiosity, as while I had never seen a Sparks movie before, I had delighted in the strange twists that many of those stories had—particularly the third act of Safe Haven, where it is revealed that a character had been a ghost all along. 

I was desperately hoping for the same sort of madness in The Choice, which appeared from the commercials to be a movie about deciding whether or not to take somebody off of life support. My imagination ran wild with the possibilities: Would our male hero (in this case a twangy veterinarian named Travis, played by Benjamin Walker) fall in love with another woman while his main squeeze was in a coma, only to have her wake up and force him to pick between the two of them? And how would anybody astral project in this reality? The Choice could have gone in any number of terrible directions, and those possibilities—coupled with its atrocious rating on Rotten Tomatoes—made for an irresistible opportunity. 

However, The Choice isn't bad in an interesting, over-the-top way. It's merely boring. There were a handful of moments that were completely bonkers, including an accidentally hilarious car accident and a sequence where our hero builds a gazebo out of driftwood. But perhaps the strangest bit of nonsense in The Choice comes when Travis and his new girl Gabby (Teresa Palmer) have sex for the first time. They've had dinner and are sipping wine, and Travis goes over to Gabby's vinyl collection to pull out a record. He puts the needle down, and out comes the National's "Terrible Love." They bone, clearing off two separate tabletops in the process. 

As its title implies, "Terrible Love" is an awful song for sex. It's not really a song about love at all—as far as I can tell, "Terrible Love" is about social anxiety and self-medicating with alcohol. But even if we ignore the lyrics (which I do all the time), its quiet storm arrangement isn't particularly erotic. (Plus, if Travis did in fact put on The National's 2010 album High Violet, then he's going to end up climaxing to the song after "Terrible Love," a track called "Sorrow" that is exactly as sexy as the title implies. However, it's unclear whether or not that would actually come up—Travis pulls a record out of a sleeve that is clearly not the cover to High Violet, a detail that drove me completely nuts for about 10 minutes while watching the film.)

High Violet was released in 2010 to rapturous acclaim and did alarmingly big business, debuting at number three on the Billboard album chart and selling over a quarter million copies in the U.S., an astounding figure for a relatively tiny release (albeit one with a lot of high-profile supporters—late night bookers love the National, and the band was able to debut "Terrible Love" on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon well in advance of the album release in order to build buzz). It's a brooding collection of orchestral post-punk that is probably a little too curated for its own good, though it's hard to deny the power of frontman Matt Berninger's hypnotic baritone. In fact, it's such a rich voice that it can bamboozle music supervisors into thinking the National songs are a good idea to put under a passionate sex scene. 

So here are your two lessons: Don't go see The Choice, and don't bone to the National. You're welcome. 

Song of the Day: Kanye West, "Dark Fantasy"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

A couple of years back, Entertainment Weekly put out an issue called All Time Greats, wherein we sought to name the 100 best movies, TV shows, albums, and books of all time. I left my mark on that list in two different ways. First, I insisted that if we were going to have a Beatles album at number one (a practice that is more or less automatic at this point), it would not be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (which I think is overrated, but I mostly wanted to leave it off as a nose-thumbing to Rolling Stone) but rather Revolver, a more difficult but also more rewarding (and in my mind better) collection of songs. 

My other big contribution to that list was insisting that Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sneak into the top 10. My logic went thusly: Hip-hop is the second most important genre to arise in the 20th century (after rock and roll), and since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the best rap album of all time, then it had to stand ahead of entries like Nirvana's Nevermind and the Beach Boys Pet Sounds (man, did people hate it when they saw Kanye was ahead of Pet Sounds). As much as it broke my heart to have Kanye so far ahead of Metallica's Master of Puppets on the list, I was confident of my convictions in the list-making process. 

I'm still adamant about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. As much as I love and acknowledge the importance of collections like Biggie's Ready to Die, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Nas' Illmatic, Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full, De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, and Jay Z's The Blueprint, Kanye's 2010 release stands head and shoulders above all of them. It's worth reliving just for the subtextual narrative: A year after drunkenly (and jubilantly) pissing on white America at the MTV Video Music Awards by crashing a Taylor Swift acceptance speech, Kanye emerged from his self-imposed exile to mourn the loss of his mother and culminate his G.O.O.D. Fridays series, which counts as the most urgent music of his career. 

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is 99 percent perfect. The one bit of imperfection? The dumb-as-hell intro speech by Nicki Minaj, delivered in her stupid almost-British accent. But once that 23-second nightmare is over, what's left is 70 straight minutes of lushly-crafted, hip-shaking, neck-snapping, head-tripping beats and West's rare combination of bravado, self-loathing, and one-liners (has there been a funnier line in hip-hop in the 21st century than "Too many Urkels on your team/ That's why your wins low"?). I wrote about the rise of depression in hip-hop last year, and what I didn't say then was that West is the forefather of the movement, beginning with 2008's 808s & Heartbreak and cresting with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's an album about celebrity and loss and sex and drugs, and it takes a guy with balls the size of West's to properly balance those spinning plates and deliver all those elements in the form of a shout-along chorus. 

Kanye's new album arrives later this week, and he just changed the title again. It was originally going to be called So Help Me God, then got changed to Swish, and then two weeks ago it changed again to Waves. I'm partial to Swish, but the new title's initials are TLOP, and he's hoping people will guess the title. Here are my guesses: 

Two Licks of Pudding (I assume it's a Bill Cosby concept album)

The Life of Pi (Kanye really likes digital tigers)

Ten Lassos or Pistols (It's Kanye's Western; he probably loved The Hateful Eight)

Twelve Legs on Pumas (Kanye doesn't understand animal biology)

Threat Level: Octopus Pirates (Kanye's concept of terrorism is odd)

To Limp Our Putterfly (Kanye saw the number of Grammy nominations Kendrick got)

Ten Lessons on Pain (Actually, that's a pretty good title, isn't it?)

Song of the Day: Rob Zombie, "Jesus Frankenstein"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

When you break it down, Rob Zombie is probably my favorite living artist. There are filmmakers whose work I'm more invested in, and there are musicians I go deeper with, but the combination of the movies and the records is a potent one. I certainly love his work enough to borrow the subtitle of this very website from one of his albums. 

My ranking of the Zombie flicks goes like this: 

1. The Devil's Rejects

2. The Lords of Salem

3. Halloween 2

4. House of 1,000 Corpses

5. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto

6. Halloween

I'm incredibly excited for 31, even though the reception it got at Sundance was mixed (though obviously Zombie's movies have rarely received the type of acclaim they deserve—sure, a lot of them are genre exercises, but The Devil's Rejects is one of the best movies of the first decade of the millennium. 

Zombie has a new album coming out soon, too. Every Zombie album is super solid, and they always feature three or four singles that should be huge in parallel universes. Zombie is basically my Beyoncé—an artist who means far more to me than the sum of his parts, and somebody who I still freak out around even though I've interviewed him professionally half a dozen times. All hail. 

Song of the Day: Metallica, "One"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

There are plenty of songs I like more than Metallica's "One." In fact, there are oodles more Metallica songs I like more than "One," which is a killer jam that may not actually make my Metallica Top 10. 

(Actually, let's run down that 10 right now, just to see if that's an accurate statement: 1. "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" 2. "Hit The Lights" 3. "Disposable Heroes" 4. "The God That Failed" 5. "The Unforgiven II" 6. "For Whom The Bell Tolls" 7. "Master of Puppets" 8. "Harvester of Sorrow" 9. "Battery" 10. "Enter Sandman")

But "One" is made up of a lot of different moments, and there's a bit in that song that is undoubtedly my favorite 11 seconds in all of recorded music. It comes just after the breakdown, once the song has resolved its first section and settled into its jackhammering tail end. Over machine gun guitars, frontman James Hetfield barks, "Darkness! Imprisoning me! All that I see! Absolute horror!" It's thrilling, and as sharp a distillation of what metal means to me. Hetfield opens his eyes and takes in an endless sea of anguish and brutality. And what does he do? He shouts right back into the void, beating down the darkness with the power of his throat and his electric guitar.

In 2013, I saw Metallica play a SiriusXM-sponsored show at the Apollo Theater, which coincided with the release of the action-horror-concert film Through the Never. It's one of the five best concerts I've ever seen in my life: I was sitting in the fourth row of a tiny room, surrounded by a mass of grateful people for whom Metallica was undoubtedly their favorite band. They played "One" about half way through the set, and when Hetfield stepped up to the microphone to shout the "Darkness!" line, I became completely overwhelmed, and I couldn't do anything but weep. That has only happened a few times in my life, and I treasure every single moment. (Next week I'll have to tell a similar story about Nine Inch Nails.)

Song of the Day: David Bowie, "Always Crashing in the Same Car"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I've already written a lot about David Bowie, but even though I spent 48 straight hours constructing his tribute for Entertainment Weekly not too long ago, I never got tired of it. (In the past, I almost always end up hating the people for whom I've written obits, though to be fair I didn't like some of those people even before they died.)

But I somehow ended up having a dream about Bowie last night (the timing of my subconscious has never been great—this post would have been a stronger SEO entry a few weeks ago). It was as straightforward as it gets: He was walking very rapidly, and I was chasing after him in a journalistic capacity, simultaneously trying to compliment him for his vocal performance on the last song on his final album while also asking him about the "Berlin Trilogy." He didn't answer any of my questions but didn't seem all that perturbed by him, and as he sped off into the shadows, he flashed me a sly grin. Then he vanished, and I was impressed that even in death—even in the caverns of my brain—Bowie still kept a few steps ahead. 

I love the three albums he made with Brian Eno in Berlin: 1977's Low and "Heroes" and 1979's Lodger. They're weird and interesting and I learn something new every time I spin any one of them. Low remains my favorite, and "Always Crashing in the Same Car" is not only a haunting tune but also a fantastic image that I have always associated with George Orwell's vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever. It's about inevitability and fate and the cycles we trap ourselves in, and it's lovely and strange. I'll never get tired of Bowie, and his discography provides that I never will. 

Song of the Day: Pixies, "Dig For Fire"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Woke up with this one in my head. I love the Pixies, though my favorite album is Bossanova, their penultimate release (from their original run, at least; I keep forgetting that they've released a bunch of new music in this millennium) that is more or less considered the first pass at a Frank Black solo album. Outside of "Rock Music," the tracks on Bossanova lack the savage toughness of previous Pixies releases, though pound for pound it's probably Black's best collection of pop songs. My attachment is one of almost pure nostalgia: Just before I left to go to college, a friend of mine (who also, coincidentally, now lives in Los Angeles) burned a bunch of CDs for me. This was in that strange middle period of digital music when MP3s were more or less everywhere but the iPod had yet to come around to revolutionize the way we carried around music. 

I bought a stack of recordable CDs and took a handful of his records with me. When he offered the Pixies, I was only interested in 1989's Doolittle because it began with the band's best song ("Debaser") and ended with the song that Kurt Cobain ripped off for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ("Gouge Away"). But my friend was savvy and said, "You'll want this one." I had never heard Bossanova but was immediately hooked on its combination of surf riffs and sci-fi romanticism—that mix of fun and paranoia that is basically an auditory version of an X-Files episode. It ended up being the album in the heaviest rotation during my first semester at NYU, and when people watching Fight Club would ask whose song that was at the end of the movie, not only could I safely identify the Pixies, but I was able to offer up some deep cuts. That was as good a cultural currency as I had in that era, and it's the one-level-deeper philosophy that has always fueled my quest for new music.

At some point I'll talk about new stuff (probably when Waves arrives), but at the moment I'm enjoying unpacking the detritus. Bang on, Pixies. 

Song of the Day: Flaming Lips, "Race For The Prize"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I have two stories surrounding the above song, which is the opening track on the Flaming Lips' 1999 album The Soft Bulletin. 

The first is from when that album was released back in the summer of '99. I was approaching my senior year of high school and preparing myself for the coming onslaught of applying to college. Because I wanted to get into a theater school, I not only had to fill out the usual applications and write essays, but I also had to audition. The audition process was different at each school (remind me to tell you about the time I came unprepared to dance when trying to get into Carnegie Mellon), but it generally involved performing a monologue plus a song or two. According to my voice teacher, song selection was paramount, as you had to be able to show off your various skills as a performer (range, personality, acting chops) without pushing yourself too hard, going too long, or lapsing into clichés. Like many of the decisions you have to make when you're 17 years old, it was very much expressed to me that the quality of the rest of my life hinged on picking the correct piece of music theater nonsense to present to a total stranger. 

I was in the process of choosing songs when I wandered into the Music Box in Newport, RI that July. This was the rare time in my life when access, economic means, and sheer volume allowed me to spend roughly 60 percent of my waking life in record stores (I had money and a car, and they were still everywhere), and the Music Box was a regular stop on my family's annual summer trips to the shore. When I first found it in the late '90s, it was a great store, and I have a lot of vivid memories of shopping there (as with most of the music in my life, I can remember exactly what I bought in that place). That July night, after flipping through the same dozen Broadway albums every record store seemed to stock (Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Rent, Camelot, and usually a Sondheim or two, typically Into the Woods or Company), I flipped through the new indie releases and landed on the Flaming Lips. 

The Flaming Lips were a big band for me at that point, not so much because they were one of my favorites, but because my adoration for their 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic had lent me what amounted to indie cred (or as much indie cred as one could have in middle school). Everybody had heard their surprise Buzz Bin hit "She Don't Use Jelly," and some of my friends enjoyed the deeper cuts on the album Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (shout out to "Turn It On"), but by the time they released their '95 follow-up, most everybody in the mainstream had moved on. But I tacked Clouds Taste Metallic onto a Columbia House order after liking "Bad Days," their entry on the Batman Forever soundtrack. I still love Clouds Taste Metallic, as it had just the right amount of noise-rock scuzz, rhythmic heft, and psychedelic playfulness. 

I was not aware that the Lips had a new album coming out, so The Soft Bulletin was a completely blind purchase for me (though I did like that it had a song that was about Superman). When we exited, I popped it into the family car's CD player, and "Race For The Prize" unfolded. I was immediately enamored of its swirling strings and off-kilter melody, but my mother was not impressed. 

"Who is this?" she asked. 

"The Flaming Lips," I told her. 

"This guy is a terrible singer," she noted. I did not offer protest, as I realized something astounding: In that moment, my mother realized that I could actually make a living as a performer. Like any concerned parent, she had her doubts about my life choices, but listening to Wayne Coyne warble nonsense about rival scientists gave her the confidence that if that guy could do it, certainly her well-trained and disciplined son could. 

My other "Race For The Prize" story comes from 2006. I was on assignment at Lollapalooza in Chicago for Spin, which primarily kept me marooned in the press tent interviewing bands in between photo shoots for fashion spreads. One of those subjects was Coyne, whose publicist asked if I wanted to hang out on stage with the band later that afternoon when they played their set. I had a hole in my schedule, so I agreed. 

At the time, the Lips were rolling with one of the great live shows on the planet: Coyne regularly walked over the crowd in a sort of hamster ball, sent giant balloons over the audience, shot confetti cannons, and stood flanked by an army of revelers dressed either aliens or Santa Claus (a reference to the then-unreleased but still cultishly-adored Lips film Christmas on Mars). I was drafted as a Santa, and my only instructions were to keep dancing. In a suit that did not breathe and in the oppressive Chicago heat, I was not ready to dance. But as soon as I got a look at the rapturous crowd, and the Lips laced into "Race for the Prize," I lost my damn mind. The opening drum slaps of that song still send me to that place. 

As it happens, I had only been dating my now-wife a handful of weeks when I went to Lollapalooza in 2006, but though we hadn't been together that long, I missed her very badly. A few years later we would go to Lollapalooza together as a married couple, where I saw the Flaming Lips again—this time from the comfort of the audience, with my best friend by my side. 

Song of the Day: Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins, "Rabbit Fur Coat"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

As mentioned in previous posts, I am old. Not geriatric by any means, or even really middle-aged if I'm being perfectly honest. But since I have dedicated most of my adulthood to pop music, I have to measure myself in pop music terms, and in that universe I am ancient. Plus, I'm at the point in my career where it's possible I don't understand a lot of what I'm supposed to be thinking about (most of the EDM revolution, to be perfectly honest), and I'm susceptible to nostalgia (the last few features I wrote for Entertainment Weekly included a long tribute to the late David Bowie, an in-the-studio dive with Weezer, and a first-person walkabout trying to figure out what Kurt Cobain's music would sound like today). Case in point: Rihanna—perhaps the most thinkpiece-worthy radio-dominating artist not named Taylor Swift—just put out a brand new album whose release was hilariously botched, and all I want to talk about is a song from 10 years ago. 

Here's a thing that definitely makes me feel old: I'm at the point in my career where there are now retrospective re-releases and anniversary editions of albums I covered when they were new. It's one thing to talk about what Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire meant to me and realize that it turns 20 this year, but it's a whole other thing to look at the nostalgia coverage of a release from the mid-aughts and think, "I had conversations about those things, often with those artists, as they were happening." I confronted that reality last night at the first show on the mini-tour in celebration of Jenny Lewis' Rabbit Fur Coat, her first solo album cut with the Watson Twins that came out all the way back in 2006. 

I was a pretty big fan of Lewis' band Rilo Kiley, but even though I put songs like "It's a Hit" and "I Never" on nascent iPod playlists (shout out to the 3rd generation), there was a nagging (and honestly pretentious) voice inside me that couldn't commit to Lewis because she had been a child star. I have no idea why playing video games with Fred Savage would disqualify somebody from having a thoughtful career in music, but that's how my brain worked in 2004. 

Rabbit Fur Coat was a whole new ball of wax, though. I didn't know who the Watson Twins were (I still kind of don't, if I'm being frank), but the songs were undeniable, and the title track was particularly devastating. It spins the tale of Lewis' life as the breadwinner for her messed up mom, and the titular garment becomes a metaphor for her decadence and the emptiness at the center of her relationship with her daughter. When Lewis performed "Rabbit Fur Coat" at last night's show, she dismissed her band members (and the Twins) and took it on by herself, line after heartbreaking line. Perhaps it was because the show was in a church, or maybe it's just because Lewis has the sort of charisma that can't be taught, but the bangs-and-glasses crowd was hanging on every line in reverent silence. I came away wondering how Lewis manages to get through performing that song, as I get pretty choked up about it and none of that stuff happened to me. 

(As an aside: For the second straight day I've picked a song to write about because of its lyrical content, despite the fact that I've always taken the stance that lyrics don't matter and I don't care about them. Could the first revelation of this project be that I'm completely full of shit?)

The rest of the show was just as amazing. On a converted altar, Lewis played through the entirety of Rabbit Fur Coat with soul-baring guile, then broke for an intermission and tacked on a mini-set of jams from her exquisite 2014 release The Voyager, plus a new song called "Red Bull & Hennessy." She remained mysterious during the Rabbit Fur Coat portion of the show, noting that she had recently seen Phish at Madison Square Garden and noticed that Trey Anastasio doesn't talk to the crowd, and she was trying to ape that approach. But Lewis is a great all-time talker, and is one of my favorite interviews. In fact, one of the best thing I've ever written was when I talked with Lewis about old school hip-hop albums she loved during the promo push for Rabbit Fur Coat. She did not rap last night, but I like knowing that deep down, Lewis still thinks of herself as Bonita Applebum. 

Song of the Day: Lorde, "Team"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I was skeptical of Lorde when she first showed up. Her story—social media-minded New Zealand millennial makes a manic pixie bedroom record, uploads tracks to SoundCloud, blows up huge while still maintaining some mystery—seemed too precious to be possible, and I didn't think "Royals" was anything special (the fact that it was inspired by a photo of George Brett, who was once a real dick to my then nine-year-old brother when he asked for an autograph in a hotel lobby, didn't help). Even when "Royals" was making a seemingly permanent home in the upper echelon of the Billboard Hot 100, Lorde had the air of a one-hit wonder, as initially fascinating but ultimately disposable as her fellow Oceanian Gotye, whose "Somebody That I Used to Know" had only recently been disposed of. 

When I finally dug deep into Pure Heroine (I go back and forth about whether or not that is an amazing pun or a sign of the coming apocalypse), I realized that "Royals" is about the seventh-best track on Lorde's debut, and that the real juice was in "Tennis Court," "Ribs," and particularly "Team," which ended up being the record's third official single. 

"Team" begins with a weird a cappella portion, with some ethereal high harmonies and haunting echo that rapidly devolves into a record-skip loop that gets slowed down like so many chopped and screwed remixes (this is Lorde at her leanest, if you will). The beat is one of the more authoritative backing tracks on Pure Heroine, though it still retains its minimalist charms (there are so few things going on in this track—outside of the keyboard washes in the chorus, it's almost all kick drums and hand claps). Once the intro dies, it settles into a pretty traditional structure, though that doesn't make it any less weird as a pop song, particularly when it comes to Lorde's lyrics. 

Here's a thing that gets me in trouble as a music writer: On the whole, I don't care much about lyrics. A dopey lyric can still ruin a song for me, but I'm more interested in the feel of a song than anything that is actually said. I acknowledge that Kendrick Lamar is a fantastic lyricist who has a lot to say about a bevy of topics, but I'm more impressed by his ability to deliver those words and marry them to his intricate tracks than the actual content. Or, more simply, I would still think Lamar is an essential artist even if he was just rapping about Olive Garden or straight-up spouting gibberish. 

But I'm not immune to adroit turns of phrase, and the line on "Team" that gets me every time is "Living in ruins of the palace within my dreams." (Just typing it gave me goosebumps!) On the one hand, that is pretty straightforward teen journal poetry, the kind of thing a junior who has already read ahead in the AP English syllabus writes in the margins of her civics notes. On the other hand, I find it to be an intensely striking image, one that simultaneously evokes wonder and sadness in equal measure. It's tragic and grey, but not hopeless. A once-great empire is no more, but the capacity to imagine remains. What describes heartbreak better than that? 

Song of the Day: My Chemical Romance, "Ambulance"

I have been writing about music as a professional for the better part of 15 years, and before that I wrote about music for myself, crafting year-end lists (my number one album of 1995 was Rancid's ...And Out Come The Wolves) and pretending to be Kurt Loder delivering updates on Scott Weiland's rehab on The Week in Rock. The bulk of the money I earned as a teen went to paying for compact discs, and the vast majority of my memories from that era are associated with musical deep dives: scouring Tower Records in Boston for local band Jiggle the Handle, driving up to Enfield Music Outlet to score Nine Inch Nails bootlegs, getting lost on the way to an audition only to find salvation in a forgotten cassette of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. 

Music—particularly analyzing and thinking about it—was so important to me that, once I decided to leave the idea of becoming an actor behind, I tried to make it into a career. And I did! For a long time, people have been paying me to generate thoughts about what Rihanna songs mean and to ask Trent Reznor what his favorite records were while he was making The Downward Spiral. ButIt has remained the greatest job in the world, and I am in no way complaining—after all, it's better than working for a living.

However, there is something that happened somewhere along the way, which I suppose was inevitable: At some point, coming up with insights about songs became something of a bodily function. I suppose that means I got good at it, and in the sped-up version of the pop culture Internet we currently have, it has been valuable for me to be able to react on my feet and turn a surprise appearance by a Drake dis track or a Katy Perry single into something that vaguely resembles valuable content. 

But the process takes over eventually, and because efficiency trumps pretty much everything else on Twitter, there was no room left for actually feeling anything. I realized recently that I wasn't getting the same charge out of a great song that I used to, that everything felt different and duller. 

Now, I have a few theories about why this has happened to me, and the likely solution lies somewhere in the middle. Allow me some bullet points. 

• The music is less good. I don't like to give nostalgists their due (I can't stand that Rolling Stone idea that everything peaked in the '60s), but I have to allow the slight possibility that music made today—and we're talking mass-consumed pop music, which includes anything that might fall under the "rock" category, however ephemeral that idea is—simply isn't make with the same quality as the stuff I grew up with. Now, there are clear markers why this is wrong—I can honestly say that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a hundred million times better than those mid-tier No Limit Records products I banged in my car at 17 (shout out to Silkk the Shocker's Made Man). But less and less time is spent on album curation, and most albums are produced with digital delivery in mind, which means they sound like over-compressed garbage. So it is entirely possible that, sonically, the songs I'm listening to now are fundamentally different—and in many ways worse—than stuff from before the millennium. 
• I am old. Science says your taste calcifies some time in your early 20s because your brain becomes more immutable to new stimulus—in essence, it becomes physically impossible to have the same experiences with culture—particularly when it comes to music—once you hit a certain age. 
• My life is more diverse. The charge I got out of the excitement of new music was one of the only that I had back in the day, and now I apply those same cultural sensors to television, movies, books, video games, and even sports. I'm more active than I ever been. I have a wife and a series of adult relationships. I no longer need to be vindicated by what's coming through my headphones—I get my pleasures in myriad ways. 

Now that I'm no longer required professionally to have deep thoughts about Adele, I'm going to see if going deep still provides me with the thrill it used to. So every day, I'm going to break down one song. It may be something from my deep catalog of stuff I have collected over the years, or something new, or something I ask Spotify to randomly shout at me, but there will be a single track, a single focus, and (hopefully) some form of revelation. 

Today's song is by My Chemical Romance, a band I spent a lot of time thinking about professionally when I worked for Spin magazine and they were on the rise as the most important group to a certain large subset of Warped Tour youth. (In fact, I declared them "the last most important band on the planet" when they broke up, and I stand by that assertion.) The song below comes from a project called Conventional Weapons, which was supposed to serve as the follow-up to 2006's sprawling rock opera The Black Parade. At some point in the process, the tracks were abandoned, and MCR ultimately recorded and released 2009's Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys instead. Conventional Weapons was released as a series of singles shortly before the announced break-up, and it stands as a decent link between the theatrical gloom of The Black Parade and the more glam-oriented Danger Days. 

Of all the songs on Conventional Weapons, "Ambulance" is my favorite, largely because of the way the chorus swells—everything sounds fantastically multi-tracked, and singer Gerard Way is doing his best to harmonize with the Freddie Mercury version of himself (and largely succeeding). This song is the centerpiece of my running mix, and every time it pops up and reaches that chorus—which finds Way shouting "If you save my life, I will be the one who drives you home tonight," a fantastically suburban take on life and death—I can feel myself getting slightly faster. It's as though that sudden push to get to the song's salvation is also providing the extra boost to my runner's high. 

"Ambulance" makes me feel the way music used to make me feel, so it's as good a place to start as any. As always, play it loud.