A list (in no particular order) of my 500 favorite songs (singles, deep cuts, hits, and more) of all time. Includes a wide array of selections from rock, punk, funk, R&B, soul, classical, jazz, folk, and world music.
"Shake Your Rump" from the classic album Paul's Boutique (1989) is the line between "the old Beasties" and "the new Beasties" for me. All you have to do is listen to the first :30 of the track, and you instantly know that the frat boy shenanigans of 1987's Licensed to Ill are a thing of the past. In fact, they'd had a highly publicized split with Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, and Def Jam Records in 1988, the result of the band wanting a bigger cut of the profits and more creative control. This ultimately led to the Beasties relocating from New York to L.A. and hooking up with the production team of John King and Mike Simpson (a.k.a. The Dust Brothers). It also spawned weird rumors that the band was defunct because Michael "Mike D." Diamond had died from an overdose. (I can't help but wonder if Rubin and Simmons might have had a hand in spreading those very rumors.) Anyway, Mike D. wasn't dead, as he addresses in the second verse of the song (Well I'm Mike D., and I'm back from the dead / Chillin' at the beach down at Club Med...). And the Beasties weren't kaput. In fact, their tag-team flows were even more intricate and filled with pop culture references than ever before: they namecheck everyone from Fred Flintstone to The Brady Bunch's Sam the Butcher on "Shake Your Rump." On top of that, the song introduced the world to a whole new way of sampling recorded material. No longer were the Beasties just copping some Black Sabbath riff and looping it over a single Led Zeppelin breakbeat; the track was one, big sound collage (there are at least one dozen identified samples on the track), culled from a vast library of vinyl and pieced together in completely unexpected ways. It was as inventive as it was funky. My favorite moment of this song is still that first instance when DJ Hurricane scratches in Afrika Bambaataa saying Shake your rump-ah! from his 1984 collaboration with James Brown, "Unity, Pt. 2," and then segues into that fantastic Moog synth growl from Rose Royce's "6 O'Clock DJ (Let's Rock)" from the Car Wash soundtrack. It's still as fun and fresh as it was in 1989.
Midnight Marauders (1993) is one of those rare 90s albums that I can still put on without feeling silly or skipping a single track. Even the little interstitial "skits" featuring the robotic, Siri-like guide still work for the most part. If you're cherry-picking, the album contains several bonafide classics ("Oh My God" with Busta Rhymes, "Electric Relaxation," and "We Can Get Down"). My personal favorite, though, is still the lead single, "Award Tour." Beyond the lyrical acrobatics (and Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spit some extremely clever verses), it was the production on the track that drew my ear years ago. The backing instrumental is so melodic, so fluid that it's kind of hard to fathom that it's built from at least five different samples—the most prominent one being jazz keyboardist/composer Weldon Irvine's "We Gettin' Down." It still sounds amazingly fresh 20+ years later. That's a testament to the creativity of this crew and the group's not-so-secret-weapon Ali Shaheed Muhammed, whose inventive, tasteful production work with everyone from D'Angelo to the short-lived Lucy Pearl continues to amaze and move me.
I think the thing about The Fugees that amazed me was their ability to take all of these different, disparate elements, throw them into the blender, and then come out with something crazy fresh that sounded like nothing else going on at the time. The track "Fu-gee-la" off The Score (1996) is the perfect example. The whole song is built on the famous drum break from Lee Dorsey's "Get Out My Life, Woman" and a 5-second sample from keyboardist Ramsey Lewis's "If Loving You Is Wrong." Thing is, the samples are spliced and filtered in such a way that neither one jumps right out at you. In fact, the Lewis sample is barely recognizable; it sounds like a merry-go-round calliope playing over the soundtrack to a Kung fu movie. (And I love it.) If that weren't enough, then you've got Lauryn Hill recasting the refrain from Teena Marie's 1988 single "Ooo La La La" as a hip-hop boast about her crew. Not only is it clever, but her voice sounds like hot butter. But what really makes this song a favorite of mine is Hill's verse. Although Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel turn in decent verses, Hill's flow is in another galaxy. The intricate internal rhymes ('Cause we fortified, I could never hide, seen "Cooley High," cried when Cochise died...) blow my mind every time I listen to this song. It's evidence that Hill not only is one of the best vocalists of the past 20 years, but also one of the best emcees of all time.
I was living in Charlotte back in 2006. And hating it. (Sorry to anyone who lives there now. But I've never lived anywhere so insular and blind to its own problems yet so ready to admire itself in the mirror every chance it gets.) The only saving grace of the whole experience was that I was working for an online video marketing start-up that I believed in. I mainly interviewed clients and then scripted their online commercials, but I also was composing and recording all of our production music (to avoid copyright issues) and running a video blog that covered community events around the city. It wasn't unusual for me to put in a full day of work and then have to head right back out with my camera to interview the organizer of a charity run or street fair, and then come home to eat a late dinner by the glow of the video editing suite on my laptop before working on some new production music for Client A, who'd specifically requested "something that sounds like Duke Ellington" for her commercial. After spending my late night hours chopping up video or channeling the spirit of Billy Strayhorn, I'd crawl into bed around 1 a.m. to try and sleep before doing it all again. Inevitably, my asshole upstairs neighbor (I lived in a ground floor apartment) would come stumbling home around the same time—often with an entourage, fresh from some bar downtown, and the afterparty would continue into the wee hours of the morning. This was on weeknights, by the way; weekends were their own, unique frat house kind of hell. (I had to wonder how a salesman for Rubbermaid Industrial Products could literally and figuratively afford to live like Vince Neil, circa 1989, seven days-a-week.) Point is, the days were long, and I wasn't getting much sleep. I was enjoying the work, but I wasn't making any money (none of us were). There were lots of external stressors—from lingering college debt to family drama—making life tricky. And I was in a relationship that wasn't working. It all began to take its toll. One sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2006, I came home after a very long day. We'd had a brand new laptop stolen from our reception desk (all signs indicated that a client's wife had walked off with it while we were shooting the husband's commercial in our studio), and my faith in humanity was pretty shaken. I simply was exhausted and sick of the whole Charlotte experience. Anyway, I'd been hearing about this song called "Crazy" that supposedly was a collaboration between Thomas Callaway (a.k.a. CeeLo Green) and Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse). But I'd yet to actually hear it. So I was poking around iTunes, trying to get inspired to do some more backing music for an upcoming production, and I finally had a chance to preview the track. It was just a :30 snippet, and all I heard was the end of the second verse (You really think you're in control?) and that now-famous chorus. Chalk it up to extreme fatigue, but it hit me hard, and I started to bawl. CeeLo's Nina Simone-like delivery seemed to capture all of the frustration I was feeling, but he also seemed to be channeling the world's anguish in his man-in-the-wilderness wail. It was cathartic. Necessary, in fact. It was no surprise to me when it became a massive worldwide hit. As Burton told New York magazine in 2006, the basic track (which samples the instrumental "Last Men Standing" by Italian composers Gianfranco and Gian Pero Reverberi from the 1968 film Viva! Django) was a blatant homage to Spaghetti Westerns and the music of Ennio Morricone (think: "The Theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"). In a separate 2006 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Burton expanded on this by saying he'd played the instrumental track for Callaway, who was blown away by it. From there, that sparked a conversation between the two about artistry, insanity, and the public's perception thereof, leading them to the conclusion that no one takes artists seriously unless they're perceived as being crazy. Said Burton, "So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy. We talked about this for hours, and then I went home. But while I was away, CeeLo took that conversation and made it into 'Crazy,' which we recorded in one take. That's the whole story. The lyrics are his interpretation of that conversation."
If you go searching around the Web for "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," you'll find lots of references to British rock/R&B band Eric Burdon & The Animals, along with phrases like "Burdon's song" or "the Animals' song."
This is dead wrong.
It was Nina Simone's song first (in 1964).
As the 2012 book Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas tells it, Burdon came backstage after one of Simone's concerts to meet her soon after The Animals had scored big with "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" in early 1965, nearly a year after her own version had failed to chart. And the pull-no-punches Simone gave it to him right between the eyes.
"So you're the honky motherfucker who stole my song and got a hit out of it?"
What most sources online also don't get right is the story behind the composition.
The composer/arranger Horace Ott, a South Carolina native who also wrote/arranged for jazz organist Jimmy McGriff and drummer Bernard Purdie, came up with the song's haunting refrain (Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood) and basic structure after a fight with his future wife, Gloria Caldwell. He then took the tune in its skeletal state to pals of his, songwriters Bennie Benjamin and Sol Marcus, who fleshed out the verses and put the finishing touches on the composition, specifically with Simone in mind.
But if you take a look at the writing credits for the song, Ott's name isn't anywhere to be found. That's because Ott was a member of Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), whereas Benjamin and Marcus were members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP)—different organizations that protect artists' copyrights and make sure they get paid proper royalties for their work. At the time, that meant they weren't allowed to work together. So Ott handed over his writing credit to Caldwell. (Sort of appropriate, considering it was an argument with her that prompted him to sit down at the piano and create the first seeds of the song.)
I prefer Simone's version to all others—not just because it's the original, but also because of her vocal. It's supple and smoky, like a shot of Bourbon that simultaneously burns and soothes. What's more, she delivers every word with enormous passion and conviction.
Putting the performance in context of the 60s Civil Rights era, it doesn't take too much effort to realize that she wasn't just singing the lyrics from the point of view of a hurt lover; she's singing them as a black woman, stating her hope to be accepted as a human being. (Take a listen to the track again with that in mind, and the song takes on a whole new depth of emotion and meaning.)
Ott's arrangement also is engaging, combining tasteful strings with celeste, choir backing vocals, and some sort of melodic percussion that I've never quite been able to figure out. (Is it roto toms? Marimba? Some sort of everyday plastic container, played like drums? I've listened to the track on repeat before for a solid hour, trying to figure out what instrument Ott used to get that distinctive sound. And it still eludes me!)
I remember hearing "Don't You Want Me" from The Human League's 1981 album Dare on the radio as a kid. It sounded like a pop song made by robots from outer space, and I loved every minute of it. Still do.
Funny thing is, the band wasn't all that enamored with the final product, even though it turned out to be the group's signature song.
Frontman Phillip Oakey had written "Don't You Want Me" after reading a story in a teen magazine about a well-connected guy who pulls a young girl out of a dead-end waitressing job and turns her into a star, only to be dumped by said girl in the end. If you focus on the track's hook, it seems like Oakey wrote a simple breakup song, in which the male protagonist is begging his ex-girlfriend to rethink their relationship. But if you take a closer look at his lyrics, they paint a picture of a sociopathic lover who threatens to destroy this young woman's newfound success because she has (wisely) decided that it's time to move on. In other words, this is not a guy to root for. Although, it is one hell of a character study.
Taking it from that standpoint, Oakey envisioned the song sounding very dark and isolating. But Martin Rushent, the producer/engineer on Dare, wasn't aware of Oakey's vision or the true mood of the lyrical content; he just heard a song with a memorable hook that was begging to be a pop hit. So after the vocals and basic instrumentation were laid down in the studio, Rushent and keyboardist Jo Callis took over completing the track, adding copious layers of synthesizers to really ratchet up its pop feel. When they were done, they knew they'd created the band's first mega hit. But Oakey and bandmates Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley disagreed, as Rushent told Sound on Sound in a July 2010 interview.
"When (Oakey) and the girls returned and we played it to them, they absolutely hated it. 'We need to have a band meeting, Martin. This is horrible. You've completely ruined the song'."
Ultimately, it took execs from the band's record label stepping in and convincing them to release it as a single. And even though the impossibly catchy tune about manipulation and dysfunction turned them into pop stars and poster children for the glammed-out British synthpop movement overnight, Oakey & Co. still banished the track to the final slot at the end of Side Two on the album.
So every time I've seen an interview with Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden (a.k.a. MGMT), they have been stoned out of their minds. Initially, I thought it was an act. You know, "time to pretend" and whatnot. But evidence suggests they really do love some pharmaceuticals. (Here's a homework assignment: Google "MGMT interview," and try to find a single video clip where they aren't FaceTiming with Jesus. I double-dog dare you.) I'm not one to wag fingers. I believe everyone has the right to live his/her life however he/she pleases. But, Benj. Anj. Come on! Did you guys not learn anything from VH-1 Behind the Music, growing up in the 90s? We all saw the shows. The moral of every single episode—from Mötley Crüe to The Partridge Family—was that hard drugs will fuck you up. Period. You will wake up pantsless in the middle of a Lane Bryant in suburban L.A., face down in a pool of your own sick, screaming, "You can't arrest me! I'm Danny Partridge, dammit!" (Or whatever the sordid details were of Bonaduce's story...) You mark my words. All that to say, I love the song "Electric Feel" from the 2007 album Oracular Spectacular. It's strange, spacey, deeply funky, and hellaciously catchy. The first time I heard the song, streaming on a coworker's computer, my immediate reaction was, "Whoa. When did the ghost of Frank Zappa produce a song for The Bee Gees?" (It was, in fact, produced by Dave Fridmann, the man behind the console on most Flaming Lips records of the past 20 years.) And, yes, I've come to realize over the years that the lyrics are an ode to tripping on some sort of psychedelics, and not about an actual female. But I still can't get enough of that preternatural falsetto hook: I said ooh girl... I guess addiction comes in many forms.
