Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Kind of Blue; August 17, 1959
Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb
RIAA-certified triple platinum; top-selling jazz album of all time.

Noël; October 9, 2007
Josh Groban
RIAA-certified quadruple platinum; top-selling album of 2007.

A friend of mine recently asked me to turn him on to some tasty new music. I recommended a crash course in classic MBP, the catch-all term for Brazilian pop. And since it’s convenient, I’m using the blog as a platform, from which I imagine some of our other readers could potentially benefit.

I chose to keep it simple and focus on the uncontested kings of MPB from the ’60s through the ’80s: Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

Jorge Ben - Mas, Que Nada

and
É Só Sambar

The original “Mas, Que Nada.” Fuck Sergio Mendes and all his Black Eyed Peas. This is from Mr. Ben’s first album, full of charmingly polite yet insidiously funky samba ditties.

Caetano Veloso - Alegria, Alegria

and
Superbacana

These are from Caetano Veloso’s second album, the Sergeant Pepper’s of the Tropicália movement. Tropicália is a little too complex for me to feel like going into, but in short: in the late 1960s, a Brazilian offshoot of hippie culture sprang up, characterized by self-consciously psychedelic and eclectic music, art and fashion, but unlike American hippies, the Brazilians were living under a recently-founded military dictatorship and thus actually had something to be DayGlo-bitchy about. Eventually, the government kicked some of them out of the country, including Caetano Veloso. Anyway, this album straddles a delicate line between completely awesome and utterly cheesy, which is why I have to recommend it.

Gilberto Gil - Pé da Roseria

and
Domingo no Parque

Gil is essentially a fellow Tropicália traveler of Caetano Veloso, but, y’know, black. He got kicked out of Brazil too.

Caetano Veloso - Mora Na Filosofia

Four years after Tropicália, Caetano had decided to stop being so damned weird.

Jorge Ben - Eu Vou Torcer

and
Magnólia

Errare Humanum Est

Zagueiro

Jesualda

If it’s not apparent, I love me some Jorge Ben. Especially his mid-70s period, when the blood in his veins was apparently replaced with funk.

Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben - Nega

and
Taj Mahal

Gil and Jorge are incredible on their own, but together, armed with two acoustic guitars and one percussionist, they blow their entire recording catalog out of the cachaça. Rod “Constant Decline” Stewart liked “Taj Mahal” so much that he stole it in its entirety and gave it a thorough disco gutting to create the execrable “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” over which Jorge Ben sued (and won).

Now wasn’t all that tastier than an Instant Caipirinha Party?

For Harley, with love, and abundant cynicism:

If by the end of this mix you have not wholly internalized misogyny, you’ve proven yourself a feminist so steadfast in your conviction and ideological purity that you make Betty Friedan look like Betty Crocker. This mix would make Valerie Solanas reappraise the merits of the X chromosome. This mix would turn Rita Mae Brown into a man-identified woman. Think of it as trial by ordeal.

On to the music! 19 tracks, beginning and ending with the most eloquent of hip-hop’s misogynists, Jeru the Damaja. To give you an idea of the dominant tone, the name “Jezebel” appears in no less than three songs.

Play “Mixogyny” in sequence:

1) Jeru the Damaja - Da Bitchez

Jeru claims in this masterful polemic against the fairer sex that he’s not a misogynist, but true misogynists, sort of like Jews and gays, can effortlessly identify one of their own.

2) Elvis - Hard-Headed Woman

The King doubts the queens.

3) Capleton - Good in Her Clothes

This rousing dancehall number is actually a paean to the virtues of modesty, but as we are all aware, implying that so-called virtuous women are, well, more virtuous than their more exposed sistren is as much an affront to feminism as glass-based architecture.

4) The Soulmates - Pussy Catch A Fire

Maintaining the Jamaican groove, the Soulmates conduct a thorough investigation of the flammability of man’s favorite orifice.

5) Parliament - Handcuffs

Parliament is willing to take drastic steps in the name of love, and they don’t care if they look like a chauvinistic kind of whatever. Quite possibly the sweetest invocation of the threat of chastity belting ever captured on tape.

6) D’Angelo ft. Method Man and Redman - Left & Right

The ever-dependable and ever-stoned dynamic duo, Method Man and Redman, gleefully skewer D’Angelo’s falsetto-wafting loverman act with the crudest come-ons this side of your alma mater’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter, and also a somewhat inexplicable Happy Days reference.

7) Del tha Funkee Homosapien - Money For Sex

Del, in keeping with a venerable hip-hop tradition, views women’s perfectly natural desire for economic security with considerable ambivalence.

8 ) Niney - Look Pon Pussy

“Wouldja look ‘pon that? Damndest thing I ever saw! Looks…kinda like the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi…”

9) Amy Winehouse - Fuck Me Pumps

Women can be misogynists too (and really, they should know best). Amy validates the patriarchy by affirming that if you, like the news, get pressed every day, you may well be a skag. And really, she should know best.

10) Bob Marley & the Wailers - Adam and Eve

Remember next time you hold up Bob Marley as a revolutionary radical prophet that he once blithely sang “Woman is the root of all evil.” That’s so Peter Tosh of him!

11) Fleetwood Mac - Black Magic Woman

Peter Green, typically, fears the potent magick naturally flowing forth from the yoni of every wommon.

12) Frank Zappa - Jewish Princess

If the Bnai Brith lodged a protest, it must be good.

13) Funkadelic - No Head No Backstage Pass

Funkadelic lays down the debasing LAW.

14) Lauryn Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing)

In the drunken, shrieked words of my Papist compatriot, she has a voice like an angel. A motherfucking angel.

15) Dizzee Rascal - Jezebel

It may sound like a cautionary indictment of a certain type of young woman, but it’s really just chauvinist propaganda.

16) Raekwon (ft. Ghostface Killah) - Wisdom Body

When I get a bitch, I got a bitch. I also considered the wonderfully coarse “Ice Cream” off the same album, notable for Ghostface’s use of the rare Biblically-inflected pick-up line: “Your whole shell, baby, is wicked like Nimrod.” Ay yo, peep it, I know you love Sefer Bereishit.

17) Run-D.M.C. - Dumb Girl

Rappers were railing against the scourge of gold-mining women even in the mid-1980s.

18) Vincent Foster - Shine Eye Girl

Reggae artists share the same concerns as their spiritual descendants in hip-hop. Vincent Foster stresses the importance of fiscal responsibility in relationships.

19) Jeru the Damaja - Me or the Papes

And right back to Jeru, who responds to the controversy engendered by “Da Bitchez” with…yet another scathing denunciation of pink-toned materialism. Also featuring DJ Premier production at its finest.

Now isn’t that mix the most compelling argument for misogyny since Oprah’s vanilla-flavored ascendancy? Don’t you just want to run right out and repeal Roe vs. Wade?

The Clash garnered the title “The Only Band That Matters,” and for the last few years of the 1970s, they very nearly were. The band fulfilled the promise of its name with the visceral patois punk of their debut album, drawing energy from the riotous street-level alliance between skinhead and dreadhead, a white-hot white riot informed just as much by Big Youth’s Screaming Target as by the Ramones. No other band would, or could, rail with equal ferocity against the dreary employment and stagnant career mobility facing lower-class British youth (”Career Opportunities”) and the slicked-back trebly rootslessness of touring Jamaican reggae acts (”White Man in Hammersmith Palais”). The Clash’s punk burned not with the safety-pin-pierced, amphetamine-fueled rage of the Sex Pistols, but with the rumbling, woofer-rattling, Babylon-incinerating dread roiling within reggae’s dark heart, dread sooty with the ash of a nation in flames. Never Mind the Bollocks was a fist through a window; The Clash was a fist in the air.

And then, of course, after the hard rock excursion Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the Clash dropped London Calling, an album which screamed iconic from its cover to its last fading note. A maelstrom of disparate musical styles, revolutionary rhetoric and snatches of Americana, it is a testament to the Clash’s deific powers that they not only spun Cadillacs, Federico Lorca, Stagger Lee and dreadlocks into a cohesive artistic statement, but created one of the greatest albums of all time. It deserves its own post. It deserves its own book.

After London Calling, the Clash could have announced an album of sea chanteys and inspired only breathless anticipation. Instead, in the biggest of an endearing series of “fuck yous” to their record company, they announced the release of a 3 LP set for the price of a single album.

Enter Sandinista!

At 2 and a half hours, with 36 tracks sprawling out over three records, Sandinista! made the lengthy and stylistically diverse London Calling look like an EP. It was nominally the Clash’s dub album, but to call it so would overlook the stylistic pandemonium etched into the wax: rap, ’60s soul, political disco, rockabilly, rock, waltz, cocktail music and haaaard reggae (and that’s only disc one). But in their admirable effort to make as much Clash music as possible available to fans, the band overreached slightly; nobody really needed to hear the snarling “Career Opportunities” recast as a sing-along by the children of Clash organ player Mickey Gallagher, and drummers generally aren’t singers for a reason.

So the conventional critical wisdom about Sandinista! is that somewhere in those three discs lies a truly classic Clash album. This may be slightly unfair - most of the songs on the album have at least something to recommend them - but for the purposes of this post, we’ll go with the conventional wisdom. I have endeavored to divine the location of the musical Avalon hidden in the sea of Sandinista!, a fat-and-”Lose This Skin”-free version of the Clash’s most controversial album. And no, I didn’t just pick all the dub songs.

Play the Ideal Sandinista! tracks uninterrupted, in sequence (52 minutes):

1) Police On My Back

A hard-charging rocker that, save for far more reggae-inflected production values, would fit in perfectly on The Clash, “Police On My Back” is a killer opening number.

2) Corner Soul

The Clash at their melodic best.

3) The Crooked Beat

A sequel of sorts to “Revolution Rock,” “The Crooked Beat” is another loving Clash paean to the redemptive power of reggae. It’s also arguably the sickest drum and bass Topper and Paul ever laid on wax. Subwoofer a must.

4) The Magnificent Seven

And you thought Run-D.M.C. was old school? Keen observers of the musical scene, the Clash realized that the still-nascent rap developing among New York City’s black youth was the wave of the future. In keeping with other early rap milestones like “Rapper’s Delight,” nobody has any idea what the fuck the lyrics are talking about. Italian mobstah shoots a lobstah!

5) Something About England

Just good old-fashioned Clash songwriting.

6) Somebody Got Murdered

My pick for the second-best rock track on the album, after “Police On My Back.”

7) The Equaliser

In an album chock full of experimentative dubs, “The Equaliser” is the most successful, combining a potent political message, swirling violin (an instrument rarely heard in the genre) and the shuddering echoes and electronic bloops which constitute the hallmarks of dub.

8 ) Washington Bullets

Not only the most pointedly political track on the album - an indictment of the United States’ hand in various brushfire conflicts and revolutions around the world - but also the only Clash calypso song I’m aware of.

9) Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)

More proto-rap!

10) One More Time

One of the several Mikey Dread-assisted reggae tracks on the album, concerning that most classic of reggae topics: misery and the youth.

11) Charlie Don’t Surf

I reckon this song is in reference to the notorious surfing scene from Apocalypse Now. If Charlie did surf, it would be to this song.

12) Living In Fame

A declamatory Mikey Dread toast graces this version of “If Music Could Talk,” offering advice everyone could stand to take to heart: “If you say you a selector, you have to have good selections.” Not only is it a great track, the mysterious query at the end (”Who holds the key that winds up Big Ben?!”) makes it the perfect album closer.

Taste is of course subjective, so to encourage reader participation, I’d like to hear some other versions of the ideal Sandinista! I know at least a couple you own it, so drag it out and make your choices. Try to keep it to 12 tracks or less (i.e., one third of the album) and pay attention to sequencing. Then report back! It will make me happy…

In two years of college replete with an ever-mutating rogue’s gallery of drinkers, smokers, snorters, queens, Jews, Papists, naked Papists, Texans, naked Texans and malevolent force known only as “Reilly,” few heroes emerged. In fact, few people who could be relied upon to get through one meeting with visiting parents without crying, fighting someone or garnishing at least three sentences with the word “buttfucking” emerged.

But there was one hero. The rock around which our substance-addled eddies swirled, the Alice B. to our vodka-swilling Gertrude and Ernest, the bass player - the Minotaur. A backwards-hatted Italian square of jaw and torso, the Minotaur could drink and smoke all of us into a tear-soaked corner and still muster up more than enough fortitude to carry the ladies home. The Minotaur kissed girls on the hand and boys on the cheek and made it seem classy rather than Gallic. The Minotaur, armed with only a vintage teardrop-shaped Vox bass and a level gaze, mediated the many conflicts that inevitably arise when drummers are forced to provide beats for the Wicked, also known as lead singers.

The Minotaur’s room always - always - had candy.

And the Minotaur’s discerning taste led me to more than few discoveries in film, comics and music - among them one of my enduring favorites, dub-fiending Bristol trip-hoppers Massive Attack. We were relaxing in his room, ganja doubtless having been smoked, he put on “Karmacoma,” and I was hooked. So this Massive Attack-related post goes out to the Minotaur and all the Butterfinger, marijuana and gentlemanliness he represents.

I was recently discussing Massive Attack with Harry - specifically which of their albums is the most compelling, or in music geek’s terms, kicks the most ass. While we agreed that 100th Window wasn’t worth owning for anything beyond completeness’ sake, Harry favors the churning-rock-over-inky-electronica aesthetic of Mezzanine, whereas I could spin Blue Lines ten times in a row without growing tired of it. But the standard Massive Attack debates - whether Blue Lines or Mezzanine is the better album, whether the band is more at home in dub and soul or electronica and rock, whether No Protection, Mad Professor’s dub remix of Protection, actually exceeds its source album in quality - all overlook the secret weapon that makes every Massive Attack album worth multiple listens: reggae singer Horace Andy.

Massive Attack deserves boundless credit for both exposing Horace Andy beyond reggae aficionado circles and for sensing the darkness pulsing under many of Andy’s best 1970s Jamaican recordings and its applicability to trip-hop’s musical and cultural principles. Andy’s shuddering falsetto, as compelling today as it was in the early ’70s, invariably transforms the Massive Attack songs on which it appears into album highlights: the nervous “Spying Glass” from Protection, the breathtaking “Angel” off Mezzanine.

But as universally admired as Horace’s work with Massive Attack may be, his solo output still remains chiefly the domain of reggae cognoscenti, which is a tragedy. So Kosher Eucharist aims to rectify the situation both by exposing our (admittedly few) readers to a sampling of Andy’s classic records and by giving them an appreciation for how many of the Massive Attack tracks he appears on are direct covers or heavy quotations of his vintage originals. We’ll go in order of album:

The clattering dub-hop of Blue Lines’ “Five Man Army,” a precursor of sorts to the band’s most stunning track in this vein, “Karmacoma,” quotes from, count ‘em, three Horace Andy oldies: “Cuss Cuss,” “Money Money” and “Skylarking.”

Massive Attack - Five Man Army

Horace Andy - Cuss Cuss

Horace Andy - Money Money

Horace Andy - Skylarking

Protection’s “Spying Glass,” a melancholy lament about Babylon’s refusal to leave peace-loving Rastas alone, gives Horace Andy’s original a swirling remix without straying fundamentally from the source.

Massive Attack - Spying Glass

Horace Andy - Spying Glass

Which brings us to Mezzanine’s “Angel,” perhaps Massive Attack’s finest hour. Andy’s falsetto, never before sounding as chilling as it does here, lifts a pulsating, sinewy bassline into a gloriously apocalyptic midsection and then, with a mantra of “Love you love you love you love you” brings it right back round again. Without a doubt one of the finest recordings of the 1990s. But how many people know that the nucleus of “Angel” lies within a relatively innocuous Horace Andy song from the early 1970s, “You Are My Angel”? Well, now you do.

Massive Attack - Angel

Horace Andy - You Are My Angel

And here’s to hoping that the follow-up to 100th Window, rumored to once again feature Horace Andy and be slated for a 2007 release date, lives up to the promise of Blue Lines and Mezzanine.

It snakes out of speakers hanging over beach towns and boardwalks from Asbury Park to Eilat. Its rhythms reverberate through ten thousand freshman residence halls. It inhabits the iPods of white American suburbanites and the tape decks of African freedom fighters. It’s served as the soundtrack to so many spliff-burning sessions over its 23 years that an entire generation can catch a contact merely from hearing the words “I wanna love you / and treat you right.”

And it’s a thoroughly mediocre album.

In case you haven’t left your house for the past couple of decades - and if so, let me take this opportunity to say that Catcher in the Rye was thoroughly overrated - I’m talking about Legend, the cash-in greatest hits collection that somehow became the only Bob Marley album, the slice of revolutionary Jamaican dread found squeezed between Eagles and Fleetwood Mac greatest hits albums on every CD rack in middle America, the pantheon of reggae anthems sharing iTunes space with Jack Johnson on the computers of every high school and college student in the Western hemisphere.

Bob Marley may be the most significant musician of the 20th century, at least in terms of global impact - say what you like about John and Paul, but nobody sharpens the knives of revolution to “Norwegian Wood,” and nobody has sex to “Yesterday” - but of all the musicians who could truly be described as border-shattering international phenomena, as modern-day prophets (no, Boney M doesn’t count), Marley is the only one not afforded the respect of being treated as an album artist.

Take the aforementioned Beatles. Most people will insist on the importance of owning Sgt. Pepper’s. People who know what they’re talking about will insist on the importance of owning the White Album. But no record store clerk will ever respond to being asked what Beatles album one should start out with by saying, “Dude, you fucking have to hear One.” Because greatest hits albums are not representative of an artist’s creative vision expressed to its fullest, they are representative of the public taste - a public taste which turned Celine Dion into a more globally recognized figure than Mother Teresa (who was mixed down to near-inaudibility on “We Are the World”). A public taste which subjected the entire world to six uninterrupted months of hearing about the virtue of Shakira’s pelvis.

Fuck the public taste.

Relegation to greatest hits status is especially cruel to Marley, who along with his fellow Wailers and Lee “Scratch” Perry was instrumental in transforming reggae into a genre which viewed the album as not merely a collection of songs, but as a cohesive artistic statement - the Wailers/Perry collaboration African Herbsman was an album in the way that Sgt. Pepper is an album and Meet the Beatles isn’t. And of course, no one song on Legend is a bad song, because Bob Marley is one of those few artists possessed of both enough talent and a sufficiently early death to have never written a truly bad song, but the tracklist hits a surprising number of Marley’s more mediocre moments, and the sum of those somewhat pallid parts is barely quantifiable. Unlike, say, Catch A Fire or Exodus, Legend gives you no sense of satisfaction or completion at the end - it is an unconsummated album, a playlist, a background track. And of course, playlists have their place just as compilation albums do (for the uninitiated), but the ganja-sticky crux of the issue here is that Legend isn’t even a compilation of Marley’s best songs. Every album from which the songs on Legend are culled has a song that is somehow better, a song more deserving of your aural love (with a couple of exceptions) - and I’ll prove it.

Song on Legend: Is This Love
Better Song on Original Album (Kaya): Sun Is Shining

Note: Sun Is Shining is one of my top five all-time Bob Marley songs.

Song on Legend: No Woman No Cry
Better Song on Original Album (Live!): Burnin’ and Lootin’

Note: This is actually the definitive version of “No Woman No Cry”, and features an absolutely tasty guitar solo from Al Anderson. Essentially, every track on Live! except for “Get Up, Stand Up” is the definitive version of the song - as such, “Burnin’ and Lootin’” isn’t better than “No Woman No Cry”, but it’s as good.

Song on Legend: Could You Be Loved
Better Song on Original Album (Uprising): Forever Loving Jah

Song on Legend: Three Little Birds
Better Song on Original Album (Exodus): The Heathen

Note: I find “Three Little Birds” inoffensive, if overplayed, but Mobius hates it more than he hates himself, his people and the state of Israel. In any case, “The Heathen,” with its sinuous guitar lines and ominous lyrics, is a far superior song.

Song on Legend: Buffalo Soldier
Better Song on Original Album (Confrontation): Trench Town

Note: Confrontation is a pretty lackluster album all around - something Marley can’t be blamed for, since he was dead when it was released - so “Trench Town” isn’t a huge improvement over Buffalo Solider, but at least the melody of the chorus wasn’t yanked from an old children’s show.

Song on Legend: Get Up, Stand Up
Better Song on Original Album (Burnin’): Rastaman Chant

Note: You can’t really touch the revolutionary fervor of Get Up, Stand Up, particularly Peter Tosh’s snarling verse about the futility of ism/schism games. But the Wailers demonstrated their more spiritual side with the closing track of the same album, “Rastaman Chant,” a Rastafarized version of a traditional American spiritual. The longing for Zion expressed in the “fly away home” section of the song rivals anything in the Tanakh.

Song on Legend: Stir It Up
Better Song on Original Album (Catch A Fire): Concrete Jungle

Note: “Concrete Jungle” also appears on my all-time top five Bob Marley songs list. The guitar solo, which climaxes in a lingering, note-perfect squeal of feedback, was the work of Stax/Muscle Shoals session guitarist Wayne Perkins, who happened to be in England during Catch A Fire’s overdubbing and, despite never having heard reggae before, laid down one of the best recorded guitar solos in reggae music.

Song on Legend: One Love/People Get Ready
Better Song on Original Album (Exodus): Natural Mystic

Song on Legend: I Shot the Sheriff
Better Song on Original Album (Burnin’): N/A
Note: I may personally like some songs on Burnin’ a bit more than “I Shot the Sheriff,” but as an anthem, “Sheriff” is essentially immune to criticism.

Song on Legend: Waiting in Vain
Better Song on Original Album (Exodus): N/A
Note: “Waiting in Vain” is the best call made by whoever compiled Legend. It’s a perfect song. It’s on my top five list, and I can find no fault with it.

Song on Legend: Redemption Song
Better Song on Original Album (Uprising): Zion Train

Note: “Redemption Song” is part of that unfortunate collection of easy-to-learn, “deep” songs that have been ruined for all time by That Fucking Guy at the Party With the Fucking Acoustic Guitar. You’ll be passing around a blunt, shooting the shit, having a good time, and suddenly your ears are assaulted by the screech of a white kid whose parents made $200K a year launching into a spirited “Old piiiirates, yes they rob I…”. It’s not even a bad song. I just can’t listen to it anymore.

Song on Legend: Satisfy My Soul
Better Song on Original Album (Kaya): Running Away

Song on Legend: Exodus
Better Song on Original Album (Exodus): Turn Your Lights Down Low

Note: What’s the deal with “Exodus”? It’s one of Marley’s most anthemic and widely-recognized songs, and also one of his most mundane and repetitive.

Song on Legend: Jamming
Better Song on Original Album (Exodus): N/A
Note: Are there better Bob Marley songs? Yes. Does everyone - ev-er-y-one - love “Jamming” anyway? Yes they do.

I rest my case.

And with my case rested, I institute a new rule: if Legend is the only Bob Marley album you own, and the only reggae album you own, you cannot call yourself a fan of either Marley or reggae. All owning Legend qualifies you as, given its ubiquity, is a member of the human race. Diversify!

Why am I listening to new jack swing? And why can’t I stop?

The sickness is spreading to my brain.

Noted Spearhead of the Golden Horde and Butcher of Samarkand Mobius presented to me a welcome offering of music today, including a great many albums I’ve been meaning to get my hands on for months, even years (until today, I did not own the first Wu-Tang album - can you believe that shit?). Among them was a particularly tasty morsel - Sinéad O’Connor’s latest album.

No, seriously.

I can’t say I’ve ever been a big fan of Her Controversialness (although she does look cute in oversized combat boots), and I refuse to accept the commonly-held belief that her version and video of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” is definitive (probably because crying women make me uncomfortable) - but it seems she recently gave up on that whole “Mother Bernadette Mary” thing and travelled to Jamaica, whereupon she apparently terrified the normally breathtakingly misogynistic Rastas into submission long enough to convert to Rastafari. And then what did she do?

She recorded an album of note-perfect covers of classic roots reggae songs, with the inimitable Sly and Robbie holding down the riddim. And it’s really fucking good.

Admittedly, compiling a Burning Spear-heavy list of Babylon-burning reggae anthems and playing them faithfully makes it difficult to screw up. But really, the Irish lilt over deep roots works surprisingly well. Check it out:

Marcus Garvey (Burning Spear)

Door Peep (Burning Spear)

Y Mas Gan (The Abyssinians)

I also found this kind of cute story…it’s Burning Spear himself and Sinéad interviewing each other about music, Rastafari, Jamaican history, Irish history, religion and fish.

I predict Sinéad has a few more years of Rasta in her. After that, I reckon she’ll fall in line with current market trends and become Jewish. I mean, she named her latest spawn “Yeshua,” which is already an ominous sign.

Unless you don’t have a soul, and given the limited interest shown so far in these Songbook posts I’m going to assume that’s a common affliction among our readers (I kid, I kid, please affirm me), you’ve got a shortlist stashed somewhere of those songs that get you on your feet and slap a silly grin onto your face with exuberant force, those sing-along, air-guitar, hop-around-the-bedroom tunes that force you to cast aside your problems for three to six minutes. I certainly have my list, and on my more charitable days I’m tempted to believe that the true value of music, the key to its universality, lies not in any inherent standard of musical quality, but merely in its ability to allow the soul temporary release - but then I remember that some people’s shortlists doubtless include “You Light Up My Life” or Dave Matthews tunes or, I’ll say it, “Imagine,” and when I think of a song, I hear it in my head, and then I’m right back to feeling uncharitable.

But of course, I’ve already slapped the shit out of “Imagine,” and I’m sure I’ll get around to going a few rounds with Mr. Matthews’ insipid art-music-for-frat-boys eventually, so I’m going to hold on to my charitableness while it lasts and talk about the songs that have countless times over the years lifted me out of the self-pitying, silly-banged white person kind of funk and ensconced me in the loving embrace of the hop-around-the-bedroom funk in which we all belong. Love them.

The Clash - Revolution Rock

The putative closing track of London Calling (a deserved title stolen by the album’s hidden sole radio-friendly track, “Train in Vain”), Revolution Rock is a raucous, rollicking middle finger of a song, ruuuuuuuuude in the fullest Jamaican sense of the word, a resounding wax-printed testament that these 4 drugged-up London white boys felt and understood reggae in their bones, that they unlike their contemporaries realized that reggae was not merely the rhythm guitar chicken-scratching on the 2 and 4, but like the title implies, the sound of an untidy-yet-glorious revolution. Joe Strummer is audibly piss-drunk and ad-libbing half-forgotten lyrics that were probably never written down in the first place, the “country”-style reggae horns are slightly out of key, Topper Headon’s drumming becomes increasingly manic as the song gloriously disintegrates, and from the very first drum fill to the fade-out announcement “And bongo jazz a spe-ci-al-ity…,” “Revolution Rock” is absolute, unimpeachable musical perfection. This is the music, this is the beat of the Brixton street in turbulent late ’70s London, the music of disaffected immigrants targeted by sus laws, of stoned Rastas in the shebeens, of nervous white punks “so pilled up that [they] rattle,” all threatening to “mash up the nation” - but the sentiment underlying those threats isn’t anger at all, but sheer joy at the promise of a new tomorrow. Everybody may smash up their seats rocking to the brand new beat, but when the dust clears over the rubble, everything’s gonna be alright.

Stevie Wonder - Sir Duke

Stevie Wonder is unabashedly feel-good music for cool people, an acceptable indulgence in sunniness for the kind of music listeners who prefer music about death and unmitigated despair. There is no musician whose innate optimism shines as brightly through every note of every song, regardless of subject matter, as Stevie Wonder’s does - only Stevie could sing about urban decay, racism and heartbreak and still somehow make you feel better. And nothing is as relentlessly cheery as “Sir Duke,” a brassy tribute to everything that makes music wonderful. If you can’t feel it all over, you’re probably dead.

The Melodians - My Conversation

They may have possessed none of the revolutionary fire of Burning Spear, the spiritual intensity of the Congos or the prophetic appeal of Bob Marley, but the Melodians nonetheless remain one of reggae’s most appealing vocal groups. And the reason is songs like “My Conversation.” Reggae couldn’t be about burning down Babylon all the time - even the hardest dreads, not to mention the vast majority of reggae listeners who had nothing to do with Rasta militancy, needed to simmer down, and there couldn’t be a better way to do it than with this near-lullaby with its tinkling piano and exhortations to love your brothers and sisters. It never fails to put a smile on my face.

Parliament - Wizard of Finance

Parliament, unlike its more conscious counterpart Funkadelic, which spent the ’70s musically tackling issues ranging from psychologically shattered Vietnam veterans to rampant homophobia in the black community, tended to make its best music in pursuit of a goofy good time. It’s most famous for exhorting dancers to tear the roof off the sucka, and for its tripped-out space-obsessed funk operas, but Parliament (made up chiefly of former members of R&B vocal groups) had a way with a falsettoed-out ballad, injected of course with the group’s trademark warped humor, and there can hardly be a better example than “Wizard of Finance.” The lyrics are as close as George Clinton and crew ever come to undistilled sweetness, slinging around stock market puns - “If I were a wizard of finance, I would probably invest my life in you / my dividends would be so tremendous, baby, even Dow Jones won’t believe it’s true” - in the greater service of good loving, and the music is pure space R&B bliss.

João Gilberto - Rosa Morena

João Gilberto is one of my musical heroes - although he would eventually be regarded as one of the titans of modern Brazilian music, and become the international face of bossa nova in the wake of his collaboration with Stan Getz on the record-smashing Getz/Gilberto, before becoming famous he took a few years off to sequester himself, play his guitar and smoke a heroic amount of ganja. Truly, a man after my own heart. And laid-back as I am, his meditative bossa nova poems provide the perfect accompaniment to any activity that discourages rushing - i.e., any activity worth doing. “Rosa Morena” is my favorite, a langorous, sun-kissed entreaty to a beautiful young girl with a rose in her hair to lay aside her girlish pose and come dance. Its quiet chords and hushed vocals make you want to do drop the mundane responsibilities and affectations of your life and do the same. As João repeats, mantra-like, in the closing bars of the song, “the people are tired of waiting.”

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers - Moanin’

I could probably go on about this song for at least the length of a thesis (I really should have tried to get a musicology major), but I’ll try to keep it short. Suffice it to say, I love every second of this song’s eleven minutes. Art Blakey’s groove shakes the Earth, Lee Morgan’s solo is an absolute face-melter, Bobby Timmons is the rawest, funkiest cat to ever occupy a piano bench and the song’s outro is essentially the musical equivalent of an orgasm. The pinnacle of hard bop. Every time a new lady comes into my life, I play this song for her. If she doesn’t dig it, we’re done. Seriously. Call it immature, but a man has to have his priorities.

And there you have it - I’ve given you the secret to eternal bliss. Or if that’s overstating the case a little, I’ve at least given you all the knowledge you need to placate me. Do me any wrong short of running over my dog, play me one of these songs, and I’ll probably forget what I was even mad about. And I might even get a little lip-synching action in.

Oh, hell, let’s have one more sample of musical prozac for the road, a song that will make every single person born in the 1980s light up like a damn chanukiyah (and with good reason)…

Ooh, perhaps some reader participation would be in order. What’s on your shortlist of vitalizing songs? Share! I promise not to judge…

I just realized, because I’m sometimes slow on the uptake, that two songs I really like by two (nominally) different artists I really like are built on the same sample.

Check it out:

Portishead - Glory Box

Tricky - Hell is Round the Corner

I suppose one could turn that into a comment on the sample-predatory nature of trip-hop, which apparently eventually had to start sampling itself in an Ecstasy-soaked cannibalistic Bristol orgy (Tricky even ripped off his own lyrics from his Massive Attack days), but I feel there’s a more important issue to raise: if Tricky and Beth Gibbons from Portishead got into a knife fight, who would win?

My money is on Beth Gibbons. Any woman who can write a line like “Render your heart to me” and sing it with a voice that sounds like it’s hiding a shiv in its boot isn’t someone you want to bet against.

Okay, normally I’m opposed to posting Youtube videos on blogs, because I find it unaesthetic, but I’m about to throw aesthetics, as well as any potential lingering illusion that I was anything other than a (foul-mouthed) little kid at heart, to the wind. Because what I have found must be shared.

In keeping with my recent Prince kick, it’s the Purple One himself, circa the mid-nineties “O(+>” years, performing “Starfish and Coffee” off Sign ‘O’ the Times…on Muppets Tonight.

I have but one onomatopoeia: squee.