I'm a big hip-hop fan. I'm often willing to overlook the relatively common misogyny, violence and other stereotypes to find the gems of the ouevre. That relatively few hip-hop songs have made the top 500 songs list is a little disappointing to me. That this song, apparently about pushing it on the dance floor, made the list is mystifying.
I'm not sure I believe that this song's about dancing. It all sounds like it was intended to be a little sexual. It's also completely bloody awful. It has no redeeming features whatsoever. I'd rather 'push' pins into my eyeballs than 'push it' to this song. It's like a TV show caricature of a bad 80s rap song, or the theme song to an early 80s Eddie Murphy movie.
Verdict: Push off
Tomorrow: John Mellencamp - Pink Houses
Monday, July 27, 2009
The Del-Vikings - Come Go With Me
Oh hell yes, there is nothing that this red-blooded male loves more than some Del-Viking acapella-style vocal harmonising. Even cold beer, fast cars and wild women are mere distractions on the road to the shining temple of the Del-Vikings. And why not? Everyone knows that nothing is cooler than vikings, not even pirates or ninjas (ninja-pirates may have a slight edge on them, but that's just semantic frippery).
That said, I'm getting the impression that these rather honey-voiced, shiny-faced, smartly-attired young men didn't know much about rape, pillage or drinking the blood of their vanquished foes. In fact, I'm feeling a little cheated. I bet they don't even believe in Valhalla. I can't see them singing this crap while they row their longboat to a faraway shore for a relaxing spot of massacre. Frauds. See image comparison below:
Viking.
Del-Viking.
The song sucks. I was lying, I hate acapella-style vocal harmonising. These guys make Celine Deon look like a marauding beserker. The song is so saccharine sweet it made my teeth ache. If they were singing about decapitation, or even the aerodynamic properties of battleaxes, I'd be more inclined to listen to it, but as far as I can work out, there's not even a mention of Thor.
These guys are vikings like I'm a real music reviewer.
Verdict: This is one of those times I wish for a real horde of vikings.
Talking about rock nutters, here comes a man who knows a thing or two about being a lunatic: Little Richard. Despite managing to (roughly) sustain a career that started in 1945, he's done pretty well for being an ordained minister, most notably in terms of the rather liberal sprinklings of drugs and homosexuality that have peppered his career. All that and he still manages to look like Prince's bulldyke birth mother.
And the song? It's raucous, bouncy and nowhere near as camp as something made by Little Richard should be. It's based on an 8 bar blues but, to be honest, that would be like saying that an atomic bomb is based on a firecracker. The drumming is fantastic, all driving and frantic and copied a million times by everyone from Led Zeppelin to Eddie Cochran. The sax is just dirty and Little's voice is straining and multidimensional, while still managing to be louder than the rest of the band put together. You get the feeling that he would consider not having a microphone only a very minor inconvenience. His trademark hoots sound like an owl on crack, having a DH Lawrencian 'crisis', at earth shattering volumes.
Horrific similes aside, this is, along with Muddy Waters' Rollin' Stone, one of the cornerstones of everything that is good and holy in the name of rock and roll. This is a man who gave a young Jimi Hendrix a spot in his band and of whose voice Hendrix stated that he wanted his guitar playing to sound like. How can I review something like this without taking into account its immeasurable importance? I could be churlish and point out that the production is pretty rubbish (they weren't very good with things like levels in those days) and the sound's quite muddy, but that would be disregarding all of the characteristcs that make this one of the first documents of a sound that would sweep the world, leaving so much dead and burned in its wake and ushering in rock and roll, the sound of debauchery and delinquency and all manner of good things.
Verdict: Incomparable Tomorrow: The Dell-Vikings - Come Go With Me
I really do love the Wailers. I promise, I do. I'm not about to disavow Robert Nesta Marley's importance to music, socio-politics and the war against racism and colonialism &c &c. But don't make me listen to this song again. Please. Hell, I'll listen to the live versions of Lively Up Yourself or No Woman, No Cry from 1975's Live album a million times over and never get tired of them, but this song just doesn't capture the essence of Marley's or the Wailers' talent. It's not raw enough. Great reggae should, like the blues, be raw as hell, not sanitised and overproduced. This is a song about killing a policeman over drugs - it's not meant to be an out-and-out pop song.
The only time you really hear Marley singing is at about 3:28 in the song, when he's belting it out with all the conviction of a man who shot the sheriff and realises that this may not have been the smartest career move. The rest of the song is just far too clean and poppy for me, which is a shame, because had it been a bit darker and rawer (like the live version), it would have made for a better song, in my opinion. But then again, what do I know?
That said, how did Marley fare on the Rock Nutter Scale (tm)? Pretty well, really. Needless to say, he has the drugs aspect covered, what with being the figurehead of stoned Trustafarians everywhere. He managed to piss off enough people to get shot, probably due to his political views, and was arrested and convicted in the UK for possession of marijuana (what a suprise?). He was also an alleged womaniser of note who managed to father a brood who seem pretty keen on destroying the Marley name in music. OK, so his real name was actually Robert Nesta Marley but, apart from that, most of the boxes are checked. He may not be Keith Richards, but he's done himself proud.
Verdict: Maybe he should have shot the deputy too?
The only thing I can say about this song is that the version that Cher did with Beavis and Butthead is better. But I'm not going to say that, because Cher, clearly a robot from the future sent back in time to rid the planet of humans via autotune, will find me and terminate me.
I can, however, understand why Bill Murray was always trying to kill himself in Groundhog Day. Having to wake up to this everry day would sap my will to live pretty damn quickly too.
Oh, and Sonny Bono is not related to a certain pretentious Irish halfwit.
Verdict: This sucks more than anything that has ever sucked before.
Tomorrow (if I'm still alive by then): Bob Marley - I Shot The Sheriff
I have some personal history with this song - it's iconic, chorusy bass intro was one of the first pieces of music I (and many of my contemporaries) learned to play on the guitar. I probably listened to this song, and the rest of the first 6 or 7 tracks on Nevermind, a million times between the ages of 13 and 15, as I traversed the dark void of being a middle class adolescent. It was never my favourite song on the album though - that honour went to Smells Like Teen Spirit or Lithium - but I know this song.
And, while listening to All Apologies recently was a pleasant suprise, re-listening to this is a little disappointing. Where All Apologies felt like a far more mature song, both musically and lyrically, Come As You Are is a little more adolescent, immature and raw, and it's not helped by that. It does a good job of furthering the definition of Cobain as a songwriter capable of stitching together immediate, catchy, punky songs from hooky riffs (or stealing the riffs from Killing Joke, as is the case of this song) with lyrics that make Bob Dylan look like a real poet.
My other issue with this song is that it doesn't really change tempo - while the dynamics of the song changes, Dave Grohl could have been replaced by a drum machine with no appreciable detraction from the song. It could even be argued that the world would be a better place if Mr AIDS-denialist Grohl was replaced by a machine (probably a discussion for when we review a Foo Fighters song in the top 500. Oh, wait, no Foo Fighters songs made it? Guess that proves who the talented one was).
On reflection (after listening 3 or 4), that assessment seems a little harsh - the tempo does change a bit, but there's nothing like the near-gleeful (this is Nirvana we're talking about, so gleeful is probably a bit excessive) tempo shifts of 'Teen Spirit or All Apologies that accompany the change in song dynamics. So let's change tack and go back to tearing the song apart for being immature. Well of course it is. Cobain recorded it for the first time when he was 24. And a junkie. And not married to Courtney Love. Clearly being married to Love was enough to turn him into a cynical old git in two short years. I'm suprised it took that long, to be honest.
All in all, this isn't the best Nirvana song. In fact, it isn't even the best song on the album. But it's still good enough to get into the list, which should be testament to how good a song it is. But it's not actually that good a song. As a piece of my youth, it's left an indelible mark, but as a song, it's a bunch of non-sequiturs draped around a riff stolen from Killing Joke and it would have had none of the impact it did if it wasn't preceded by Smells Like Teen Spirit.
After some pretty maudlin songs recently, the rootsy ska of Pressure Drop is like a breath of fresh air, lightening the mood and bringing smiles to glum faces. It's also one of the first songs to introduce reggae to a global audience, thanks to its appearance on The Harder They Come, and has been covered by everyone from The Clash, The Specials, Keith Richards, The Oppressed and.. erm.. Robert Palmer and Izzy Stradlin and the Juju Hounds.
Nevertheless, it's a great song - all bouncy ska and vocal harmonies courtesy of the Maytals with Toots Hibberts' toasting riding the surging wave of pressure. It's easy to imagine this song sounding like a breath of fresh air to a world caught in the tense, confrontational late 60s, listening to Pinball Wizard and Whole Lotta Love. Added to this, imagine the impact of this song in those areas of London where Jamaican immigrants lived, often in terrible conditions, feeling cut off from their homeland. This song's implications are gigantic, both on the British ska movement, typified by the Specials and Selector, and on the wider UK punk movement, which identified with reggae and disenfranchised Jamaicans long before The Clash discovered Junior Murvin's back catalog and wrote White Man (In Hammersmith Palais).
This song makes me feel happy. I don't know what the hell Toots is singing about. It's not clear whether Toots do either - he was a man known to appreciate Jamaica's other big export, to the extent of spending 18 months in jail for possession - but the results are a great reggae song. It's probably a little raw to appeal to trustafarians the world over but, as one of the archetypes for the ska movement that would spawn some of my favourite bands and music, it stands as a testament to reggae's ability to uplift.
A tale of woe via young love and death by Harley Davidson, The Leader of the Pack is viewed as possibly the greatest of the Brill Building classics. Sung in classic call-and-response style by some delinquent street toughs from Queens, New York (ring any bells?), legend has it that this song features both a real Harley Davidson (driven into the studio which happened to be on the second floor of a hotel, via the lobby) and a young Billy Joel playing the piano. The song was also refused airplay by the BBC because it was thought that it may incite mod/rocker violence*.
The song? It's horribly produced. The instruments are muddy, the vocals are metallic and the mix is wishy-washy as hell. It's almost a relief when Jimmy the leather-jacketed thug crashes his bike and you know that the end is near. This is rebellious schoolgirl music for the cloth-eared. I'm sure that it's a great song (and the minor key vocal style is enticing) but it's just too harsh on the ears, in a bad way, to bear repeated listens.
*And that's a bad thing? I would have paid good money to see Keith Moon beat the piss out of Elvis.
From jaunty and twee to "dear god, could they be any more morose and miserable?". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Lou Reed is in the house with his merry band of pranksters, The Velvet Underground. And they're here to tell you about kittens, flowers, sweetness and light. Actually, they're here to talk about heroin and how it makes them feel (apparently, like Jesus's son and how they guess, but just don't know). And who said men never talk about their feelings?
Reed also manages to perform admirably on the Rock Nutter Scale (tm). To whit: Drugs? Umm, yes. Reed knew his way around heroin and quaaludes. And probably everything else.
Name? Prosaically no. Real name: Lewis Allan Reed.
Weird and Unstable Behaviour? Does repeated affairs with transvestites count? Or hanging out with Warhol and his factory? Read Please Kill Me and any doubts will be erased. Also, 3 words: Metal Machine Music.
Upbringing? He was given electroshock theraphy for homosexual tendencies. Seems suitably weird.
Trouble with the Law? Not really.
If you ever thought about doing heroin, listen to this song and you'll realise that it really can't be any fun. That said, maybe it's more fun than actually listening to this song. Especially when the screaming feedback starts. That's when it gets really fun. Thanks for that, John Cale, my eardrums were doing fine before you started trying to perforate them with viola feedback.
It may not be a fun song to listen to, but that doesn't mean that it is bad in any way. The point of this song is, rather than to glorify heroin, to demystify it, to express in music the anticipation of feeding an addiction, the rush of the drug, the bliss that follows it, and finally the all-encompassing wash of the chaotic feedback as everything comes together. The song starts slowly with clean guitars and Reed's near-monotone, building to a false crescendo at the first chorus, slowing up again for the verses and building in pace and volume again for the choruses, a rollercoaster of excitement and anticipation and relief, finally reflecting the narcotic bliss and pain and rush, driven by Maureen Tanners more and more frantic drumming and Cale's screaming viola feedback but offset by the mellowness of Reed's voice, before the calmness envelops the listener again and normalcy returns.
It's all very harrowing in fact. It would probably sound a little derivative and unauthentic were it released in a post-Trainspotting world, but its context is original and Reed's cachet as a true rock nutter can only enhance this songs claim to glory.
(Let's be clear here, the closest I've come to heroin is watching Trainspotting)
From the Magical Mystery Tour album, Penny Lane was originally released as a double A-side single with Strawberry Fields Forever, a release that George Martin considered the finest single released by The Beatles.
It's a fine, jaunty song but has prompted a rare apology. When I called The Twist twee, I really meant it, but I've realised that twee is relative. This song is more twee than .. something incredibly, unutterably, ridiculously twee. It's the Deathstar of twee. It is indescribably twee. This assessment is, of course, based on the fact that I consider most of The Beatles' output to be such. This song, however, takes the biscuit. There's none of the ironic detachment of Sgt Peppers or the youthful joie de vivre of I Want To Hold Your Hand, merely almost nauseating cuteness and daintiness. It should be enough to make you want to mug an old lady, or think impure thoughts about Kate Hudson's Almost Famous namesake groupie, just to feel better about the world, but the song is actually pretty good.
OK, it's great. And it doesn't get out of your head. Especially not the chorus, which I have spent a good portion of the morning cursing due to it's limpet-like attachment to my rather feeble mind. Plus it's got little sexual references like "keeps his fire engine clean" (apparently, whatever that means). And you can also imagine Kate Hudson all dressed up like she was in Almost Famous..
(gratuitous Kate Hudson photo)
Point is, it's a little McCartney for my liking, but it's still a fantastic song.
Verdict: Kate Hudson Kate Hudson Kate Hudson Kate Hudson etc
Glen Campbell is an unsung hero of rock and roll. Well, at least the less rock-y side of rock and roll. This is the man who played guitar on most of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound work, as well as on songs by Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, The Kingston Trio, Merle Haggard, The Monkees, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, The Troggs, Frankie Laine, The Association, Jan & Dean, and The Mamas & the Papas. He was also a touring member of The Beach Boys, filling in for Brian Wilson in 1964 and 1965 and played guitar on Pet Sounds.
This was the dude that played guitar on Ol' Blue Eyes' Strangers in the Night, You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' by The Righteous Brothers, and I'm a Believer by The Monkees.
So, while he may not be Tony Iommi or Jimmy Page, the man clearly has some chops and a pretty sound resume. What he does not have, however, is even an ounce of rocking out in this song about a dude running out on his lady. Clearly things didn't work out particularly well because mr Campbell ends up running all the way to Oklahoma. I'm thinking he knocked her up.
Basically, this is Glen Campbell telling some anonymous woman that she is the worst song, played on the ugliest guitar. By The Time I Get To Phoenix is not, however, the worst song. It's just pretty insiduous - the swells of strings, Campbell's mournful vocals, the quietly strummed minor chords in a periphery - it all manages to make you feel pretty sad on both parties' behalf, like you're watching a relationship implode, knowing full well that neither party wants it to happen but that there is also no choice in the matter. There is nothing exculpatory or self-pitying about the song, it's merely Campbell's farewell note. When I first heard this song, I was fully prepared to pan it. Now I quite like it. And repeated listens have caused it to grow on me. It's not necessarily something I would listen to repeatedly, but I can think of worse songs to listen to when you've run out on your lady and are feeling bad about it.
For the record, it's also been covered by Dean Martin, Georgie Fame, Isaac Hayes, Marty Wilde, Solomon Burke, Burl Ives, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Hayes' version runs an incredible 19 minutes, including a full backstory of why the breakup too place.
In a happy twist, Campbell scores pretty well on the Rock Nutter Scale (tm): - Name: Glen Travis Campbell is about as strange as white bread. An estimated 15% of the male population of the US's Red States have Glen, Travis or Campbell in their name (and 20% of the female population). No points. - Drugs: Tales of cocaine and alcohol abound. Tick. - Erratic Behaviour: Married four times and the father of eight children. Numerous near death experiences, heavy spending and public brawls with wife number three as a result of drug and alcohol abuse. Tick. - Time in Jail: Ten days for drunk driving. Arrested, but not prosecuted, for battery on a police officer. Tick. - Strange Upbringing: One of twelve children, born in a town with a population of less than 100 in deepest Arkansas. You better believe that was a weird upbringing. Half points.
Not bad, Glen, not bad. You almost snuck past Willie Nelson to be the most crazed country singer so far. But Willie's just cooler, gnaw'mean?
Verdict: Do you think Oklahoma has an extradition policy?
With a voice sharing the approximate tone and volume of a horn section and a name parodying Fats Domino, Ernest Evans, aka Chubby Checker, went from being a musical impersonator to the face of a global phenomenon (easily comparable with pet rocks and the hula-hoop) with the release of his cover of Hank Ballard's The Twist. The song actually has a number of relatively dubious accolades - it's the only song to have two identical versions hit US #1 and it's spawned a number of increasingly dire sequels - Let's Twist Again, Slow Twist and, worst of all, The Twist (Yo Twist!) with half-witted comic rap group The Fat Boys.
In addition, it's probably the only US #1 to be a direct copy of another song - as American Bandstand producer and presenter Dick Clark couldn't get Ballard to perform the song on his show, he merely hired Checker and a band and recreated the song in the same key and tempo, getting Checker to impersonate Ballard. The result was such that Ballard initially heard the song, he thought it was him and later complained that he had been "cloned".
Ethical issues aside, the song is a little twee. Fatty keeps singing about how his sister dances - while this would normally be pretty far over the weird/creepy line, the song's too geeky and innocent to be particularly twisted.
And I keep thinking he's singing "come on little bitch / and do the twist".
Verdict: Twisted sister
Tomorrow: Glen Campbell - By The Time I Get to Pheonix
Before getting himself Sam-Cooke'd (i.e. shot by a woman in a hotel room, not to be confused with being Robert Johnson'd, or killed by a cuckolded husband), Sam Cooke was one of the brightest stars of the late 1950s and early 1960s American R&B movement, as well as a successful gospel singer, civil rights activist and record label owner. And there's a pretty good reason for this - the man had a VOICE.
The music is all huge swells of strings, muted horn and subtle, almost rhumba-like percussion. It's pretty generic and, to be honest, ridiculously schmoove. Far too schmoove for me. Luckily, it's not the main attraction - that honour goes to Cooke's voice, which is smooth as an oil-slicked penguin and seems to treats the verses as an opportunity to soar above the mundanity of the song. And the song really is mundane - the lyrics are as cheddar-tastic as the music.
The result is an annoying muddle - the song is too corny to really do anything other than use as a cod-romantic soundtrack to some kind of nauseating pseudo-romantic moment, but Cooke's voice is so phenomenal that it almost rescues the song. Almost. I want to like the song, hell, I want to love it, but it's cheesier than a bath full of cottage cheese. Having Cupid on permanent rotation for about 45 minutes helped me realise that it's just an innocuous song - it's lack of an edge means that it's going to be condemmned to be background music, a role in which, sadly, it functions just fine.
As I wrote previously, Guns n' Roses are not exactly a favourite on this blog. So it was with a certain enthusiasm that I sharpened the knives against the grindstone of sarcasm in preparation for today's post. Needless to say, the temptation to use the phrase Paradise Shitty was massive. I'll get it out of the way then: The only way to describe this song is Paradise Shitty.
Boom! Genius! Review done. Time for booze and groupies.
More?
Well, alright. You see, this song isn't actually as reprehensible and juvenile as Welcome to the Jungle, despite being written by the same bunch of drunken miscreants (normally a compliment when coming from me, in this case, not) at the same time. The truth of the matter is that this song doesn't come across as forced, which is not the case with Welcome to the Jungle. Welcome to the Jungle sounds like Rose was trying his absolute hardest to be a misanthrope whereas Paradise Shitty (damn!), erm, City is a little more relaxed and shows the more melodic, mellow road that GnR were going to walk down with the best of the Use Your Illusion albums (Civil War, November Rain etc).
Big ups to them but I still wouldn't listen to this song if I had any kind of a choice in the matter. The song itself is almost painfully over-produced and Rose's voice doesn't ever stray from his timeworn canine-deterrent formula. Add to this completely juvenile lyrics and the result is something that, while not being entirely painful to listen to, still manages to be mildly offensive. And by this time you haven't even factored in the personalities of the various band members..
There's a degree of redemption in Slash's guitar playing - he appears to be going completely wolvo-beserker for most of the song and he's actually quite a good guitar player, in the air-guitar-hero-wanker-y mode. But in the end, it is Slash's guitar playing that truly symbolises GnR, and especially everything off Appetite for Destruction, quite nicely - showoff, adolescent and masturbatory.
This is the sound of someone taking themselves very seriously, for no good reason.
George Harrison, eh? Apparently he had some talented friends. Clearly that bunch managed to lean on a record executive heavily enough to get Harrison a record contract because there is no way that he would have gotten one on the basis of his talent. Well, certainly not if My Sweet Lord is anything to go on.
And what a pile of execrable, pseudo-pious bullshit this is. This is the kind of music that middle aged housewives on their Hare Krishna experimentation phase decide they want played at their funerals. To add to it all, this song is nothing but a rip off of The Chiffon's He's So Fine. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Probably the worst bit of an awful song are the chanty backing vocals. Music has to work pretty hard to be worse than My Sweet Lord's sickly sweet backing vocals proclaiming "Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, etc etc". Harrison did, apparently, manage to push the boat of shit out a bit more by exhorting crowds at his concerts to “chant the holy name of the Lord.” before singing “Om Christ, Om Christ, Om Christ” ad nauseum, adding, “I know a lot of you out there think that’s swearing, but it’s not! If we all chant together purely for one minute, we’ll blow the roof off this place" (Giuliano, The Private Life of George Harrison). I don't know how the crowd managed to contain themselves but, seeing as the stadium probably didn't have a roof anyway, disaster was narrowly averted.
By this juncture we've worked out that Harrison is the untalented, psycho-religious Beatle. One would imagine that it would be hard to be less talented than the drummer (there's an old joke about rock drummers: How do you suffocate a rock drummer? Lock them in the car on a hot day. Guffaw), but Harrison has managed to sink to that low. Basically, this is one of the worst songs I have had the displeasure of finding on this list and it will forever colour my view of Harrison. Verdict: My sweet load of crap.
I last remember listening to this song as a fourteen or fifteen year old, when everyone else in the world was also listening to Nirvana - Kurt Cobain had just offed himself and, in typical fashion, was being hailed as nothing less than a combination of John Lennon, Nelson Mandela and Bob Cratchit. After a few months of listening to nothing but Nirvana and their heroin-and-corduroy slacker ilk (Alice In Chains, Soundgarden etc), I shrugged it off and went in search of something a little less moribund.
Strangely, a few weeks ago I listened to Alice in Chains' Sap and Unplugged albums and they were actually quite good. My suprise was reinforced through relistening to this song. I was pretty suprised to see it on this list, as it's not only, as I expected, a rallying cry for disaffected teenagers. It's a really good song. This is the coruscating, visceral howl of a pretty pissed off and tortured artist.
We all know the Kurt Cobain story - successful band, heroin, crazy wife, depression, shotgun. But some of the music is also suprising. All Apologies is a far more mature expression of pain and anger than Nevermind was. Where Nevermind comes across as the output of a songwriter who wrote good, catchy songs with shit lyrics, All Apologies doesn't necessarily abandon the lyrical formula, but it tempers it into something that is a little more than rhyming non-sequiturs. While some of the lyrics are nothing more than lyrical tchotchkes, picked out of a hat at random and howled into a microphone, some of the lyrics actually make a little bit of sense.
Musically, the formula is instantly recognisable - melodic intro, verse, chorus, verse. Repeat ad nauseum. Cheap Trick with louder guitars, as Cobain once described his band. The guitar work is pretty basic, to be honest - buy a cheap guitar, run it through a tube amp cranked to 10 and you won't sound markedly different. Actually learning to play it is pretty optional. It's not for nothing that the first song a generation of guitarists learned was a Nirvana song. In terms of the rhythm section, Kris(t) Novoselic's personality is a perfect metaphor for Novoselic's bass playing - largely anonymous. But Dave "AIDS denialist" Grohl's drumming is pretty good, despite coming from a despicable, ignorant human being.
Let's just say that the world would be a better place if Cobain had shot Grohl instead.
Finally, let's see how Cobain looks on the Rock Nutter Scale (tm):
Weird History? Not really. He was a disaffected teen. Who wasn't?
Prison? He was arrested for beating up Courtney Love, which is almost understandable, given how unpleasant she is (the beating up, that is) and for some minor infringements over the years. Half a point, because he was never actually sentenced to a prison term.
Wild Behaviour? He married Courtney Love. That should be enough.
Pseudonym? Kurt Cobain's almost strange enough, but it's not a pseudonym. No points.
Drugs? You name it, Cobain smoked it, snorted it or shot it up over the course of his life.
A strong showing from the man from Aberdeen, Washington, but not good enough to best the charming misanthropists at the top of the scale.
Arriving in a flourish of female backing vocals and saxophone is Lloyd Price's tale of a gambler-turned-murderer, Stagger Lee. It's clear that Stagger Lee was a totemic figure in blues and soul music - the first song directly referencing him was recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928 and direct references to him have turned up in songs by Taj Mahal, Wilson Picket ('Stag-O-Lee'), The Clash ('Wrong 'em Boyo'), Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ('Stagger Lee') and The Black Keys ('Stack Shot Billy'). And, of course, Mr Price's opus which was, commercially at least, the most successful, charting at #1 in 1959.
That it charted at all in the conservative 1950s was a miracle - it's a song about a man welching on his gambling debts and killing his fellow gambler, despite being begged for mercy. It's violent and vicious and celebrates criminality and murder.
I love it.
Price sings with fire and passion over a bed of exhortative backing vocals and bouncy horns, continually celebrating Stagger's murderous acts. It's really upbeat - no wonder the idiot box has such an easy time desensitising its viewers to murder - when the medium is this good, it's impossible not to like the message. That said, I'm not likely to murder someone purely because I like this song. I'm far more likely to induce murder amongst people by continually playing this song until they decide to batter me to death with a blunt object. I seem to evoke that feeling in people quite a bit. In that case, I will fully condemn this song for encouraging violent behaviour.
In the meanwhile, get your Stagger on.
Pointless and obvious speculative notes: Needless to say, this song was a direct progenitor to the gangsta rap of the various flavours of Ices, Vanilla excluded, and the Death Row posse. It was also considered a celebration of the strong, violent, anti-establishment black man and celebrated by the Black Panthers - Panther leader Bobby Seale reportedly named his son Stagger Lee in tribute.
An attempt to listen to Rolling Stone magazines 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 500 days - one song a day, starting at the bottom.
Opinions may differ.
