Best of 2008 and 2009

Due to being back in school and the economy being down in general, I didn't have enough money to buy a ton of new albums in 2009. In fact, there are several I would like to own that I missed. So, instead of making a best of 2009 I compiled a best of 2008 and 2009, figuring that my best of 2008 was poorly circulated anyway. If you were on the mailing list, this is the disc listed as 0809. Also, by spreading it out over two years I was able to limit it to one song per album. The whole collection ended up leaning fairly alt-country and has a nice warm feel for much of it. Enjoy.

1. Mudcrutch – Shady Grove (from Mudcrutch (2008))

Tom Petty and his high school buddies, most of whom ended up in the Heartbreakers, make a great bluegrass band. What makes this album better than just about any Tom Petty album, though, is that it is more collaborative with shared vocals and shared songwriting. This song, an inspired take on a traditional number, showcases the band’s instrumental prowess.

2. Hayes Carll – Beaumont (from Trouble In Mind (2008))

I’ll admit it, I bought Hayes Carll major-label debut for the same reason most people did: the funny song titles. “Drunken Poet’s Dream,” “Wild As A Turkey,” “She Left Me For Jesus” and “Faulkner St.” were all promising titles, but the album’s best songs turned out to be the more straight-forward, and often more serious, ones, such as “It’s A Shame” and “Beaumont.”

3. Jill Sobule – Palm Springs (from The California Years (2009))

At first I thought I was drawn to this song simply because the syntax of lines like “I took the Prius. / It gets good mileage” is so prototypically Sobulian. I realized there was more to this song, though, than Sobule’s signature objective detachment revealing an underlying sense of solitude. Though this song seems hopeful at its beginning, the refrain, “something’s gonna happen to change my world,” sounds like a portent. The song reaches its climax with the statue of Sonny Bono, the town’s hero. The song’s speaker is like Enoch Emery in Flannery O’Connor’s Wiseblood, chasing down Sonny Bono like he does the mummified midget.

4. Kimya Dawson – Loose Lips (from the soundtrack to Juno (2008))

Leave it to a crazy chick like Kimya to make an anti-Bush song out of a WWI propaganda slogan. “They think we’re disposable? Well, both my thumbs’re opposable. Spell that on your double word and triple letter score,” ranks with the best signifying ever.

5. Elvis Costello – Turpentine (from Momofuku (2008))

This song sounds like a leftover from a Warner Bros.-era Attractions album, most likely Brutal Youth. As a general rule, these are my least favorite of Costello’s albums, but they all had at least a few good songs, and they all had songs that could have been even better had Costello taken more time to develop them. This sounds like an outtake, but it sounds like it could have been the album’s big single, a “Sulky Girl” in the making, and like he decided to take the time to develop it right. Also, the Imposters – the Attractions with a new bassist – provide more than ample backing, giving a layered production that sounds reminiscent of Imperial Bedroom, Costello’s 1983 attempt at sonically recreating the Sgt. Pepper’s sound, and frantic playing that is like a more rocked up Delivery Man than what comes off as rather stilted on Warner albums like Spike and All This Useless Beauty.

6. Bob Dylan – Shake, Shake Mama (from Together Through Life (2009))

Dylan has recorded so many blues shuffles that they rarely intrigue me anymore, especially when they have a title as silly as “Shake, Shake Mama.” Before I heard Together Through Life, I decided from the song titles that this would be my least favorite song on the album. It was easily in the album’s top half and slowly crawled over other favorites like “If You Ever Go To Houston,” which seems an update of 1970’s “Wanted Man,” and “Forgetful Heart.” What makes this song isn’t only the groove but the strangeness of many of the lines, and the later revelations concerning where many of them came from. The verse about Judge Simpson, for instance, is lifted more or less wholesale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

7. Flowers Forever – Strange Fruit (from Flowers Forever (2008))

I was somewhat impressed by Flowers Forever when I saw them open for Daniel Johnston. I was blown away by their energy in the studio. This civil rights anthem was most famously recorded by Billie Holiday and was written by Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym of Lewis Allen, who later gained fame for adopting the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I do not know if he ever appeared before HUAC himself.

8. Prince – Dreamer (from LOtUSFLOW3R (2009))

This song features Prince the political preacher, a face he has worn time and time again, starting with 1981’s “Sexuality” through to 1991’s “Money Don’t Matter 2Night” (the Spike Lee directed version of the music video for this is astounding) and 2004’s “Dear Mr. Man.” These songs have, in many ways, become less nuanced, and have certainly become less implicit (though “Sexuality” was simultaneously explicit). “Dreamer” is perhaps the least implicit of all, paying direct tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose spirit Prince is trying to embody in all of these works. Prince’s guitar work here begins by seeming to channel Lenny Kravitz channeling Jimi Hendrix – rocked up, but not too much. Then it becomes a bit funker – Prince channeling Lenny channeling Prince channeling Jimi, which is looser than it sounds on the page. By the end, the final solo channels Jimi directly.

9. Amos Lee – Won’t Let Me Go (from Last Days At the Lodge (2008))

I purchased Last Days at the Lodge as a birthday present for my girlfriend, Sarah. The first or second time through the disc, she commented that she didn’t like this song because it sounded like Michael Jackson. I know what she meant, but I disagree. The song features Lee trying out his falsetto for the first time, but he doesn’t consistently use it throughout the song. Having heard a number of Michael Jackson records, I don’t think he can sing any lower than he does. At first thought, I thought this seemed to channel Al Green. It has a little of an early-70s R&B vibe to it, and there’s no doubt it’s a song of seduction. After listening a little more, I realized that the way Lee glides between his lower range and his falsetto comes closer to mirroring Prince. The similarity goes beyond the vocal styling. The lyrics of the second verse open with “Stood around while you dated that old fool Parker.” Using “old fool” as an insult sounds like it comes straight out of a Prince song, and Parker sounds like a name he would use. The next like, “Whole time I knew he wasn’t no damn good for you” features Lee wrapping his vocal chords around “you” like it’s a double note, which is another Prince move. The verse ends with “all I wanna do is make sweet love to you,” peeling up into the falsetto. The song fades out with Lee’s voice double-tracked, singing his own background vocals. The whole thing comes off sounding like what many of Prince’s mid-to-late nineties genre experiments would have founded like had they been successful. A week or so after I gave her the CD, I caught Sarah singing along with this in the car.

10. Flight of the Conchords – Robots (from Flight of the Conchords (2008))

Dance techno that sounds inspired by Ween and 70s sci-fi kitsch. The music is catchy and the sci-fi is fun. Part of the sci-fi is simply funny, such as the binary solo which is just a voice repeating 0 and 1. The rest of the sci-fi kitsch shows up in the hilarious and nearly touching pseudo-social commentary that fills the track, much like it did films like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, films made at a time when 2000 did seem like the distant future where anything was possible. There is the line about how there is “no more unethical treatment of the elephants… of course, there are no more elephants, but still it’s a good thing,” and then the whole story line of man enslaving robots and forcing them to work “for unreasonable hours,” pushing us humans to near empathy. Also, is it just me or does it sound like Kermit the Frog saying “Their systems of oppression – what did it lead to? Global robo-depression”?

11. Scarlett Johansson – I Wish I Was In New Orleans (from Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008))

Critics lambasted Anywhere I Lay My Head, the album where ScarJo and David Sitek rummage through Tom Waits catalog, but I thought it was surprisingly well done, and this is only one of many standout tracks, chosen perhaps because it nicely segues into Randy Newman, a real New Orleans pianist.

12. Randy Newman – Piece of the Pie (from Harps & Angels (2008))

I read an interview with Newman where he said him and his manager were having dinner somewhere and all of a sudden this guy came and banged on this huge plate-glass window, flipped off Newman and then walked off. When Newman asked his manager who it was, he said it was John Mellencamp. Newman sent him flowers hoping he’d take the whole thing in good fun, but apparently the feelings weren’t returned. If this story isn’t wholly apocryphal, Johnny Cougar should quit his whining. The only person who comes out good in this song is Jackson Browne, who still comes out ignored. Newman throws the first stone at himself – “the rich are getting richer; I should know” he sings.

13. Nellie McKay – Crazy Rhythm (from Normal as Blueberry Pie (2009))

McKay’s best Doris Day covers are those from Day’s time with Les Brown’s orchestra singing the big band hits. “Crazy Rhythm,” a jazz standard, has often been recorded as an instrumental but the lyrics perfectly describe syncopation’s intoxicating powers. Also interesting is how the lyrics describe jazz as “low brow,” though it is not often seen so today. Bob Dorough guests on piano.

14. Levon Helm – Growin’ Trade (from Electric Dirt (2009))

“Growin’ Trade” is probably the most lyrically intricate piece of music released in 2009. It is a dramatic monologue set to music. The audience in unclear, but over the course of the song it becomes more and more clear that the speaker is growing marijuana, “a crop you grow to burn,” and that he feels shame for it. This captures the cultural zeitgeist evident in shows like Weeds, where hard times and unforeseen circumstances have forced otherwise honest people into the drug trade. Whereas Weeds uses that premise for laughs, however, “Growin’ Trade” is all tragedy, a recession-fueled tirade against the ills of corporate farming.

As the song opens the speaker is characterizes as a man whom “hard labor” has “never bothered.” Right away, this draws a sympathetic, if not empathetic, ear from the listener. The more mature I become, the more appreciation I have for work and the more disdain for sloth, so from my perspective, I admire the speaker immediately. We soon learn that the speaker is going through hard times though, enduring “seasons of calamity.” The speaker complains that he’s “half the size that he used to be / and half of that is gone.” “Gone” suggests finality, meaning that there is not enough labor for him to do to rebuild himself. Furthermore, this metonymically extends to the land. Not only is the farmer’s muscle gone, but so is his land as it is getting bought up by corporate farmers. We finally get the specific reason for falling on hard times: the increasing difficulty to make a profit as an independent farmer. The speaker reports that “seedin’ ten” crops will “only get you five” and that his livestock have nearly starved to death. The first verse ends with the like “I gotta do what I can to survive,” which suggests the speaker will do something that compromises his values, maybe even something illegal as suggested by the first line of the chorus, “The law won’t be forgivin’.” That something turns out to be growing marijuana, hinted at by the phrase “I used to farm for a livin’. Now I’m in’ the growin’ trade” that recurs in the chorus, and confirmed by connecting various references throughout the song, such as “a crop you raise to burn.”

We learn more about the speaker’s moral struggles in the second verse. He sees himself as part of a tradition of hard-working men dating back to his grandfather. He describes the farm as his “legacy,” as something that must be carried on to the next generation. He also is concerned however with the loss of dignity that occurs when he is forced to turn from the work of farming to the drug trade. This further develops the notion of the speaker as a hard worker trapped by economic hardship. The second half of the second verse moves in a different direction, showing how hard work has been replaced by paranoia. Helm croons that there’s a “shotgun on [his] shoulder / where a toe sack oughta be.” Each of these has a metonymic relationship to a specific type of work. The toe sack, a name for a sack which potatoes were bought in and which was later reused to harvest cotton by hand, is symbolic of the hard work the speaker has endured, but it has been replaced by the shotgun. The shotgun is there for protection, of both the speaker and his crops. The speaker is worried that “the thieves are getting bolder / and the feds may be wise to” him, and he needs the shotgun to fight them off.

The sense of paranoia which begins in the second verse is much more emphatic in the third verse, which opens with an image of “helicopters in the distance.” The helicopters may be real or imagined; may be used to spy or drop fertilizer. The speaker reacts by saying that whoever is in the helicopter “is going to meet some resistance,” although the irony is that the helicopter may not be a police helicopter at all. The helicopters are supposedly “getting closer every day,” but the description of them never gets more specific, hurting the speaker’s credibility. The speaker sounds like a man crazed. He says “there’s no price too big to pay” to save his farm, and implicit in that is a threat of violence. He says that “they [have] take[n] it all away,” and the listener quickly realizes that “it” is more than just the land or the marijuana or even the ability to grow crops and control production – “it” is the speaker’s identity. The speaker is being driven by a loss of self so deeply affecting that he feels no reason to live. He says there no difference “between a cot in the jail house / and a bed beneath the clay,” but the lyrics sounds patterns here betray him. “Bed beneath” creates a soft alliteration that makes the grave sound more inviting than jail. Furthermore, the rhyme scheme in the third verse is abababcbb. “Jailhouse” is the only end word without a rhyme in the verse. This disrupts the rhyme scheme and makes the jailhouse sound uninviting, as opposed to “clay,” which restores the rhyme scheme. In the end, the speaker is defeated, having lost himself and having resigned himself to an early grave, fighting no one to save his imagined dignity.

Another layer the song has is the speaker’s spiritual struggles. This theme is first suggested in the first chorus, and illustrates one important feature of the performative aspects of music as opposed to looking at lyrics purely as poetry. When Helm sings the line “the law won’t be forgivin’” the first time, he slurs “law” so that it sounds like “Lord,” and one can imagine by extension that “law” suggests not only law and order but the Law as handed down to Moses. Verse two begins “the summer beauty of the cotton fields / was like a view from Heaven’s door.” He also notes that his granddad “said that harvest time was what the good Lord made us for.” These lines suggest that the speaker sees farming as being God’s work, and so by becoming a marijuana grower as opposed to a farmer he sees himself betraying God. After this, God leaves the song until the end of the third verse, signaling perhaps that the speaker is having trouble coming to terms with his relationship with God. At the end of the third verse we have the line where death, the “bed beneath the clay,” is declared to be no different than jail. This suggests that the speaker may feel that death will entrap him and punish him. He may believe that he has doomed himself to hell. The final line of this verse – “I guess there’s nothing to do now but pray” – finds the speaker once again seeking solace in God, suggesting that he has found his way back and no longer feels shamed out of his spirituality by being a marijuana farmer.

Another aspects of this song which is striking are the multiple levels of diction appearing side-by-side on the page, creating what Yusef Komunyakaa would call the “neon vernacular.” There is a blend of low diction, – “big,” “work,” “good,” – middle diction, -- “labor,” “seasons” – and high diction – “calamity,” “dignity.” There is also a good blend of the rural farmer’s voice, suggested by dropped endings and jargon such as “toe sack,” “live stock,” and “seedin’,” and the more street-wise voice of the urban drug runner, embodied in phrases like “the feds may be getting wise” and “they’re gonna meet some resistance.”

The sound in “Growin’ Trade” also makes good use of various effects. For instance, even when police aren’t being mentioned, they are always lurking in the song’s sounds. In the first verse “hard labor” connotes prison even though the speaker has labored as a free man. “Crops” and “crop” both appear, and both sound very similar to “cop.” As the paranoia grows in the song, so does this sound pattern. At the beginning of the third verse, “cop” is contained in “helicopters,” and as Helm performs it “heli-” is mumbled to the extent that “copters” may as well be “coppers.” Later, “cot” again echoes “cop,” further suggesting the threat of police intervention. Sounds call to sounds throughout and Helm excellently manipulates the rhyme scheme throughout, using a series of slant rhymes to create tension just where it is needed.

15. The Jayhawks – Rotterdam (from Music From the North Country (2009))

The Jayhawks always stun me with their beauty. Every note is beautifully played and sung on albums such as Tomorrow the Green Grass and Rainy Day Music. When the Jayhawks announced the release of Music From the North Country, a greatest hits collection, I was excited to get an overview of the albums I didn’t have, but was thrilled when I heard a deluxe edition would be released with an album’s worth of outtakes, b-sides and alternate versions. “Rotterdam” comes from the deluxe edition. It does not disappoint. This is the most American song every about Manchester, so much so that when one hears Gary Louris singing about the train, one can’t help but imagine the American railroad rather than one going through England. The mountains and the prairies and the babies that open the song sound more West Virginian than Liverpudlian. The overall effect of the song, like so much of the Jayhawks work, is to leave the listener in a state of joyous peace.

16. Jakob Dylan – Valley of the Low Sun (from Seeing Things (2008))

This song evokes John Wayne, but then dismisses him. Lines like “I know soldiers are not payed to think, but something is making us sick” unmistakeably evoke a political message, but don’t quit us quite as hard over the head as some of Jakob’s father’s early, acoustic songs. Jakob has been making music for nearly twenty years, but this is his first opportunity to shine as a solo artist, and it is interesting that he does so with a stark acoustic album. The comparisons could be obvious, but if you listen closely they really aren’t. Yes, Jakob and his dad have both recorded acoustic solo albums and both have described a war-torn world contemporary with our own. There is something unique about the way the younger Dylan constructs his narratives though. In some ways they are looser, less bound to form. Rather than make grand statements, Jakob lets his images float, lets them bump into each other while he sits on the sidelines just imagining what we can make of them.

17. Bob Dylan – Red River Shore (from Tell Tale Signs (2008))

Tell Tale Signs is a compilation of Dylan’s unreleased leftovers spanning the period between 1989 and 2006. Time Out of Mind is perhaps Dylan’s most heralded album from this period, and yet when it came out many of the people who played on it expressed shock that “Red River Shore,” the best song recorded at the sessions, was left off the album. Tell Tale Signs reveals other errors in judgment with regard to that album, but certainly leaving off this gem was one of the most egregious. This song is a ghost story, but the mystery is who the ghost is. Most commentators have felt that the speaker is pining for a girl who is long dead, wishing her back to life. Lazarus and the attendant possibility of being brought back certainly loom large here, but I’m not convinced that the girl is dead. It is the speaker who is certainly dead, whether he realizes it or not. The girl may or may not be dead, but since the song is really about the speaker’s state, whether she is alive or dead matters little. There are several parts of the song that suggest it is the speaker who is dead, such as “the frozen smile that’s on my face fits me like a glove.” The speaker has “been out where the black winds roar,” which doesn’t sound like a place mortals have visited. He even admits that “some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark to be where the angels fly;” if he gained that knowledge through experience, then the speaker is surely dead. Coming back now, in a different time, searching for the girl who he feels a soul mate too, the speaker talks to people, but they don’t seem to be listening. When he says “I wonder if anybody saw me here at all, except the girl from the red river shore,” the listener knows that none of the people he talked to were aware of his presence. Sadly, although the speaker continues to search in vain, even if he finds the girl from the red river shore she may not be interested. The speaker says she is “true to life,” and the irony is she can’t be faithful to both life and a dead man.

18. Elvis Costello – Red Cotton (from Secret, Profane and Sugarcane (2009))

Elvis Costello culled the songs for Secret, Profane and Sugarcane from a number of projects he had been working on that had just never gotten finished. He reworked several of them into a more or less Americana theme that would work with a nice acoustic-country feel. While I am not convinced that the effort as a whole hangs together as successfully as King of America does, many songs stand out as being quite brilliant. “Red Cotton” is one of the Secret Songs, a project Costello was recruited to work on. As I understand it, The Secret Songs is to be a new musical/opera based on the life of Hans Christian Andersen, though the songs from it that appear on Secret, Profane and Sugarcane seem to have more to do with P.T. Barnum. As I understand it, the people behind The Secret Songs have since passed over Costello in favor of Nellie McKay, and Costello remade the songs to fit into Sugarcane’s Americana shtick. The song is now from Barnum’s point of view and in it, according to Costello, “Barnum reads an abolitionist pamphlet while manufacturing souvenirs of the ‘All-American Tour’.” This seems a bit simplistic to me, especially for a song nearly intricate enough to challenge “Growin’ Trade.” The song begins with Barnum “cutting up her pure white dress / that [he] dyed red.” Right away, the listener must situate themselves. The white dress suggests Barnum is referring to a female, which brings in all sorts of gender issues. Her dress is white, suggesting purity, but Barnum has dyed it red, suggesting violence. The white dress in particular suggests sexual violence, and in addition to rape perhaps murder with the sound of “dyed/died.” In the context of abolition and the Civil War, it is likely that this refers not only to misogyny, but also couples that with racism. The red cotton of the title may be the dress of a slave raped by her master, a practice common throughout the South. Furthermore, the dress is being cut up and the scraps are being put “in cheap tin lockets” to be sold as souvenirs, showing that this practice further commodifies sexual violence. Still, when those in Europe buy these American items, the violence is what “time erases and memory mocks,” showing how commodity fetishism causes the consumer to ignore the commodity’s history. Costello accomplishes all of this within the song’s first four lines. As the song goes on, though, Barnum realizes that the slaves are transported in “coffin ships” and to them the new world is only one of “auction blocks and whips.” Later still, he describes the “sheet on your fine linen bed, / the blood stained red on each cotton thread,” confirming the sexual violence suggested in the opening lines. By the end of the song, Barnum is ready to quit capitalizing on icons of the slave trade. The last two verses are perhaps the most powerful – strong statements of what is wrong with Barnum’s trade and how it undercuts society. Barnum says “the Lord will judge us with fire and thunder / as man continues in all his blunders. / It’s only money. It’s only numbers. / Maybe its time to put aside these fictitious wonders. // But man is feeble. Man is puny. / And if it should divide the Union / there is no man that should own another / when he can’t even recognize his sister and his brother.” In that final couplet we are reminded of the violent miscegenation which led slave owners to have two families – white and mulatto – who lived in resentment of each other.

19. Ry Cooder – Spayed Kooley (from I, Flathead (2008))

This song cuts two ways. It opens with Cooder wryly declaring that certain people are going to make a lot of money off of homeland security. Cooder’s speaker, though, has all the homeland security he needs, and it is a dog. This sounds like a cruelly delightful satire of how much the Bush administration has spent in Iraq in the name of “homeland security.” As the song continues, though, it becomes clear the speaker wants to secure the homeland, and the border, against immigrants, and that his dog has been trained to be racist. This level of the song opens with the lines “empty out your pockets, let him see your hands. / Be sure to talk good English so he can understand.” The second line of the couplet makes it obvious that the speaker has a problem with Hispanics, especially those who haven’t learned English. The line before it is perhaps more revealing, though. “Empty out your pockets,” in the song’s immediate context, means to show that you are not armed. It also means to hand over your money, though, and has insinuations of loss of privacy and robbery by coercion. As soon as the song moves into its more racist direction, it also serves to simultaneously undercut that position by making the speaker out to be a villain. I, Flathead is the last of three concept albums in a row that deal with Hispanics in Southern California, and his work with Buena Vista Social Club and long history of appreciating Latino musical styles suggests that this undercutting of the racism is what Cooder intended all along.

Women's History Month: Kimya Dawson

Sesame Street has always been hip, but I don't think they've ever solicited the participation of anyone stranger than Kimya Dawson. Of course, it seems less odd given that she recorded a children's album, titled Alphabutt, late last year.

Dawson came to prominence last year with the release of the soundtrack to Juno. The soundtrack features several solo compositions, as well as her work with Antsy Pants and the Moldy Peaches. The soundtrack climbed to the number one spot, giving her mainstream coverage. Of her selections on the soundtrack, my favorite remains "Loose Lips," a song that manages to make references to World War I related-slogans and Scrabble, all while being a simultaneously anti-war and anti-suicide song. Good stuff indeed.

2008 Supplement -- Best Female Songs Ever, Vol. 1

1. Jill Sobule - "Jetpack"(from Underdog Victorious, 2004)

This tender, heart-wrenching acoustic ballad is proof positive, for those that ever doubted it, that both the lower classes and lesbians have emotionally complex relationships. Its brillaince is that Sobule doesn't take the easy route many songwriters do of telling the audience these things. She shows us she is poor -- "but I don't have a jetpack, I don't even have a car. All I have is this token and a head full of stars" she cries in anguish. As for being a lesbian, you mostly have to pick that out of the other tracks on Underdog Victorious, an album that begins with a failing relationship, goes into some social work as a way of healing, reflects on the relationship, and ends with a potential fling with a butch cop. Of course, one could look at the speaker's obsession with baseball and dominant role in the relationship as defying gender normatives.

2. Mary Lou Lord - "Shake Shugaree" (from Got No Shadow, 1998)

Despite being a talented songwriter in her own write [sic], Lord provides what may be her best performance on this traditional folk song collected by Elizabeth Cotten. The double-tracked vocal, providing an imperfect, folksy harmony lends the song the proper sense of both awe and sorrow as the speaker sells away any hope at livelihood.

3. Mary Fahl - "Going Home" (from Gods and Generals soundtrack, 2003)

Originally a member of a Boston group known as the October Project, Mary Fahl made her solo debut on the soundtrack for the Civil War film Gods and Generals, and it was a glorious debut. The soundtrack featured numerous symphonic compositions and two with vocals -- this composition of Fahl's and Bob Dylan's "Cross the Green Mountain." Reissued on Tell Tale Signs, "Cross the Green Mountain" is now getting the credit it deserves as one of the finest songs in Dylan's canon. As great as it is, though, it may not be the best song recorded for Gods and Generals. Lyrically, Dylan may win out but Fahl's rich and textured voice lends this period piece a pathos deep enough to be plowed through.

4. Suzanne Vega - "Ironbound/Fancy Poultry" (from Solitude Standing, 1987)

In this song, Suzanne Vega dreamily imagines an open market in Portugal where women are bound in iron, then butchered and sold in parts -- "breasts and thighs and hearts." The metaphor to women being pieces of meat is obvious and a bit cliche, but in the song Vega makes it visceral enough that it sounds new and engaging.

5. Peggy Seeger - "Gonna Be An Engineer" (1970, reissued on Best of Broadside 1961-1988, 2000)

This song systematically deconstructs so many of the barricades which have attempted to hold women back, and brillaintly so. It looks at how women are forced into being objects, locked into marriage, robbed of fair pay. Every line is a direct protest. And all of it set to a poppy, bouncing beat that creates a tense contradiction, simultaneously undercutting and sharpening the song's edge. Like Roberta in Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children, Peggy Seeger is not content to sit idly by and let men take all the fun jobs.

6. Kimya Dawson - "Loose Lips" (2006, reissued on Juno soundtrack 2008)

Really, this song is more or less a nonsensical string of allusions. We start off with World War I propaganda about spreading was strategy to the enemy. We get some lines which do get a bit more serious, though -- calling for Bush to be ousted and arguing the ills of suicide. The real treat though comes from Dawson's rhyming skills. She has more verbosity than Paul Barman with lines like "They think we're disposable? Well, both my thumbs're opposable. Spell that on a double word and triple letter score."

7. Joan Baez - "All My Trials" (from Joan Baez, 1960)

This spiritual about finding hope in the afterlife, hope that God will repay us for our trials, carves deep into the soul. It may not be Joan Baez's best known song, but it is one of her best performances, one that, like the river Jordan, chills the body but warms the soul.

8. Joni Mitchell - "A Case of You" (from Blue, 1971)

Prince's Joni Mitchell rip-off, "Ballad of Dorothy Parker," sounds like it could have come off of Court and Spark, but when he decided to record a cover of one of her songs, he chose "A Case of You." Blue is filled with brillaint evocations of heartbreak and regret. "A Case of You" is about the difficulty of letting go while knowing that the person you are leaving behind will continue to effect your life ad infinitum. Mitchell sings that her man is in her "blood like holy wine." She has internalized him, and what's more she's built him up to be like Jesus, an implicit comparison in that he has transubstantiated within her. Mitchell misreads a metaphor, visits a fortune teller and is drawn to devlish men; an impressive feat to cram in to less than four and a half minutes.

9. Billie Holiday - "Strange Fruit" (1939, numerous reissues)

This is often cited as the ultimate protest song. Writted by Abel Meeropol, adopted son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg -- the American communists who sold the bomb to the Russians --, this song describes the fruits of racism -- black, rotting bodies, bloated and swollen, swinging from poplar branches. Seventy years on, it is still urgent and necessary, as evinced by such songs working against it as "Barack, the Magic Negro." How sad America sometimes is. We must hope it can heal from these wounds.

10. Scarlett Johansson - "Fannin St." (from Anywhere I Lay My Head, 2oo8)

I think this song is about avoiding priggish conformity on one level, and also about the dangers of going one place only for the purpose of escaping another. Anyway, when we escape, we often don't know what we are leaving behind. What I do know is, after listening to this song I want to observe Fannin St., but only from a protected spot far, far away, safe from whatever allure might try to trap me there.

11. Nellie McKay - "It's A Pose" (from Get Away From Me, 2004)

Nellie is an idol of mine. While I think this song essentializes men a little too much at times, and I'm not entirely comfortable with it, I realize that McKay is trying to make me uncomfortable and I like it. In a 1993 issue of Esquire magazine, there is an article that defines what they term the post-sensitive male, a term which resonated with me at the time, though I recognized myself as not a part of it, and which I have seen more and more as I've grown older and wiser. This seems to be the kind of constructed masculinity -- faux intellectual and faux feminist -- that McKay so incisively deconstructs in "It's A Pose," which may constitute her most striking set of lyrics to date.

12. Tom Tom Club - "Genius of Love" (from Tom Tom Club, 1981)

The Tom Tom Club is more or less Talking Heads minus David Byrne, a fruitful side project while the rest of the group waited for their mastermind to prep his next cerebral soundscape. This song may be better than anything Talking Heads released, though. Musically, this is an extension of the naked funk sound Prince was experimenting with back in 1980. Lyrically, its a whole nother beast. The speaker is a woman recently released from prison and trying to find herself a funkified man. She wants "natural fun" with a rhythmically-blessed black man. Among those she expresses interest in: George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bob Marley, Smokey Robinson, Sly and Robbie, and Kurtis Blow. The lady was surely up to date. Near the end, the genius himself shows up on the scene, breaking down some old school hippity-hoppity and laying down his love for James Brown. True genius.

13. Natalie Imbruglia - "Wishing I Was There" (from Left of the Middle, 1997)

This song is a brilliant example of how phrasing can help a song out. The beat is cool, the melody is great, the chorus is catchy, but what really makes this song stand out is the start-stop rhythm of the vocals when Imbruglia lingers over phrases like "well, fine.... till I think of the problem."

14. Maria Muldaur - "Midnight At the Oasis" (from Maria Muldaur, 1973)

This song is basically just a pean to sultry sex in the Sahara. At times, it can be a bit stereotypically offensive in how it presents arabs, but it is never jingoistic. It stereotypes, but is respectful of the culture. What makes it memorable, though, is Muldaur's shimmering, slinky vocal and that near-disco beat that seems fit for a moonlight rendezvous.

15. Northern State -"The Man's Dollar" (from Dying In Stereo, 2002)

One of the great traditions in rapping is boasting, and there is no dearth of boasts in this bad-ass romp through American culture. I mean, who else writes a book report about the Federal Budget? Of course, my favorite might be that "like Derek Jeter, I'm-a make you stop short." But then, there's always "I'm more European than an English muffin." Decisions, decisions....

16. Loretta Lynn - "Mrs. Leroy Brown" (from Van Lear Rose, 2004)

In the tradition of response songs, Loretta Lynn calls out Jim Croce's classic "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown." In the voice of his wife, Lynn sounds pissed to hell that Leroy has left her alone and destitute to watch after the kids. She has been good and faithful; I mean, she's almost drunk from the drink's that [she's] turned down." She doesn't deserve a prick like Leroy Brown. What is she gonna do about it? Take his money from the bank, buy a new car, beat the fuck out of the woman Leroy's sleeping with and skip town from the sound of it.

17. Lorrie and Larry Collins - "Mercy" (1958, reissued on Loud, Fast and Out of Control, 1999)

Guitar-slinger Larry Collins was only fourteen when he lay down the searing axe work on this song. His sister Lorrie was sixteen. Her breathy, raspy voice, calling out that her man makes her cry mercy, sounds like it belongs to a cougar in heat. This song is the exact reason why people thought rock was so dangerous.

18. Hollywood Jills - "He Makes Me So Mad" (1968, reissued on One Kiss Can Lead To Another, 2005)

This song is a great girl group track in the tradition of the Shangri-La's "Leader of the Pack." The lead singer calls out complaints about her boyfriend while the other girls respond. The end result is pretty hilarious. None of the complaints are really valid, and the other girls opinions reflect that.... for the most part. The final complaint is that the girl's boyfriend takes her to see movies at the dollar theatre. Finally her friends turn on the boyfriend and call him out. Its incredibly kitschy, but it is also incredible fun set against a steady rhythm guitar that is punctuated by some well-placed horn charts.

19. The Runaways -"Cherry Bomb" (from The Runaways, 1976)

Joan Jett has always rocked, and this was the earliest evidence of that rocking. Total punk attitude about a girl who is explosive telling herparents to deal with it and quit dictating morality. Many will remember this song from when it was expertly used in Dazed and Confused.

20. Blondie - "X Offender" (from Blondie, 1976)

This song introduced the world to Deborah Harry. Masquerading as another "Leader of the Pack"esque number, "X Offender." The song is sung to a cop from a dominatrix attempting to seduce him. The spicy tale is propelled by some plowing runs on the Farfisi organ and what sounds like a guitar solo based around the F7 chord -- not the easiest shape to make.

21. The Revillos - "Motorbike Beat" (1980, reissued on Children of Nuggets, 2005)

Arguably, the women here may be on background vocals, but they do sing the chorus and they make the verses. In this breakneck ode to motorcycle mayhem is made by the women singing about how they love men on motorcycles. It's surf guitar and revved up engines gived it the amphetamine-fueled feel it needs to flow from the speakers like molten lava.

22. Samantha Ronson - "Pull My Hair Out" (2004)

One listen to "Pull My Hair Out" and it becomes clear that djing and being Lilo's girlfriend is the wrong career path for Samantha Ronson. The punk guitars with a metal grind and cheerleader-style chants coupled with a dance floor bass beat make this a syrupy, irresistible pop confection that is still edgy enough that most listeners might be afraid to sink their teeth into it. Even though this single got no attention upon its release, Roc-a-fella made a big mistake in shelving Red, the full-length rock album this was drawn from. After paying for Ronson to record it, they mysteriously sat on it after the failure of the first single, instead releasing only a few of the lighter weight tracks on ventures like the soundtrack to Mean Girls. This is the only song released from the sessions with real bite, and its ready to draw blood.