Listening Log (January, 2024): Cyndi Lauper in a trash can, Sleater-Kinney forever, the Memphis blues everywhere
Listening Log

Listening Log (January, 2024): Cyndi Lauper in a trash can, Sleater-Kinney forever, the Memphis blues everywhere

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Here’s a stab at a kind of monthly listening diary, notes on music I sought out or encountered the previous month.

Cyndi Lauper in a trash can

A social media feed can be its own kind of stream-of-consciousness.

A couple of weeks ago, wasting time on the Artist Formerly Known as Twitter took the form of unintentional doom-scrolling. Great stock market! Great unemployment numbers! Inflation under control! And yet the ongoing media cataclysm suddenly picked up new velocity. Broadly good economic news was parried on my timeline with new assaults on what somehow became my life’s work: Journalistic writing. 

Sports Illustrated. Pitchfork. The Los Angeles Times. All being torn up and picked apart like other publications before them and more to come. 

Somehow amid this I encountered a random post about the under-rated 1980 Prince album Dirty Mind, which got me thinking about Cyndi Lauper, who covered that album’s greatest song, “When You Were Mine,” on her lone great album, 1983’s She’s So Unusual.

And that pulled me into a YouTube wormhole that brought up the video for one of the other great covers on Lauper’s album, her version of the Atlanta new wave band the Brains’ “Money Changes Everything.”

The song is from two generation’s back at this point, literally old news. And the power of Lauper’s version is old news to many. (Eternal hat-tip to critic Greil Marcus, in particular, on this subject.)

The song, as written, isn’t about the forces of capitalism rolling over art and news but rolling right over love itself. 

It’s a great song. Lauper makes it a great record, more than just a nervy idea, and her version excises the sense, in the original, that male romantic grievance undermines the larger meaning. 

Lauper inhabits the song with shock and desperation and a kind of awful acceptance, somehow all at once in the catch of her voice. She puts blood into it, and then spills it all in the street. Listening to her sing it is like witnessing a murder. Our own. 

That’s all old news to me. But while I’d definitely seen this video, the song’s official one in an age where videos were ubiquitous, I don’t think I’d ever really watched it. 

On tour, apparently here in Houston, the performance climaxes with Lauper folding herself into a trash can, where the forces she implicates would be only too happy to put us all, and riding it above the crowd. She has the microphone in her right hand. Her left is holding one of the wires that’s keeping the can aloft, and it looks very precarious, like if she lets go she will tumble right out. But as Lauper shakes and shouts the title phrase, she can’t help herself, finally letting go for a couple of seconds to pound her fist in the air. 

This is not an acceptance of the naked fact being sung. Translation, with a nod to “A Visit From the Good Squad” author Jennifer Egan: “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” 

It could have been recorded tomorrow. 

Sleater-Kinney forever

How many singers are, all at once, as powerful, expressive and idiosyncratic as Lauper in the mid-Eighties?

One answer is definitely Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker in the late-Nineties. Or now. 

I tend to not hear much new music in January, a time of shutting down after the year-end listening and list-making of the previous month. 

But then here comes a new Sleater-Kinney record. 

I miss drummer Janet Weiss, sure. Her addition on 1997’s Dig Me Out made this band’s music motorvate like little before or since. But Sleater-Kinney was (Carrie) Brownstein-Tucker before Weiss and remains Brownstein-Tucker now four studio albums into the band’s second life. 

Even without Weiss, the new Little Rope seems to be the most rocking S-K record since the with-Weiss 2015 comeback No Cities to Love.

Tucker remains an earthquake of a singer. You feel the tremors and then earth starts breaking apart, perhaps most of all here on the vocal-showcase bookends “Hell” and “Untidy Creatures.”

Their guitar interplay has an oceanic quality, Brownstein’s fleet runs like waves lapping and sometimes vaulting over the top, with Tucker providing a churning undertow.

This musical relationship (with the addition of Brownstein’s more human-scale vocal counterpoint) is a physical fact, even when you’re struggling to fully connect with the songs as songs, as I still am a half-a-dozen listens in. 

Speaking of YouTube wormholes, this sent me on another one. If I could choose only one band from one moment of my lifetime, the answer is definitely Sleater-Kinney, spring of 1997, when I saw them on (I think) a late Sunday afternoon/early evening at Minneapolis’ 7th Street Entry, still the best concert I’ve ever witnessed.

Here’s a full (?) set from New York’s CBGB from around the same time, and if the video/audio quality isn’t top notch, it all comes through anyway.

The early run of “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” (Weiss driving a song whose studio version pre-dates her) into “Turn it On” into “All the Drama You’ve Been Craving.” Whew. 

At the 15:58 mark, between songs, Brownstein asks the crowd, “Does anybody know the Sonics score right now?” A decade-plus later, I somehow found myself interacting on social media with big Blazers fan Weiss. My people.

I don’t think she gets an answer. I looked it up. The Seattle Supersonics, who had lost to the Chicago Bulls in six games in the prior summer’s NBA Finals, beat the Houston Rockets in a second-round playoff game that night, holding off elimination. They got bounced in the next game. Sorry, Carrie. 

After that, Tucker asks those in front of the stage to put their cameras down. This is pre-cell phones. 

“Put your security blankets, your shields down, because we’re not wearing any,” she says.

Then they play “One More Hour,” the most intense song they’ve ever written. Or maybe that’s “Good Things,” which comes toward the end. Another pre-Weiss song. She pushes it heaven-ward this time. 

Welcome back, and the new Sleater-Kinney leads a good month for rock-oriented women singer/songwriter/guitarists I admire, with fine new singles from Waxahatchee, (Big Thief’s) Adrianne Lenker and Hurray for the Riff Raff. 

Memphis blues everywhere

The music I actually spent the most time with in January was Memphis blues from the late 1920s and early 1930s, richly collected as part of The Memphis Blues Box, a 20-disc (!) collection from Bear Family Records that showed up in my mailbox in December, unsolicited and unannounced. 

The set runs up to 1969, and I wrote about it all, including an interview with compiler Martin Hawkins, in The Daily Memphian, where I included my own selected 40-song Spotify sampler. 

In order to convey the breadth of the set, I included at least one song from each of the 20 discs on the playlist, but what I’m most drawn to are the pre-WWII stuff, the street jug bands and two-guitar duos, the vaudeville-schooled bands and rich array of female singers. 

If Sleater-Kinney is the best rock band of my lifetime, then the Memphis Jug Band is arguably the first great band in American pop music, a key precursor to rock and roll and rhythm and blues.

But in honor of Lauper and Tucker, a closing salute to some of the female singers of this Memphis era, such as Memphis Minnie, Minnie Wallace (different person), Sadie James, Jennie Pope and especially Hattie Hart:

Best of 2023
Revisited

Best of 2023

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Long time, no post? 

I’ll make no promises (to myself) about returning to this space more frequently in the coming year, but I listened to more new music in 2024 than in any other year this decade and felt compelled to jot down some loose thoughts. I do plan to continue that in the new year, the listening at least. 

ALBUMS

1. Rat Saw God – Wednesday: I laugh every time Karly Hartzman opens this album by gazing into a wishing well and yelling “Fuck all y’all.” Their lower middle class western North Carolina circa 2023 doesn’t feel much different from the lower middle class Eastern Arkansas circa 1980-something where I grew up. “God make me good but not quite yet” is this band’s Lord’s Prayer, and they’re here to tell you all of their worst, with humor and insight. After all, every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes. So it goes. 

By the way, where does “Drunken laughter/Violence after” rank among greatest rock and roll couplets? Behind “Sweet little sixteen/She’s got the grown-up blues” and “Hangin’ out in the street/Same old thing we did last week” and definitely (duh) “Second verse/Same as the first.” But maybe top five?

They respect their Southern rock elders with a Drive-By Truckers name-check, and they’re even more country, with pedal-steel twang and a hint of Appalachia in Hartzman’s drawl. But the sludgy dissonance and barely controlled tempo shifts and whined/slurred vocals are more reminiscent of alt-rock elders Dinosaur Jr. Slower and heavier than my usual rock ideal, but all the details, lyrical and musical, conspire to overcome. The result: Very “for me.”  

2, The Record – Boygenius: The band name, attached to these three young women, is a lot of concept, underscored by band photos and group harmonies that consciously evoke Boomer icons Crosby, Stills & Nash. These tweaks on “classic rock” tradition make a point: This entire project is a turf grab, an assertion of relative self-worth, yet not quite a rejection. This band improves an indelible Simon & Garfunkel melody by giving it a better, plainer, deeper lyric. It’s love & theft. 

This dynamic finds its apotheosis in Lucy Dacus’ Lyric of the Year candidate, which somehow sings about as well as it scans: “Leonard Cohen once said, ‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ And I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery, writing horny poetry … but I agree.” 

The mostly subdued tempos and voices means it might require repeated listens and close engagement to bloom. And as a species of folk-rock, it’s very much a writer’s record. But what writing!

Ultimately, the true-blue concept here isn’t really the righteous generational and gender trappings. Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker have all soared solo, but have perhaps never been better than together, and the heart of the matter is a tribute-by-example to being young and finding your cohort. A wise twist on over-familiar vernacular that can be read a couple of different ways: “When you don’t know who you are, you fuck around and find out.”

Fucking around and finding out is risky, but so is youth, where fucking around is also a path to self-discovery.

3. Zach Bryan – Zach Bryan: Paul Simon told us that every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, and Bryan feels like an example, with the demographic modifiers more narrow than
“generation.” In a subgenre – commercial male country – riven by self-consciousness and calculation, Bryan never seems like anything other than himself here, and that idiosyncrasy, that lack of phoniness, makes him more relatable.

To these ears, this country/folk/rock chart-topper is a sizable leap beyond Bryan’s impressive but over-stuffed 2022 breakthrough-not-debut American Heartbreak. It’s appropriate that this fully formed fourth album is the one called Zach Bryan.  

Musically, these 15 songs with spoken intro rarely falter and often surprise: The red-dirt country rock augmented here and there with just the right dollops of fiddle, harmonica, piano or horns. The songwriting takes detours that pretty much always find something interesting along the way. Released in late August, it’s maybe still the most played 2023 album within my family. It just never quits. 

In a genre where “Nashville” is too easy a shorthand, Bryan’s pure Oklahoma: “I hear Turnpike’s getting’ back together and they’re writing songs,” “Kansas ain’t no place to be a man” (har har). His rough-hewn prairie drawl renders “Oklahoman” an accent I never recognized or knew I needed. 

4. Maps – Billy Woods and Kenny Segal: This indie-rap coup is more late-breaking for me than the top three, even the relatively recent Bryan, and it’s the densest of the bunch, so I’m still finding my way through it. But it’s the obsessive listen that ended my year. 

 I knew Woods was my kind of guy when he opened the “Soundcheck” portion of this tour diary with this: “I will not be at soundcheck/I will not be in the green room if it’s too lit/Could be at the local greasy spoon or Szechuan establishment.”

Old fogey that I am, I prize rap as a medium drunk on wordplay, and Woods has a true writer’s/rhymer’s passion for words, both their meaning and, crucially, their sound. Lyrical sample from a song called “Rapper Weed” that many have found too good not to quote, myself now among them: “If the track slaps, in the back you can almost hear the black cackling/When it’s my time, no need to pass the hat/Just throw me in when the fire good and crackling.”

5. 10,000 Gecs – 100 Gecs: In a grand rock and roll tradition (see: The Ramones, Licensed to Ill, Mellow Gold), they are very knowing about how very stupid they are, in this St. Louis to SoCal duo’s case while sorting through the far less cool but age-specific pop detritus of mash-ups, nu-metal, pop-punk and Midwest mallbrat EDM.  

“Frog on the Floor” is the singalong song of the year. It’s about a frog. On the floor. “Give him some space/He’s still working it out/Give him some space/He doesn’t know what people think about.” Other important topics include snack food and a sore tooth, relationship uncertain. They don’t watch the news, they just read statements. Put emojis on their graves. They’re smarter than they look. They’re the dumbest band alive.

6. Guts – Olivia Rodrigo: A few months later, this not-quite-40-minute follow-up doesn’t seem quite as miraculous as her not-quite-35-minute debut. Sour was a mostly unprecedented pop triumph that crucially bracketed a nine-song dissection of one teen girl’s first breakup with an everyteen anthem up top and a song of everyteen empathy to go out. 

My favorite lyric on that album, from “Enough for You,” was this: “I knew from the start this is exactly how you’d leave.” She knew her subject was mundane, and fated to be temporary. And she knew it still felt like the biggest thing in the world to the person experiencing it for the first time, she being that person. And Rodrigo honored both sides of this dual knowledge.

On Guts, she applies the same trick – being outside and inside her experiences as they’re happening, analyzing her mistakes as she makes them – to what’s actually more mundane pop territory: Not the first breakup of a regular girl but the romantic travails on the road to adulthood,  celebrity division. 

That she makes so much of it anyway is a testament to her talent, and how grounded and smart and decent and musically gung-ho she remains. Plus: “Get Him Back!” is a popcraft masterpiece even if the charts somehow haven’t agreed. 

7. This Stupid World – Yo La Tengo: Another very good album from a great band, long past the point where we have any reason to expect such a thing. Bonus points for supplying my favorite concert experience of 2023, the reason for a father/daughter indie-rock road trip to Nashville. 

8. Everyone’s Crushed – Water From Your Eyes: Cryptic lyrics, sprung rhythms, funny little sound-for-sound’s-sake bleeps and bloops and blurts, real tunes bubbling up from the noise. Just a couple of kids fucking around and finding out. Punk rock lives, and takes many forms. 

9, Time Ain’t Accidental – Jess Williamson: A dozen things could have gone here but I’ll let this be a kind of backdoor acknowledgement for the family’s most played album in 2023, the late 2022 released I Walked With You a Ways from Plains, a duo debut that paired the Texas/Los Angeles Williamson with Waxahatchee’s Alabama/Kansas City Katie Crutchfield. On her own, Williamson can get a little precious, both in word choice and phrasing. Her partnership with the more pleasingly sour Crutchfield mitigated that. Still, this solo followup was a good coda to a great duo record.  

Nine More Albums

  • How to Love – Withered Hand
  • I Play My Bass Loud – Gina Birch
  • Weathervanes – Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
  • Eye on the Bat – Palehound
  • Several Songs About Fire – A.Savage
  • The Devil I Know – Ashley McBryde 
  • The Age of Pleasure – Janelle Monae
  • The Window – Ratboys
  • Rabbit, Rabbit – Speedy Ortiz

Nine (or so) More Songs

Some favorite 2023 songs not on my top 18 albums.

  • “Vampire Empire” and “Born for Loving You” – Big Thief: My favorite music of 2023 is here, on a couple of standalone songs from the band whose 2022 Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is my favorite album of the decade so far. An exultant two-song encore to that album or a sneak preview of something big to come?
  • “It’s Only Poison” – Robert Forster: A love song about chemotherapy.
  • “Tiny Garden” – Jamila Woods featuring duendita: A love song about necessary labor. 
  • “Thicc” – Gloss Up: Favorite Memphis song of the year. When she invokes Ja Morant and the beat switches, it’s on. “Collard greens, cornbread-eating, ass getting thicc” fills me with pride of place. Memphis runner-up: Optic Sink’s bass-forward “Glass Blocks.”
  • “The Old Woman in Me” – Lori McKenna: The best country/folk songwriter of her generation adds another great one to her songbook.
  • “Tiny Little Titties” – Corook: Lyric of the Year candidate: “I don’t feel like a man/I don’t feel like a woman/I tried to describe myself/It turns out that I couldn’t.”
  • “Kill Bill” – SZA feat. Doja Cat: Single from a late-2022 album, a reminder that I should do a retroactive 2022 post. 
  • “Bored of Men” – Mhaol: “I’m so bored of talking about men/Look at the news, is it that time again?”
  • “Bravo” – Tobe Nwigwe: One hundred seconds of undeniable beats-and-rhymes, a reminder that I need to search harder for hip-hop in 2024. 

MOVIES AND MORE

I have somewhat more of a professional rationale to share my move list, so I’ve already written on this at The Daily Memphian. As a result, I won’t write much here. This is a longer ordered list than shared there. The Top 10 is also slightly different. I intentionally left “The Zone of Interest” and “The Taste of Things” out of my Top 10 in that piece, partly because neither has been available to local readers and in the case of “The Zone of Interest” because, additionally, I didn’t want to write about it. It also sort of felt out of place. Jonathan Glazer’s depiction of the domestic life of the man running the Auschwitz concentration camp is a kind of pure art movie, unlike anything else on this list. It almost feels more like it belongs in a museum installation than at a multiplex.

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Showing Up
  3. Past Lives
  4. May December
  5. The Zone of Interest
  6. Killers of the Flower Moon
  7. The Taste of Things
  8. Barbie
  9. The Killer
  10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  11. Poor Things 
  12. Asteroid City
  13. Anatomy of a Fall
  14. You Hurt My Feelings
  15. A Thousand and One
  16. The Boy and the Heron
  17. The Holdovers
  18. Godzilla Minus One
  19. Theater Camp
  20. Rye Lane
  21. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
  22. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
  23. American Fiction
  24. Priscilla
  25. The Iron Claw

Best Old Movies Seen for the First Time This Year: Fat City (John Huston, 1972), Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981), Thief (Michael Mann, 1981), Daisies (1966, Vera Chytilova).

Television I Loved Without Hesitation: Succession, The Bear, Slow Horses.

Television I Watched With Appreciation: The Last of Us, Daisy Jones & the Six.

Television I Watched Out of Perceived Obligation: The Crown, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Best Novels I Read For the First Time This Year: In Country – Bobbie Ann Mason (1985), White Noise – Don DeLilo (1985), Libra – DeLilo (1988). 

Best Non-Fiction I Read For the First Time This Year: In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (1966). 

De La Soul’s Two Testaments
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De La Soul’s Two Testaments

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[As it happens, it’s one year to the day since I last updated this site. I started it several years ago for two main reasons: To republish some old writing I still felt worthy and to publish some new lists as I worked my way through the entirety of my own record collection and used the project as an excuse to fill in some gaps. I lost the thread on the first a long time ago, and the second more recently. Will this get me back here more frequently? I don’t know.

But Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, one of the three members of De La Soul, died today. De La’s debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, came out during my freshman year of high school and was a kind of foundational text as I found my way in life and in culture. It remains one of my very favorite albums. In 2009, for the Memphis Flyer — What was the occasion? They must have been playing a show in town. – I wrote a piece about that album and the group’s deeply overlooked 2001 album AOI: Bionix, which I dubbed the band’s two testaments. I still very much feel that way.

For what it’s worth – and I know that it isn’t much, but a mention for posterity – this was one of three pieces that year I submitted for the annual awards contest for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, a collection that took second place in music criticism in the Flyer’s circulation category. Republished here with a few small edits. ]

Hip-hop has produced more momentous artists than De La Soul. Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Notorious B.I.G., Outkast, and a few others perhaps have a greater claim to the genre’s Mt. Rushmore. But in a culture so far short on longevity and mutability, I know of no other hip-hop artists whose peaks are more than a decade apart and who have had as much to say to the music’s fans — once referred to as the hip-hop generation — about living a rewarding life.

As Long Island teenagers making their debut with the precocious epic 3 Feet High and Rising, this trio — Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Mase” Mason— bravely tested hip-hop’s cultural boundaries, burrowing deeply into their own idiosyncratic personalities. Later, as thirtysomething fathers on the deep and subtle AOI: Bionix, they crafted the most convincing argument yet for what hip-hop as stable grown folks’ music might sound like.

“Sony Walkmans keep us moving/De La Soul can help us breathe.”

— “Tread Water,” 3 Feet High and Rising

Released in 1989, 3 Feet High and Rising spearheaded a hip-hop movement known as the Native Tongues, a loose affiliation (or, in Tongues parlance, a tribe) of artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and Queen Latifah united by an Afrohumanist philosophy and a playful sense of sonic exploration. The Native Tongues offered both a middle-class alternative to a form born in the New York City streets and housing projects and a gentler alternative within a genre then divided by the political militance of Public Enemy on the East Coast and the gangsta aesthetic of N.W.A. on the West Coast.

De La’s debut was a commercial hit and a relative critical smash, winning 1989’s Village Voice “Pazz and Jop” national critics poll, becoming the first teen winner and first debut-album winner since the Sex Pistols. But even then some found it too slight to be a Great Album, its full-fledged songs interrupted by recurring skits (a practice it launched, for better or worse), esoteric jokes, and other aural experiments, and its perspective too unreadable and navel-gazing.

Fans dubbed it “the hip-hop Sgt. Pepper’s,” but in retrospect “the hip-hop White Album” is probably a more apt Beatles comparison. More audacious and more definitive than anything else to come out of the Native Tongues crew, it’s a sprawling 24-track invitation to an unknown world, filled with in-group solidarity (“The Magic Number,” “Me Myself and I”), social commentary (“Ghetto Thang,” “Say No Go”), inspired DJ cut-and-paste (“Cool Breeze on the Rocks”), Aesop-like fables (“Tread Water”), and total weirdness (“Transmitting Live From Mars,” 66 seconds of a scratchy French spoken-word record over a Turtles sample).

It’s an album that contains both hip-hop’s first convincing love song with “Eye Know” (right, LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” came first, but he just wanted to get in your pants) and the genre’s healthiest sex song with the posse cut “Buddy.” And despite its teen-oriented self-absorption, it has a fierce spirit. The first rapped verse on the record, courtesy of 19-year-old Posdnuos: “Difficult preaching is Posdnuos’ pleasure/Pleasure and preaching starts in the heart.”

With its “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” rhetoric (which stands for “Da Inner Sound, Y’all” — don’t laugh), Day-Glo color schemes, private lingo, unexpected references (stray lyrics about Fred Astaire and Waiting for Godot), and inscrutable in-jokes (“Posdnuos has a lot of dandruff”), 3 Feet High and Rising was the sound of creative teenagers energized by their own brains. 

As much as indie-rock kings-in-waiting Pavement, who emerged soon after, these were modestly privileged suburban bohemians turning their surfeit of leisure time and their overactive intellects into something familiar yet totally new, its verbal imagination actually topped by its sonic imagination.

Two years earlier, fellow Long Islander Rakim — as culturally conservative as De La Soul were radical — had made a claim for the genre: “Even if it’s jazz or the quiet storm/I hook a beat up/Convert it into hip-hop form.” It’s a classic lyric, one that announced the genre’s voracious musical appetite. But Rakim couldn’t think past mainstream African-American forms. De La, inspired by George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic and partnered with sampling genius Prince Paul, took Rakim’s manifesto and added to the list Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, Johnny Cash, “Schoolhouse Rock”, and a French-language instructional record, just for starters.

Underground mix-masters like Double Dee & Steinksi were earlier to the game, and the Beastie Boys would double-down on De La’s achievement later the same year with Paul’s Boutique, but more than anything else, 3 Feet High and Rising expanded hip-hop’s sonic vocabulary.

As insistent as the trio had been initially to confront hip-hop’s cultural boundaries (perhaps captured best in the comically put-upon “Me Myself and I” video), they did succumb to peer pressure, recording the fed-up defense to a stupid recurring description, “Ain’t Hip To Be Labeled a Hippie,” and then following up 3 Feet with the self-conscious and self-negating De La Soul Is Dead.

But 3 Feet‘s influence won out. The sonic message was that absolutely anything could be turned into hip-hop. But the personal message was that hip-hop could be anyone’s vehicle for self-expression, a message later embraced by white trailer-park products (Eminem), mixed-race Midwesterners (Atmosphere), nice middle-class white girls (Northern State), Third World survivors (M.I.A., K’ Naan), and lots of other people with something to say and a beat to say it over.

“No need to spit a cipher to show you I’m a lifer in rap/I cultivate moves larger than that.”

— “Bionix,” AOI: Bionix

3 Feet High and Rising‘s sonic fragmentation is generational but also partly a product of youth. Feeling creakier on the wrong side of 30, the band pursued a steadier groove on their Art Official Intelligence records: 2000’s Mosaic Thump and 2001’s better Bionix. 

Where 3 Feet was bumpy, the AOI records are smooth. Where 3 Feet was clever and cryptic, the AOI records are smarter and more plainspoken.

What the trio lost in youthful verve they made up for with a consistently rewarding musical vision on their second career peak. Rather than the Prince Paul-organized bricolage and jokiness of 3 Feet High and Rising, here is hip-hop as the ultimate adult R&B, without the confrontation or showy party vibe of most contemporary mainstream hip-hop or the spare beats of the underground. Rather, De La’s AOI records luxuriate in the sturdy, comfortable, and soulful — groove music for stay-at-homes. This music doesn’t grab you, but it deepens over time.

And it’s no accident that the more limited sources but more consistent groove makes for a fuller connection to the African-American musical tradition. After flying their freak-flag as kids, this later music embodied the Black middle-class experience they were living. Even the skits on Bionix (“Rev. Do Good”) tap into a Black American iconography that might have felt limiting as teenagers.

With AOI: Bionix, the group united verbal concept with the music’s grasp for the eternal. This was an album about growing up without giving out. Its most compelling moment comes on the concluding “Trying People,” one of the first pop-music acknowledgements of 9/11 outside of tribute-song rush jobs. The song is directed at hip-hop’s younger generation, with Dave (long since dropping his old “Trugoy” moniker) rapping, “You see, young minds are now made of armor/I’m trying to pop a hole in your Yankee cap/Absorb me/The skies over your head ain’t safe no more/And hip-hop ain’t your home.”

Once obsessed with making music in their bedrooms, the group was now focused on a different set of priorities: “Got fans around the world/But my girl’s not one of them,” Posdnous raps on the same song. “And my relationship’s a big question/’Cause my career’s a clear hindrance to her progression/Says she needs a man and her kids need a father/And I’m not at all ready to hear her say ‘don’t bother.’”

This central conceit is explored all over the record. The opening scene-setter, “Bionix,” features lyrics such as, “I don’t ball too much, ya dig/I got a ball and chain at the crib who want my ass at home.” The charming lead single, “Baby Phat,” is the middle-aged answer to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”: “Your shape’s not what I dig/It’s you … You ain’t in this alone/I got a tummy too/Just let me watch your weight/Don’t let it trouble you.” 

On “Simply,” they search for a place to have fun without young “thugs” (their language) ruining everything, and on “Watch Out,” they make romance by proposing a joint account.

The record’s decorum breaks down toward the end with the sexed-up “Pawn Star” (which should surprise no one who remembers 3 Feet High and Rising‘s “De La Orgie”) and the funny, conflicted marijuana meditation “Peer Pressure” (with Cypress Hill’s B-Real). But this detour is needed confirmation that adulthood doesn’t have to equal stodgy.

Hip-hop hasn’t yet proven to be a form with the personal longevity of blues, country, or even rock. But after saying more about both teendom and responsible adulthood than anyone in the so-called hip-hop nation, one hopes De La Soul can stay interested long enough to pull hip-hop into the uncharted territory of middle age.

Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Give ‘Em a Great Big Kiss Show”
Radio shows

Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Give ‘Em a Great Big Kiss Show”

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If you listen to this show, rather than just check out the setlist, you’ll here a screw up (not the first!) as I started playing the wrong side of the Superchunk 7”. The thing about having a theme each week is that everything has to fit it, so I couldn’t just let the “A” side go. 

So, in execution, I dunno. But in concept this is one of my favorite shows so far. 

The stream:

The setlist: 

  1. “Kiss” — Prince & the Revolution
  2. “Give Me a Big Kiss” — Van Morrison
  3. “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” — The Shangri-Las
  4. “Looking for a Kiss” — The New York Dolls
  5. “One Kiss Led to Another” — The Coasters
  6. “Kizza Me” — Big Star
  7. “I’ll Kiss You” — Cyndi Lauper
  8. “Beer and Kisses” — Amy Rigby
  9. “Passionate Kisses” — Lucinda Williams
  10. “The Shoop Shoop Song” — Betty Everett
  11. “Then He Kissed Me” — The Crystals
  12. “Just One Kiss” — Raphael Saadiq
  13. “On the Mouth” — Superchunk
  14. “Make Out Club” — Unrest
  15. “Kiss Your Lips” — Allo Darlin’
  16. “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” — Yoko Ono
  17. “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss” — X
  18. “Kiss and Say Goodbye” — Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Tribute Show”
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Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Tribute Show”

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This week’s show was tribute songs, from one artist to another. There are tons of these, so I mostly tried to play pairs of linked chains of tribute. I haven’t had a chance to listen back myself, but there were some technical issues early on, at least in my headphones. Wasn’t sure if it was impacting the broadcast. 

The stream:

The setlist: 

  1. “Bessie Smith” — The Band
  2. “Song to Woody” — Bob Dylan
  3. “Song for Bob Dylan” — David Bowie
  4. “Thin Wild Mercury” — Todd Snider
  5. “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs” — The Minutemen
  6. “D.Boon” — Uncle Tupelo
  7. “Dancing with Joey Ramone” — Amy Rigby
  8. “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” — Sleater-Kinney
  9. “Tunic (Song for Karen)” — Sonic Youth
  10. “Johnny’s Gonna Die” — The Replacements
  11. “Alex Chilton” — The Replacements
  12. “The Replacements” — Art Brut
  13. “Lightnin’ Hopkins” — R.E.M.
  14. “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence” — Pavement
  15. “Sir Duke” — Stevie Wonder
  16. “Parker’s Band” — Steely Dan
  17. “Funeral Song for Mississippi John Hurt” — John Fahey
Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Girls & Boys Show”
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Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Girls & Boys Show”

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This week’s show was one of my favorites from an idea/setlist standpoint. Thanks to Prince for the inspiration. 

The stream:

The setlist: 

  1. “Girls & Boys” — Prince & the Revolution
  2. “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” — The Barbarians
  3. “Girls” — David Johansen
  4. “Boys” — The Shirelles
  5. “Hey Boy” — Magic Kids
  6. “Hey Girl” — The Blasters
  7. “Bad Girl” — The New York Dolls
  8. “Bad Boy” — Holy Modal Rounders
  9. “Bad Girl” — Smokey & the Miracles
  10. “Bad Boy” — John Prine
  11. “Bad Girls” — Donna Summer
  12. “The Good Girls” — Amy Rigby
  13. “Cynical Girl” — Marshall Crenshaw
  14. “Singular Girl” — The Old 97s
  15. “This Boy” — The Beatles
  16. “That Boy” — Carsie Blanton
  17. “Fast Girls” — Sarge
  18. “Losing Boy” — Eddie Giles
  19. “Androgynous” — The Replacements
Sing All Kinds Radio: “The 1967 Show”
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Sing All Kinds Radio: “The 1967 Show”

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This week’s show was one of my monthly “time travel” episodes, jumping back to 1967.

The stream:

The setlist: 

  1. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ — The Beatles
  2. “A House is Not a Motel” — Love
  3. “She Has Funny Cars” — Jefferson Airplane
  4. “Country Air” — The Beach Boys
  5. “8:05” — Moby Grape
  6. “Sittin’ On a Fence” — The Rolling Stones
  7. “Pictures of Lily” – The Who
  8. “Ups and Downs” — Paul Revere & the Raiders
  9. “Run, Run, Run” — The Velvet Underground
  10. “Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out)” — The Hombres
  11. “Neon Rainbow” — Box Tops
  12. “Expressway to Your Heart” — The Soul Survivors
  13. “Spanish Castle Magic” — Jimi Hendrix
  14. “Bring It Up” — James Brown
  15. “Tougher Than Tough” — Derrick Morgan
  16. “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man” — James Carr
  17. “Wait You Dog” — Mable John
  18. “You’re All I Need” — Bobby Bland
  19. “Soul Serenade” — Aretha Franklin
  20. “Love is a Doggone Good Thing” — Eddie Floyd
Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Morning Show” and “The Lonesome Show”
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Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Morning Show” and “The Lonesome Show”

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SING ALL KINDS is an afternoon show but to note the beginning of a new year, the first show of 2021 was “The Morning Show”

The stream:

The setlist: 

  1. “Good Morning, Good Morning” — The Beatles
  2. “Watch the Sunrise” — Big Star
  3. “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun” — Al Green
  4. “Breakfast in Bed” — Dusty Springfield
  5. “Woke Up This Morning” — Johnnie Frierson
  6. “Cigarettes and Coffee” — Otis Redding
  7. “Sunday Morning” — The Velvet Underground
  8. “Monday Morning” — Fleetwood Mac
  9. “Monday Morning Rock” — Marshall Crenshaw
  10. “Bloody Mary Morning” — Willie Nelson
  11. “One Too Many Mornings” — Bob Dylan
  12. “Early in the Morning” — Louis Jordan
  13. “Early in the Morning” — Buddy Holly
  14. “Early in the Morning” — Heartless Bastards
  15. “In the Morning” — Built to Spill 
  16. “In the Morning Time” — The Clovers
  17. “Jumpin’ in the Morning” — Ray Charles
  18. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” — Johnny Cash
  19. “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning” — Gram Parsons

This week, one of pop music’s grand topics: “The Lonesome Show.”

The stream:

The setlist:

  1. “Tired of Being Alone” — Al Green
  2. “It’s Gonna Be Lonely” — Prince
  3. “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long’ — Frederick Knight
  4. “Ain’t Got No Home” — Clarence “Frogman” Henry
  5. “Crazy with Loneliness” — Harlan T. Bobo
  6. “If Loneliness Was Art” — Allo Darlin
  7. “Lonely Girl” — Todd Snider
  8. “Lonely Girls” — Lucinda Williams
  9. “The Lonely, the Lonesome and the Gone” — Lee Ann Womack
  10. “Nobody’s Lonesome For Me” — Hank Williams
  11. “Lonely Coming Down” — Dolly Parton
  12. “Lonesome and a Long Way From Home” — Delaney and Bonnie
  13. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” — Bob Dylan
  14. “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights” — Earl King
  15. “Lonely Nights” — The Hearts
  16. “So Lonely” — Johnny Ace
  17. “Wish Someone Would Care” — Irma Thomas
  18. “If Only You Were Lonely” — The Replacements
Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Staying In Show”
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Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Staying In Show”

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This week was a special New Year’s Eve edition, with songs about not going out and instead sitting around the house. 

The stream:

The setlist: 

  1. “Party Lights” — Claudine Clark
  2. “Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party” — Courtney Barnett 
  3. “TV Party” — Black Flag
  4. “Stay Away” — Nirvana
  5. “Sequestered in Memphis” — Hold Steady
  6. “In My Room” — The Beach Boys
  7. “Waterloo Sunset” — The Kinks
  8. “Watching the Wheels” — John Lennon
  9. “Flowers on the Wall” — Statler Brothers
  10. “Bedda at Home” — Jill Scott
  11. “Late to the Party” — Kacey Musgraves
  12. “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” — The Beatles
  13. “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” — Willie Nelson
  14. “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down” — Hank Williams Jr.
  15. “Stillness is the Move” — Dirty Projectors
  16. “Hommage a Grungie” — Kate & Anna McGarrigle
  17. “My Little Corner of the World” — Yo La Tengo
Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Covers Show” (Vol. 1) and “The Jesus Show”
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Sing All Kinds Radio: “The Covers Show” (Vol. 1) and “The Jesus Show”

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New Year’s resolution: Get back on a weekly posting schedule.

Two weeks ago, on “Sing All Kinds,” I finally leaned on an obvious crutch to which I’ll return from time to time: A covers show. This first one focused mostly on modern “alt-rock” artists borrowing from the classic-rock or pre-punk canons. 

The stream: 

The set list (original artist in parenthesis):

  1. “Gloria” — Patti Smith (Them, featuring Van Morrison)
  2. “Femme Fatale” — Big Star (The Velvet Underground)
  3. “Sweet Jane” — Mott the Hoople (The Velvet Underground)
  4. “And Then He Kissed Me” – Moe Tucker (The Crystals)
  5. “Into the Groovey” — Sonic Youth (Madonna)
  6. “Eight Miles High “– Husker Du (The Byrds)
  7. “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey” — The Feelies (The Beatles)
  8. “Norwegian Wood” — Cornershop (The Beatles)
  9. “Waiting for the Day” — Reigning Sound (The Beach Boys)
  10. “Crimson and Clover” — Joan Jett & the Blackhearts (Tommy James & the Shondells)
  11. “Stop Your Sobbing” — The Pretenders (The Kinks)
  12. “Soul Kitchen” — X (The Doors)
  13. “Alone Again Or” — Mouse Rocket (Love)
  14. “Candle Mambo” — Amy LaVere (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band)
  15. “Friday I’m in Love” — Yo La Tengo (The Cure)
  16. “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” — Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric (Jackie DeShannon)

Last week, on a Christmas Eve edition, I did “The Jesus Show.:

The stream:

The setlist:

  1. “Jesus Christ” — Big Star
  2. “Jesus is Waiting” — Al Green
  3. “Spanish Pipedream” — John Prine
  4. “Me and Jesus” — Tom T. Hall
  5. “New Friend Jesus” — Craig Finn
  6. “Travellin’ on for Jesus” — Kate & Anna McGarrigle
  7. “Jesus Christ” — Woody Guthrie
  8. “Christ for President” — Billy Bragg & Wilco
  9. “Jesus, Etc.” — Wilco
  10. “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” — Nirvana 
  11. “Jesus Christ was an Only Child” — Modest Mouse
  12. “Spirit in the Sky” — Norman Greenbaum 
  13. “Jesus Just Left Chicago” — ZZ Top
  14. “Jesus, the Missing Years” — John Prine
  15. “Jesus” — The Velvet Underground
  16. “Touch the Hem of His Garment” — Sam Cooke
  17. “Talkin’ About Jesus” — Delaney & Bonnie