13. PERFECT SONGS

I was tempted to put this list up with no side comments - after all, the whole point is that my love for these songs is beyond mere rational analysis. But you and I both know that I do not have the willpower to do that, and actually you get not just an introductory ramble but a few words about most of the individual songs. I would make you a mix tape if I could, and just keep my trap shut, but I can't, so here you go with the next best thing.

I think it's significant that my list has a preponderance of pop songs, though I am only half a pop fan these days - there's something infinitely satisfying about a song going exactly where you know it's going to go, or rather about knowing a song so well and thoroughly that each bit of the song sets up a Pavlovian twinge of anticipation for the next bit. This is theoretically possible with any sort of organized sound, and indeed, it can be much more gratifying to get to know something really complicated, say an entire Shostakovich symphony, but it's much more likely that one will be able to wrap one's mind around two and a half minutes of a I-IV-V progression, which is why this list contains approximately 80% songs that are under 3 minutes long and only about three that could be considered complicated by any criterion including number of instruments or percentage of multisyllabic words. I am just a simple girl, really.

Big Rig, "New Fist"
The ex-singer of Operation Ivy plus most of Screw 32 equals the most emo song that ever wasn't called emo (Morrissey's entire recorded output excepted, of course). It's a testament to the persuasive power of delivery that "I tried to touch you, but my hand got in the way" here sounds not just un-hackneyed but really fucking tragic.

Bright Eyes, "The Calendar Hung Itself"
Speaking of tragic - a breathless moaning lost-love song that manages to turn prying and stalking and pathetically obsessive behavior ("does he walk around all day at school with his feet inside your shoes, looking down every few seconds to pretend he walks with you?") into the stuff of epic romantic sagas. I never realized "You are My Sunshine" was so sad.

Blonde Redhead, "Melody of Certain Three"
There is something in certain music - I think it's a particular type of chord progression, but really, I'd rather leave the technical whys of it a sacred mystery - that evokes the most enormous feelings of tidal melancholy in even my dried up little brown heart. For lack of a better word, I call it big-and-tragic, and the first few chords of this song (C5, C and an A flat with an added C, if you're curious, but don't goddamn tell me the theory behind it, man, because I don't want to know) bring it out like crazy. By the time the drums and singing kick in, I'm already wrecked, a flailing thing ready to knock myself limply into walls like the lurching rhythm demands, and it's all the better that the lyrics are just the sort of sad things one wants to howl whilst knocking oneself into walls. Hit yourself into the wall while yelling "I don't know! I understand!" and you will see what I mean.

Brutal Truth, "I See Red" and "Walking Corpse"
Circus Lupus, "Texas Minute"

Creation is Crucifixion, "The Cyborg Handbook"
Speaking of learning something really complicated - knowing exactly what's coming next in this song is the more satisfying because there are so many bits to it and they're all insanely complex and come at you at about 600 mph, right at your head. First there's the chugging part like a steamroller doing the cha-cha. Then this amazing bit of discordant guitar, and then the whole band gathers itself up and hurls itself around the room with bullet-train speed and a hundred thousand snare hits, and then the discordant guitar again, and I dunno, you just have to hear it. It kills me.

The Ex, "State of Shock"
Franklin, "Major Taylor"
Fugazi, "Waiting Room"
Peter Gabriel, "Here Comes the Flood"
The Gits, "Second Skin"
Godflesh, "Flowers"

His Hero is Gone, "Carry On"
This is from one of those records that I don't listen to for months on end, and when I pull it out again, I wonder what possessed me to take it out of the player, ever. I look forward to my favorite part at the end of the song as soon as the song starts, I look forward to the song from the second I put the record on, I look forward to listening to the record when I am on my way over to the stereo with it, and on and on until that one little riff between "bought their way out" and "while the rest suffer" turns into the culmination of my entire life. Oh mercy.

Imperial Teen, "Ivanka"
Isis, "Celestial"

Long Hind Legs, "Dusk"
One of the very first songs that made me cry. With only two guitars and two voices it draws the bleakest, most beautiful picture in my head - a prairie, somewhere in the Dakotas, at that last drawn-out moment of early winter dusk when you start thinking that maybe the sun won't ever go down, that maybe it will hang on the horizon forever, snagged on the lone bare tree which is the only thing breaking the horizon for a hundred miles in any direction. The wind sighs and mutters, the guitars play a melancholy leafless little melody that rocks itself back and forth but never goes anywhere - and then one blink and it's dark, the sun slips below the horizon with alarming speed and the guitars shriek and howl and the air around you is suddenly black and thin and frozen with loneliness, and you're pinned to the vast ground with it. The sere, snowless grass extends out to the curve of the earth, and the night is long and has only just begun.

Metallica, "Creeping Death"
Whenever I see a boy of that certain really dangerous age - say around 17 or 18 or 19, when so many boys are riding about in their mothers' cars blasting Limp Bizkit and yelling at girls on the street - whenever I see such a boy engaged in something useful and wholesome like playing bluegrass fiddle or drawing, I want to pat him on the head and thank him for not being a useless lout. Metallica at the time they wrote this song were certainly something less than wholesome, and I suppose their overall usefulness could be debated as well, but I do want to pat them on the head for their somewhat surprising knowledge of ancient Jewish history.

The Monorchid, "X Marks the Spot: Something Dull Happened Here"
Os Mutantes, "Minha Meninha"
Piano Magic, "There's No Need for Us to Be Alone"
Sepultura, "Arise"
The first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10
Sigur Rós "Hun Jorð" as remixed by Hassbræður
Sleater-Kinney, "Little Babies"
Superette, "Saskatchewan"
Third Eye Foundation, "Corpses as Bedmates"
This Heat, "A New Kind of Water"
Les Thugs, "Strike"
Ultra Vivid Scene, "Lightning (72 bpm/4am)"

White Hassle, "Oh What a Feeling"
This is actually a cover of an Everly Brothers song, but Don and Phil are a little too showbiz to do it justice themselves. Their version is too pat, too smug at having come up with such a funny little conceit for a song - "it must be love, oh what a feeling," but just when you think we're about to swoon off into some moon-June (or at least maybe-baby) fantasy, we find out that no, it must be love because it hurts so damn bad that she doesn't love us back. Marcellus, Dave and Matt didn't write the song, and their lack of self-congratulatory reserve frees them up to be as abject and weepy as the sad sad story demands. The guitars flail, the drums bash, and the voices harmonize in such gutwrenching ways that the whole thing feels like an accident, a song spontaneously coalesced from a sobbing fit - three sad sad monkeys with instruments accidentally writing an Everly Brothers song.

The White Stripes, "The Union Forever"