"Life's Too Short" Music List #1 (of 2)

"Life's Too Short" music list #1

Around the time I turned forty I came to the realization that life is too short either to pretend you like music you don’t (but “should”) or to pretend not to like music you do (but “shouldn’t”). So I’ve decided to swallow my pride and stop pretending not to like the following artists and genres, even if it means that my wife raises her eyebrows at me from time to time when she hears what I’ve put in the car stereo. Mildly freaking out your wife is one of the few pleasures of male middle age, anyway.


* Scritti Politti – in particular, the gloriously cheesy Cupid & Psyche album. Now, granted: Gart Greenside’s Marxist/situationist politics was a bunch of posturing twaddle, and he sang like a simpering part-time drag queen, and yes, those glistening Stratocaster funk licks and candy-coated synthesizer parts are the distilled essense of all that was wrong with pop music in the ‘80s. But there’s just no denying the hooks, and the shorter my life gets the more I care about hooks. Also, that’s Ranking Ann toasting over the dub mix of “The Word Girl (Flesh & Blood).” Ranking Ann, people.

* Mariachi music in general and Linda Ronstadt’s mariachi albums in particular.I love it all. I love the trumpets, I love the violins, I love the tight harmonies, I love the glorious sound of La Ronstadt’s voice soaring above everything and holding those notes for highly improbable lengths of time. And I love the sobbing/laughing cries from the gitarron player.

* Buck Owens. When I was a young kid, desperately in love with early country music, I absolutely hated Hee Haw. I thought pretty much everything about the show was stupid, but worse was the way it made genius musicians complicit in their own ridicule by a culture that didn’t appreciate them. Actually, I still feel pretty much the same way. But my disgust was never enough to temper my once-secret love for Buck Owens, architect of the Bakersfield Sound and composer of some of the finest and most tightly constructed popular music of the 20th century. I’ll go out on a limb and say that “Above and Beyond” is one of the best love songs of the past 50 years.

* Phil Collins. As a longtime Peter Gabriel fan, I still harbor some resentment of Phil Collins, who I believe stole both his vocal style and his signature highly-compressed drum sound from Gabriel. And it’s also true that his songs pretty much exemplify 1990s schlock. But as Steve Reich once said about Wagner, the man’s a musical genius and you simply have to lump it. Collins has a great voice, he writes fantastic songs, and he has a sense of humor. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Phil Collins song I didn’t like, whether I was willing to admit it at the time or not.

* Hall & Oates. It’s time for us to just give up and acknowledge the fact that Daryl Hall had (maybe still has) one of the two or three finest voices in the history of popular music, and he wielded it with both taste and power. These guys were easy to hate, but every single one of their (many) hits was a genuinely great song. If simply reading the words “Rich Girl” doesn’t hook that song in your head for the next three days, then chances are you’re either tone deaf or under 30.

* George Jones. He’s been called the greatest pure singer in country music, and that may actually be understating the case. In the complexity and soulfulness of his delivery he is rivaled only by Ralph Stanley, a completely different singer with a similar level of genius. Jones’s voice was shaped and inspired by the barroom in the same way that Stanley’s was by the mountains of southern Virginia; Jones can break your heart with a single syllable the same way Stanley can make every hair on your body stand on end with a single melodic ornament. Jones’s wispy Dry Look hairstyle and goofy glasses are distractions. Ignore them, and listen to how he lands (and avoids landing) on each and every note that he sings, as well as the brilliantly counterintuitive way that he clamps down on the most intense phrases in the lyric rather than giving way to them. I’m not even sure he actually knows what he’s doing – I think he may just be that kind of scary-intuitive talent.

* The Kingston Trio. Among the purveyors of what my uncle lovingly calls Crass Commercial Folk Music in the 1950s and 1960s, the Kingston Trio was nearly unique in its perfect blend of humor, chops, and taste. They weren’t above bending the knee to the standard golden calves of the era (Bob Dylan covers, etc.), but neither were they able to hide the sheer joy in songcraft that led them to their best material. And their voices – none of them especially noteworthy in a solo setting – blended beautifully. They also generally avoided political material, which was in some ways a cop-out and in some ways quite courageous – what it did do was keep the focus where it belonged: on the songs themselves.

* Luther Vandross/Anita Baker. Two giants of the Quiet Storm school of bedroom R&B, both of them a pure joy to listen to. I’ve heard it whispered that Baker is a raging diva, which I hope isn’t true – she’s such a cutie pie.

* Sade. Jazz? Please. But there’s nothing wrong with jazz-inflected pop music, and Sade’s weird combination of cool reserve and throaty, smoldering passion (along with top-notch schlock-jazz session players) made all of her albums interesting and some of them brilliant. I consider her the thinking lounge lizard’s Grace Jones, with an actual voice. 

* Bob Wills. I was once channel-surfing and came across an amazing thing: a music video, vintage 1940 or so, featuring Western swing titan Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. My astonishment turned to rage when I realized it was being shown as part of a program highlighting “Great Moments in Musical Kitsch” or something to that effect. Bob Wills? Kitsch? OK, I guess I can see where it comes from, but still. Western swing is one of the purest musical pleasures still available in a world gone rotten – I mean, come on: a country band with a big horn section? What could be better? – and Bob Wills is still the king. If I had a Bob Wills t-shirt, I’d wear it every day. And my wife would raise her eyebrows at me.

(List #2 will cover the music that I’m no longer willing to pretend that I do like.)