[pop is the new alternative]

It's a truism that the millennial generation is a whole lot more earnest than the Gen-Xers who preceded them. Certainly they don't seem to be mired in the crippling irony that we all seemed to struggle against, and they don't have the combination of seething anger and helpless despair that fueled the whole alternative movement.

There are two relics of the Gen-X period that to me sum up what stood out about our generation and why. The first is a line from "Smells Like Teen Spirit": "Our little group has always been/And always will until the end." There just aren't a lot of us, and I think that made a difference. The boomers were marketed to relentlessly, and still are. The same is true of the millennials: movies like Look Who's Talking and Three Men and a Baby, came out when they were born, and the music industry was creating pop stars for them when they were still tweens. But for Generation X, the marketing juggernaut never really got ginned up. I think we never fully bought into corporate America because corporate America never really bought into us. The resources weren't invested, so we went our own way and listened to weird bands and wore weird clothes that were difficult to sell in any organized way. I'd like to imagine that the alternative scene was about something deeper, but I suspect that we felt like we had no real place in contemporary America simply because no one was trying hard enough to sell us things.

The other Gen-X artifact that I think of is the movie Slackers. Its various characters are all struggling in one way or another to gather and communicate information: the guy who collects TVs, the guy who keeps shouting about how people need to read the newspaper, the Kennedy assassination buff, the girl trying to sell Madonna's pubes are all trapped by their inability to connect with anyone who shares their enthusiasms. And what's remarkable about this movie is that every one of those problems is solved by the Internet. With YouTube, political blogs, social networks, eBay, you no longer need to be alone with your obsession. That devastating feeling of isolation and powerlessness that the alternative scene was meant to assuage is simply not a problem in the way that it was. Millennials have come of age knowing that they can make a difference, that they can have an impact on the wider world, whether through serious political engagement or through participation in a flashmob.

But so here's where the whole situation with pop music starts to get interesting. For Gen-X, there were two kinds of popular music: pop that was manufactured by people who didn't seem to understand us that well, and who were definitely not us; and alternatives to that pop, whether gangsta rap or grunge or what have you, that had to define itself musically against the slicked-up sounds of more traditional pop. To be authentic, music had to be uncomfortable, at least a little.

But for the millennials, that's just not true anymore. They voted for their American Idols, so it's OK to like them. And they watched Justin Timberlake grow up, so it's OK to like him. And now, there's the emerging and fascinating phenomenon of the ironically self-aware pop star. Lady Gaga is the obvious queen of this new phenomenon, but you see it in Lily Allen and in Timberlake, and I noticed in in Ke$ha on SNL this weekend. (Sudden thought: was it Eminem who bridged the gap between alternative rage and abrasiveness, and self-parodying pop stars?) They're pop stars, and they know they're pop stars, and they seem to think that the whole thing is a zany lark, akin to a YouTube video that blows up for no apparent reason. You get the sense that they genuinely realize the whole thing is a crap shoot, and that there's nothing all that special about them as people.

It used to be alternative that was the realm of DIY, where you went to see bands that made you feel like you could be in a band just like them. You could never be a New Kid on the Block, but you and your friends could totally pull off a Beasties punk number, and any schmuck could dress that badly. But now it's the guitar bands that seem kind of remote and obscure, while anyone with a sequencer and a webcam can make a video and maybe turn into a pop star. It's like Toto pulled back the curtain, and the millennials decided that Oz was totally great and they wanted a turn at the levers.

[what does it all mean?]

I don't know, but it's on every hip hop record, and apparently it's New York City Mayor Fiorello Laguardia explaining the moral of a Dick Tracy comic strip over the radio during a newspaper strike (the famous sample kicks in at about 1:27).

The first use is almost certainly Double Dee and Steinski, who included it in their Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix from 1983, an astonishing sound collage.

The more you know ... Star!

[beatles and birth order]

Does birth order affect who your favorite Beatle is? My sister is the youngest. Her favorite is George, who happens to be the youngest Beatle, who had to fight to get his voice heard, and who really came into his own as an equal to John and Paul only on the later albums.

My brother, the middle child, seems to like Ringo, the amiable peacemaker without strong opinions. Such a middle child!

As for me, I'm the firstborn, and I like John, the solitary dreamer, the one who turned his back most firmly on the fraternity of the group, and who really just wanted to settle into a relationship that didn't have the bother of outside interference.

[vienna teng]

I've just discovered Vienna Teng, a lovely and powerful singer-songwriter. Her music reminds me of Noe Venable and of Fiona Apple, though Teng is distinctly her own thing (and in fact there's a YouTube video of her covering Noe's "Midsummer Night's Dream"). Visit her site and listen to "Blue Caravan." Then check out her MySpace page and listen to "Grandmother Song." It's an Americana stomp about being an aging singer-songwriter, a common enough theme, yet it manages to tie in (allusively) the whole Taiwanese-American experience, with the weight of war and deprivation that weighs so heavily on the youngest generation.

[memory, history, and the beatles]

What does it mean to remember an experience? Sitting with my parents recently, listening to the Beatles remasters that just came out, it became clear that what my parents remembered about the Beatles — the order things came out, which songs were on which albums — was a kind of visceral memory, often inaccurate when measured against the archival record. My father compared it to the way people of his parents' generation remembered World War II versus the way he grew up learning about it: they knew better what it was like, while he knew better what had actually happened.

Time also has a way of distorting our views. I know that I take Kurt Cobain a lot more seriously now than I did when he was alive. Until his suicide brought his art back into focus for me, I thought of Nirvana as a pretty good if simplistic and overhyped grunge band that was never as cool or interesting as Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. He wasn't the voice of my generation until he no longer had a voice.

That effect is probably even stronger with the Beatles, who shaped a generation far more intensely than Cobain ever could have. In the many years since the Beatles were a going concern, we've seen Wings, and Plastic Ono Band, and the Concert for Bangladesh. We've seen The Compleat Beatles and Anthology. We've heard Let It Be de-Spectorized. We've seen John Lennon martyred, and Yoko Ono transformed from witch to hipster icon. And we've grown more familiar with the canonical materials, while the uncollected detritus of abandoned pop culture — radio and television interviews, DJ chatter about new Beatles songs, the speculation of one's friends about whether the Beatles turn on, the newspaper and magazine articles — all fade into oblivion.

Above all, we know how it ends now. We know that Sgt. Peppter's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the highwater mark, that Abbey Road is the coda. We know that no Beatle ever did anything solo that was as impressive as the Beatles together. And we know that the story was closed forever by a pointless murder.

But what was it like to here "Tomorrow Never Knows" without knowing what was to come?

Sitting with my parents, listening to their memories of these songs when they were new, I got a taste of what that might have been like. And that got me to thinking about my own first experience of the Beatles.

Until 1987, what we had were the records — the American records. I grew up with an album called Song, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles, a decidedly silly repackaging of Vee-Jay's Introducing... the Beatles that included a gatefold, drawings of the Beatles, blurbs on their likes and dislikes, and places to put heart-shaped photographs of oneself under photos of each Beatle and the words, "JOHN LOVES," "PAUL LOVES," "GEORGE LOVES" or "RINGO LOVES." It was a record meant to be bought by a schoolgirl, and it was, and that has some meaning to it.

What changed in 1987 was that the surviving Beatles and George Martin released something resembling the whole Beatles catalogue in what became canonical form, based on the British albums, with the stray bits and pieces gathered onto Past Masters I and II. I say something resembling the whole because they did away with the instrumental versions of several songs that populated the American versions of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, and because all of the canonical CDs were in stereo. To muddy the waters even further, in 1987 George Martin took it upon himself to redo the stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul, so we've been listening to different versions of those LPs than the already somewhat obscure British stereo records.

The newly released remasters are a useful corrective. The music sounds grand, which is obviously the most important thing. I don't imagine that it sounds quite like a brand new pressing of British wax played on a brand new hi-fi from 1965 — certainly not when I play it on my iPod, through quality earbuds — but it sounds clear, resonant, full, and punchy.

And the release of the mono remasters, complete with the original stereo mixes of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, makes it possible to hear something much closer to what everyone heard when the Beatles' music was new. For the first couple of albums, the stereo mix is pretty arbitrary, mostly an artifact of how the music was recorded for mono: the vocals are all in the right channel, and the instruments are all in the left. I'd go so far as to say that Please Please Me and With the Beatles are actually preferable in mono, even on headphones.

There's also the peculiarity that certain songs have different bits in them, depending on whether you're listening to the mono or the stereo version. The Sgt. Pepper that played endlessly on the radio was probably the mono version, in which "She's Leaving Home" is a faster number in a different key, avoiding some of the soupiness of the stereo version, and the reprise is noisier, layered with more crowd noise and crescendoing with some great shouting by Paul that's missing in stereo. (In other cases, the stereo versions are better. Who wants to miss out on Paul reaching for the high notes as he sings, "Every single day!" during the fadeout of "Got to Get You Into My Life," or Ringo's famous "I've got blisters on my fingers!" as "Helter Skelter" fades back in?)

Getting to hear all this music, in a variety of formats, is wonderful. And it's not too difficult to create a playlist that recreates the American discography (although you do have to live without those instrumentals).

So what's the difference? Well, often the songs were in different orders, and the whole experience of the early Beatles was shaped by the overlapping releases of Introducing and Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, which launched American Beatlemania, opens with the world-conquering "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but leaves out "Twist and Shout" (not released by Capitol until The Early Beatles came out in 1965).

Even more significant were the changes to the middle-period albums, which were my parents' favorites, and whose structure and release schedule helped to map their courtship and coming of age. The now-canonical albums aren't the ones my father remembers. Help! opened with a James Bond theme intro (not digitally available), and was full of instrumentals. It didn't contain Yesterday, which wasn't on a US album until after Rubber Soul.

And it's maybe Rubber Soul where the changes matter most. My father remembers that record as part of his experience of traveling around Europe in the summer of '66, being in love with my mother. In the US, it opened with Paul's lovely, folkie "I've Just Seen a Face," not the smirky "Drive My Car." Side two opens with "It's Only Love," a considerably sweeter number than "What Goes On." And the dark moods of "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are left off completely. The result is an album that has a different ratio of love to chagrin. There's a different vibe.

Then there's the whole sea change that seems to come with Revolver. In the US, that change was spread out over two albums, with "Yeterday"...and Today coming first, opening with "Drive My Car," "I'm Only Sleeping," "Nowhere Man," and "Dr. Robert," and closing out with "Day Tripper" (not found on any UK album). In America, Revolver was a bit less trippy than in the UK, and provided almost a lull in the psychedelic experimentation before the summer of Sgt. Pepper and love in 1967.

Somewhere in my parents' house is a reel-to-reel recording of my parents calling in to a radio show and chatting with John Lennon while they were tripping on LSD. I'm not entirely sure whether I've actually heard this tape, or just heard of it. I can't remember what anyone said. But this sort of relic reveals the unbridgeable gulf between the canonical text and the lived experience. No one will ever release a handsome boxed set of snippets like that. But chatting with John on the radio was another kind of listening to the Beatles. I'll have to dig up that tape one of these days and find out what, if anything, they talked about.

[more on japanese vs. korean coolness]

I was going to follow up on an earlier post about Korean vs. Japanese coolness, and wondering whether anyone in Korea would ever be doing something like this:

Yes, it's awful. But it's also cool in a way that I didn't think Korean culture would quite grasp: the cool of the avant garde.

So I went fishing on the Interwebs to see if I could find an equivalent, and lo and behold, I discovered Balloon & Needle, a Korean artists collective that does things like this:

For some reason, this gives me hope.

[is korea getting kinky?]

"Abracadabra" from Brown Eyed Girls is the first bit of Korean pop culture I've happened across that makes explicit reference to either BDSM or female bisexuality. (It's much more common to see sadomasochism couched in a "horror" context, which makes it more acceptable.) It's a sexy video, and not just a cutesy pantomime of American sexy.

Back in 2002, Korea was not sexy or cool. It really wanted to be cool, but it just wasn't.

I had a friend who was teaching in Japan at the time, and she reminded me that Japan used to be the same way. Back in the 80s, Japan was Mr. Miyagi and the dorky car executives in Gung Ho. And then one day, somehow Japan was cool. It was weird techno and Cibo Matto and tentacle porn, and those cheesy anime shows we used to watch were suddenly part of a vibrant Asian subculture.

When I wondered whether Korea would turn a similar corner, I saw a few things holding it back, but mostly it came down to prudishness and conservatism. Where Japan has a long tradition of frankly bizarre erotica and exuberantly weird subcultures, Korea's long-reigning Joseon Dynasty emphasized Confucian values of propriety, frugality and restraint. And Korea today is home to a large and passionate community of devout Protestant Christians. Also, Korea doesn't really do irony, and irony seems crucial to finding your way into the hearts of American hipsters.

Even so, the Hallyu, or Korean Wave, has managed to spread Korean pop culture across Asia in recent years. Compared with a stagnant, aging Japan and a China where censorship still rules, Korean culture can seem downright (dare I say it?) dynamic.

Will it catch on in the US? And if it does, where in our culture will it fit? I don't know, but I do know that Korea continues to surprise me.

[25 random facts about me]

Note: This is a meme from FaceBook, thus the instructions are Facebooky. 

Rules: Once you've been tagged, write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to Notes under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people [in the right-hand corner of the app], then click Publish.)

1. I have a teddy bear named Elver, which I thought was a perfectly normal name when I gave it to him, at my cousin Louise's bat mitzvah. This bear is somewhere in my parents' house back in California.

2. Throughout much of my childhood, I was deeply concerned with war. Specifically, the war between the good people of Planet Salvania and the bad people of Planet Alto Deto over the resource-rich jungle planet of Reorilia. I made this all up in my head, of course.

3. The highest place I've ever been (outside of an airplane) is Muktinath, a Buddhist and Hindu shrine in the Himalayas of Nepal.

4. In middle school I stayed back a year, repeating sixth grade by taking a year off from Hebrew school and going to the local middle school. That year, I discovered that I was a nerd and made the transition to wannabe, buying Bugle Boy jeans and T&C surf shirts and totally failing to fit in.

5. The first time I heard "Loser" by Beck, it was on my car stereo, and I actually pulled off the highway to make sure I wouldn't lose the signal before I found out who the singer was. I felt like I had been waiting for exactly that song for years.

6. The first time I heard "Hand on the Pump" by Cypress Hill was at the Berkeley Square, a fantastically hip little club on University in Berkeley back in the day. It blew my mind so completely that I asked the DJ what it was. "Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of/Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of..."

7. The first tape I ever bought was Quiet Riot's Metal Health. The first time I heard Quiet Riot was in the car with some friends, and there was heated debate over whether the singer was a boy or a girl.

8. I'm a big fan of a local Brooklyn artist by the name of Elyse Taylor.

9. I love the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and one of my absolute favorite works of art there is a miniature sculpture of the goddess Durga killing the buffalo demon, Mahisha (Mahishasuramardini).

10. When I decided to go to Korea, I had never even tried Korean food.

11. The first time I was given a seriously grownup book to read in English class, it was with Mr. Poirier in seventh grade. We read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was breathtakingly magisterial. I just reread it, and it wasn't as brilliant as I remembered.

12. I like that breakfast cereal that's made of oats and is super high fiber, and it's kind of like square Cheerios made out of granola dust.

13. I keep my old heavy metal T-shirts in a trunk because they simply can't be thrown away.

14. I'm an inconsistent meditator at best.

15. When I was little, I assumed that everyone wanted to write books when they grew up, and the only reason not everyone was a writer is that we need people to do other things sometimes. It was a shock to discover that there were people with no interest whatsoever in becoming writers.

16. I've always had a legalistic, argumentative streak, and for a while I thought I might want to be a lawyer.

17. My very first time on the Internet, I went fishing in Gopherspace and discovered instructions for seducing a horse.

18. I'm not sure I believe in God, but I pray a lot anyway.

19. I've always been fascinated by the exotic. When I was very little, I would imagine that my bed was a lifeboat drifting off to some undiscovered country. When I got older, I thought Ozymandias and Kubla Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner were totally cool. I also really liked The Horse and His Boy, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book.

20. I will contemplate the other desserts with due seriousness. Then I will choose the chocolate one.

21. My favorite pair of boots ever was the biker boots I got at Daljeets on Haight Street.

22. My first car was my dad's old Toyota Corona, which burst into flames early in the morning of New Year's Day, just after I'd dropped off my friend Teresa, having gone to a concert together that night.

23. I know that the battle sequence at the end of Star Wars takes longer than the time that's stated in the movie. I know because I've timed it.

24. At various times, the Beastie Boys, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, the Beatles, Metallica, Guns'n'Roses, Bang Tango, the Cult and Soundgarden have been my favorite band. 

25. Briefs.

[springtime in new york]

It's spring, and a lovely one. The weather is delightful. There are cherry blossoms on the trees (well, the cherry trees), and whole streets are paved in petals. The magnolias too are in bloom, and the dogwoods, and the tulips are getting slightly obscene. 

My life here continues apace. All is well at Google — I've had my first guest come in to ooh and ah at the wonders of my Googley life, and if you're nearby, you're more than welcome to swing by sometime for a free dinnner on Uncle Google. And this weekend I'm finally going back to the All-Night Concert of Indian Classical Music, an annual event held at St. John the Divine's Synod Hall. I went once years ago, discovered a love for the bansuri, India's wooden flute, and left at around 5 a.m., by which time I was seeing spots. I was younger then, too. We'll see how far I get this time. One advantage is that I won't be on my own (at least for the first few hours), as a Punjabi friend of mine will be joining me. And she may even know something about the music, which would be a welcome improvement over my admittedly blissful ignorance.

See you on the other side!

[μ (sic)]

I've decided to break out my music posts into a new blog, [μ (sic)]. Enjoy.

[everything i know is wrong]

Golden Age (YouTube) | Paper Tiger (YouTube) | Guess I'm Doin' Fine (YouTube) | Lonesome Tears (YouTube) | Lost Cause (YouTube) | It's All in Your Mind (YouTube) | Round the Bend (YouTube) | Sunday Sun (YouTube) | Little One (YouTube) by Beck (Sea Change)

In 2002, while Jenny and I were in Nepal, Beck came out with Sea Change, a beautiful album about the aftermath of a broken heart. Jenny and I were already engaged by then, and I remember thinking that this particular record would always remain a little distant from me — that the subject matter wasn't something I'd ever be going through again.

People keep asking me how I'm doing. I don't know how to answer, but the lyrics to "Guess I'm Doin' Fine" keep running through my head. The lyrics to the whole record, really.

I know they're asking about the divorce. I'm never sure whether they want to hear the despair or the hope — there is hope too — or just want me to say something cursory. And it's nearly impossible to say how I've been, or how I will be, because it keeps changing.

What's happening now in my life is tremendously painful and disorienting. Things I thought I understood about myself, about Jenny, about my life, turn out to be completely wrong. Plans and certainties are crumbling away. The ground has given out beneath me, and I don't know at all where I stand.

The hardest and most baffling thing right now is the discovery of how little Jenny and I seem to have known each other. We spent six years as a couple and lived together even longer, yet we were able to misunderstand each other almost totally as we struggled to save our marriage. And I know there were parts of me that Jenny never saw or guessed at, because it destroyed our marriage when I revealed them.

Right now, the idea of ever trusting anyone so deeply seems impossible. How could we have been so wrong? So blind? So blind to our blindness? How will I ever be sure of anyone else?

Even so, I know that I will almost certainly trust again. Life goes on — when I first started telling people about the divorce, they kept reassuring me that it wouldn't kill me, as if this were good news — and eventually pain recedes.

My hope — I did mention that there was hope — is that I can continue in my process of recovery to become a person with integrity and without secrets. It's the secrets that have brought me to this pass — the hidden parts in myself, and the way they resonated with the hidden parts in Jenny — and so I need to reach a point of fundamental honesty with myself. That will take a lot of work and involve facing many things I haven't ever been willing to face, loneliness not least among them.

There are also more mundane hopes — for a new job, for a new home, for new friends and a new future. They will come in time. Sometimes these hopes buoy me up and make me feel almost good. Then there's also a lot of anxiety about all the logistical steps I have to take. And there are moments when I'm able to turn my life over to the care of God, feeling relief in letting go and trusting the universe to take me where it will.

For the most part, though, what I feel is a deep ache, just on the edge of weeping.

Sorrow. I feel sorrow.

[arguing with fools]

United Abominations (YouTube) by Megadeth (United Abominations)

Is it worth arguing with fools? I don't mean people who are genuinely stupid, but those who are wedded to some wrongheaded ideology or who have been led astray by some sort of faulty reasoning?

Obviously it depends on the situation, but there's something to be said for countering even the most obviously specious arguments of those who advocate dangerous politics from any sort of public platform.

Alas, this category includes Dave Mustaine, the leader of Megadeth, who is now 46 years old and should know better. Granted, Mustaine was never exactly a genius. He made the politics of a young James Hetfield look positively insightful. Still, what is charmingly antisocial stupidity at 25 is just depressing at 46. Mustaine is no longer angry youth; now he's your drunken uncle, ranting at someone's birthday about the Trilateral Commission and JFK.

Mustaine's latest album (Megadeth has always been a solo project) is entitled United Abominations, and the cover depicts the UN Headquarters under military attack. The title track is an anti-UN screed that seems to blame the organization for all that's wrong in the world. It seems too stupid to take seriously, but I guess it's good that UN Dispatch, a blog on the UN, has posted a point-by-point takedown of this very silly song. If you're concerned to know exactly how and why Mustaine is being a schmuck, well, now you can. (Thanks, Daniel!)

[coolest thing ever?]

Daniel McKleinfeld (who is appearing in Hamlet, so go see it), sent me a link to a Chuck Closterman piece about bands that are neither over- nor underrated, but rated perfectly, which contained this gem about Blue Öyster Cult:

The BÖC song everyone pays attention to is the suicide anthem "Don't Fear the Reaper." However, that song is stupid and doesn't use enough cowbell. The BÖC song almost no one pays attention to is the pro-monster plod-athon "Godzilla," and that song is spine-crushingly great. So, in the final analysis, Blue Öyster Cult is accurately rated — by accident. This happens on occasion; look at Scottie Pippen.

This is precisely true, so I went looking on YouTube, and OH MY GOD but look at what I found. Those glasses! That beard! That crappy stage monster and psychedelic drum solo! And keep an eye out for the bass player's severe case of sissyneck¹ during his solo.

—
1. Beck once explained that the song "Sissyneck" is named for the weird pecking motion that is mysteriously common to bass players getting their groove on.

[a song meme]

Ask in the comments and I will give you a letter. Then post your top ten songs beginning with that letter.

My letter is I from Pagan Mom.

Those of you who know me will know how hard it was for me to narrow this list down to ten. So these songs are the ones that mean the most to me, or are simply the best of the lot, for today. I may have to do another post just to get in my favorites from among the rejects.

10. Isfahan by Duke Ellington (Far East Suite: Special Mix)

I'm a sucker for quality Orientalism, and The Far East Suite is a masterpiece of the genre. Johnny Hodges' alto sax leads "Isfahan," a stately paean to Persia's most beautiful city.

9. In a Cold Ass Fashion by Beck (Jabberjaw Compilation: Good to the Last Drop)

"I got options, I got cop shows
I get nauseous and the sweat is day-glo"

The best Beck lyrics lodge in my mind and stay there for years as cryptic labels that seem to sum up vast, complex, otherwise indescribable phenomena. "In a Cold Ass Fashion" is a throwaway produced by Carl Stephenson, who also did "Loser" and "Beercan," but it has more memorable lines than Beck's two most recent albums put together.

8. I Got a Woman by Ray Charles (The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years)

"She give me money when I'm in need
Yeah she's a kind of friend indeed"

Understated, smoldering, datedly sexist, genius. That crack in the voice when he says "money" makes my hair stand on end. Thank you, Ray Charles, for inventing soul music.

7. It's All in Your Mind by Beck (Sea Change)

"Well you're all scared and stiff
A sick stolen gift
And the people you're with
They're all scared and stiff"

It reminds me of someone I loved and lost, try as I might to change her. First released as a simple acoustic ballad on One Foot in the Grave.

6. I Am the Walrus by The Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour)

"Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your Knickers down."

It could've been "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "In My Life" or even "I'm So Tired," but we all know the Beatles, and I didn't want to turn this into ten songs by the Beatles starting with I. Anyway, this symphonette by John Lennon and George Harrison deserves pride of place, and I had it memorized for a while when I was 11.

5. In Bloom by Nirvana (Nevermind)

"Sell the kids for food"

For a metalhead like I was at the time, "In Bloom," with its surging power cords, tom fills and soaring chorus, was the way in. It was the first Nirvana song to grab me by the throat and not let go.

4. Intimate Interlude by Duke Ellington (The Intimate Ellington)

This song was the processional at out wedding. Jenny understood.

3. I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) by Aretha Franklin (The Very Best of Aretha Franklin, Vol. 1)

"You're a no good heart breaker
You're a liar and you're a cheat"

Aretha's Atlantic sides are some of the best-produced records ever made. Listen to the way Aretha's voice fuzzes out when she gets loud, and listen to that band!

2. It's So Easy by Guns N' Roses (Appetite for Destruction)

"Besides you ain't got nothin' better to do
And I'm bored"

So deliciously sleazy! There are days when I think this is the best song on the best album ever.

1. In a Sentimental Mood by Duke Ellington (Duke Ellington & John Coltrane)

Yes, Duke Ellington is worth three slots on my top ten. Besides, he wrote a lot of songs starting with I ("It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)," "I'm Beginning to See the Light," "In a Mellow Tone"). This exquisite track opens the beautiful album of collaborations by two of the greatest innovators, thinkers and spiritual seekers in jazz. With Aaron Bell on bass and the incomparable Elvin Jones on drums, closing the piece with a press-roll that's almost a holy act.

[goin' to chicago]

Baby Are Yeng by Nancy Jacobs and Her Sisters
Chicago by Sufjan Stevens (Illinois)

Today is Jenny's first day at her new consulting gig in downtown Chicago, where she will be spending three to four days a week for the rest of the year and possibly beyond.

I know next to nothing about Chicago. I have only been there once, for an evening, and spent it in a depressingly cheesy jazz club. I know they have deep-dish pizza, that the Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueler lived there, that it once burned to the ground long ago, that it was a magnet for the westward migration of Polish and German and Irish and Italian immigrants and a magnet for the northward migration of African-Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., did poorly there. The buildings downtown were steam-cleaned in the eighties for the filming of The Untouchables. Chicago blues is an electric variety that helped create rock and roll and that has a dangerous tendency to fall into wanky self-parody. Chicago is America's second city, and the moniker "Windy City" comes from a reference to its politicians, not its weather.

And that's about it. Trivia, really. None of the living feel of the place. You could drop me in the middle of Jaipur or Seoul without a map and I could find my way, but I'd be hopeless in Chicago.

But like most great cities, Chicago is also a city of the mind, a target of the imagination. In "Baby are Yeng," Nancy Jacobs and Her Sisters (about whom I could find basically no information) give South African bounce to the very African-American yearning to leave the Jim Crow South behind for better odds in the big city, in what has to be one of the catchiest tunes ever. (Via the inimitable Locust St.) And in "Chicago," Sufjan Stevens manages to invoke both that city and New York in a story that I don't understand, but that moves me anyway.

Jenny, I'll miss you when you're far away. Have fun!

[going bananas for k-pop]

Humming Urban Stereo: Banana Shake (YouTube)

Spooky Banana: Mr. Firefighter (YouTube)

Humming Urban Stereo is DJ Jeereen, a Korean who seems to be among the first of his countrymen to grasp the poker-faced kitsch approach to pop music that makes certain Japanese bands so hip. "Banana Shake" is a ridiculously charming ditty that seems to be about exactly what you'd think. You can find more Hus music at their MySpace page and at this fan MySpace page, and you can read a bio at KBS World.

"Mr. Firefighter" is a rare glimmer of hope for the continued existence of one of our favorite Korean bands, Spooky Banana, whose CD we picked up in a cool record store on Daehagno (College Street) in Seoul based entirely on how much we dug the name of the band. Apparently the song has found its way onto a recent arcade release of the video game Pump It Up, which is a Korean knock-off of Dance Dance Revolution.

[the so called seder]

This seems like about the right time to bring your attention to So Called, a Jewish DJ whose So Called Seder is an astonishing blending of weird old Jewish recordings and performances by a range of fashionable musicians — Killa Priest of the Wu Tang Clan, Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle and Chassidic ragamuffin Matisyahu the most prominent among them — into a powerful if gestural retelling of the Haggadah. (MP3s can be found at Brooklyn Vegan.)

Despite the strenuous efforts of modern Jewish movements to sanitize the story of Pesach (Passover) into a parable of universal liberation, I find the traditional story — told for at least the last thousand years — to be quite different: a specific narrative of a specific war in which a specific oppressor is overthrown and his land laid waste. Indeed, much of the emphasis is on a detailed recounting of how severely the Egyptians are brutalized:

Rabbi Yosi the Gallilean said: How do you know that the Egyptians were stricken by ten plagues in Egypt, and then were struck by fifty plagues at the sea?

In Egypt it says of them, "The magicians said to Pharaoh 'This is the finger of G-d.' At the sea it says, "Israel saw the great hand that the L-rd laid against Egypt; and the people feared the L-rd, and they believed in the L-rd and in His servant Moses."

Now, how often were they smitten by 'the finger'? Ten plagues!

Thus you must conclude that in Egypt they were smitten by ten plagues, at the sea they were smitten by fifty plagues!

Rabbi Eliezer said: How do we know that each individual plague which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt consisted of four plagues?

For it is said: "He sent against them His fierce anger, fury, and indignation, and trouble, a discharge of messengers of evil": 'Fury,' is one; 'Indignation,' makes two; 'Trouble,' makes three; 'Discharge of messengers of evil,' makes four.

Thus you must now say that in Egypt they were struck by forty plagues, and at the sea they were stricken by two hundred plagues.

Rabbi Akiva said: How do we know that each individual plague which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt consisted of five plagues?

For it is said: "He sent against them his fierce anger, fury, and indignation, and trouble, a discharge of messengers of evil": 'His fierce anger,' is one; 'fury,' makes two; 'indignation,' makes three; 'trouble,' makes four; 'discharge of messengers of evil,' makes five. Thus you must now say that in Egypt they were struck by fifty plagues, and at the sea they were stricken by two hundred and fifty plagues.

In a beautiful track on the Hip-Hop Haggadah, a woman sings in a plaintive voice, over and over, "When Moses was in Egypt land / Let my people go." But what is truly haunting is her very last line as the roiling track comes to a close: she trails off with, "At night I'll kill your firstborn son ..."

That's not liberation. It's murder. Pesach is a holiday that remembers the brutality of war while insisting that sometimes the innocent must be tortured and killed for the sake of a greater cause. It's a celebration of victory, but also a remembrance of deep suffering by all the parties in the conflict. It's a stark reminder that the journey to the Promised Land begins with darkness, rivers of blood and the bread of affliction.

Happy Passover.

[cradle music]

Pinball Number Count (YouTube)
The Pointer Sisters
Songs from the Street: 35 Years of Music

1-20 Raga (YouTube)
Sesame Street

Sing it to anyone who grew up in America who grew up in the 1970s and their eyes light up: "One-two-three-FOUR-five, six-seven-eight-NINE-ten, eleven-twelve!" This gem of a segment is quite possibly the funkiest music ever produced for children — funkier even than Roosevelt Franklin, that now-bizarre Muppetary exemplar of Black Power — and it has stuck with us through all these years, lodged firmly in our imaginations. (Click here and here to see examples of the shorter original segments.)

It wasn't just the music, of course. Those animations are seriously groovy. But the music was key. And those solo sections aren't exactly easy listening, either. Sesame Street was training our ears for the sophisticated sounds of post-Bitches Brew electro-jazz.

Less widely remembered is the "1-20 Raga," a nugget of sitar-driven psychedelia that may well have been my first exposure to South Asian culture. Whether the pungent atmosphere of Marin County in those days contributed to my particular appreciation of this clip is an open question, but certainly it stayed with me. In fact, it's the Indian bits that remained in my memory all these years — the sitar, the morphing Mughal patterns; I had forgotten the insipid vocal and the number-factory setting.

Sesame Street was and remains an extraordinary tool for reaching out to the very young with challenging material. As music classes are cut across America, it may be one of the last places capable of reaching little kids with sophisticated music.

Bonus for Jenny: How Crayons Are Made (YouTube)

[immortal]

James Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006)
So the Mothership has come to collect. On Christmas no less. Even his death has a kind of rhythm.

James Brown is dead, but James Brown will never die. As long as human beings still listen to the popular music of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries, they'll be hearing James Brown. He's everywhere, especially now that hip-hop has become a global music with a reach even greater than rock and roll.

I'd say rest in peace, but that was never JB's style. The funk goes on, and wherever James is now, they're all gonna have a funky good time.

[holiday greetings]

Silent Night | The Baby Jesus | Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer | Noël | Little Drummer Boy | Jingle Bells | White Christmas | Santa Claus Is Coming to Town | Love Is | The Three Wise Men by 슬기둥 (Sulgidoong) (캐롤집 [Carol House]) (Via Music from Korea)

Happy Yule! The actual solstice will take place at 7:22 pm this evening.

Happy Chanukah! Tonight we will light seven candles, and tomorrow night will be the full eight (in both cases not counting the shamash, which is used to light and stand guard over the other candles).

And a few days early, a Merry Christmas! We'll be spending ours with Jenny's niece Emily, some aunts we don't know, and a pot roast. We do not expect the pot roast to survive.

Today's musical selection is an unusual twist on the old (and not-so-old) Christmas carols. Seulgidoong is, according to the only information I could find, "a leading modern chamber ensemble devoted to popularization of traditional music by modernizing it. Its 9 members have given distinguished performances of their unique music. They combine traditional music and new world of music in a unique way to create an original repertoire." Sure. I'm not convinced it's genius or anything, but hey, how many times have you heard "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" played on gayageum and geomungo?