8 posts tagged “songs”
We previously delved into the (if you’ll excuse the redundancy) world of geography with our 25 Horrible Bands Named after Places and in doing so incurred the wrath of hardcore fans of Kansas/Boston, bands we perhaps unfairly dumped on because they’re part of that most loathsome movement in music—Prog Rock. Then again, the more comments we get from people leaping to their defense, the less we regret their inclusion.
Gene Simmons defended the music of KISS, saying basically—and we’re paraphrasing here— simplicity is good (hell, KISS stands for Keep it Simple Stupid) and that people prefer things that are basic and catchy, like the marches of John Philip Sousa. Such advice was never heeded by those terrible bands in the 70s who dominated our list by penning 8 minute songs often accompanied in the studio by a horn section, chamber orchestra, penitents who Gregorian chanted, a high school Glee club, out of work poets (the only kind) and basically everything but the organ grinder monkey.
Defenders of these acts always say “they’re amazing musicians”. Well, not really. They’re decent compared to the likes of Nirvana, who couldn’t tune their guitars if you gave them a four string head start, but compared to jazzers and the classically-trained, it’s a different league. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Folk/Pop/Rock/Rap music is simple, fun and that’s why people are drawn to it, the same way musicians are usually the only people who like jazz.
Anyway, we’re back riding the geography train here and wondered after hearing Sweet Home Alabama, would anyone sing a paean to Pennsylvania? How ’bout an ode to Oregon?
So, here’s a rundown of US STATE SONGS, listed alphabetically, so we wouldn’t tire out our Google fingers tracking down when each joined the Union.
Caveat:
- Nearly every single one was penned by John Denver
- We’ve left out fight songs.
- This is by no means exhaustive, as you could fill a brochure with music about the states of California/Texas, but this is the best we could do.
Enjoy!
Alaska: North to Alaska, Johnny Horton.
Horton was a buddy of Johnny Cash and being born in LA didn’t stop him
from writing about pretty much everywhere else. “Where the river is
winding, big nuggets they’re findin”. Horton also made the Honky Tonk
Man famous before the WWF
introduced the wrestler, known for a finishing move that was an
acoustic guitar to the back of the head (lucky for his opponents, he
wasn’t a bassist)
Arizona: Hotel Arizona, Wilco, Arizona, Kings of Leon. One of our faithful readers pointed out that in our Top 10 Drinking & Driving Songs of All Time (incidentally, Johnny Horton was killed in a DUI crash) we failed to mention the great Chicago band Wilco and their homage to boozin’ behind the wheel (or in this case, just next to it), Passenger Side. So, they make an appearance here. Here are two songs that pay homage to the high & dry state.
Alabama: Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd / Alabama, Neil Young. Alabama along with Southern Man, were Northern Neil’s Red State baiting, famously countered by Skynyrd. In the Gene Simmons Celebrity Roast (because no list of US State Songs is complete without at least two references to him), one of the comics slammed the house band saying, “I’ve heard better sounds from Lynyrd Skynyrd—as they were crashing!”
As we noted in our Top 10 Bar Songs of All Time, many musicians have adopted the ‘write what you know’ credo, and given that they spend a considerable part of their waking hours in taverns (this isn’t nearly as much as it seems as they sleep in until well into the late afternoon), they looked around, put pen to paper gave us the decomposed remnants of organic matter from which our Top 10 List could grow.
If you’ve taken this ‘write what you know’ phrase to heart (even though it’s more worn than a yogic flier drawers), and find you’re still staring at a blank screen, you may in fact, not know anything. Luckily, there are plenty of people who can write what they know and who are more than capable of picking up your slack, you lazy, untalented hack.
Some of these people, though not nearly as many as those who’ve found inspiration at the bottom of a beer/wine/whiskey glass, have chosen Mother’s Ruin, as their muse.
Why is that, you ask? Well, gin, simply put, has a lousy reputation and the phrase ‘bathtub gin’ likely came about it’s the first thing that would spring to mind if you had to clean a ring around yours. The juniper berry spirit has its origins in 17th century Holland, where it was believed to alleviate gout and its popularity, not surprisingly, spread quickly, as abandoning a diet rich in fat and booze was beyond comprehension, especially when the antidote could be guzzled cheaply and plentifully from the comfort of one’s armchair. 
The potable soon spread to England, and from there, to mask the flavor of quinine so that English soldiers could spear colonials, unfettered by malarial concerns, while domestically, like reality television or the internet these days, it was blamed for every prevailing social ill. [Editor’s note, a strong case can be made for blaming every prevailing social ill these days, on the internet, please see our Top 10 Drinking and Driving Songs of All Time and Battling the Red Menace: Happy Kick a Ginger Day]
On these shores, and we’d like to think everywhere else, gin forms the basis of the only martini a man should be seen drinking (if you have one with cranberry juice or chocolate, you might consider arranging a fitting for a dress) and as a result, has seen its reputation improve, though you’d never really know it from some of the songs we’ve compiled here. So here, because to the best of our knowledge, it hasn’t been done (and if it has, carpal tunnel has prevented successfully Googling it) is our Top 10 Songs about Gin.
Neil launched his hometown show with a shotgun blast from Weld–Love and Only Love– and proceeded to pummel his guitar into submission with the Frankenstein monster guitar calisthenics he’s been known for since Old Man ‘put him in the middle of the road and he headed for the ditch’.
Wilco pleased with a set heavy on well, light, in retrospect a welcome move as even without Crazy Horse’s ragged glory backing him, Neil’s guitar sounds like a jumbo jet being sawed in half.
Tweedy and company wowed with War on War, Jesus, Etc, Heavy Metal Drummer, the stunning Passenger Side off their A.M. debut, tracks from their latest Sky Blue Sky and of course, California Stars, part of a collection of unpublished songs Woody Guthrie offered to Bob Dylan, set to music by Wilco and Billy Bragg, when his Bobness was thwarted by a reluctant babysitter (which sounds more unseemly than it should. For more on this, check out his amazing Chronicles).
Dylan, to whom Neil is invariably compared (each lacks what the other has, Neil, Bob’s incomparable lyricism and Bob, Neil’s incomparable melodies) was showcased with Wilco’s beautiful version of I Shall Be Released, made famous by those other hometown heroes, The Band. [for a review of Dylan's Hamilton show, click here]
Neil’s Hey Hey My My kept the Sabbath-style dirge riffing to a maximum, slower than a Crazy Horse run through but Sherman tank-heavy followed by Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, the crowd favorite Powderfinger (preceded with a short, snowmobile Canadiana anecedote from N.Y.) and Chrome Dream II’s mind-bending Spirit Road, (You paint yourself in a dark, dark place, You get your shoes, And get your hat, Get out here while you still can).
The boys beside me, who’d consumed at least 15 pints between them midway through Wilco, were part of the 18,000 plus yelling Cortez Cortez, 10 minutes of epic electric followed by the spare 2 minute Cinamon Girl and its infamous one-note guitar solo.
Oh Lonesome Me and Mother Earth provided a moment’s respite before the night’s lovely acoustic turn: Heart of Gold, Needle and Damage Done and the unmistakable three-note bendy twang intro to Unknown Legend.
Thereafter a triad of new songs, two of which impressed, the nakedly pro environment/Obama, the double entendre’d Sea Change and its rebuttal, the stunning Just Singing a Song (won’t change the world) lead into Get Back to the Country and the lengthy feedback industrial drill guitar of Cowgirl in the Sand. The closer was a steel-toed boot stomping Rockin’ in the Free World (Canada’s other official national anthem along with Takin’ Care of Business) launched with a galloping bass line. Air Canada security staff, paramedics and even Metro’s Finest (who’d just turfed an unlucky pothead) were seen singing along.
A Day in the Life was the sellout crowd scream-along encore, ended with one note struck on a xylophone by the always cheeky Young. He just never disappoints.
Last week we presented our list of the Top Ten Karaoke Duets of all time, and, since we are not the kind of guys you can pry away from the microphone without a giant Vaudeville-style hook, we are revisiting that world of beer nuts and butchered harmonies — the American Idol audition reject’s last venue in which to sparkle — the karaoke bar. This time though we’re not focusing too closely on the songs but rather on the psychological effects of mixing lakes of booze with people who could not carry a tune in a velcro backpack.
Karaoke DJs are like the special-ed teachers at elementary schools. No matter how hopeless the performance they are witnessing, they are duty-bound to be positive and keep morale from settling to where nature intended it to be. And for the most part audiences are similarly charitable; drunk themselves and not wanting to be booed when they work up the Molson Muscle needed to get on stage, crowds can be surprisingly forgiving as a tone-deaf woman with a lisp makes her way through Celine Dion’s back catalogue.
But there are times when that powder keg of liquored up rowdies and household favorites being executed (in the murder-y sense) is set off. We’ve plundered old news reports, paid attention to new ones, and have even attempted to incite riots by singing “Yellow Submarine” in the depths of an urban slum, to bring you our list of the Top 5 Karaoke-Inspired Acts of Violence!
According to reports, the Beatles’ experimental song Carnival of Light includes gargling, distorted guitar and shouts of ”Are you alright?”, or to put it another way, complaints that would rouse an apartment building superintendent at 4AM.
Apparently, during the Penny Lane sessions when he penned his 14-minute opus, Macca was gleaning inspiration from avant garde composer John Cage, perhaps best known for 4′33, a ‘completely silent composition’, which prompts the question: ‘if you were ever to attend a live performance, when would you applaud?’ Click here for an extraordinarily uninteresting sample, where the piece ‘allows the audience to absorb the sounds around them’, or to put it another way, the most conspicuous time to head to the bathroom.
One thing that can be said about the Cage piece, is that it can be performed by any instrument regardless of whether it’s in tune, or anyone who can count to ‘273′, has access to throat lozenges and who doesn’t have gas.
It’s Thanksgiving in Canada and Columbus Day in the States and it’s fitting that North American markets are closed today, as due to the financial meltdown there’s been increasingly less to be thankful for anyway, unless you count your health.
Thanksgiving stateside is a big thank you to major networks for airing continuous football coverage to ease the tensions of family get togethers (Canadians enjoy the south of the border holiday in their own way by delaying their return to the office from the pub by an extra hour to make sure their team covered the spread) while Turkey Day up here isn’t nearly that big a deal but roughly coincides with the start of hockey season.
Growing up, hockey competed with WWF wrestling, sharks and dinosaurs for our attention and one of us was taught how to skate by a dad who’d grown up in Southern Italy and had never seen snow [Editor's note: to this day skating backwards remains elusive, however for a large number of skaters, it is as well and doesn't detract from one's ability to enjoy the game, just one's ability to properly play it. Editor's note, II: For those interested in dinosaurs, check out Sarah Palin's Yabba Dabba Science here]
During those formative years, a favorite of ours was Dale Hunter, who made up for various deficits in skill by being one of the dirtiest, filthiest players ever to have laced up the blades in the NHL and who delivered one of the cheapest shots the game has ever seen when he blasted a player face-first into the boards after the guy had scored a goal [To give you an idea of how dirty he was, when the Washington Capitals retired his number, Hunter was actually presented with a commemorative penalty box]. He gave hope to all of us who were untalented, under 5′10, who used their stick like a samurai sword and who took inspiration from the movie Slap Shot (R.I.P. Mr Paul Newman)
Bon
Jovi’s baffling popularity has continued unabated for two decades now,
as this weekend’s Central Park concert shows, however in our minds,
there is nobody more deserving of both a solid punt to the arse, or a
safe dropped on them from a sufficient height, than these crap-rock
poster boys, whose music is so middle of the road, their tour bus
should have its own dedicated lane.
If only we could lace ‘em up and kick ‘em when they’re down, but they’re never down, churning out the same Springsteen-lite cacophony year after year.
To honor the band, and also in the spirit of celebrating the worst of everything, we’ve decided to put together a tribute, of sorts, to Bon Jovi, the world’s most famous Bruce Springsteen tribute band/wimp rock quartet.
Unlike
some bands, the core group has remained relatively intact. This has
enabled the Jersey boys with Swiss watch- like reliability, to
consistently put out unspeakably awful music year after year.
The sole
exception of course, the booting bass player Alec John Such (the ’soul’
of the group in that he sported soul patch facial hair), because he
‘couldn’t play his instrument’—a requirement obviously forgotten as few
of the remaining members actually know how to play theirs (with the
exception being David Bryan, the band’s keyboard player, who actually
trained at the Juilliard School of Music, and judging
by his current gig tickling the ivories with the Jersey dunder-heads,
is about as overqualified as the ‘Ice Man’ Chuck Liddell doing security
detail at a Girl Scouts Jamboree)
Their intrepid leader Jon Bon Jovi, of course, is Bruce Springsteen— if Bruce had a tin ear, Meg Ryan’s hairstylist, and penned gems like ‘Tomorrow’s getting harder make no mistake, Luck ain’t even lucky’ instead of great songs like Born to Run, Highway Patrolman or Thunder Road.
It is not hyperbole to say that BJ represents everything wrong with modern music, or at least, modern horticultural hair band music that became more bankrupt, creatively speaking, than Bear Stearns, and peaked around oh, 1987, unbeknownst to the band.
Bon Jovi is a church-basement rummage sale clearing house version of The Boss. Their ‘rock-lite’ is more sanitized than a trauma burn unit and their Forest Gump libretti induces more projectile vomiting than the elimination round at a chili eating contest. If this wasn’t enough, and from our vantage point here it certainly is, their news anchor bobs will guarantee they’re a shoe-in for the next installment of ‘Old Men who Look Like Lesbians’.
The only thing worse than an
actual Bon Jovi song, however, is Bon Jovi doing a version of someone
else’s, automatically better original. Worse still, would be someone
actually COVERING a Bon Jovi song, but to the best of our knowledge,
the likelihood of this occurring is about as probable as a meteor the
size of the state of New Jersey striking the earth. 
Since their own music wasn’t bad enough, here is Bon Jovi doing what they do best—spilling their own REO Speedwagon / Journey / Three Dog Night / Springsteen-lite effluent on some of the world’s most well-beloved songs. Luckily for all concerned, these are so popular that nobody would mistake them for Bon Jovi originals and mislead any future generations. Here, in no particular order, because the pork rendering plant stench emanating from each, is indistinguishable from the other, is our 10 Worst Bon Jovi Covers of All Time:
10. Save the Last Dance for Me, Pomus and Shuman.
Among the ‘better’ song on this list, only in the sense that it’s
better to have testicular cancer than say, lung.
Despite sinking more coins into our Olympic coffers than a virgin at Lucky Fountain, Toronto
has been repeatedly denied the chance to host the games and as a
result, we won’t get to see if the shot-put can, after 2500 years of
failing to do so, finally ignite the public’s imagination.
By not landing the Games of the Olympiad, we’ll not only miss out on yelling ‘Geronimo’ off a 10 meter springboard, but also the aesthetic thumb in the eye that is the opening ceremonies, which distill a nation’s character down to a few silly gesticulations, which in our case would be break-dancing Mounties, some sort of giant papier-mâché leaf and a chorus line of lumberjacks.
However, the Olympics are about more than just cheap showmanship,
like your uncle who can balance a cane on the end of his toe while
whistling “Chevy Van”. They’re a chance for countries to atone for past
sins, march together in a show of togetherness twice a decade and see
whose athletes can pump themselves more full of pharmaceuticals than an
Amy Winehouse pot lock.
There
are some countries, such as those whose main export is a variety of
tart nectarine, that you never really get to hear from in non-Olympic
years unless an extradition treaty is violated or some autocrat is
ousted and replaced by an antelope as the interim head of state.
The odd time though, one of these nations will unhinge the masturbatory grip on the podium held by Russia, Germany or the United States and you’ll get to hear an off-key warbling of some country’s national anthem and bear witness to a moment of pride that’ll last for generations to come, if you define “generations” as however long it takes for the urine sample to come back positive, the sportsman in question to defect, or when the next commercial break will air.
But what exactly are they singing about as banners are raised to the rafters and the eyes of the world (or at least the eyes of the world that aren’t glazed over by a less than rousing game of handball) are upon them?
Not surprisingly, most anthems are a call to arms, mostly partisan hymns that are a soundtrack to bayoneting your nearest geographical neighbor and a tune you can tap your jackboot to as you proclaim the superiority of your culture, mountain ranges and comely women (the seldom heard fifth stanza in Slovenia’s national anthem: “To you, our pride past measure, Our girls! Your beauty, charm and grace!”)
There are some ditties sung that are much more ominous than any ‘Bombs bursting in air‘, you might’ve whistled while relieving yourself after a heavy lunch, and that would make a scout troupe cower in fear more than a scoutmaster’s invite to a midnight swim.
Of course, officials quickly noted that when performed at certain epochal functions, some of these stanzas were better left out altogether, like in the case of Italy, where if something of import were to be held in Warsaw, for example, it might be prudent to omit the bit about “the Polish blood they drank, along with the Cossack.”
We thought we’d share a few choice verses, unearth a few national secrets, and perhaps create a diplomatic shit-storm with this, our list of the Top 10 Most Violent National Anthems!
10) Algeria: Being that Algeria’s national hymn was written not long after the North African nation broke free from France, thus ending one of the most violent and oppressive periods in European colonial history, we’re not surprised that their national anthem makes scant reference to daisy-picking and the value of complacency. Of course, as you’ll learn during the course of our bloody world tour of national anthems, nothing ups the carnage in a national anthem like a good throwing off of the yoke of an oppressor. However, this one gets bonus points for the fact that amidst all bloodshed and overthrowing of oppressors, it never forgot the importance of the beat:
Choice Lyrics:
“When we spoke, nobody listened to us,
So we have taken the noise of gunpowder as our rhythm
And the sound of machine guns as our melody”
(click here for full anthem)
9) Tunisia / Haiti: Continuing
on with our theme of countries breaking free from French colonial rule
and celebrating their independence in violent verse, here are two
nations that preferred death over French rule, much as we’d prefer such
a fate over say, a screening and subsequent discussion of the Sex &
the City movie.
Choice Lyrics:
“The blood surges in our veins,
We die for the sake of our land.”
“For the flag, For our country
To die is a fine thing! Our past cries out to us:
Have a disciplined soul! To die is a fine thing!”
(Full anthem: Tunisia, Haiti)
8) Albania: It
is impossible to enter into a discussion about Albania, without in some
way referencing Mother Teresa. That should suffice. For a far more
eyeball-rewarding look at a native of that country, turn your peepers
to the left. Saints preserve us!
And in its national anthem we have a recurrent theme in many such ditties: the glory of having your ass shot off in a war.
Choice Lyrics:
“From war abstains only he,
Who a traitor is born,
For he who is a man is never frightened,
But falls, but falls a martyr to the cause!” (Full anthem)
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