I Need You To Listen To…

250.Song:Lose Yourself

Artist:Eminem

Album:Music From And Inspired By The Motion Picture 8 Mile 

The scratchy record noise that accompanies the haunting piano and synth chords in the opening isn’t there to generate feelings of happy nostalgia, if anything it speaks to memories that perhaps would be best left forgotten. “You only get one shot”, he sings in the chorus, to leave behind a life of crushing poverty takes not only skill and gumption, but incredible amounts of luck. We all know that Marshall Mathers’s story had a happy ending to it, that he maximized his talents and drive at the precise moments on offer, but the reason this song can remain as powerful an anthem for the downtrodden is its mythic arc appeal. Telling the story of the movie 8 Mile to us in discrete verse, with a guitar riff that is reminiscent of “Kashmir”, as if to remind us further how high the barriers are to escaping poverty, his double tracked vocals are doing everything they can to drill the point home into your skull. Consider us all lost in the moment.

249.Song:The Hardest Button To Button

Artist:The White Stripes

Album:Elephant

The White Stripes were a kooky duo, the kind of band that would name an album after the vague outline of an animal you can only barely perceive if you squint at their posture. Meg White’s drumming style could often be called “adjacent to” precision beats, while Jack White, a modern day musical renaissance man if there ever was one, could barely shove out ideas as fully formed as he would like and the audience would demand. The famous music video, where Meg White lays nice little drumkit eggs on every beat and just sort of leaves them all over the place as she follows Jack’s muse, shows their talent for meme-ification. With lines like “I grabbed a rag doll and stuck some little pins in it…/ Now we’re a family, and we’re alright now” feeding us an image of horrific dysfunction, and Meg’s bruising beats keeping us from just fleeing for our lives, it’s hard not to feel as if you are being held against your better judgement.

248.Song:Where The Streets Have No Name

Artist:U2

Album:The Joshua Tree 

Perfection is a pursuit that can drive people mad, take Brian Eno who, at one point during the recording process, was ready to delete the multi-track recording. Timely intervention by an assistant engineer proved its salvation. It took weeks of work in the studio, but Bono and the rest of U2 finally arrived at their vaguely implied destination.Watching the concert DVD U2 360 At The Rose Bowl, I was struck by how powerfully the opening organs and guitar flicks snuck up on the crowd, how magnificently it overwhelmed their senses. They were cheering for this subtle, inhumanly beautiful opening crawl as if it would personally take them to…”Where The Streets Have No Name”. “And when I go there/ I go there with you/ It’s all I can do”.  Bono had successfully intuited that this would be the “Ultimate U2 live-song” before the band had finished recording it, its awesome ethereal energies have barely been bettered, let alone equalled.

247.Song:That’s What You Get

Artist:Paramore

Album:Riot! 

Reading through a history of the band Paramore will yield rich revelations, both to the sound of each record, and to Hayley William’s astonishing consistency given the emotional storms surrounding her. Handcuffed to a band that would largely come to blows with itself, the stop start nature of “That’s What You Get”’s main guitar riff reads as less an artistic statement and more of a functional cudgel. With the drums playing along, the guitars seem to be reaching upward melodically, spastically, to what? In the chorus, they adopt a sickly sweet distorted edge, ringing out alongside “That’s what you get/ when you let your heart win”. Subtle. At the center of all of this noise is Hayley Williams. Possessor of a wicked vocal range backed by a powerful belting ability. Her vocals crystallize all of the questions surrounding her, her bandmates and the lyrics “Pain, make your way to me, to me/ And I’ll always be just so inviting”.

246.Song:Place To Be

Artist:Nick Drake

Album:Pink Moon

I’ve searched and searched, but no other guitarist sounds like the results Nick Drake achieved on Pink Moon, recorded late at night in the studio with only engineer John Wood accompanying him. It seems he had a unique ability to weave a spell on his audience. Solace is the word that comes to me when hearing this song, like you have sat yourself underneath an elm tree, contemplating the paths that led you there. Even if his lyrics expose regretful feelings, “Now I’m weaker than the palest blue/ Oh so weak in this need for you”, there’s no drowning in sorrows, just simple acknowledgement of well-worn laments “I never saw the truth hanging from the door”. Nick’s voice is a lulling, chill, wind, carrying you along on its wistful tides. His presence in the mix is very upfront, allowing his voice to fill out the stereo field with soothing frequencies. The guitars, recorded with such warmth, allowed him his personal emotional coda, before his tragic end.

245.Song:Never Too Late

Artist:Three Days Grace

Album:One X 

Adam Gontier has a voice that sounds like it hurts. When he belts out the chorus ““Even if I say, It’ll be alright/ Still I hear you say you want to end your life”” I can’t help but feel that he could benefit from a soothing beverage. Having said that, some songs deserve maximal output from everyone involved, “Never Too Late” is one of those songs. The rest of the band is playing like their lives depend on it, contributing to a compressed wall of sound that can be truly breathtaking to experience. Anyone who has experienced depression can relate to every single aspect of this song, from the surprisingly delicate acoustic guitar riff intro, to that aforementioned compressed roar, from the dark post-grunge atmospherics to Adam’s pleas “It’s not too late/ It’s never too late”. The most damaging realization that “The world we knew won’t come back/ The time we’ve lost, can’t get it back” can always be held off by not giving up, always holding on to hope.

244.Song:Cult Of Personality

Artist:Living Colour

Album:Vivid 

Maybe highlighting how ridiculously fragile the sheen of fame is on the people promoting themselves and how the vagaries of their egos affects us and society is what makes this song as potent as it is. Or why the guitar riff sounds like ascending and descending blocks, as if to show how easy it is for some random nobody to ascend to the ranks of these cults of personality, and then fall from grace. “You gave me fortune, you gave me fame/ You gave me power in your God’s name/ I’m every person you need to be”. Vernon Reid’s guitar work here is a masterwork of graffiti-laced distortion, foisting immaculate riffage on us before tearing the guitar apart into a mess of garbled noise. Corey Glover’s sharp vocals are given lots of space to breathe, Muzz Skillings on bass sounds like he is having the time of his life, the way he pounds each accenting note, the way he follows the guitar riff to a tee….Uh-oh. I’m in the “Cult Of Personality” now!!!!!

243.Song:Paper Planes

Artist:M.I.A.

Album:Kala 

The montage of youthful abandon that plays in Far Cry 3, right before the camera zooms out to reveal you being held hostage by a crazed mercenary named Vas, is the perfect encapsulation of what makes this song so great. How can a song that features M.I.A. quite literally robbing a store in each chorus not be an anthem for the type of person who wants to give in to their darkest impulses? Far Cry 3 has your protagonist literally becoming a local god, a wrathful spirit of vengeance killing his way through armies of mercenaries, while doing boatloads of drugs and engaging in questionable local business opportunities. “Paper Planes”, a reference to the passports that enable you to fly, celebrates that level of criminal enterprise, revels in it, but with music so cheery that it can be hard to tear your attention from it, even when gunshots are ringing out and people are dying “Some some some I some I murder/ Some I some I let go”.

242.Song:Holy Wars…The Punishment Due

Artist:Megadeth

Album:Rust In Peace 

Dave Mustaine was a guitarist who actually sounded like he was thrashing out some intense emotional feelings with his records. All of the chugging, thick slabs of distortion, the slashing riffage that gives his work its uniquely punk characteristics within thrash as a genre, the way the rest of his band keeps up with him beat by punishing beat. It all adds up to a punishing mixture, one, dare I say it, superior to the more clinical approach that Metallica took with many of their records. Here you feel the intensity of the Holy Wars that Mustaine is writing about. The genius page for this song notes that it was inspired by the Irish Wars of religion and Irish independence [1], but it’s hard not to read some reference to the Middle East with some of its musical passages. Whatever specific conflicts that he sings about, the raw power on display here will surely fan the flames of perpetual conflict for quite some time to come.

241.Song:Mojo Pin

Artist:Jeff Buckley

Album:Grace 

I must confess that I often, when making edits to this playlist, held my finger hovering over the delete button for “Mojo Pin”, pondering whether a song that takes a while to offer up its true substance to us listeners truly deserved its hallowed space amongst (waves hand at the rest of the playlist). Every single time, I would listen again and get overwhelmed by its colossal beauty. The intricacies of its guitar arrangements and drum patterns climbing slowly into view. To be sure, it has an opening for the ages, with Jeff Buckley’s angelic vocals drifting in over floating guitar chords, but the age of cynicism has primed the listener for such delicate things to shatter before long. “Mojo Pin” holds firm. “Ageless, ageless/ And i’m there in your arms”. Jeff builds momentum, priming the listener with inward tensions and sonic beauty, until, finally, he cuts loose with pent-up hard rock energies. If love is an explosion, then “Mojo Pin” is truly volcanic.

240.Song:Loser

Artist:Beck

Album:Mellow Gold 

“Loser” might be one of the weirdest great songs. In a case completely opposite to what the Cocteau Twins achieved on “Cherry-Coloured Funk” earlier on this playlist, here you are meant to hear every syllable, every single word that forms the chain of perplexion. Nonsense spews from Beck’s mouth in sputtering cadences “Someone came, saying I’m insane to complain/ About a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt” or “With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose job”.  The best that I and others have been able to wring from these inanities is Beck wrestling with poverty in a tone poem of shocking insignificance. In other words, the type of brilliance that music critics adore and the rest of us plebs can only scratch our heads at. Hey, sometimes you need to hash out a lot of emotions about your state of mind through insane flights of thought about whatever is to hand, or, as Beck says as an afterthought in the chorus, “Get crazy with the Cheez-whiz”.

239.Song:Sunflower

Artist:Low

Album:Things We Lost In The Fire

Confirmation of a song’s meaning can often be frustrated by artist obstinacy or a song simply being so obscure that nobody bothers to ask before it’s too late. In the wake of vocalist Mimi J. Parker’s death in 2022, it might be too early to ask the other members of Low what this haunting dirge really means. Regardless, one Genius user[1] gave it a try to connect the imagery, and came out with the Holocaust memoir Sunflower (David Weisenthal). The record notes show that Alan Sparhawk is the lead singer on this song, it would truly not be complete without Mimi’s bittersweet vocals accompanying him, hanging off of every note like a remembrance. Its rough, sparse production allows for the dynamics of the song to reach a heartrending plateau, then some sweet strings come in to let us off gently. When I learned that Steve Albini produced this record, all of the pieces fell into place. This is a lived in record, borne of despair, grief and resignation.

238.Song:Billy Jack

Artist:Curtis Mayfield

Album:There’s No Place Like America Today 

Music Production is the art of giving a track exactly what it needs to succeed artistically. So when Curtis Mayfield Produced “Billy Jack” he wanted to create an atmosphere of crushing, oppressive dread, that permeates every pore of the listeners being. He was already well versed with funk’s innate sense of rhythmic dynamism, and especially what a wah-wah pedal could do for a guitar’s sounds. But something was missing from the kaleidoscope of vocal harmonies and tight, dry drums, something that appears so simple on the surface that its obviousness causes a few shakes of the head “Of course that’s what a song like this needed!”. What Mayfield did was fill a thermos with water and a few ice cubes and shake it to the beat. When combined with those moist guitar lines, you have a musical atmosphere of stifling heat, you can practically feel the sweat drenching Mayfield and his cohort. A small detail that speaks to Mayfield’s impeccable artistry.

237.Song:Get Up, Stand Up

Artist:The Wailers

Album:Burnin’ 

There’s something so natural in reggae for it to serve as fertile ground for protest anthems. Perhaps the stark, insistent, on-the-2 emphasis allows for harsh dichotomies to be highlighted, for the verse-chorus-verse to come off even more tightly structured for a point to be made more emphatically. Whatever the case, “Get Up, Stand Up” may be the very best of the great reggae firestarters. It exudes chaotic energy, each instrument sounds like they are having their own party somewhere else from the vocals. As if they are waiting for a rallying cry to bring them together. “So now you see the light, aay/ Stand up for your right, come on”. Bob Marley and Peter Tosh both have their chance to shine as they spew incendiary  verse “We’re sick and tired of your ‘ism and schism game”. This is a song that tilts on the edge of revolution, releasing the tension with potent harmonies in the chorus, imploring you “Don’t give up the fight”.

236.Song:Wake Up

Artist:Rage Against The Machine

Album:Rage Against The Machine 

“Wake Up” is the most accessible song off of Rage’s debut record, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have the same blazing fury exhibited on other tracks like “Killing In The Name Of”, if anything its “Kashmir”-like opening riff allows for Zach De La Rocha to build towards something approaching a cathartic release near the end. Tom Morello’s surging guitar lines throughout are a perfect backdrop to Rocha’s stop-start vocal stylings and the constant way that they evolve throughout allows for natural evolutions of lyrical themes from “He turned the power to the have-nots/ and then came the shot” to the guttural screams of “what was the price on his head?/ What was the price on his HEEEEADD?”. What we have here is a tragic poem wrapped up in a hard rock/rap fusion, an explosive outburst at the ways in which we allow our heroes to get killed and the seething resentment that that builds in society.

235.Song:I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Artist:Marvin Gaye/ Creedence Clearwater Revival

Album:In The Groove/ Cosmo’s Factory 

Originally written in 1966 and recorded by multiple artists around the same time (it’s complicated), Marvin Gaye’s version has proven definitive. Can you believe it was rejected as the first official release? [1]While Gaye had recorded this take first, Gladys Knight & The Pips got to release their single version while he had to settle for keeping it as an album cut. Buried on an album, probably dead on arrival on the charts. It’s a good thing Disc Jockey’s back then had functioning ears. This is one of those sublimely intimate takedowns that only soul could effectively muster. Marshalling the steady backing of the Motown session musicians, Gaye’s voice glides over the proceedings with grace and precision. While the lyrics would imply that he is heartbroken, the evidence that our ears give us lace it with a subtle, threatening, aura. Adele would try to recapture this feeling over her whole career, Gaye owns it in 3:17. A masterclass.

234.Song:Baptized In Blood

Artist:Death

Album:Scream Bloody Gore 

Scream Bloody Gore. Scream Bloody Gore. As an album title, it’s one of those perfect “things” to say that gets your hopes up for the content of the album. “Baptized In Blood”, with its main riff reaching gothic cathedral levels of titanic magnificence, is an extended screaming session. Chuck Shuldiner’s guttural yelps make it sound like his throat is being scraped by some infernal sandpaper. “Dark Is my soul/ Reborn they’ll learn/ Baptized in blood”. Chris Reifert’s blast beat drumming  has the audible effect of cornering Chuck, amplifying his screams into paranoia-fueled howls. The guitars are frantic, feeding into that manic energy that gets full release with every “Baptized in blood”. Considering that Chuck Shuldiner played every note on every guitar himself, the intensity of this lattice structure of distortion is astounding, something that only true genius can craft and the slightly off-kilter can appreciate.

233.Song:The Kids Aren’t Alright

Artist:The Offspring

Album:Americana

“How can one little street/ swallow so many lives?”. Written as a belated response to The Who’s “The Kids Are Alright”, this is a blistering riposte, a song unafraid to dive into the needless sufferings of one little street in america. Its rough guitars, bathed in distortion, coupled with its thunderous drums, are all the backing one needs to tell tales of woe, of abject desolation. “Jay committed suicide (whoa-oh)/ Brandon OD’d and died/ What the hell is going on?/ Cruelest dream reality” Dexter Holland’s wails are a plea for salvation, for understanding of how the brightest lights can be snuffed out by the bleakness of life’s many miseries. It may come across as somewhat rich for a band of suburban white dudes to sing about such suffering, and maybe that was the point. If The Who can get away with salving the egos of an entire generation, maybe everyone can find the faults in that mode of thinking, maybe we all can suffer equally.

232.Song:Learning To Fly

Artist:Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Album:Into The Big Wide Open 

The cover of the album, Into The Great Wide Open, depicts a painted pastoral scene, adorned with autumn leaves and a big blue sky soaring over it all. Tom Petty, exceedingly fond of jangly guitar chords, to the point of acquiring the sobriquet “Baby Byrd”, sure paints a pretty picture with his twelve-string guitars. Singing with a voice that has been described as “Bob Dylan but in tune”, he exists warmly at the core of the jangles. Here is a song so breezy that it comes off as effortless, eternal. Like a lost folk anthem passed down through memory. “I’m learning to fly/ But I ain’t got wings/ Coming down/ Is the hardest thing”. It might come across as a little too simple for jaded cynics, but “Learning To Fly” has such a joyous atmosphere to it that it ascends beyond such negativity. Tom Petty’s songcraft has always reached above the clouds, let “Learning To Fly” take you there, soaring into the great wide open with glee.

231.Song:I’m A Believer

Artist:The Monkees

Album:More Of The Monkees 

If I may make a somewhat clumsy comparison, I reckon that Coldplay and The Monkees would find a lot of common ground musically. Both bands excelled in finding the awe in sheer, bloody minded, naivety, writ large and small. At their best, both hit the sweet spot. If Coldplay did small best with “Yellow”, The Monkees did it here. Originally written by Neil Diamond, The Monkees, a band forever branded as an industry plant, a facade of a rock band propped up by the dreaded “teen” demographic, gave it their all. The result is an effervescent, eternally luminous, pop-rock gem. Every aspect hits perfectly, from the airy guitars strumming with a tinge of tape distortion, to the bouncy bass lines and preppy tambourines. From the propulsive vocal harmonies [“I’m in love (Hmmmm)/ I’m a believer (ahhh)/ I couldn’t leave her if I tried (yeah)”], to Micky Dolenz’s sublime lead performance.. Let the hype catch you in its joyous embrace.

230.Song:War Pigs

Artist:Black Sabbath/ Faith No More

Album:Paranoid/ The Real Thing 

Tony Iommi’s unique guitar tone on Black Sabbath’s best music is hard to describe as compelling to a modern listener, songs like this leave us with work that often sounds disconnected from the rest of the band. It fills a lot of stereo space that could have been used for something else, most definitely he wouldn’t be produced this way in a modern studio. Its frequencies are somehow both warm and coldly distant, wiry and restricted. But these qualities are precisely how Iommi’s work remains as beguiling as it is, something you can’t quite get a handle on is also something you will regret not trying to. Compare Iommi’s work to Faith No More’s recording, a more muscular recording that layers on reverb and multiple tracks to accomplish its sound. This spatial breadth finds itself competing with stark singularity. While you may find yourself preferring FNM’s take, the original has a mysteriously compelling quality to it that will forever defy convention.

229.Song:Come Together

Artist:The Beatles

Album:Abbey Road 

Are we reading too much into this song when we call out the fact that John Lennon says “Shoot Me” during the intro and interludes? Maybe we are, given the panoply of ridiculous lyrics that are peppered through the song, only coming together (heh) on the line “One thing I can tell you is you got to be free”. Everything else about this song is predicated around that line. He wasn’t foretelling his own doom, he was laying down a blueprint for life and this song that resonates more than the tragic end of his life. He lived as he wanted to and wanted that for us as well. To do this he predicated curiosity with those nonsense lyrics “He got monkey finger/ He shoot, Coca-cola”, or “He got ju-ju eyeball/ He one holy-roller”. With Paul McCartney’s appropriately swampy bassline sticking us in this stoner swamp, coming away with any conclusion other than that this song exists as a power anthem is a bit knackered. “Come together, right now/ Over me”.

228.Song:Jesus Of Suburbia

Artist:Green Day

Album:American Idiot 

Punk almost always seems to bring out the monumentality of its greatest creators. The Who started it all with Tommy, a proto-punk (if vastly overrated) conceptual leap, The Clash pummelled Sandanista to life, and Green Day crashed into the zeitgeist with American Idiot. On this stadium sized epic, really five songs in one, Billie Joe Armstrong weaves a steadily progressing suburban odyssey. Rife with the imagery of the disaffected: the rampant drug use, the urban decay of a hollowed out generation, even the soft betrayal of the mottos of modernity “Of the 7-Eleven where I was taught/ The motto was just a lie”. Thick slabs of distorted guitar, interrupted occasionally with some acoustic guitars and coo-ing “Oooh”’s, are our guide through this moral apocalypse, culminating in a soft Piano coda “I don’t feel any shame I won’t apologize/ When there ain’t nowhere you can go” and one final explosive release “Ah, you’re leaving home”.

227.Song:Livin’ On A Prayer

Artist:Bon Jovi

Album:Slippery When Wet

Emulating Springsteen-ian aesthetics is a task that has occupied generations of musical producers and artists. So when Producer Bruce Fairbairn had to try he took the sound of Bon Jovi as a unit and pumped their sound to the limits. The result is a skyscraping, stadium-sized, epic. One of those songs that translates the intensely personal into the immensely large. The Talkbox riff that Richie Sambora plays throughout undulates like an argument, personified by the characters of Tommy and Gina roughing their way through a thankless existence. Jon Bon Jovi’s vocals are at times warm and consoling and at others straining at the top of his vocal range, trying to reach the emotional climax promised by that most anthemic of choruses. “Take my hand/ We’ll make it I swear/ Woah-oh, livin’ on a prayer”. What some would term needless sentimentality I call a sincere attempt to strive for what’s always just out of reach.

226.Song:What A Wonderful World

Artist:Louis Armstrong

Album:What A Wonderful World 

This song might be the siren song of kitschy schmaltz, but in the chaos of the modern world it strikes a note of dissonance that brings chills to the spine. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore recognized this when he played it over a montage of death and destruction in the film Bowling For Columbine. In fact, I invite the reader to listen to this song and imagine the sounds of artillery and war alongside images of riots, soldiers fighting in urban environments in various military conflicts, of the environment being destroyed for petty financial gain. Images of the past decade of discord and disillusionment for modernity. If you don’t experience chills, you are the 1%. Originally written to bring people together, unfortunately, it only illustrates how far apart we all are from each other. Still, the honest sincerity that Louis Armstrong’s presence brings to this record, with all of its rough-hewn sweetness, is enough for it to mean what you need it to mean.