92. Pet Shop Boys, "Liberation" (1993)

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This has always been my favorite song from my favorite Pet Shop Boys album—yes, I like it better than "Dreaming of the Queen," and "To Speak Is a Sin," the two next-closest to it. But I admit it's one that sneaks up on you. I like the wukka-wukka guitar sound that textures and drives it (which incidentally further underlines, along with the Village People cover and other elements, how much this was actually their "disco" album, and not their "rock" album, as originally promised by the perhaps satiric PR). I like the scenario in the lyrics of love finally acknowledged and accepted, and I like that it happens on a car ride late at night, involving the simple expedient of holding hands. And I love the way the orchestral sounds swell right at the moments when the emotional intensity is greatest, which includes the opening, a rapid dive into swirling waters. In the end, it doesn't need much of Neil Tennant's sly irony—virtually none, in fact—nor does it need much of Chris Lowe's production muscle either. It's just a very nice, simple song with a very nice, simple message. I said "simple," not "easy." In fact, I think it may be evidence that either or both of these Pet Shop Boys may well be prone to my own greatest weakness, crippling sentimentalism, played so straight here that it's practically opaque about any other intentions or aims. "The night, the stars / A light shone through the dark.... Your love is liberation, liberation." It might even be characterized as "sincere," if one is inclined to take the position and risk the ridicule.

93. Ray Charles, "Mess Around" (1953)

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On a list like this I can't very well include every track from The Birth of Soul, which is as massively enjoyable as it is massively important, so I will choose a representative favorite. I like this one best today, getting the edge if only for the iconic moment when Ray Charles deliberately drives a wedge of silence between the words "pit" and "barbecue" in the first line, which somehow launches the thing to unimaginable levels of feverish excitement. Check it out: a song based on a backyard good-times rave-up, playing and wailing just for the pleasure of it, and for the escape—the same kind of thing that Louis Jordan and others have memorialized elsewhere in songs about rent parties. The tempo is fast, and Charles furiously pumps his rollicking piano with his left hand and skitters across the keys with his right. The horns are boss—just boss. The vocal is loose but always in command. Ray Charles the piano player seems entirely self-aware of every bit of the song's stride/boogie-woogie antecedents as it moves through its paces. It's sloppy and tight all at once, and there's a saxophone solo with potential to tear your head off. This well-known version at some two and a half minutes is freewheeling and explosive, and I can only imagine how it must have sounded on gutbucket nights when whatever band Charles had assembled stretched and let it hang out, with all its trapdoors and veering passages. Best enjoyed standing on a chair. And I wish Mary Fleener would make a comic strip out of this one too.

Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003)

As a product, this is a rather strange book—more of a pamphlet, really, hardly bigger in dimensions than a mass market paperback and with a total of 44 pages, plus Frank Rich's preface. It contains a single piece by Joan Didion that ran originally in the "New York Review of Books," where the articles can go long, but generally not book-length. Of course, with 9/11 and its aftermath top of mind once again with the recent news of the death of Osama bin Laden, it's not hard to see how one gets to formulating a book like this. It was such an alarming and depressing time (not that it's gotten particularly better, but at least the overbearing urgency for making colossal mistakes seems to have diminished somewhat), and, indeed, this essay was a heartening meditation in that time, when so few seemed able to see so clear what was happening. "[Americans] recognized even then," she writes, "with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that 'bipartisanship' and 'national unity' had come to mean acquiescence to the [George W. Bush] administration's preexisting agenda—for example the imperative for further tax cuts, the necessity for Arctic drilling, the systematic elimination of regulatory and union protections, even the funding for the missile shield." I'm not entirely convinced a majority of Americans actually did recognize that, but certainly from our vantage today the bad faith and incompetence of Bush and Cheney can be seen more than ever in stark relief. It was plainly visible then too, as this little book argues and provides evidence for by its very existence, but I lean toward believing it wasn't a message anyone seemed interested in hearing—even from what I observed among the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts. Ultimately that might make this tract interesting more as historical artifact. Try to imagine, as you read, that her points of view were considered dangerously radical, naïve, hidebound, and foolish. In actuality (or "meanwhile back here on planet Earth"), it overflows with a common sense, rendered with Didion's typical acerbic tartness, that was all too sadly in short supply then. We are still paying for the mistakes of that time—literally, still paying, for example for the radical, naïve, hidebound, and foolish Iraq War adventure. Which still has its defenders. And so, if only for that reason, this remains essential, even as it likely also remains an exercise of preaching to a choir.

In case it's not at the library.

Separations (1992)

I like Separations a bit more than His 'n' Hers—maybe just because it loosens up and lets itself range wide in its second half, the foray into "acid jazz." (I use the scare quotes only to indicate my general ignorance here; I don't entirely understand the term beyond that it is a flavor of electronica.) In the first handful of songs I sometimes hear something like the Stranglers, which might just be Jarvis Cocker's croak amid the arch and studied arrangements. Other times I hear things that put me in mind of Camper Van Beethoven. That's probably just the scraping violin. I'm sure these perceptions could well mean that I must be insane. The songwriting is always adroit even if it doesn't particularly distinguish itself memorably. But that second half, the "acid jazz"—well, it's pretty fucking good, if I may express my appreciation by swearing. The song times stretch to well upwards of five and six minutes and the pace picks up considerably, even as the rubbery synthesizer figures quietly assemble behind Cocker, who shifts as seamlessly as ever between his croaks and his impassioned breathless exclamations verging on yelping and back again. In fact, I like how Cocker doesn't particularly change his approach at all—it's as eccentric and insinuating as ever, with the rear-screen projection playing behind him more the factor that has been altered. It's still recognizably Pulp, by and large, just with a few unusual adornments that throw it all into interesting relief. "My Legendary Girlfriend" seems to me to be the winner of the set, with an underpinning full of dynamics and dramatic flourishes (and, yes, those rubbery synthesizer figures again), which shifts and bursts into throbbing declarations at the chorus. Effective, in a word. "Death II" gives it a run for its money, with a bit more propulsive momentum, a few nice breaks, and a nifty line opening up the production in "down at the D-I-S-C-O." Plus this: "Hey I feel this night will never end / and I will never see the day." Play loud and dance. Try not to frighten the household pets.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

La passion de Jeanne d'Arc, France, 82 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Carl Th. Dreyer, Joseph Delteil
Photography: Rudolph Mate
Editors: Marguerite Beauge, Carl Th. Dreyer
Cast: Maria Falconetti, Eugène Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean d'Yd, Louis Ravet

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of those films with a history notably beset by exceptional troubles, all too easily raising fatuous speculation on God's will. Though it did not suffer the production setbacks of, say, The Exorcist, once Joan of Arc was in the can it encountered a remarkable series of problems. In fact, in the end it was never given many public screenings at all. Vociferous objections came almost immediately from French authorities, British censors, the Catholic Church, and elsewhere, all of whom had a stake in the way the story was told, each with an agenda based on thin-skinned self-interest more than anything else. (On the changes demanded by the Catholic Church, for example, one historian of the film has written that they left only "an annoying, Catholic film in which the Rouen tribunal had become almost sympathetic.")

Then a fire destroyed the original negative. Director Dreyer painstakingly reassembled his film from second takes, deeply disappointed at the overall inferiority of this second version, though others argue there is not that much difference. But the second negative soon after burned in a fire too. The Passion of Joan of Arc thus languished in gray obscurity for decades, as prints of it were found and bowdlerized and otherwise revised to various ends, all of which only increased Dreyer's despair. He fought them but went to his death in 1968 thinking his early masterpiece was little more than a lost cause and footnote to film history.

But expect a miracle, right?

94. Walkabouts, "Train to Mercy" (1991)

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From about 1988 to about 1993, the Walkabouts were my favorite live act. I got out to see them every chance I could, which sometimes was as often as every month, a real treat. They were basically the red-headed stepchild on the Sub Pop roster of the time (a roster now full of red-headed stepchildren, but more famous at the time for Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Nirvana); the PR machine cavalierly labeled the Walkabouts as "hippies with big amps." That label could serve as well retroactively for Country Joe & the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead, but point taken. The music of the Walkabouts was rumbling and loud, but well leavened with folk-rock currencies. You can hear the drift for yourself on "Train to Mercy." I hope you can also hear how effectively it could close a show, which is how they used it for several years. It's big enough to fill arenas, and I feel privileged to have been able to witness it in tiny clubs, and numerous times. The nine and a half minutes that this lasts effectively takes me back to those halcyon days, and it's even hard sometimes to resist the temptation to get to my feet and sway. How Brian Eno, who plays synthesizer and sings, came to be involved in it remains something of a mystery, though the song fits his sensibilities well and you can certainly hear his impact. Chris Eckman, one of the band's principals with partner Carla Torgerson, has written of Eno's participation, "He happened by the studio that night, almost by chance and recorded some tracks only after we got him drunk." That still doesn't answer the question of how Brian Eno "happened by" a Seattle studio one night, but whatever. Worked out well for all.

95. Talking Heads, "Cities" (1979)

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I've said before that I'm a big fan of the Talking Heads album Fear of Music, as much for its humor as for its adventurous experimentation, but this piece of it is an enduring favorite for slightly different reasons. It's not without its jokes, of course—the way Byrne yelps and otherwise fools with the chin-stroking, thoughtfully meditated problem of making the comparisons ("good points, some bad points"), and the thing about the smells of home cooking in Memphis ("home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks") being "only the river." But at a time when I badly wanted to leave the place where I grew up, Minneapolis, it offered a kind of primer on how to decide what to do next. "Find a city, find myself a city to live in" became a way of living for a year or two before I finally settled on Seattle, a place I visited and instantly felt a connection. I still love the way the song so much makes oneself the agent of the decision, and the open approach it takes to solving it, considering as example in its four minutes or so London, Birmingham (presumably in England rather than Alabama, but who knows, given what follows), El Paso, and Memphis. In the end, evidently, Byrne chose New York. But you know what? You can live anywhere you want, anywhere that feels right. It's just a matter of picking up and doing it. As the song warns, you'll get a little freaked out now, and that's for sure—I didn't know anyone in Seattle, I didn't have a job, and I didn't have a place to live. But it all works out. This ridiculous little song provided me a lot of comfort on the way.

96. Aztec Camera, "Jump" (1985)

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I was never that big on Aztec Camera, though somehow I ended up with one of their early singles, "Oblivious," a slight thing but with something of a lilting appeal. Nor was I even close to liking Van Halen or their 1984 dance crossover mega-hit. Put the two together, however, a confluence found in the shadows of a strangely packaged mid-'80s EP, a recording of a live performance in London—well, now that's something altogether different. Roddy Frame & crew took the blatant and largely empty commercial gesture that played a role in David Lee Roth's departure from Van Halen and converted it from light-hearted teen-focused dancefloor parable into something very much like a suicide note. The way Frame moans it out, the chorus sounds vastly different from the rather more chipper version by Roth, particularly when Frame starts leaning into it hard, repeating the message: "Awww," he sings, "You might as well—jump. Well, you might as well jump. Go ahead and jump. You might as well jump.... Go ahead...." The guitar solo that follows—I'm presuming that's Malcolm Ross but it's possible it's Frame—is like unto the chaos of death. The contrasts are stark. A hushed and somber feeling accompanies the singing part as it industriously sets about recontextualizing, finishing the job with a certain finality in the second reading of the chorus and opening the door then for the band to bring it up and Ross, or whoever it is, to grind away. The band gets louder, the guitar wilder, bolts of feedback erupt. I have a fanciful image in my mind of the crowd standing as one, holding their hands over their ears like the figure in Munch's "The Scream." Suddenly not so fun anymore, is it?

97. Kid Creole & the Coconuts, "Dear Addy" (1981)

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I don't recall from the vinyl version of the Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places album the spoken-word overture that now accompanies this song on anthologies and reissues, but it is otherwise exactly the gem I encountered, undiminished: a glittering production of a straightforward lamentation of love lost (maybe—perhaps the spoken-word intro is there to indicate the jury is still out on the matter, all hope not yet lost), complete with swirling strings, sighing Coconuts, woeful backstroke guitar chording for rhythm, and a host of small touches designed to make one's heart swell, as swell it must. Bronx native August Darnell, aka Kid Creole, had a real knack all through the '80s for working memorable pop strains into various molds of world music (by way of Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building) powered by an encyclopedia of rhythmic figures to drive them. Nearly anything he recorded is worth looking into, and some of it is essential. This closer for a concept album about a globe-circling adventure remains my single favorite for its simplicity and for its shameless mournfulness. The voyager has returned home and all he wants now is his Addy. "Dear Addy, I'm afraid / I've lost more than I've gained," so on and so forth. The cries for Addy on the chorus are piercing, just her name and the sweet aching mess of the sound. It only goes to show you can travel the world 'round and when you come home again all you find is yourself, or something like that. It was a top 40 hit in the UK in 1982, which in its own way also just goes to show.

Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders (1997)

In the mid-'80s, almost immediately in the wake of Joe McGinniss's book Fatal Vision and the celebrated TV movie based on it, Jerry Allen Potter was approached by a retired FBI agent, Ted L. Gunderson, who claimed that the "slam-dunk" case was not all it appeared to be. Potter greeted this assertion with the skepticism that only someone who knows McGinniss's book could have, so damning is the portrait presented there of the so-called Green Beret murderer, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was accused and eventually convicted of brutally slaughtering his wife and two young daughters with bludgeon and knife and then attempting to point the finger for the crime at nameless, faceless Manson-family-like hippies chanting "acid is groovy, kill the pigs." But Gunderson eventually lured Potter into looking harder at the case, and Potter in turn brought in co-author Fred Bost. The book that was published 10 years later based on their findings, Fatal Justice, is a fascinating companion piece to read with the McGinniss, practically inducing whiplash as it so thoroughly takes apart the case against MacDonald, along the way uncovering a good deal of prosecutorial and other misconduct that at the very least dwells in a gray area if it isn't outright malfeasance. The details are grinding and I'm not about to attempt to summarize them here; instead, I urge anyone under the spell of McGinniss's book to consider looking at this. McGinniss's role in the fiasco has been so grotesque that MacDonald was able to successfully sue him for damages in civil court, even as he remained (and remains) housed in federal prison. What concerns me at this moment—arguably off-point, I'll concede, but of more immediate concern—is that now Joe McGinniss has decided he's just the person to write a big book about Sarah Palin, and has moved to Alaska to do so. It's coming out later this year. McGinniss first launched his career as something of a New Journalist prodigy, writing about politics as a young man in 1968 with The Selling of the President, an interesting x-ray of the Nixon campaign for the presidency that year with a decided air of prescience about the way politics was going to be done in the U.S. post-television. But McGinniss hasn't acquitted himself well since—first the MacDonald debacle, and then, in the '90s, a book about the Kennedy family that found him the subject of charges of plagiarism. I'm not nearly as worried about Sarah Palin as I was before she resigned the Alaska governorship and set about proving in earnest for anyone willing to look that she's little more than a grifter preying on ignorant Medicare-leeching Tea Party Bible thumpers. But that doesn't mean I don't have a certain amount of dread about how McGinniss is capable of shooting himself in the foot in an all too likely attempt to crucify her with a calculated "edgy" book he hopes will make him some big bucks. With friends like this, who needs enemies? Fatal Justice, along with Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, make abundantly clear the lazy and arrogant levels on which McGinniss operates. Time for him to just go away now.

In case it's not at the library.