Handsome Furs “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues”

It’s probably difficult to watch a Handsome Furs show without feeling a bit of envy for Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry: They are clearly doing their favorite thing with their favorite person, throwing themselves fully into the moment and enjoying every second of it. Boeckner’s body language is loose and relaxed, contrasting with the nervous energy in his voice. Perry is restless and spazzy, kicking and falling dramatically through the set, and being about 400% more physical than her task as a keyboard player and drum machine operator requires. The songs and the performances are intense, but in watching the show, your mind doesn’t go to a dark and desperate place. Instead, you just marvel at this couple’s wonderful chemistry, laugh at their banter, and smile when they display a deep gratitude for the very fact that you showed up to see them play in a city with a myriad entertainment options. Not everyone gets to live the dream like these two, but it’s pretty obvious that they deserve it.

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I think that most everything that I love about Chicks On Speed would be the top reasons why most people would find them to be incredibly off-putting: Hooks so aggressively catchy that they may as well be jingles, over-the-top campiness, relentless sloganeering, an unapologetic obsession with modern art and feminism. I’m also rather fond of their voices and the way their accents contrast, particularly in a song like “Girlmonster” that shifts between them at a dizzying pace. You can dismiss this as pretentious fluff, but it’s your loss — if people are going to be so ostentatiously arty, why not also be silly and fun? I love these women.

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Cam’ron is on this track, but he’s on a lot of songs, so nevermind him for now — I’m a lot more interested in his guests. Byrd Lady is a young MC from Harlem who is making her recorded debut on this song and the single “Cookies-N-Apple Juice,” and I’m very impressed by her performance on both cuts. Her voice and delivery reminds me a bit of Lil Kim, but she’s clearly her own person, and her verses ring out with a lot style, charm, and humor. She comes on authoritative and strong, but also quite playful, ending on a spoken bit punctuated with stifled laughs that kinda melts my heart. Apparently she’s working on a mixtape right now — I’m definitely interested.

Byrd Lady is followed by 40 Cal., a Diplomats rapper who turns in a vaguely odd verse that bounces between ostentatiously speedy rhyming and moments when he pauses for a few beats before finishing a thought. This is most amusing when he asks “What’s your favorite number?,” and in the few split seconds before giving an answer, your mind just stops cold, thinking “Wait, what is my favorite number? Should I know this? Is this slang? Am I old? Too square? What’s going on?” And then the answer: “40!” Oh, right! Of course. His name is 40 Cal.

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The last four Sonic Youth shows that I have seen have either featured all of Daydream Nation, or a large chunk of it, and so it was quite a relief that the band opted not to play anything from that record at the United Palace. The other notable thing about this show was that it was indoors, which has become something of a rarity for NYC-area Sonic Youth concerts in recent years. It was a nice change of pace — United Palace isn’t exactly my favorite venue, but it suited the darker, more intense oldies selected for this setlist. Aside from the meandering “Massage The History,” this show clearly favored tight, tense numbers with a lot more grit than the lighter, more sprawling songs favored during the Rather Ripped era. I’d prefer for the band to head off more in this direction — I’ve had my fill of beach blanket SY, and I have always had a great love of their more sinister material.

Sonic Youth “Calming The Snake”

Of all the songs from The Eternal, “Calming The Snake” is most certainly the best in concert, and I hope that they keep it around for years to come. The studio recording is excellent, but it does not fully convey the deepness of its slithering groove, or the urgency of its rhythm, particularly in its most jarring moments. I like the new album fine, but I would absolutely love it if it was more in the mode of this song — sweaty, sexy, scary, violent, unhinged.

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Like most everything else in the R.E.M. catalog, I have already written about this song. The thing is, even if you’ve decided very long ago to like a piece of music, it may not mean very much until some aspect of it somehow resonates with the circumstances of your life. This is the case for “Letter Never Sent,” a perfectly lovely number that I had always classified as a relatively minor album track, and still kinda do — obviously, I think very highly of a great many R.E.M. compositions. Either way, listening through the bonus live record with the new reissue of Reckoning, the song caught me by surprise. “Letter Never Sent” has a light, sunny bop to it, which serves to understate the loneliness at its core. It’s a song about missing people, and wishing that people could just be with you whenever you want them around, even as you come and go as you please. The line that rings out for me the most is in the chorus: “Heaven is yours where I live.” Well, yes, of course it is! Even if it’s a bit condescending, it’s always true from your perspective. Come here and make me happy, and of course you’ll be happy too! Ha, maybe that’s why Michael is knock, knock, knocking on wood.

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The first several times I heard this song, I misheard the lyrics slightly, and the result is that I’m making the song mean something to me that it’s not actually saying. That’s fair game, though, especially when I’m responding to the melody and the sound of the chords more than anything else. The phrase I’ve inserted into the song is “I shouldn’t make it matter,” which is actually the opposite of what they are singing, but precisely what I need to keep in mind, particularly when in the sort of mellow emotional drift suggested by the arrangement. I need to keep reminding myself that while it is perfectly reasonable and totally human to have feelings of petty resentment, jealousy, and disdain, it is foolish and self-destructive to dwell on them, and to make those feelings matter more than what is actually good, meaningful, and relevant. The sound of “Cheerleader” fits into this sort of minor, blindingly obvious epiphany — there is tension, but it slowly dissipates, shifting from shrugging resignation to a sense of calm and security.

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I’m pretty sure Amazing Baby do not want you to think too much while listening to this song. If they did, they probably would’ve at least spell-checked the word the singer is spelling out in the chorus. But really, why bother when the hook is so catchy and every other line is entirely inscrutable? It’s all surface and sensation, and that doesn’t have to be a problem. It’s sexy without being skeevy; it’s somehow rather smart about being very, very dumb. The song is like a very attractive person who could say anything at all, and you’d just nod along, smiling just to have their attention in the moment.

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It would be a profound understatement to say that Michael Jackson had a very strange life. In fact, the man led perhaps the single most unlikely and bizarre life of all time, every step of the way entirely removed from what anyone could consider anything like a normal existence. This is a large part of his tragedy, but it is also something that highlights his uncanny gifts as a musician and entertainer: Somehow, despite being so totally estranged from the ordinary, he was capable of evoking and articulating the essence universal emotions, and not just in broad strokes. I am certainly not an expert on Jackson’s love life and would not ever want to be one, but I think it’s fair to assume that the scenario in “The Way You Make Me Feel” probably doesn’t match up with his own experience — the line “I’ll be workin’ from 9 to 5″ is a give away — but the man could sell the sentiment of the tune without flaw, nailing the nuances of his character’s infatuation, excitement, and confidence. His musical skill was clearly innate and miraculous, but it would not have meant that much without this incredible gift for interpreting, simplifying, and at times totally abstracting emotional experience into something so potent and primal that it could be instinctively understood across nearly all cultural boundaries. The man probably never felt normal a moment in his life, but it really seems like he understood humanity, or at least enough to synthesize his observations into these brilliant, intuitive performances.

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Since it is fair to assume that famous rappers do in fact get a lot of groupie action, it is also reasonable to believe that songs like this are in some way non-fictional, and the girls described in the lyrics are actual people, or at least composites of women the rappers have been with. (You know, like in New York Magazine!) So with that in mind, what do you reckon it’s like for these ladies when these sort of sex tunes come out? These guys are probably quite prolific, so is there maybe some doubt in their mind whether they are actually rapping about them? Even if you’ve done something as specific as give head to Kanye West in a college library, how do you know that’s not some fetish of his, and he’s been getting BJs in the stacks of every university on his tour route? If you’re certain that the rapper is talking about you (”YES! I was born in 1988 and Kanye boned me! It has to be me!”), do you tell everyone, or keep it as a more private source of pride? Do you get a little annoyed when Common quotes you in a somewhat unflattering way? Are you bothered by the fact that you get mentioned in a song that loops the best hooks from a Lady Gaga song built around the thinly-veiled phrase “poke her face”? Did you want something more romantic? If you’re the subject of the least-famous rapper’s verse, are you jealous of the chicks who got with the bigger names? So many questions!

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One of my favorite things about MayKay’s lyrics is her perverse penchant for mentioning unlikely food and beverages in her songs, with a particular emphasis on the way they smell. In my experience, odor is rarely evoked in music, and when it is, it’s usually a casual reference to something that smells very good. MayKay, on the other hand, seems interested in grounding emotional moments in unflattering contexts, suggesting that our most romantic experiences and dramatic epiphanies cannot exist in a vacuum devoid of the junk of life. “Tie Me Up With Jackets” is full of meatballs, apple schnapps, odd in-jokes, and disses of obscure bands, but no amount of clutter can obscure the big passionate heart beating at the core of the song. The sentiment comes out all weird, but there’s no mistaking her love and desire.

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