126. "Hey Ya!" by OutKast

There was a time, according to my impeccable memory, when pop music had completely lost its goddamn direction and any value of melody. Just go listen to anything from 1995 to 2003. Tell me one pop melody that really strikes you as magical. I defy you to find me anything with a melody you'd define as transformational, something that just drilled into your cerebral cortex and left you a vegetable. There is nothing there. A Death Valley.

This is not to say music was completely lost. There was plenty, plenty of fun invention going on at this time. It just didn't win Grammys. It didn't make the mainstream pop radio stations.

Then one day, I was a salesman in a mall. Yes, I was. I was surrounded by the sheen of peak acquisitive, pre-08 ecomonic meltdown vanity. I sold cellphones to people of breathtaking profligacy from 2003 to 2006, compiling reams of character study that I will one day convert to proper use. But one day, I noticed our showiest, clubbiest, most of-the-zeitgeist salesman singing along with a song playing on the mall intercom. I had developed an aural/psychological circuit breaker to tune this out. 

Strangely, something tripped it.

It was... a melody.

The song playing was "Hey Ya!" by OutKast. 

Okay, the song was catchy, I granted, then went back to the sale I had on the hook. I privately granted my glitzy coworker the respect of enjoying one halfway respectable song in the parched environment of those times. 

There was a problem. 

The song was still playing and I was having a hard time not listening.

The verses were so novel, sung so free and uniquely, to a driving drum pattern and a truly cool guitar strum. The choruses were pure addiction in four wonderful notes. The middle breakdown was too much, just ridiculously audacious, so blatant and so beautiful in its music. The repeated line was unforgettable, really poetry.

My life began to crumble.

"Hey Ya!" remains a towering example of pop melody, a monument to what happened when pop artists let in a little of the indy weirdness happening at the time. More pop artists have learned that lesson since then.

A few years after the release of this song, the whole damned economy collapsed and the party was over. I had been long fled from that scene.

Behind the glitzy public areas of malls are bare, dark, sullen cement tunnels and metal doors.

125. "Hey Joe" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

I wrote earlier about how "Fire" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience was the song to make me become a drummer. Weirdly, it failed to make me much of an actual fan of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

That had to wait for another happenstance of 1990s Americana.

Like many families, my family got our first PC computer in the mid-90s, and it was full of many space-age features such as dial-up internet and Solitaire. But most important of all, to me, was the Encarta Encyclopedia. I am a fan of encyclopedias. As a kid, I read my youth encyclopedia set in a few nights when my new asthma medicine kept me awake. The wide-ranging non-fiction, non-dramatic, non-needy attitude of encyclopedias is something I zestily feast on. They will not beg you read them; they will not pay you off with attention-grabbing histrionics. They will simply be there, a range for your mind to ramble. 

Many, many hours I spent touring through the Encarta Encyclopedia. One of the best features: Short (very short) digital videos, something positively sci-fi at that point in history. There weren't very many; they were reserved for some of the most consequential subjects. Great speeches. War footage. And a super-select group of musical performances. 

One of those performances was about 2 minutes of a Jimi Hendrix Experience performance of "Hey Joe." Easily one of the longest clips available in the Encarta Encyclopedia, it spanned from the first verse to the end of the guitar solo. I have tried but can't seem to locate that exact clip anymore.

There was so much about Jimi that blew me away. Unlike many early live versions, the Encarta clip featured him playing the guitar solo with his hands, not his teeth. I prefer that, aware that he hated the gimmick of playing with his teeth. During the verse, he notices a string out of tune and fixes it in-song, in-beat, turning the tuning peg and making it sound like a whammy bar bend, then chuckles over to bassist Noel Redding about it. But like "Fire," what fascinated me most about the song was the drumming of Mitch Mitchell. 

The agility and flair that he employed were hypnotic. His ability to flail his sticks in a blur around him as he whipped his head around wildly probably made 20,000 drummers overnight upon first seeing him. The drumming was ecstasy incarnate. It was freedom of movement.

It's such a slow blues song - how are hyper-agile drums even a feature? Thank Jimi Hendrix, probably. Many other band leaders maybe would've told their drummer to dial it back, not just to serve the somberness of the song, but also to avoid the cardinal sin of upstaging said band leaders.

Hendrix dealt with just this issue coming up as a backing guitarist in the Chitlin' Circuit before becoming famous on his own. For many years, he was the guitarist for Little Richard. Little Richard knew Jimi was a genius. But that genius was not for Little Richard's stage. Little Richard was the genius of his stage, and there was apparently a great amount of conflict between Jimi and Little Richard over even modest amounts of showiness peeking out in Jimi's performance.

There came a day when, in a scene I have embellished with likely too excessive mythic quality in my mind over the years, Jimi simply walked out on his touring gig, boarding a bus for New York City, where his fortunes of all different varieties awaited. I see the guitar case in his hand.

So Jimi's band encouraged all players. They flew together. "Hey Joe" is my favorite song on their first album, a blues standard elevated to singular greatness by Jimi's voice and musicianship, Mitchell's drums, Redding's excellent bass foundation, and the exhilarating chromatic blues runs they played at climactic moments.

After repeating the Encarta video for about as many times as I could stand, I began to seek out everything by this group. The music of Hendrix has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It all truly got underway with "Hey Joe." And an encyclopedia.

124. "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors

This song is barely over two minutes long; there should be next to nothing to note about it. But this weird little number is the nexus of so much trivia. 

First, the song actually pre-dates the Doors, as it was written and demoed by another incarnation of the Doors musicians sans guitarist Robby Krieger. The name of that earlier group was the slightly less-evocative Rick & the Ravens. Ah, the early '60s.

Second, the song was essentially reissued rarity when the Doors recorded it for their third album and released it as a single. The only reason they did was because Jim Morrison wasn't functioning too well at the moment, so the rest of the band combed back through old material to sell. "Hello, I Love You," a song about a girl Morrison saw on a beach, fit the bill. 

Third, this was one of the first songs released as a stereo 45 and served as a showcase for the format. That whammy bar cadenza was the selling point, which would've blown minds when the sound whip panned across the stereo soundscape.

Finally, and this one veers into actual musicality, this song was deemed in court to be a complete rip-off of the Kinks' "All Day and All Of the Night." I am someone who is obsessed with identifying imitated music, but this one never occurred to me. And the reason why has some instructive songwriting insight. 

Let's be honest, the similarity barely more than tenuous. The verse chord progression is the same in both but they are played radically different. The Kinks' tune is predicated on pick-up notes lending the progression a very modern, slick vibe. The Doors' tune is intentionally played totally on the beat, with mocking, goofy garishness. The instrumentation is also totally different. The drum parts are radically different. Beyond the verses, the songs have nothing in common. 

One thing is the same. The first phrases of the verse singing melodies are nearly identical. A total of 11 notes.

Now ponder this: Do people accuse Nirvana's "Mr. Moustache" of ripping off the ending guitar line of "Hello, I Love You"? Of course not! Who is going to care about ripping off an outtro?

The insight: Your money is made in the first 11 notes of your song. Make sure they are really good. And sue anyone who copies them.

I still celebrate "Hello, I Love" you despite all these hallmarks of illegitimacy. It's a blast of catchy silliness, zaniness sung with Morrison's dead stare.

123. "Helena Beat" by Foster the People

I don't know how to properly describe this song to you. It is so strange, has such a cool pace, has the pitch-shifting organ, an odd falsetto singing part. It is an ugly song written with beautiful care.

122. "Heaven Beside You" by Alice In Chains

The chorus harmonies are so great. The last grunge single.