136. "I Can Change" by LCD Soundsystem

Pure-MTV synths. So dancey. But a dance song with a front-and-center singing melody, asking listeners to move to the music and simultaneously listen to the singer unfurl a long thought process about a collapsing marriage and the identity challenges long-term commitments serve to their participants.

It's LCD Soundsystem!

There is nothing better for long drives than LCD Soundsysetm albums - with their long-developing, trance-prone structures. Between these epic treks live culled pop gems like "I Can Change" that work like interludes. The band's final album, Is This Happening, is the best at this, with only two songs of ten clocking in at less than six minutes. At 5:56, "I Can Change" counts as one of those more focused pop moments.

135. "I Am the Walrus" by The Beatles

Sometimes I hear people characterize sarcasm as a character failing. Let me tell you, if it weren't for sarcasm, the greatest psychedelic song in history wouldn't have been written. 

It was 1967, and the Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the high-water mark of psychedelic music at the time. They had spent years working up to that album, sticking a toe in with Rubber Soul. Getting to waist level with Revolver. Finally up to the eyeballs with Sgt. Pepper. Praise erupted the world over for that seminal album.

The only place to go was further. So the Beatles made the combo album/film Magical Mystery Tour. And with that, their heads disappeared into the clear, cleansing liquid.

In the midst of writing for Magical Mystery Tour, John Lennon got a letter from a student at his old high school. The student informed Lennon about a teacher leading interpretive readings of Beatles lyrics in his class. Though perhaps pleased, the only proper response for John was to begin writing the most unintelligible set of lyrics he had ever attempted. According to legend, after completing the song, Lennon muttered, "Let the fuckers work that one out."

His weaponized brain buster was "I Am the Walrus."

One of the Beatles' finest achievements: Pure sarcasm.

The music video for the song, featured in the Magical Mystery Tour film, is wackiness. As it opens, Paul arches backward and drives a pointer at Ringo Starr, and Ringo rat-a-tats his drum entrance. Paul understands innately that, for all of the complex instrumental layering on this song, the real foundation is that drum beat. Sometimes there is nothing so surreal as a basic four beat just fast enough not to be slow, just slow enough not to be fast.

There are so many details in this song, John's mission clearly went beyond lyrics and decided to throw about fifty kitchen sinks into the musical composition and production as well. To try and describe and interpret everything would just fall into the dumb trap John set for me. I'm not one of those fuckers.

But the sheer imagination boiling in this song means that in every measure there is an attraction. During the infinite ascending/descending scales of ending, the Shakespearean dialogue (King Lear) appearing was from a live radio broadcast that John and the engineers fed into the mix as they committed it to a master reel.

By the way, watch Magical Mystery Tour the movie if you haven't already. It's only about an hour long. The plot is infinitesimal. The dialogue is inscrutable. There are moments of pure sublime strangeness. The music videos are landmarks of the medium. It's kind of the Monty Python before Monty Python and MTV before MTV at the same time. And enjoy your spaghetti.

134. "Hyacinth House" by The Doors

The late 1960s saw a shift in fads from dreamy, extravagant-sounding psychedelic pop full of abstract, disorienting chord combinations to a rock priding itself on being stripped down, honest, and rooted in the tradition of American folk, blues, and gospel. Some bands (Beatles) seemed blindsided by the turn of tastes and did their best to transition gracefully out of their grandiose ways. Some bands (Pink Floyd), paid no attention and opted to redefine psychedelia in the late '60s and into the '70s. Some bands (Hendrix) were grateful to leave the trickery behind and focus more on the roots sounds they were most attracted to anyway.

I think the Doors, differing from all these bands, had the least amount of soul searching to do about this transition. While they did begin adopting a harder blues edge in their later albums, they had always written songs with a certain old-school core (see "Back Door Man" on their first album). While their music did sound psychedelic, it was mostly because they sounded so unorthodox, not because they were cribbing any of the psychedelic playbook. When the time came, the keyboards changed voicing from harpsichord to rock organ; that was really about the end of it.

Look at "Hyacinth House," from the Doors' final album, L.A. Woman. 

This is essentially a psychedelic song in the classic Doors sense. It name checks a semi-poisonous Mediterranean plant with a Greek mythological history. The middle organ solo is an extravagant run of classical scales that is more mind-bending than Mississippi Delta. The song's outtro passage is a stirring, unsettling repetition of dark melody far out from where a folk tune would trouble itself to go. 

But the plagal chord cadences undergirding the song's verses are so salt of the earth, so unobtrusively pure, that they allow the song to pass in the post-psychedelic world.

Poor Jim Morrison, if there is one song really showing his sense of isolation at this point near the end of his life, it has to be this one. "I need a brand-new friend," is a pathetic, missed cry for help.

But I don't listen to this song to feel down and mopey about things.

This may be one of the most purely beautiful songs the Doors wrote, and I'm obsessed with its sophistication on so many levels. The lyrics are really so well realized, clear, with numerous evocative allusions. The guitar leads are excellent throughout. The organ solo is riveting. The drums pick such a cool down beat in the verses. The soulful vocal is top-notch. And the outtro could play for an hour and I would continue finding harmonies to sing along with.

It all ends with a nice gospel finish, like they'd just been playing us a little church tune.

133. "Hurt" performed by Johnny Cash

In the 1990s, someone had the off-the-wall idea to strip this Nine Inch Nails song down to guitar and add Johnny Cash's time-enriched voice, and the recording that resulted has been growing steadily in stature from head-scratching novelty to cultural touchstone. (That someone was Rick Rubin, the legendary hip-hop producer, which makes the idea off-the-Green-Monster.)

I think we all know the reason why this version works so well. For as much as Trent Reznor may have been through in his life and late-blooming career by the time he wrote this song, there was almost no living human more qualified than Johnny Cash to perform it from the point of looking back on an entire extraordinary life lived, maximized, wasted, and saved. The words ring true and horrifying. He spent a lifetime working and working and working tirelessly through fallouts and tragedies only to express here that his achievements may have amounted to a mere "empire of dirt." There was seemingly not a person left that he felt he could relate to personally, all relationships sacrificed at the altar of quintessential American success. Johnny Cash, rest in peace, has a mythic external legacy, but it came at a deep cost.

Without success or failure, triumph or regret, there is still music.

His plain, stoic performance, with all dissonances of the original version removed, is one his most unexpected and indelible.

132. "Human Sadness" by Julian Casablancas+The Voidz

I know this may sound strange, but this is the song I wish I wrote. There are so many fantastic songs, this is the one I would've had the most fun writing, if that makes any sense.

This song is 11 minutes long, and it is slow. That alone is insulting enough for me to have enjoyed producing it.

The song is astonishingly ugly too. The melodies are rotting with chromatic dissonances and spliced into jagged rhythmical fragments. The instrumental voices are clashing, with bass drum thuds over a tiny guitar, dinking bass, and nostalgic strings. The chorus guitar and vocals have similar effects on them, doubling the same melody, cancelling each other. There are three verses and the guitar solo equivalent of graffiti before the song's halfway point.

Five minutes in, the chord progression finally changes. Not only that, it's a key change. Five and a half minutes in, the full drum set finally enters the song. The singing here starts with unintelligibly clashing parts that I will term "harmony." There are video game laser sound effects.

Guitar solo number two is a sarcastic imitation of a Great Solo.

There are another verse and chorus to go. The final chorus slants all the original supporting chords while keeping the original singing melody, drawing new, demented contexts with each change.

And then we end with an '80s-esque synth denouement.

I think I hear hoofbeats in the background.

The lyrics are sprawling, opaque expressions of depression and regret, apologizing to someone we could only guess. It's more important to Julian Casablancas and the object of his apostrophe than us. If only all of us were acclaimed enough to be able to settle personal scores in the form of public craft.

I first heard this song while I was typing at work, so I wasn't listening extremely hard. There came a point where I was conscious that it was still the same song playing, and I chuckled.

Usually, long songs make amends to the audience by being varied, even a bit bombastic. They give us something to help pass the time. "Bohemian Rhapsody" moves through wildly shifting modes. "Stairway to Heaven" builds to a masterful climax. "Hey Jude" gives us a fun, catchy line to sing a billion times along with a pre-recorded crowd. "Free Bird" gives us a classic open, an stirring endless closing guitar solo, and a contact high.

"Human Sadness" gives us four identical chords for five minutes.

The dismembered vocal melodies are still so beautiful. The four chords are a classic, catchy pattern, and synth strings add a truly haunting ambience. The key change and new attacking guitar progression are strangely welcome the more times you hear the song. The big drums busting up the song's idleness provide a cool element just when needed. The second guitar solo, for being essentially a joke, is still marvelously performed. And I can't repeat enough, I love beautiful ugliness well-performed.

After first hearing the song, I tried just ignoring it. Who has eleven minutes to throw away on something as plotless as this? And then I kept coming back, hungering for its music ideas, despising and reveling in my shattered expectations. Now it's weaseled its way onto this list. I'm not responsible.