156. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was the subject of a great early documentary called Don't Look Back, which follows him around 1965 England on tour in verité black and white. I grew up with no Dylan exposure, so seeing this film for the first time at around 20, I remember being struck by how Minnesotan Bob Dylan actually was. The accent was more or less subdued, but his laconic, dark quips belied many sun-starved winters surrounded by ice shacks. 

Anyway, my favorite scene in the whole movie is the party in his hotel room, where he plays "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." He's just met a supposed rival in the English folk singer Donovan, and they trade performances. Donovan delivers a perfectly well-adjusted, good-hearted folk ballad, smiling a smile of a man happy to be there. Dylan takes over and unleashes "Baby Blue." It's a sneering rendition where he emphasizes words almost sarcastically for understanding.

It's worth noting that "Baby Blue" was the last acoustic number Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival, where he infamously "went electric" and played with a rock band for the first time.

The folk music scene clearly exasperated him, the grins of the simply happy to be there, the vacant seriousness of those purists not happy to be anywhere.

And maybe that anti-folk quality is why I gravitate to this song. It has more of an aggressive rock progression in its chorus, a minor passage with a dark but catchy melody. I enjoy the lyrics, which are concrete but not governed by obvious sequential logic. And they are best sneered. Bob Dylan would win no television singing contests.

It's the song of someone who knows they're moving on, not happy to be there, which, it turns out, was the past.

155. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2

You can't be passé about songs of spiritual hunger like this. This feeling rests beneath so much of what every person does. And, as so many people have lamented in beautiful ways, it is very double sided. That hunger has found evocative, pitiable context in everything from the stalwart scroll declamations of Ecclesiastes to the engrossing camera-born meditation of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

So I won't just say these lyrics fall into some cliche genre. We all see the end. Our shouts all reach space. 

I will point out an irony. So many 1980s pop songs were about religion and sin. Madonna, Prince, and George Michael used the conflict of morality and desire to re-claim the acceptability of certain shunned aspects of desire. And they tended to benefit as much from the risqué nature of the stance as the controversy resulting from the stance. U2 seemed to reverse the polarity and claim that the desire, even if indulged, cannot be quenched. What a bunch of choir boys. You'd think this practice would've been commercial suicide in the '80s. I've even read how a producer asked Bono to write a song about the conflicts of morality and desire, and I'd like to think that producer was hoping to get a little sensuality out of young, fair Bono. Well, not this time. ("Mysterious Ways" might have been Bono giving in.)

The song better be good!

The shimmering guitar drone, such an invention, still so unique sounding after lots of imitation.

A soaring, earnest gospel melody.

A chorus of immaculate purity.

A rhythm section creating the song's thoughtful backdrop.

The song fades out and may never arrive.

154. "Is This Love" by Bob Marley and the Wailers

There is so much going on musically in this song having to do with the guitar parts and their rhythms. In the verse, the main guitar melody counterpointing the vocal is so simple and unassuming that you maybe won't realize it will become one of your favorite music cues. During the singing, bouncing on top of that reggae beat, the guitars staccato tap little melodies that so craftily end ahead of the beat and carry out over. It creates an otherworldly feel that made me slightly uneasy at first hearing, like jazz but more mysterious.

The chorus guitar part again pulls this ahead-of-the-beat trick and combines it with minor chords that don't resolve as much as just hold until their sustain is gone. Bob Marley was so good at odd chord changes that at first don't feel like they're going to fit into the song and then find some almost overdue way of resolving back down into what's going on. Credit the rhythm section for really holding solid to what they're doing, keeping the backbone of the song strong.

Bob Marley's singing throughout is just outstanding, just pure love. He was so, so gifted, simply born with either a spotlight or a halo on him, maybe one in the same. And the backing singers go just as far to put everything in the mood.

Fun fact: The official music video for the song includes a first appearance by then-7-year-old Naomi Campbell.

153. "Is This It" by The Strokes

A clinic of two-chord progressions with four things going for it: One, the layering of the guitar parts using lines of melody more frequently than strummed chords. Two, a perfect, simple verse bass line. Three, excellently phrased, narcoleptic vocals, especially in the middle bridge. Four, a dry, lo-fi production that made the simplicity of the song into its theme. 

The song opens the band's first album. I will never recapture the thrill of being so thoroughly impressed by a song with less energy than Garfield.

152. "I Shot the Sheriff" by...

Man, here it goes.

I prefer the Eric Clapton version to the Bob Marley original.

Do I have to justify myself? I feel like praising too much of the Clapton version will just look like I'm tearing apart the Marley version, which is also so, so good. This is a really close call!

But actually it's not.

The lyrical content is the exact same in both versions, so there is no question about the sentiment unifying them.

Musically, the Clapton version is so upbeat and sharp, with an absolutely delicious funk drumbeat. The guitar lead in the choruses cannot be overpraised for its understated cool. The flowing blues organ is perfect. The vocal melody is refined into a crystalline catchy pop formation.

The Marley version is some beautiful, minor-key introspective, radical reggae (more rocksteady, actually). The lyrics discussing police harassment are explosive coming from Marley's rough, desperate experiences. My heart is with this version.

But that Clapton version is so cool. Can we not just celebrate this one unlikely alignment of two mythic but distant contemporaries?

Also, from some very basic research, I was interested to read about some different subtext possible in the song. Marley's former girlfriend apparently claimed the song was truly about Marley's opposition to birth control (and I would assume abortion), citing the line "Sheriff John Brown always hated me, For what, I don't know: Every time I plant a seed, He said kill it before it grow." In her account, the term "sheriff" was conveniently used to replace the intended title "doctor." Marley's conservatism is de-emphasized in most accounts of him, but his religious convictions were real and deep. Had he lived, he could be the Jamaican Nugent of today. Put that in your pipe.

Marley's version still gets the link.

Clapton's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRgcwT9X2J8