171. "Ladies On Parade" by Benji Hughes

Fun, loud, fantastically recorded with layers that go back as far as you can hear on headphones, sporting an electro sheen in a bright major scale, full of audaciously long catchy melodies, I really don't know how to make you people like Benji Hughes if you don't get into this one.

The chorus singing melody is something you have never heard before. There is not a damn moment in that melody that has been reproduced from any previous source. This is what utter originality sounds like. It is so graceful and groovy.

I've said before how much I enjoy it when songs end on new ideas. Why whip out another chorus when you can go out in the throes of one last discovery?? This song knocks this concept out of the park and injures a grandma in the deli across the street. Every single time I hear the ending passage of "Ladies On Parade," I yearn to have musicians at hand to perform it with me in full flush. The funk-Latin-dance drums, bass and guitars fused into a single fuzzed, syncopated line, the keyboard back there holding soft eighth notes in sweet little inversions... and then the guitar solo of pure sloppy multitracked noise-joy. 

What damned derangement.

170. "L.A. Woman" by the Doors

I am a Doors fan. Not a "steal a car and drive it to the desert" Doors fan, but as a musical being, the Doors have always been a soul burning out there in the darkness, filling me with a sense of familial belonging even generations removed.

I am kind of particular as a Doors fan, in that I love their late music more than their original ethereal incarnation. I can still listen to the first albums without skipping a track, and just lie on my back knowing that worthiness has traversed this plane. But nothing approaches the affecting exhaustion of their last album, the weathered result of years of tumultuous fame. The thin, wizardy voice that Jim Morrison started with had broadened into a bristling moan.

"L.A. Woman," off that last album (L.A. Woman) lets that mature voice moan, scream, bellow, buffoon. The instruments eventually slow to a crawl, enabling the guttural chant of the most definitive repeated phrase in rock, "Mr. Mojo Risin," which is an anagram for "Jim Morrison." It's inspired moments like this that addict people to music.

On the whole, I love the airy blues style, the vamping quality promising such fun to see Morrison and the rest expanding the song to its full theatrical potential live. The verse and chorus vocals are at once based in blues roots and accomplished pop melodies, singable all day and long into the night.

No songs these days would feature a tempo change as drastic as the one in "L.A. Woman" because it would mean the musicians would have to disengage their click tracks and actually perform off each other in the studio. 

Our devices have isolated us.

169. "L.A." by Elliott Smith

One of Elliott's experiments writing a full rock song, and I'll be damned if he didn't write quite a fine Led Zeppelin song (albeit with highly self destructive lyrics).

The construction of the song defies easy labels. I prefer to think of it not having real choruses. There are verses with distinct A and B sections, and these break into sections that are more like bridges. I love the neat little rhythmic hitch of the A-sections. The B-sections are flowing with beautiful high guitar leads, and of the chord changes travel into some cool territory. Both sections are too brief to really be their own movements. 

The bridge portion demonstrates some typical multi-chord Elliott Smith ideas with winding, chromatic singing. It seems almost a little thrown together for him, but his thrown-together bridges are still theoretically air-tight. 

The song's ending scales show his chops really putting something heavy together.

The strange fade out is very reminiscent of endings on the Beatles' Revolver album. In fact, for as Zeppelin-esque as the song feels, its little 3-minute runtime and plethora of ideas in that span really puts it in line with those Revolver tunes too.

The song is one of the last of my favorites of what Elliott Smith wrote. It appears on his fifth album, Figure 8, which I consider his weakest. The early momentum of his career appears to have been dissipating, with the rush of the Oscar nomination receding into the rearview, maybe the excitement of toying with full instrumentation on his previous album, XO, leaving him scratching his head what to do next. His disastrous drug use was also beginning to decimate his talent.

He only worked on one more album, From a Basement On the Hill, which was incomplete at the time he died. There are one or two inspiring blasts on that album too, but I think it would've been a challenging, unknowably long era to endure before maybe true reinvention would've taken hold. A guy like Elliott Smith, it seems, wasn't equipped for that kind of long haul. He seemed built to break.

168. "Know Your Enemy" by Rage Against the Machine

"Know Your Enemy" ends by ridiculing the concept of compromise, among a list of other high-concept modern sins. The song is a 20th century Deuteronomy with a whammy pedal solo. I'm not a fan of conformity, hypocrisy, or the elite, but any worldview rejecting compromise must be soberly questioned. I don't have the energy to even attempt refuting any of the strident, easy phrases in this song, which is probably while I'll just end up a refugee some day sooner than most of you may expect.

But the joke is on these bastards, because heavy rock music is so loud that lyrics are drowned out. They should've played folk if they wanted coherent ideas to come across. Maybe someday Rage Against the Machine will achieve establishing their utopian, Yugoslavia-esque nation-state with mandatory mosh pits. Until then, I will just savor the beautiful verse guitar blues scale riff from my prison of mediocrity.

167. "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by the Rolling Stones

You know how Keith Richards got the cool guitar sound that famously opens this song? Let's look at his own quote:

"I used a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic tuned to open D, six string. ... there was a capo on it, to get that really tight sound. And there was another [acoustic] guitar over the top of that, but tuned to Nashville tuning. ... Both acoustics were put through a Philips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker."

Not only was musical recording analog back then, but all attempts at experimentation had a charming stone age element to them as well. These primitive rock musicians were as slapdash with their recording techniques as Pollock was with paint, because careful consideration was antiseptic. Think of all the recording studios these days, setting up rooms with the delicacy of tea parties. And that is why no band today in any way approximates the danger of peak Stones.

The song itself is pure rock, with a whale of a main riff. The choruses feature a technique I believe the Stones pioneered in many songs, something the hair rock bands of the '80s tried to weaponize into an MTV-era assault of peer pressure. Let me explain the method: There is a powerful effect of tracking multiple singers into a song, especially a big chorus. It creates this strange feeling, like all these people are having so much fun singing these long, fun notes - you should like this song along with them and have fun too. It's all positive, right? 

The '80s hair rockers knew their teen audience had a deep, dark need for belonging and self worth. They rode in providing a coked-up confidence to fill that void, lacing all their songs with raucous choruses where many, many voices joined in together - not in harmony, in unison. It was a sly maneuver to get the teens of America to buy into the hipness of the product, and by god it worked. (Subsequent grunge chorus vocals, by contrast, tended to feature a single singer wailing alone to the heavens, which appealed to a very different psychology.) 

The technique as it appears in "Jumping' Jack Flash" is actually very modest in comparison to later evolutions. Again, the song is wonderfully slapdash, leaving later generations to put on the rubber gloves and get scientific about cloning the magic.

My best memory of this song is its appearance on the closing credits of the film version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. It's such a release, this driving song, so ultimately cool and confident, as these goons drive off into the desert, having gotten away with the madness of their experiment in the American Dream.

The meaning of the song itself? It's about Keith Richards's gardener. That's it.

There is an old SNL skit from back in the day, where Mike Meyers plays Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger plays Keith Richards, and they briefly debate Ice-T's "Cop Killer." In the end, they inadvertently start writing a new song together. The song is utter nonsense but seems to be developing into something quite catchy nonetheless. 

Here's a clip featuring that moment: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-li…/video/update/2868139…

This is exactly the way "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was written. How ultimately slapdash.