150 Favorite Songs: #140, “The Bullpen,” Dessa (2010)

Dessa’s record was a revelation last year. Smart songs about things that rappers don’t ever rap about (loving your little brother! A song of support to a dickhead famous rapper’s wife). A voice that effortlessly floats from singing to rapping and back almost without you even noticing. Beats that ranged from quirky, Tori Amos-sounding things to the hard-as-fuck Doomtree style. I hadn’t listened to her record when it first came out, but I caught her opening for P.O.S. last winter and knew that I had to hear the whole thing.

“The Bullpen” is the most accessible song on A Badly Broken Code and it’s probably the most traditional, in the way it’s structured. She’s very much a storyteller on most of her songs, but here she’s rapping about herself. I saw her play a couple of nights ago, and one thing that struck me was all the dudes with their hands in the air, rapping along to all of her songs — including this one. And I thought it was an incredibly cool thing, because people relate to rappers differently than they do most other musicians. Being honest, most people experience rap primarily as a first-person power fantasy. Jay-Z writes a little bit about this in Decoded — how businessmen and executives will tell him that they listen to songs about selling drugs or shooting people to get fired up about their powerpoint presentations. When a rapper talks about — that’s who we identify with. When Eminem says “I’ma kill you,” the person listening doesn’t think, “Eminem’s gonna kill me!”, they think, “Yeah, I’m gonna kill you!”, or beat you at Madden, or nail that job interview. (This is true of most rappers, incidentally, not just mainstream violent ones. If you listen to Saul Williams, who’s thematically the anti-Eminem, on “Lalala,” you’ll hear “You better drink half a gallon of shaolin / before you pluck the strings of my violin” from his perspective.) There’s nothing wrong with first-person power fantasies — that’s what superheroes and video games are, too. We find them valuable, and that’s the form most rappers emulate.

There’s also an element of surrender when you choose to identify that way. You’re checking your own ego a little bit, to take on the rapper’s persona. And I found Dessa’s record at a time when I was trying to reassess my own ego, and learn to listen better and defer more — important skills for a good journalist, which I have been trying hard to become. And so hearing “The Bullpen,” and identifying with it was interesting — because it’s specifically about being a woman in a male-dominated field, so taking that on is a unique experience for a dude. She’s rapping about glass ceilings (“I found this here ladder / now your ceilings don’t matter / check me out, now I got glass floors”) and the way guys who seem cool turn out to be sleazy (“it’s all love backstage / but then the boys get brave / gotta say, I hope your mother doesn’t listen”), and things that there’s not really a dudely-analog for. And taking that on — the way all of those dudes I saw at her show the other night did, with their hands in the air and their heads nodding, mouthing all the words (yeah, including me) — is a cool thing. It’s a bunch of tough dudes ceding authority to a woman, and that’s valuable. At least, learning how to do that — and songs like “The Bullpen” have helped — has been valuable to me.

150 Favorite Songs: #143, “No Pussy Blues,” Grinderman (2007)

I wrote a thing a week or two ago listing out reasons I had been resistant to self-applying the word “feminist” for a long time, and I did forget one reason: if you do that, it’s kinda hard to justify listing a song called “No Pussy Blues” as one of your favorites.

But I think the reason this song sounds like it’d be offensive is only true if you’re looking for the joke in the wrong place. Because the punchline is pointed right back at Nick Cave here — he’s not angry at the girl, he’s angry at himself for getting old and growing a gut and letting himself go, and yet still being in a position where he’s chasing girls in the crowd who are obviously no longer interested in him. The whole thing is pretty arch. “I felt like Marcel Marceu must feel,” he says to explain why going through the motions while trying to get into the pants of a much younger woman makes him feel silly — way to prove that you’re hip enough for her, grampa!

And this actually leads me to a point about feminism that I’ve been trying to figure out how to voice. Because I know people who were kinda pissed about “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo, because, yeah, it’s catchy and funny and everything, but also, like, do we really need another song from a dude about gold-digging women who just want you for your money? You figure that we’ve passed the point at which that artistic territory has been fully mined. But at the same time, if that’s an experience the guys who are writing the songs have had, aren’t they entitled to write about their own lives?

The songs about those things that don’t make me uncomfortable, that don’t seem like they’re bullying or just generally crappy — are the ones that do look inward. (Note: “Gold Digger” works on these terms. “Fuck You,” not so much, but still, that hook!) Relationships go bad; people are entitled to write about them; the dudes are allowed to be angry about the things that happened; it’s never just one person’s fault, and it’s almost never as simple as, “I was perfect to her and I just didn’t make enough money!” If you think that it is, there’s probably a woman out there who could write a pretty devastating song about what a self-absorbed asshole you are. (See also: “Clearly Obsessed.”)

And anyway, I think that “No Pussy Blues” works because it’s not about how she’s shallow or doesn’t see how great the narrator is or how he deserves something he’s not getting — it’s about how he’s embarrassingly out of place in the situation he’s in. The jokes are funny, and the song is still loud and thumping and rock-y. The typewriter at the beginning, like he just finished writing it and now they’re gonna go play it? It sounds great, and since it came out, I’ve been trying to figure out why a song called “No Pussy Blues” didn’t make me super uncomfortable to listen to, and I think I know why.

150 Favorite Songs: #144, “Stranglehold,” Ted Nugent (1975)

Part two in our “reprehensible human being who makes music that I love” double-header, this is the Nuge. “Stranglehold” is his best song, of course. I love the guitar sound here, the mega-riffs that lead to this freaked-out, extended guitar solo that culminates in that martial drumming before Derek St. Holmes (note: every time I type his name, I have to delete where I first typed David St. Hubbin) starts talking about how he’s got news for you, you never have to die. I have a deep, abiding affection for songs that sound this way. 

I was talking to someone who’s spent a lot of time around musicians about ****** ****** yesterday, and he made a good point — that what everyone is going nuts for in ****** is fairly standard rock star behavior. If a band dude acts that way, management gets stoked, because that’s what we expect as “rock star” behavior. ****** describes himself as a “bitchin’ rock star from Mars” and not a movie star because movie stars are, even at their most paranoid and self-centered, collaborative. At the end of the day, it’s about the movie, which is a director plus a star, plus countless other people. But “Stranglehold” is a perfect example of how rock music is different from that. Because it’s all Nugent. It’s released on a record under the name “Ted Nugent,” and it features a four-minute guitar solo, and only about ten lines of lyrics, and so even though Ted Nugent doesn’t even sing on the song, it’s a testament to the ego of a single dude. “Stranglehold” very much plays into the concept of the rock-star-as-mythical-figure, and that’s an appealing creation. It’s one that we’ve got a lot invested in, culturally.

And I think that for dudes like me — that is to say, fairly circumspect, even-keeled guys who do not dream of ****** ******- or Ted Nugent-like ego sprees — a song like “Stranglehold” is a good outlet. Listening to it like I have in my life, and identifying with it, is a way to claim some of that power.  I don’t have the slightest interest in participating in rock star excess, but I know that it’s, y’know, cool. And “Stranglehold” is an example of that sort of cool — it’s big and excessive and it sounds great, and I can get into that for eight and a half minutes, and then turn it off when it’s done.

150 Favorite Songs: #145, “Ignition (Remix),” R. Kelly (2002)
We’re about to enter the “reprehensible human being” section of this list. (Tomorrow: Ted Nugent!) If you only ever loved songs by people who weren’t at least sometimes awful, though, you’d lose a lot of great music. Michael Jackson? John Lennon? Miles Davis? You wouldn’t want to be on any of their Christmas card lists, for sure, but a person’s art can come from a different part of themselves than the part that dictates how they treat people. I wouldn’t get a tattoo of any of those guys, but you can’t burn your records, either.

The remix to “Ignition” is a perfect pop song, or close enough to it that it doesn’t matter. R. Kelly sounds perfectly relaxed, totally comfortable saying stuff that he must consciously know is dumb shit — “Can I get a toot-toot? Can I get a beep-beep?” And the lines that aren’t necessarily supposed to be dumb are just as silly. “We got food everywhere / like this party was catered?” I can just imagine all of the people clamoring for an invite! You mean at R. Kelly’s party they’re going have food there? Even the chorus is weirdly, lazily post-modern — he just declares the name of the song, including the word “remix,” because it doesn’t matter. R. Kelly is not a poet. He’s a vocalist, and he’s a great one — here, especially, with material that lets him hit soaring falsettos as he explains what you do after the show, after the after-party, after the hotel lobby, crooning that you’re listening “to the reeeemix,” his voice oiled and controlled, his phrasing as deliberate as Sinatra’s or Jeff Buckley’s.

It’s a great song. Sure, I wish R. Kelly were in jail right now, but I’m also nodding my head. Art can inspire those contradictions. “Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce,” indeed.

150 Favorite Songs: #146, “I Still Love You Julie,” Against Me! (2000)
I was never deeply attached to Against Me!, so I didn’t mind their metamorphosis from the sort of band that made songs that sounded like “I Still Love You Julie” to the kind they are now, the sort of epic, Springsteen-y thing they’ve become. But this song always meant a lot to me.

That opening line — “Last night, a room full of drunks / sang along to the songs I never had the courage to write” — it’s something I’ve always related to. Another one: “We’re not going to call everyone on their shit tonight / even though half of you won’t even smile / the next time we pass on the street.” I’ve never really felt comfortable in the punk rock scenes I’ve found myself a part of. It always felt like at least half of what I was doing there was anthropology, and the scene politics and constant one-upping that occurs among certain members of those communities are just exhausting. And so I liked that there was a punk rock song by a band that was very much a part of those sort of insular scenes that sang about it honestly. Because a part of me, sure, wanted to be the one whose songs everyone was singing along to. And a part of me knew that even some of the people I’d had some really positive one-on-one conversations with would treat me like an asshole if their friends were around.

This song came out when I was 20, and I was just about past trying to find a home for myself in anyone’s punk rock scene at that point, but the thing I really love about it is that it acknowledges all of the things I felt — but it doesn’t define those communities by it. Because despite all of the rampant problems with punk rock scenes, and the parts of it that can be really harmful to the girls and boys who end up on the wrong side of the politics and various cults of personality, it’s also a thing that changes, and saves, a lot of lives. A lot of outcast kids who need some sort of community find it there — and so we’re not gonna call everyone on their shit tonight. Yeah, it’s probably a scam. We can admit it. But: “Maybe somehow this scam will still save us all,” he sings, and for a lot of people I knew — not me, and not everyone — it did. Keeping your eyes open about a thing’s flaws without dismissing it is, I think, one of the keys to learning how to conscientiously enjoy a lot of things in life. And maybe it’s a way to try to make those things better, too.