Thirteen songs worth stealing. Sort of.
12) Nâdiya, "Tous ces mots." In the summer of 2003, the French-Algerian chanteuse had a disco-rap hit,"Et c'est parti," of such starts-with-a-boxing-bell, string stabs'n'horn blares, "na-na-na," thumping obviousness that it took days to notice, with gathering amazement, its subtlety. "Et c'est parti," it begins, a French stock phrase meaning "And here we go," but also sounding suspiciously like a stock bit of oldschool, "Hey, say party!" Next came "pour le show," a cunning, almost-unnoticeable slip into franglish, and then "le stade est chaud," which translates as "the place is hot," but enunciated so as to be identical to "let's start the show," and really the whole opening gambit is just unbelievable, Zukofsky's Catullus to a disco beat. The big hit from her new album, a piece of glam-soul bombast called "Roc," is negligible junk in comparison, but her other 2006 single, "Tous ces mots," almost holds its own. The musical bed is perversely, energetically insipid, with "Separate Ways" synths, revving engines 'n' squealing tires, a metronomic rhythm guitar going nowhere fast. But somehow she supplies the song with an implausible urgency, racing through the franglish ("I don't wanna go — contre le macadam," she says, liquidly triangulating her markets) with athletic exuberance, like a sprinter — which, oddly enough, she once was, the French national champion at 16.
11) U.S. Air Force, "Bombs over Baghdad." Hate the war but love the warriors. Mention with great frequency that poverty is, in effect, a stealth draft. But remember also that all the soldiers at the beginning of this graymarket promo clip for death take equal part in the charming call'n'response that opens this salute. Meanwhile, the video is, at the same time, like a joke about how much traction there is in denying the political, as Andre 3000 did about this song in 2000: "That’s where the title came from, like really, like "Don’t beat around the bush.” Our first single, we were trying to let people know we weren’t playing around at all. That’s what it meant.” Good luck with that.
10) Dixie Chicks, "The Long Way Around." The first single "Not Ready To Make Nice" (fifth-best song on the album) is "Heart of Gold" with an extra minor thrown down the shaft. "The Long Way Around," on the other hand (second-best song after "Lubbock or Leave It"), is like a gradeschool primer about the content of form: Look! Their friends from high school, with their circumscribed lives, get two dull chords repeated claustrophobically. Observe! How the introduction of the "I" is accompanied by a new minor chord, to indicate both difference and said difference's difficulties. Notice! How the chorus, with its story of departure and rambling freedom, passes through the minor chord to arrive at the heretofore withheld major, inhabiting for the first time the breadth of the key, giving the complete and spacious feeling of the "long way around." See also! The simplest ideas still work, at least a little.
9) Field Mob feat. Ciara, "So What." "So what" indeed. A track of such indifference that it reads like an experiment in how little you can do and still have an appealing song, which is perhaps a way of saying that Jazze Pha is still in the zone even when he's sleeping, and that Ciara, who so recently still seemed like a sort of convenience, Jazze's Aaliyah without the emotional reserves, now seems like the queen of all summer afternoons for the foreseeable future.
8) Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair." A is for Autotune, B is for Bubbly Bassline, C is for Chic guitars; Daisy Dukes makes it work via the Janet Jackson retreat into breathy undersinging™, letting the machines and studio whizzes do the work at which they excel, without undo interference. Much has been made of the, er, similarities to "Holiday"; if we're on the subject of genius Eighties art-disco delivered by less-than-gifted vocalists, we hear those opening bells and think ABC just the same — not the alphabet, the band. Shoot that poison arrow, it'll be so nice! Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, fifteen minutes and an eight-ball; you'll gonna get something like this, and like it.
7) Big & Rich, "8th of November." This surprisingly standard-issue tragic survivor's story, marred by cliché ("like a dark evil cloud, 1200 came down on him and 29 more") still has some curious resonances among Vietnam veteran tunes. It's far more stately than precursor "Still In Saigon," Charlie Daniels' least likeable hit. The guitars' elegiac backward skirl invokes a quite different song to which this is a sort of pendant, "Copperhead Road" (the death knell of the New Traditionalist's heroic period, wherein Steve Earle's memory-moored vet has returned home to be a paranoid pot-grower, a taking-up of the family's anti-authroitarian moonshining tradition that is at the same time grimly memorial of his training so recently sponsored by those same authorities — "I learned a thing or two from Charlie doncha know; you better stay away from Copperhead Road"). But amidst all this history, certain details of "8th of November" keep tugging at stray brainstrings: the funereal/anniversarial ballad form, the date, the number 29. And these finally to the formal heart of the matter: it's a remake of a song set exactly a decade and two days later. As one memorial website summarizes it, "November 10, 1975. The Edmund Fitzgerald — 29 lost." Huh. History's just so...weird.
6) Jake Owen, "Yee Haw." "You take yer alright, you take yer can't wait, a lot of bring it on, and some damn straight, you mix it all up with some down home Southern drawl, y'all, you got yer yee-haw. "
5) Fergie, "London Bridge." London calling, speak the slang now. O Ambivalence of culture! Will you never end? Despite the numerous allusions — Fifty's rhythmic "I don't give a fuck"; Nelly et al's "urra" for "every"; hints of Masta Ace and Luke Skyywalker — as a total event, this song is part and parcel a feckless, avaricious theft of "Galang," from the staticky drum on down to that chorus sounding like the microphone's gloved in aluminum foil, each effect planed down and rounded off, forsaking the original's sinister fuzz and unexplained paranoia ("who the hell is hunting you, in their BMW?") for the vacuities of "I'm such a lady but I'm dancing like a — ." Just compare this song's "londy-londy-londeee" to that song's "get down get down get down," or any number of other jacked vocal rhythms and intonations simulated and dragged toward the middle of the dial by the ineluctable gravity of a million dollar bills. From the perspective of "Galang," this song is an abomination, a case study in the betrayal of spirit. From the perspective of "London Bridge," well, even a pale shadow of a shadow of a copy of a shadow is better than anything we might have suspected Fergie capable of. From a neutral perspective, this exchange is just a sort of education, the best one yet, in what happens — sonically, socially — when a sui generis song is recuperated into the SoundScan sweet spot. Lesson: the neutral perspective is fucked.
5) Tom Petty, "Square One." Unregenerate — is that the word? Unreconstructed? When Neil Young dies, those stations that play the contemporary form of what will later be classic rock will be left with a playlist of nothing but Tom Petty. Worse things could happen.
4) Julia Roberts," Men and Mascara," and Ghostface Killa, "9 Milli Bothers." There are tropes and there are tropes. Among the many reasons to love country and rap — the two living indigenous forms of pop music — is that their rhetorical tropework is hot to death, like, every day. In Julia Roberts' case, it's syllepsis: "men and mascara always run," ends each chorus, so perfectly inevitable in its form that it expresses the inevitability of its formulation utterly without flourish, the kind of compressed formula that made this country great. Ghostface, on the other hand,prefers antonomasia, the fancy kind always beloved by the Wu, that makes a noun of the last name and thusly, an adjective of first: "that nigga jumped up and did the Damon Dash."
3) Tori Amos, "Ode to my Clothes." Though their senses of both narrative drive and melody are markedly distinct, Tori's ability to commit to the autobiographical mode without telegraphing whether or not it’s a fiction is matched only by John Darnielle. Maybe it’s the god thing, maybe god is in the details. It's just so goddamned poignant that she has that relationship with her piano, as if only things that go always with her can really know shit, can parse the levels of intimacy and invention, and it's telling how in Tori's world things themselves seem always on the verge of abandoning their muteness and letting spill the secret knowledge they've been soaking up like a leather chair stores body heat, hence this unreleased-until-September song: My clothes, nobody knows things like my clothes, my telephone life in the back of my jeans, so elegiac and funny and oh yeah, did we mention that "Ode to my Clothes" is also the name of a poem by William Schwenk Gilbert from 1865, one of the so-called "Bab Ballads," six years before he met his Sullivan.
2) E-40, "Muscle Cars." NASCAR for black people. At any given moment, hip-hop has a dominant tempo, a slow margin and a fast margin. The dominant tempo is where the money is, tautologically; the slow tempo is usually where the cult-cred goes to die, because it's usually sinister and introspective and has the space to elaborate gritty narratives, and wise heads love that shit. And then there is the fast margin, which is where hip-hop goes to dance, and because it's party music, it gets less dap from the credentialed. For the moment, Kanye squats in the middle of the road; Houston bobs its head in the slow margin. Over in the fast margin, hyphy is the best music in the world right now. The folks who complain this album isn't hyphy all the way to the bottom are right; 40 Water's not a pure product of the movement, which is formed by a bunch of kids half his age, standing on the shoulders of giants. 40's one of those giants, and for a handful of tracks here he stands on the shoulders of the kids — the child is father to the man, indeed — so monumental you can see him from eleven states away.
1) Nâdiya, "El Hamdoulilah." It turns out that, behind the bluster and guest rappers, Nâdiya's best at perfectly low-key and lovely piano ballads that mix French and a drop of English with Islamic religious interjections (you don't get that a lot in the Hot 100), including a lightly-swung track called "Inch'allah," and this one, our favorite ballad of the year so far, with Elton John changes and a title phrase that's used on many occasions, including that of waking up.