Music of the Weak: The 100 Greatest Songs of the Millennium (So Far) - #50-41

PREVIOUSLY: #100-91 - Introductions, yacht rock, epic narratives, Elvis tributes, and one-man Canadian supergroups.

#90-81 – Jazz revisionism, shady fact-checking, Muppetized gangsta rap, and the no pussy blues.

#80-71 – A ragtag assembly of pop stars and other hate-able entities

#70-61 – More pop music, Australian pop, bedroom pop, Kanye West, and the decade’s greatest use of drum machines

#60-51 – Sex, suicide, misogyny, and a brief appearance by Amy Winehouse

50. Earl Greyhound – “It’s Over” (2006)

Earl Greyhound never blew up quite like all the magazine profiles thought they would—or, on the basis of “It’s Over” and monster lead single “S.O.S.,” like they probably deserved to. Instead, “It’s Over” is the break-up mixtape staple that never was. The Brooklyn three-piece knows how to make itself sound voluminous, but “It’s Over” finds Earl Greyhound slow-playing their hand by dropping simple elements one-by-one into the mix before expertly working them into a frenzy. The song kicks off with a thunderous, two-handed, five beat drum introduction, like the sound of someone storming out of her apartment during an argument and slamming every door along the way for good measure. Singer/Lead guitarist Matt Whyte’s immediate response is a snatch of weeded laughter and a two chord guitar riff, but the band quickly works itself up into a conniption fit of blues rock and dueling male/female vocals, courtesy of Whyte and bassist Kamara Thomas. The two circle around the line, “Our love gets colder the closer we get,” a heart-rending kōan that most bands would spend a career dogging after. At one point, Thomas holds a note for nearly 15 seconds while the music churns and flails against it. There’s so much comotion, the secret truth is that it doesn’t sound like it’s over at all, which makes “It’s Over” less of a final brush-off and more of an opening salvo, a warning shot fired the minute you hold down the play button on your cassette player.

49. The Fixxers – “Can You Werk Wit Dat?” (2007)

Though he’s finally getting a little bit of his due as a result of his recent collaboration with Kurupt, BlaQKout, for two decades DJ Quik has been one of hip-hop’s perennially underrated artists. Thing is, Quik’s production work often succeeds for the exact reasons that critics and heads tend to overlook it—he’s a master of knowing exactly what to leave out. Examine the beat from “9x Outta 10” under a microscope, and you won’t find much more than an exquisitely chopped up operatic vocal and some drum machine work that could rival Portishead’s “Machine Gun.” He’s one of very few rap producers who only include precisely what they need to, no more, and he does it with a meticulousness equal to his closest peer, the notoriously perfectionist Dr. Dre. “Can You Werk Wit Dat?,” the only officially released single by The Fixxers, Quik’s collaboration with AMG in 2007, is his high water mark for the decade. A stunning example of simplicity in action, Quik liberates isolated elements from a half-dozen rap subgenres—a ringtone-ready squiggle, two triumphant bass pulses, a single snap—and cobbles them together into something wholly unique, and far superior to its component parts. (This is something that can’t be said of most of his contemporaries. Kanye West is great and all, but I’d much rather listen to “Kid Charlemagne” than “Champion,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” than “Stronger.”) Quik also raps on “Can You Werk Wit Dat?,” with significantly weaker results—rhyming “breezy” with “cheesy,” and extending his lines with awkward phrasing to fit the stanzas. Fortunately, AMG picks up the slack on that end, kicking “some grown man game for your blue tooth,” and rattling off a litany of one-liners that might have made the track a classic even without Quik putting it way over the top.

48. Murs & 9th Wonder – “Bad Man!” (2004) 

9th Wonder was fresh off of the success of Little Brother’s The Listening and “Threat,” his contribution to Jay-Z’s The Black Album, when he collaborated with 10-year underground rap vet Murs on Murs 3:16 – The 9th Edition in early 2004. After a prescient introduction featuring a sample from Breakwater’s “Release the Beast” (which would subsequently be co-opted by Daft Punk for the lead single from Human After All), the album’s first track finds both artists at the peak of their powers. 9th takes a lot of shit from heads about his production techniques, especially his taste in drum breaks (or “breaks?”), and on “Bad Man!” there’s some merit to that. (“What the fuck, are those sleighbells?”) But his spit-polish of The Mighty Diamonds’ 1981 reggae tune, “Illiteracy,” gives Murs the perfect beat to showcase his famously surgical rap skills. In the first verse, Murs tries to convince his girl that he’s the sex-crazed lothario he says he is, but he sounds way too pleased with himself about all of the “bad” things he’s saying to be actually convincing. In the second, she turns the tables on him, convincing mall security that he’s abusing her, which results in the song’s best line delivery: “I lightly touch her arm/ What the bitch do?/ FALL!” The third verse finds Murs unable to even hold the whole bad man thing together, as he becomes possibly the only rapper on record to try to seduce a girl by offering to spoon. He does get a couple of skeevy moments in—like trying to convince the girl to let him take her from behind immediately after he’s called things off with her—but, ultimately, “Bad Man!” is about how fun it is simply to play the role. On record, nobody’s had a better time doing it this decade.

47. The White Stripes – “Hello Operator” (2000)

The guitar interplay on The White Stripes’ “Hello Operator” is a pretty neat parlor trick. Jack White asks a question via a full-bottomed, murky blues riff. Then, he answers it, via a whip-crack crystalline one. Then, he busts out the harmonica. Even with the minor amount of overdubbing going on, it sounds like there’s no way that White could faithfully replicate the recording live—but, by the time the song has built to its conversational apex, he makes you believe he can accomplish just about anything, without the aid of some pesky band. “Hello Operator” goes gloriously over-the-top, with Jack White cranking out the meatiest arena rock guitar riff since “Interstate Love Song,” and Meg White contributing what amounts to a parody of her own guitar playing, tippity-tapping on the side of her snare drum and calling it a solo. They would continue to dig in this same hole for another couple of albums, with incredible success (“Fell in Love With a Girl” is “Hello Operator” playing it straight), but “Hello Operator” is where Jack and Meg White truly figured out what mettle they’re made of. If The White Stripes were an experiment in how far you could push music with a two person band, they set their own bench mark almost immediately.

46. Beyoncé – “Crazy in Love (Feat. Jay-Z)” (2003) 

On the first pass, it sounds as if the horn hook The Chi-Lite’s “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)”easily the most celebrated sample of the 00’s, does most of the work for Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” Producer Rich Harrison repeats that sample six times, right off the top. Then he breaks for a quick round of “uh oh”s, and plays it another three. In any other song, that horn riff would be the climax, the Oscar clip. Harrison makes it the opening credits, and then gives himself and Beyoncé the impossible task of having to top it. She does, miraculously, giving a Mariah Carey-level performance with Shanice-level pipes. What makes Beyoncé a superstar is her consistent ability to raise her game up to the level of her material; she’s never been challenged harder or succeeded bigger. When Jay-Z gets on the mike in, there’s definitely an element of, “Wait, he snagged Beyoncé with that verse?” But Jay-Z’s only trying to keep up. He may drop lines like “Star like Ringo” and “Stick bony but the pocket is fat like Tony… Soprano,” but his verse is more about rhythm than content. He manages to bully the track just enough to keep from coming off like a total jackass. Otherwise, “Crazy in Love” is so airtight and built to survive a nuclear holocaust, like that refrigerator from the last Indiana Jones movie, that Jay-Z may even be the song’s wabi, its intentional flaw, another element of its genius. A song that takes even its missteps to maximum heights is a dangerous song indeed.

45. Jay-Z – “99 Problems” (2003)

Whether or not The Black Album was a true retirement move, Jay-Z left all his cards on the table with his “final” single, “99 Problems.” Rick Rubin’s monster truck rally production, which rewires “The Big Beat” and Mountain into something as ferocious as an early Run-DMC single, provides a sound that has yet to be satisfyingly replicated—with one foot in the mid-80’s and eyes on the horizon—but it’s Jay’s effortless virtuosity that knocks it off the meat rack. The first and third verses pick fairly common topics: Jay derides rap critics for complaining about his lyrical content and then using his face to sell magazine (Like most songs that lacerate rock critics, the critics loved it); Jay calculates the risk/reward of popping off on a guy talking shit to him in a club—“you know the type/ loud as a motorbike/ but wouldn’t crush a grape in a fruit fight.” The second verse, however, deserves a firm place in the rap pantheon, as Jay plays both sides of a police officer/Jay-Z confrontation, going as far as to drop a couple of “uh-huh”s in there to make sure he knows he’s listening. Then there’s the central lyrical conceit of the song, the immortal, “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.” Snaked from a 1993 Ice-T joint, Jay-Z uses it to maybe deny his relationship with Beyoncé, but doesn’t rest until he’s crowbarred every possible meaning of the phrase into the song—from flipping it around on himself (“I got 99 problems, bein’ a bitch ain’t one) to referencing a police dog. (Zing!)

44. The Dismemberment Plan – “Superpowers” (2001)

Travis Morrison’s lyrics tend to balloon from tiny, personal moments into enormous, surreal, and often funny scenarios—which is mesmerizing when a lovers’ kiss goes off the rails because the girl gets swept off of the face of the earth; not so much Morrison getting his front teeth knocked out turns out to be into a metaphor for 9/11. On The Dismemberment Plan’s “Superpowers,” Morrison pulls the reverse trick With a certain wistfulness, Morrison lists the most poignant moments of his life —“I’ve seen the world’s most beautiful women undress in ordinary solitude;” “I’ve seized with the ice cold rage of a lover betrayed, half a million miles away.” Framing him in otherworldliness, Jason Caddell plays guitar like it’s a plane getting ready for take-off, and Joe Easly’s drumming provides the song with its only real forward motion, by way of an intricate, jungle inspired beat. Morrison is meant to be role-playing as someone with extra-sensory perception. As the song evolves, however, it becomes clear that he’s pinpointing universal experience in the most specific of terms, and the lines begin to speak to the farthest reaches of the emotional spectrum—from “joy that makes my face pulse like a sugar high” to “such unreal pain [I’ve] not known what to do.” Of the last one, he says, “It isn’t mine,” but that’s not exactly true.

43. McLusky – “There Ain’t No Fool in Ferguson” (2003) 

Andy Falkous had, undoubtedly, one of the greatest blue streaks of the decade, and on McLusky’s non-album single, “There Ain’t No Fool in Ferguson,” he’s perfectly on point. “I can’t do anything today,” he confesses in the opening lines, “I’m sawdust in a sandpaper suit.” Then he proceeds to free-associate some of the juiciest curse words in the dictionary, calling the titular town a “hopeless hepatitis piss-rag Molotov cocktail monobrow shithole.” “There Ain’t No Fool in Ferguson” thrives on Falkous’ explosive delivery—he’s a freight train of yelps and screams and blurts—as well as his thorny, propulsive guitar work. On the chorus, it all comes together in a manic schoolyard chant that may have some sort of a deeper meaning (prostitution?) or may just be fun to say. Either way, Falkous uses “There Ain’t No Fool in Ferguson” to bask in the joy of language, from the point of view of a third grader, before English class went and ruined everything.

42. Herbert – “Harmonise” (2006)

Notorious for recording music found objects for the foundations of his songs (pencils, fast food containers, human hair), Matthew Herbert sounds oddly restrained on his 2006 album, Scale. It’s as if he’s trying to make a Frank Sinatra record, but from, like, drum samples recorded in a hot air balloon. “Harmonise,” the album’s centerpiece, is built around vocals by Dani Siciliano, Herbert’s wife. Her stunning performance a kind of pop whirlwind, as she whips from hook to hook to hook to hook for the duration of the song. She’s aided by a Looney-Tunes-on-an-assembly-line glitch beat, and her lines are punctuated by woodwinds left over from Herbert’s big band experiments. Yet, Herberts best move is making the whole thing Siciliano’s show, letting her dig from one patch of harmony to the next. The song gets richer and richer, until it finally peaks with Siciliano singing, “You are the world/ And I am your people.” The resulting song could be a jazz standard, but it’s built from club music’s component parts.

41. Vampire Weekend – “Ladies of Cambridge” (2007)

The B-side to the bands first single, “Ladies of Cambridge” didn’t make it on to Vampire Weekend’s debut album. It’s relatively easy to see why. While Vampire Weekend has never been an outright cool band, it’s inarguably of the moment. The debut dangled its feet in the water of African music, and presaged the current pop fascination with the continent, which is the deepest it has been since the mid-80’s. But “Ladies of Cambridge” is neither cool nor of the moment. There are no references to pimp cup wielding rap stars, or leave-your-sweater-on-I’m-randy propositions. Instead, “Ladies of Cambridge” mixes a propulsive, ska-type beat with meditations on transiency and mortality, trading the novelty of songs like “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and “Oxford Comma” for sheer emotional impact. 80% of the song is textbook pop, with Ezra Koenig pleading with a lover, “If you leave I just don’t think I could take it,” as a violin flutters in response. Then, at the ¾ mark, the band slows down to an ambient crawl, and the 22-year-old Koenig metes out a couple couplets that shed light on the rest of the song: “When you left to go to the kitchen/ I imagined that you were dead/ A morbid streak runs through the whole of my family/ But for you I could put it to rest.”

-Martin Brown, 2009

Comments

[tom]

Glad to see mclusky getting some props. I bought that single purely on the strength of the lyrics to the chorus being mentioned in the NME review, which was definitely not a mistake. But then, it would be hard to go wrong with a band that names a song 'dave, stop killing prostitutes'.

[Matthew J. Brady]

Fuck yeah, White Stripes! My favorite band, so I feel like I can actually comment. Me, I would have probably chosen one of their bigger hits, because I'm lame like that. Seven Nation Army, The Hardest Button to Button, Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, My Doorbell, I Don't Know What to Do With Myself, maybe even We're Going to Be Friends. But Hello Operator is pretty goddamn awesome.

Do the Raconteurs get a separate entry? I would suggest Steady As She Goes or Salute Your Solution. Jack White!

[Abhay]

Mark Romanek's video for 99 Problems is one of my all-time favorite music videos-- I think it's maybe the best rap video. It's super-FAST, the camera's relentless, the images stick; it looks like a documentary, but then there's weird jungle guys and dancing girls and rap video stuff mixed in. There's this wide variety of people in it, humanity, whatever. Any shot of Rick Rubin in that video is pretty great. Plus: I like the black and white, and I think there's just the tiniest amount of green to it.

[Tucker Stone]

Don't forget about Vincent Gallo. Any appearance by Vincent Gallo pretty much cements legacy.

[Mr Rendon]

This is hilarious, as the "eggs with onions cheesy for me" is the first line I think about in this song. Between that and calling a pussy "gorgeous," I don't think you can get nerdier machismo.

It's very strange, but I don't really connect with most of the songs so far in a massive way. Maybe I don't connect enough with music in general since '00 (which would be sad and something I would attempt to correct immediately) or maybe the aughts are not up to snuff or maybe the best is yet to come here...definitely enjoying this though!