PREVIOUSLY: #200-101 – The newbies and also-rans.
#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
#60-51 – Sex, suicide, misogyny, and a brief appearance by Amy Winehouse
#50-41 – 8 songs that deserve your attention, 2 songs that probably already have it
40. UGK – “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You) (Feat. OutKast)” (2007)
On its own, the sweet spot in Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You”—in which a woozy trumpet bisects a tangle of male and female voices—could elevate any song savvy enough to sample it. Not content to take the easy route, producers DJ Paul and Juicy J of Three 6 Mafia spend the length of “Int’l Players Anthem” amplifying the strength of the sample, mining it for every ounce of mystery it contains. Subtle rhythmic and instrumental changes carry the song from one verse to the next. Andre 3000’s kicks it off with a hall-of-fame cavalcade of free associative puns, but his raps are secondary to the way he weaves in and out of Hutch’s vocals, augmenting both Willie’s lines and his own. From the very first “So…”, he lines up his words with Hutch’s extended notes, creating something as close to harmony as you can get without singing. The drums drop in alongside Pimp C’s battering ram of a second verse; Bun B follows with similar rigor. When Big Boi drops in to bat clean-up, his usual hard-hitting cadence sounds downright nimble. With so many voices—the masterful performances by UGK and OutKast, Hutch’s soaring hook, and the female choir behind it—“Int’l Players Anthem” could have easily turned out to be a cacophonous mess. Instead, it’s that rare posse track where a multitude of voices are each distinctly heard all at once.
39. Rjd2 – “Smoke & Mirrors” (2002)
2002 saw the release of Rjd2’s Deadringer, Moby’s 18, and DJ Shadow’s follow-up to the monumental Endtroducing…, The Private Press. On their respective albums, Moby and DJ Shadow each got caught chasing his own tail. 18 put forth a diluted version of the gospel-plus-keyboard-preset sound that netted Moby so much notoriety with 1999’s Play. The Private Press found DJ Shadow scrambling after the distinctive instrumental hip-hop sound he’d invented on his debut. Rjd2, on the other hand, spent most of Deadringer trying to out-DJ Shadow DJ Shadow—and, for the most part, succeeding. With “Smoke & Mirrors,” he steals Moby’s vocal sample M.O., appropriating Marion Black’s bluesy “Who Knows” for the song’s first half, and the languid introduction to Chris Williamson’s “Waterfall” for the second. He affixes each to a loping rhythm, bookends them with moody instrumentals, and adds flourishes like mariachi guitar or a beat that sounds as if the drummer is struggling to keep up. All of this builds “Smoke & Mirrors” into a haunting elegy, beating each of his two predecessors at his own game.
38. Ted Leo/Pharmacists – “Timorous Me” (2001)
It’s no accident that Ted Leo and the Pharmacists structure “Timorous Me” in the style of a Thin Lizzy song. Phil Lynott’s greatest trick was conjuring nostalgia for the present moment. In “The Boys are Back in Town,” when the boys usher in the end of spring by rolling into Dino’s Bar and Grill to drink, fight, and hear their favorite song on the jukebox, it feels like a moment etched out in history—though, in truth, it’s a relatively mundane homecoming by Sons of Anarchy standards. On “Timorous Me,” Ted Leo evokes Thin Lizzy’s nostalgia in order to observe how it affects his present relationship. Leo presents a series of vignettes. The first recalls Jonathan, a childhood friend who he spends some of his adult time remembering, even though he’s not sure why. In the second, he describes the song’s muse, Timory, a fan who made a deep impression by merely singing along from the crowd of one of his shows, wearing his T-shirt, and shaking his hand after he got off stage. The last verse reveals that Leo’s reminiscing about Timory and Jonathan while driving with Jodi, in silence, wondering what’s on each other’s mind. Leo’s fondness for his memories of Timory and Jonathan leaves Jodi “dwelling in the quiet space left behind.” Amongst the dueling guitar solos, hand claps, and Celtic instrumental breaks that lift toward Thin Lizzy-like wistfulness, that nostalgia for the mundane present proves heartbreaking.
37. Lyrics Born – “Bad Dreams” (2003)
When I can’t sleep—say I’m stressed, or have a mild fever, or both—many times I’ll have a single song playing on a loop in my head. Something that would be pleasant in real life, like, say, The Beatles’ “What Goes On,” turns into a nightmarish drone, blurring the line between my resting and waking, making me unsure I’m doing either. Lyrics Born can’t sleep either. “Bad Dreams,” his song chronicling (another) long night fighting for just a couple of hours of slumber, replicates the feeling of sleeplessness by patching together a handful of otherwise pleasant sounds. Clipped female voices chirp oohs and aahhs. A funk organ punctuates each of his thoughts, never quite coalescing into a full-bodied rhythm. Lyrics Born raps with studied deliberateness, frequently breaking into monotone singing. He tosses and turns, worrying about a laundry list of troubles, none of which, refreshingly, have to do with his rap career: “Got burnt by women/ Partners in business/ Landlords and tenants/ Got served by creditors.” By the time the song hits its turntable scratches and obscured laughing, it has already achieved a hypnotic state. Finally, as the beat slows to a crawl and morphs into an alarm, you feel as if you’ve trudged through a sleepless night yourself—except, this one would be worth repeating.
36. Felix da Housecat – “What She Wants” (2004)
In the early years of the decade, Felix Da Housecat established himself as one of the pioneers of electroclash—which had all the novelty of establishing yourself as one of the pioneers behind the pet rock. This was a genre doomed to a brief shelf-life from the outset, as its major artists tended to pile gimmick upon gimmick in order to generate an audience that may or may not have been manufactured in the lab by Urb Magazine. Felix da Housecats’ own compositions were formal, if fun, pieces of rigid automation. They echoed Kraftwerk and early Detroit techno, with frigid chanteuses taking the place of the robot voices. Across his breakthrough album, Kittenz and Thee Glitz, he inherited some of his influences’ self-awareness, but even his winking carried the weight of electroclash’s pretense. The thought of Felix da Housecat ever producing something elastically funky could not have been further from his work in the early 00’s, which makes “What She Wants” as much of a revelation as it is a musical beast. The rhythm section sounds as if someone just threw a bass guitar into an inflatable bouncing room, and guest singer James Murphy contributes something to the introduction that I can only describe as throat-scatting. “What She Wants” showcases one of Murphy’s best-ever vocals. He’s free of the self-consciousness that usually defines his work, and it inspires him to contribute a loose, playful performance to a song that had no shortage of fun to begin with.
35. My Morning Jacket – “Wordless Chorus” (2005)
“Wordless Chorus” is the perfect example of a song that makes good on exactly what it promises. My Morning Jacket strip mine Blood, Sweat & Tears’ white boy funk into a couple of keyboard pulses for the opening of their 2005 album. The band had already built a substantial career by sound-tracking sunsets with freewheeling guitar wank and operatic folk torchsongs long before they released the watershed Z. Within seconds, the Kentucky natives reintroduced themselves as a different kind of force—one that improved upon the Neil Young-indebted successes of their earlier work, forging ahead with a new version of Americana as supple and sexy as it was rustic. On the verses, Jim James tosses aside beef-provoking rhetoric such as “We are the innovators/ They are the imitators” like it’s fortune cookie wisdom, driving toward the part of the song that earned the marquee placement in its title. When James nails his wordless chorus falsetto, it’s the type of payoff that most bands work toward their entire careers. As if it were flowing from the mouth of a river, James pushes his voice to such otherworldly extremes that he can only top it with the countertenor equivalent of a guitar solo, buttoned with a quick Elton John flourish at the end.
34. Madeleine Peyroux – “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” (2004)
Bob Dylan spent the better part of the 00’s attempting to connect the dots between his own songwriting and the blues and country music that presaged rock & roll. To that effect, he’s spent his last trio of albums penning anachronistic tunes, playing the riverboat gambler, and rocking a funny little mustache. In one gorgeous swoop, Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” from 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, places Dylan in a completely different lineage—directly descending from George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin. Peyroux strips Dylan’s already simple harmonica and acoustic guitar arrangement down to its barest essentials. An upright bass repeats a single note. Skittering snare drums whisper under a delicate piano. Small bursts of guitar punctuate the lines with short phrases. But the real coup is the way she exposes the hope behind Dylan’s portrait of lovers drifting apart—turning the end of the relationship into an enchanting, even desired, thing. She turns “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” into Dylan’s version of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” by recognizing that—as someone who describes impending loss by invoking Verlaine, rhyming “Ashtabula” with “Honolu-lah,” and describing Disney-esque “crickets chirping back and forth in rhyme—he must have been having at least a little bit of fun.
33. The Hold Steady – “Banging Camp” (2005)
One of the most literate lyricists in rock, Craig Finn rattles off line after line of well-crafted, quotable prose. On “Banging Camp,” he twists an old aphorism into “I grew up in denial and went to school in Massechussettes,” finds the internal rhyme between “camp” and “bank,” and, in a three-part build that would give Shakespeare shivers, describes his protagonist, Holly, as half-naked, three-quarters wasted, and completely alone. The band backs Finn with music that’s somehow both unassuming and arena-ready; it rides on a danceable punk riff that makes room for a buried horn section, frantic background harmonies, and a Boss-worthy drum breakdown. Finn and the band work in perfect synchronicity. When Holly takes a hit of nitrous oxide, and Finn promises her, “when you wake up again, you’ll be high as hell and born again,” the band pauses for a moment, to imitate her blackout. In the recesses of The Hold Steady’s rich catalogue, “Banging Camp” doesn’t call a whole lot of attention to itself. It may not have the name games of “Knuckles,” or the majestic sweep of “Stevie Nix,” or the story arc of “Chips Ahoy!,” but it doesn’t need any of that. With every detail attended to by Finn and the band, “Banging Camp” is the consummate Hold Steady song.
32. Christian Falk – “Dream On (Feat. Ola Salo & Robyn)” (2006)
Without its lyrics, Christian Falk’s “Dream On” would still have been a fantastic track of rave-spiration, with the drum-circle grinding away at some ever-ellusive epiphany as its electronic squiggles fly closer and closer to the stratosphere. Robyn threatens to tip the saccharine quotient, but never quite does; it’s Pixie Stix for dinner, but after you’ve had a late, healthy lunch. Once, you factor in the words, though, “Dream On” becomes a different thing altogether. The basic structure shouts-out a potential dedicatee (hustlers, low-lifes, snitches) and allays his or her worst fears (“you won’t be backstabbed, double-crossed, facedown, teeth knocked out lying in a gutter somewhere”). Maybe it’s a face-value exercise in empathy. Maybe it’s a satire of the gooey-good feeling generated by ecstasy, at least half a decade after it was fashionable. Maybe it’s a marketing ploy aimed at the underutilized Swedish, pop-loving vagrant population. Whatever its motivations, “Dream On” is ephemeral and hilarious precisely because it hones in on the language and fictional population of outsider art, and blows it open with uplifting melody. Pigs and fucked up interns now have their own rallying cry. Plus, you can dance to it.
31. Sufjan Stevens - "Chicago" (2005)
In the twenty-some-odd-year run-up to Sufjan Stevens’ Come On Feel the Illinoise!, indie rock acted like it was absolutely terrified of giving its songs any sort of emotional arc. Any one line from “Chicago,” that album’s best and most fully realized song, could inspire a whole new Joseph Campbell book. Stevens’ songs are at their best when he puts some serious muscle behind them. With “Chicago,” he throws down the gauntlet immediately. The arrangement sounds like Steve Reich’s 18 musicians playing the opening to “Baba O’Reilly,” and he begins the song by singing, “I fell in love again.” Then the friggin’ choir sings. It’s as if Stevens is trying to make up for decades of indie rock boredom and anger by going way over-the-top with delicacy—which seems like it should be a contradiction in terms if “Chicago” didn’t prove that it wasn’t. What’s more, he pulls it off. Sure, there are uncomfortable moments of Stevens accompanying himself on the xylophone, or claiming, “If I was crying/ It was for freedom/ From myself/ And from the land.” Nobody really believes that the dude is sitting in the back of a van, crying about freedom. But when he sings, “I made a lot of mistakes” immediately after, it rings with some of the deepest truth of any song this decade, like the line was birthed from the same ether that created Shakespeare’s genius, or John Donne’s. He couldn’t have arrived there by mumbling, only by swinging for the fences.
-Martin Brown, 2009
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