Neil Young, "Lookin' for a Leader"

Neil Young's showing his irascible side again with CSNY: Deja Vu (sorry, I'm too lazy today to insert accent marks), in what seems to be a documentary not so much of the band as its fans during CSNY's 2006 tour, which was punctuated with political statements (to some of those fans' visible chagrin). The documentary implicitly poses a question I've wondered off and on for some time: What obligations do musicians have to the audience in a live concert? Must they play the hits? Must they be safe, sane, and sober? Must they keep their opinions to themselves?

Increasingly I find the answers to be no, no, and no. If all you want is the pleasure of hearing songs, buy the CD and stay at home. If what you want is the community of fellow fans, invite people over or use the wonders of the Internet to socially commune. And if you're shocked - shocked! - that Neil Young doesn't care for the handling of the presidency or the war in Iraq and wants to say so, then you've had your head in the sand and you deserve the ignominy of having paid for a show you didn't like.

Seriously. When we buy a ticket to a show, we're paying for the privilege of seeing artists perform their craft. Art is movable, and so are artists. And if Neil Young's - and by extension, David Crosby's, Stephen Stills's, and Graham Nash's - approach to art involves offering pointed opinions within and between songs, then that's the show they have the right to put on. As Young himself explains in this CNN piece: "Just because I'm famous doesn't mean that I work for the audience. I'm not obligated to do anything. I'm an artist. I will do what I want to do. Whatever the consequences ... I certainly hope that it's a civilized reaction."

I hope the audiences' are as civilized a reaction as yours, Neil. I look forward to seeing your movie soon, and in the meantime will content myself with Lookin' for a Leader and the other astute songs from your Living With War album.

Benny Mardones, "Into the Night"

"Into the Night" by one-hit-wonder Benny Mardones may be my guiltiest of guilty pleasures. (Well, technically he's not really a OHW; he's the only person in rock history who hit with two versions of the same song and never charted Top 40 with anything else.) It was first a hit in 1980 just as radio was undergoing a major overhaul that replaced disco and funk with lots of AC and power balladry from arena-rock outfits. Mardones' overemotion fit in nicely. He recorded intermittently in the ensuing years but didn't do a whole lot else of note, and what he did do included dumb shit like this overfried attempt at Lulu/Aretha’s "Oh Me Oh My". "Into the Night" offers the creepiest opening lyric ever (running off with a 16-year-old is never a good idea), and Mardones oversings every key part, but I love it anyway. I actually wish I could sing like this, even if I would choose not to as a matter of taste and discretion. And I've been thinking that a lot of other people secretly feel the same way. Soft-rock lovers, stand and be counted!

Paul Simon, "American Tune"

"Many is the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused.
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused.
But I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones.
Still you don't expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home."

For the days when nothing feels at ease, here are rhymin' Simon and his old partner Art Garfunkel on his "American Tune", guiding us as we wonder what's gone wrong.

Green Leaves, "Yatta!"

Pop Argot's going off the grid for a few days to move from Brooklyn to Manhattan. While it would have been great to pay tribute to the wonderful borough of Brooklyn, I didn't have time to come up with the right song. ("No Sleep Til Brooklyn" - not my speed; "Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me" - couldn't find a decent YouTube clip.) So instead we get this bizarre, parodic celebration:

YATTA!

It's no "Go West" - but neither is my move.

Timi Yuro, "It Will Never Be Over for Me"

Oh, how happy YouTube has made me. As has someone from the I Love Music message board, through no fault of his own.

See, this guy I met at the EMP Pop Conference this year posts to ILM under the nom de poste "If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up." The fractured diction only added to the reference's delightful fervor, and I asked him about the source of the line (it was something someone had posted to a board, natch). But I realized tonight, when one of his posts came up on the board, that I have never heard a single note from Timi Yuro.

Geesh. Rectified that tonight, thanks to the ol' Tube. Started with "Hurt," a boomer in the Vicki Carr style, miles beyond Mama Cass into Ethel Merman territory, as command-to-attention voices go, but not my kinda songwriting. Then I got something swinging: "It Will Never Be Over for Me".

Whee!

That's really all I want to say about it - Whee! - but I'll add for scholarship's sake that the song is a 1969 Jerry Ragovoy production (same guy who coaxed great performances out of Howard Tate and a few others) , styled very much like the (contemporary?) "For the Love of Him" from Bobbi Martin. "Supper-club soul," an All Music Guide critic called it, to which I reply: "You say that like it's a bad thing."

Whee!

Nina Simone, "Suzanne"

Nina Simone was an astonishing interpreter of just about anything, and one of her absolute best efforts was this gorgeous and personalized take on "Suzanne", featuring some of Leonard Cohen's most effective and evocative lyrics, trochees at every line pushing the narrative forward. The tale tilts and turns, but I'm especially fond of the second verse, in which a forlorn Jesus, watching from his cross, resigns himself to being ever misunderstood. I can dig the feeling: "forsaken, almost human."

PS: Long weekend coming, so no Friday Funtime and no new posts till next week.

Marty Balin, "Hearts"

The summer of '81 was an unsteady time for me, considerable family upheaval having taken place that spring. We were staying in the attic of my grandmother's house, where I took consolation in our humble 8-track collection and the adult-contemporary radio station my mom often turned on. A lot of Air Supply, a lot of REO Speedwagon, bits of Journey, Foreigner, Styx.

But the one song I heard that summer perhaps more than any other was "Hearts," the sole significant hit for former Jefferson Airplane/Starship vocalist Marty Balin. I didn't know this fact at the time — though I did know "Miracles" and "Count on Me" by then — I just liked the song's chiming-bell keyboard refrain and Balin's crooning expressions of concern and compassion. Is everything all right?

Another thing I didn't know at the time was that everything was not all right with the "Hearts" video. Monumentally bad. Balin, never a mainstream sex object, nevertheless tries and falls disturbingly short in his attempt to be one here, in a video whose theme is "I'm in Alcatraz, so I have to get myself off; at least I have this guitar and this poster." The video's icky on many levels, and I have to wonder if it didn't kill Balin's career like the infamous "Rock Me Tonite" vid, with its slutty prancing, killed Billy Squier's.

The Monkees, "The Porpoise Song"

Head, the Monkees' sole movie, is forever imprinted by 1968, the year innocence died. This theme song from the film was co-written by Carole King, for whom Micky Dolenz was ever an able interpreter. Here he gets valuable backing on the refrain from Davy Jones, whose "goodbye"s are as perfect a sound of suicide as is possible. And indeed, Head begins with the Prefab Four jumping off a bridge as "The Porpoise Song" swirls in the background.

The rest of the movie, while attempting to both deconstruct the Monkees and tackle Big Issues like War and Religion, meanders like an uneven (and largely unfunny) Family Guy ep, and presumably for the same reason FG so often slips: weed's blurring of concision. Yeah, it's a stoner flick whose appeal is restricted mostly to Sixtophiles. (Not to be confused with fans of Sixto Lezcano.) But as a statement of "this isn't what I bargained for," Head remains an intriguing and undercontemplated take on the trappings of dubiously attained celebrity in risible times.

Friday Funtime: 10 More Reasons to Love 1997 Pop

Squirrel Nut Zippers were far from the only good thing to happen musically in 1997. To be fair, I was predisposed to liking things that year, having just moved to San Francisco and undertaken the discovery of its myriad sights and sounds and other sensory pleasures, mostly in the company of someone who would be a best friend to me until his death 2 1/2 years ago. With the aid of KFOG and Live 105, here's a bit of how halcyon 1997 sounded to these ears:

1. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "Walking on the Milky Way"
2. Space, "Female of the Species"
3. White Town, "Your Woman"
4. U2, "Discotheque"
5. Chemical Brothers f/ Noel Gallagher, "Setting Sun"
6. Third Eye Blind, "Semi-Charmed Life"
7. Sneaker Pimps, "6 Underground"
8. R.E.M., "E-Bow the Letter"
9. Portishead, "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)"
10. Cardigans, "Lovefool"

Squirrel Nut Zippers, "Hell"

Quite possibly the only good thing that came of the swing revival of '97. 1997 was a phenomenal year for modern-rock and pop music; we haven't seen a year like it since and most likely won't again. At least we'll always have "Hell".

Nu Shooz, "I Can't Wait"

A near-hit nearly passed me by, but I finally heard the Ting Tings' "Shut Up and Let Me Go" late last night. (Somehow the iPod ad never crossed my path.) These are the moments I really miss having tastemaking friends and websites in my presence; I would have hated to have missed out on this fun little confection. It has the bounce of Chic's "Good Times" (and thus of "Rapper's Delight"), and with its chicken-scratch guitar is a close cousin to the twin jolly-marchers of '04, "Take Me Out" and "Float On."

But what it really reminded me of goes back to 1986. The Ting Tings are a duo: she's a cute, feisty blonde with a sense of humor; he's an equally cute, utterly silent dark-haired guy who observes and assists as she runs the show. They're eroticized enough for one to think Animotion, but I prefer to think of them as their generation's Nu Shooz.

Nu Shooz were technically a nine-piece band but for all intents and purposes consisted of a husband-wife duo, John Smith and Valerie Day. They briefly surfaced with a few cutely innocent dance-poppers, including "I Can't Wait", a surprise Top 10er with a gimmicky synth riff, whose video took the gamble that people would be attracted to Ms. Day despite, or even because of, her being presented as a Head of the Class-worthy nerd (watch as she mugs with gag false teeth at the end!). I fell for it; indeed, my revisionist history tells me that, slowly awakening teen that I was at the time, I was simultaneously crushing on her and her husband.

Of course, if that video were being made today, Day would have been forced to drop 20 pounds and squeezed into some humiliating thread of an outfit in order to fulfill someone's lad-mag fantasy. I'm actually quite glad I was a teen in far simpler, far less sexualized times.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, "This Land Is Your Land"

Jesse Helms died this weekend, and my initial reaction was something short of decorous. It's bad manners to speak ill of the dead, particularly when their bodies haven't even cooled yet, and it is indeed a noble thing to forgive; but I was feeling pretty anti-noble and pretty brazen in notes I sent out to some friends, virtually dancing on the former senator's grave, unapologetically.

It would be fair for the reader to ask if this was not a terrible thing to do. Doesn't the Buddhist ethos demand compassion, urge a response that mutes suffering rather than amplifies it? Has Pop Argot actually done unto others as he would have done unto him?

I'm not that faithful a Buddhist. And I don't feel bad about my harsh words, for one simple reason: To the best of my knowledge, I have never deprived another person of his right to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. Senator Helms, on the other hand, devoted his entire professional career to the precise mission of depriving large segments of America those very rights. The anti-civil-rights, anti-voting-rights, anti-gay-rights, anti-art, anti-liberalism, anti-progressivism, anti-minority, segregationist senator did everything he could to prevent the empowerment of those classes of people who were not like him. His America was only for white Christian conservatives.

That's where Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings come in. Last week, when compiling a set of songs applicable to Independence Day, it was precisely the outmoded and wrongheaded thinking of Helms and his white-hooded cronies that inspired me to include Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions' "This Is My Country" (a sweetly voiced reminder that African Americans, having put in 300 years or more of sweat equity into the U.S., have more than partial vested interest in it) and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' firmly funked take on the Woody Guthrie-penned "This Land Is Your Land". Guthrie, whom Helms surely would have set aflame like a cigarette had he the chance, had a vision of America that was more broadly encompassing than most. His inclusiveness is best illustrated in the stanza of "This Land Is Your Land" that we never sang in elementary school or on campgrounds growing up. As rendered by Ms. Jones and company:

As I was walking, now they tried to stop me;
They put up a sign that said - ah, it said "private property."
Well, on the back side, you know it said nothing;
So it must be that side was made for you and me.

If you think that's just a glib share-the-land sentiment like in "Signs," you're not really getting the point. Those "private property" signs represent the barriers faced by any minority population; they're the signs that have appeared on country clubs, on restrooms, in churches, in classrooms throughout America's mixed and complicated history. "This Land Is Your Land" was, and is, a call for those exclusionary signs to come down, to let America be America to all.

Jesse Helms did not want to share his America. Not with blacks, not with other racial minorities, not with women, not with gays, not with liberals, not with the poor, not with those afflicted with AIDS, not with anyone who contemplated monetary redistribution for the larger good; indeed, not with anyone who contemplated, full stop.

Mr. Helms, you were wrong. America is larger and broader and more complex than you knew; the world is larger and broader and more complex than you knew. This world has no room for your worldview of the Divine Right of White. This land is your land - but it is our land too, and may some of those who have been poisoned by your logic over the years come to understand this. From the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you - and me.

Long-Weekend Funtime: Pop Argot's July 4 Set

Even though, in the words of Langston Hughes, "America never was America to me":

1. David Lee Roth, "Yankee Rose"
2. X, "4th of July"
3. Schoolhouse Rock, "No More Kings"
4. Ween, "The Shot Heard 'Round the World"
5. James Brown, "Living in America"
6. Donna Summer, "State of Independence"
7. Bruce Springsteen, "Independence Day"
8. Neil Diamond, "America"
9. Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, "This Is My Country"
10. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, "This Land Is Your Land"

Rebbie Jackson, "Centipede"

Here, enjoy a video that has nothing to do with anything; I couldn't come up with any pop songs with the themes of "The bad guys won in Zimbabwe and I'm being a sore loser" or "It would be really nice to see every theocon and most of the other Republicans get punched in the throat."

Nor could I find a song that summarizes the observation that

It's crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that's at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person's record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute "attacking" their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism. That's not a very high bar for sophistication. But right now it’s one the press isn’t capable of clearing.

Eat shit, American lapdog pundits. Most of you really suck at what you do.