March 26th, 2007
14. Richard Thompson, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"
Having covered English folk ballads like "Matty Groves" from his early days as guitarist for Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson is no stranger to the form. He updated the traditional highwayman ballad with this song from 1991's Rumor And Sigh, spinning the tale of a dashingly dangerous robber who bonds with a red-haired beauty over their shared love for the classic motorcycle of the title. It's become his most popular song, and it shows up in nearly every concert he plays, with good reason: It's a masterpiece, a great showcase for Thompson's amazingly fluid fretwork and a powerfully resonant, simple tale of doomed romance that doesn't have a single wasted word.
15. Bob Dylan, "Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts"
Dylan has so many story-songs under his belt, from the surrealist goof of "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" to the ripped-from-the-headlines "Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll," that it's hard to single out just one. But one of his finest yarns turns up on 1975's Blood On The Tracks—this Western about a charming rogue who blows into town and gets the better of villainous mine owner Big Jim, with the help of Jim's showgirl mistress Lily and put-upon wife Rosemary. The song's cinematic sweep makes it feel like it might have been a great film in the hands of a director like Howard Hawks or Dylan's friend Sam Peckinpah. And in fact, Dylan tried at least once to get a screenplay based on "Lily" off the ground.
16. Simon & Garfunkel, "Save The Life Of My Child"
Paul Simon also has his share of ballads and story-songs, but few of them are as satisfying or as pointedly conclusive as 1968's "Save The Life Of My Child," which is as much metaphor as story: As a boy sits perched on the ledge of a tall building, a crowd forms, waiting for him to jump. As his mother panics, the bystanders and the cops take the opportunity to dismiss today's youth as disrespectful, irresponsible druggies. The mass conclusion: Kids today just aren't cut out to survive. Naturally, the boy surprises them all, scoring a point for '60s counterculture by exceeding their expectations and proving them all wrong.
17. The Handsome Family, "After We Shot The Grizzly"
As a lyricist, Rennie Sparks has a lot in common with writers like Flannery O'Connor and Patricia Highsmith, both for her narrative sensibility and her darkly comic, macabre attitude. "After We Shot The Grizzly," from last year's Last Days Of Wonder, follows the grim misadventures of a group of plane-crash survivors who struggle in vain against their inevitable descent into savagery and death—sort of Lost as portrayed by the Donner party. Brett Sparks' understated performance and Rennie's deadpan sense of humor make the song something of an anti-epic, with an increasing sense of twilit mystery as the survivors disappear one by one into the darkness and the silent waves, never to be seen again.
18. Elvis Presley, "In The Ghetto"
"In The Ghetto" might be a more soulful song if Elvis Presley didn't sound entirely aware of how very, very soulful he sounds, but the material is still mighty sad—and general enough to be an iconic illustration rather than the story of any one specific person. In an unspecified Chicago ghetto, "a poor little baby child is born" to a mother who can't deal with another mouth to feed. Growing up impoverished and hungry, he also grows up mad and desperate, leading to a tragedy that Mac Davis' lyrics present as inevitable. Davis' much-covered (even on American Idol) song could stand to be subtler—the bridge where Presley demands "People, don't you understand / The child needs a helping hand / Or he'll grow to be an angry young man some day"—is particularly overwrought. Then again, it's also true.
19. Harry Chapin, "Cat's In The Cradle"
Another weepy classic that's overwrought and true at the same time, Harry Chapin's "Cat's In The Cradle" is a morality tale for absentee parents who have priorities other than their kids. When the narrator's son is a child, he idolizes his dad, "But there were planes to catch and bills to pay… He learned to walk while I was away." Before long, that idolizing kid has become a busy teen, then a grown man who blows off dad the way dad used to blow him off back in the day. The irony, of course, is that the kid spent his childhood saying "I'm going to be just like dad when I grow up," and of course, he's right.
20. Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
Not so much a story-song as a story sandwich breaded with slices of song, Arlo Guthrie's ironic anti-war saga is almost hypnotic in its meandering, shaggy-dog exigencies. Guthrie starts off "This song is called 'Alice's Restaurant,' and it's about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song 'Alice's Restaurant.'" This kind of folky, circular, stoned-sounding double-talk explains why the song takes upward of 20 minutes to perform. Also, the song isn't really about Alice or the restaurant, it's about (to cut to the punchline) how Guthrie supposedly was rejected as a draftee because he was a litterbug. Love it or hate it, it pretty well sums up the '60s.
21. T-Bone Burnett, "The Strange Case Of Frank Cash And The Morning Paper"
Before he was the Grammy-winning music producer, arranger, and composer for films like Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain, T-Bone Burnett was a performer in his own right, churning out terrific quirky songs like "The Strange Case Of Frank Cash And The Morning Paper," in which a down-on-his-luck hustler living on "lonely street" discovers that his daily newspaper lists the scores for next week's football games. He makes so much money on sports betting that he moves out of his crummy apartment and into "a sprawling estate on the lake / And by that, I don't mean by the lake, I mean ON. THE. LAKE.") But lo and behold, when the football season starts up again, "the damned paper had ceased to prognosticate." Panicked, he rushes back to his old apartment and demands the paper from the new resident, leading to a situation so dire that Burnett himself has to step in to straighten things out. It's a tremendously funny song in spite of its straight-faced delivery, though the best moment comes when Frank Cash, aware that he's just a character in a song, proclaims—ineffectually, of course—that he doesn't believe in Burnett, and that "This song is over!"
22. Barry Manilow, "Copacabana"
Barry Manilow's irrepressibly catchy, annoyingly enduring Billboard Top 10 hit had a strong enough storyline that it eventually became a musical, though ask any 10 people on the street, and they'll probably be able to sing the first line (Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl") and the chorus, and not much else. Somewhere in between, Lola and her bartender boyfriend Tony work at the Copacabana nightclub until a rich rival for Lola's affections takes Tony down. Cut to 30 years later, when Lola sits alone in her old showgirl outfit "and drinks herself half-blind" at the Copa, now a disco that presumably plays songs like this one.
23. Neil Young, "Cortez The Killer"
The soaring mini-epic anchor to Neil Young's 1975 album Zuma opens with an extended Crazy Horse jam session before segueing into a delicate, occasionally cryptic mix of the historical and personal. In broad strokes, Young tells the story of conquistador Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico for Spain in the early 1500s. ("He came dancing across the water with his galleons and guns / looking for the New World in that palace in the sun.") At the same time, he gives reverential treatment to the Aztec figure Montezuma, "with his cocoa leaves and pearls," presiding over a world where "the women all were beautiful and the men stood straight and tall." There's no reference to the conflict itself; it's more a reverie for a lost world and a lost people, connected ever so delicately to a stanza about lost love. Then the song finally circles back to Cortés: "What a killer."
24. The Coup, "Nowalaters"
Over the course of The Coup's career, frontman Boots Riley has deftly explored literary genres ranging from feminist character studies ("Tiffany Hall") to atmospheric pulp fiction ("Me And Jesus The Pimp In A '79 Granada Last Night") to sophisticated social satire (the three-song story suite that opens Genocide And Juice). On "Nowalaters," Riley lends his gift for novelistic detail and messy humanism to a first-person coming-of-age story about a teen player whose backseat bumping and grinding leads to an unwanted premature pregnancy. The protagonist prepares himself for the solemn responsibility of fatherhood, but then discovers he isn't the baby's father after all. In most rap songs, this final twist would lead to a regressive moral about the innate duplicity of women, but Riley ends the song on a heartbreakingly gracious, tender note by sincerely telling the double-timing temptress, "Thank you for letting me go."
25. Eminem, "Stan"
Somewhere between funny and tragic, Eminem's saga "Stan" mostly comes in the form of an series of letters from a young super-fan who doesn't understand why his idol won't call him or answer his letters, even though "I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom." Stan's clueless desperation veers between laughable and miserable; his life as he describes it is truly awful, and it's sad to think that he's pouring all his energy into reaching out to a celebrity who doesn't know he exists. Still, it's easy to laugh as he repeatedly goes over the top in his assumptions and demands. The chuckling ends when a despairing Stan crams his pregnant girlfriend into his trunk and deliberately drunk-drives off a bridge, too late for him to be reached by Eminem's warm, detailed, surprisingly caring response letter. It's almost as though Eminem is suggesting that celebrities occasionally don't know whether to be flattered or horrified by their most ardent fans.
26. Julie Brown, "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun"
Part parody of the endless '60s-era ballads about teen romances ending in tragic death ("Teen Angel," "Ebony Eyes," "Patches," etc.), part a standard entry in Julie Brown's Valley Girl character lexicon, and part just an enthusiastic novelty song, Brown's biggest radio hit told the story of a massacre at the big homecoming parade. Peppered with "like" and "totally," and sung in a cheerfully shallow bubblegum style that makes the song's horrible events amusing, the lyrics explain how Julie's best friend Debbie goes from bouquet-carrying, float-riding, pink-chiffon-wearing homecoming queen to cold-blooded mass murderer, "picking off cheerleaders one by one." Ignoring police warnings, Debbie keeps shooting until the cops gun her down: "She hit the ground and did a flip, it was real acrobatic / But I was crying so hard I couldn't work my Instamatic." The punchline? Just before dying, Debbie confesses that she "did it for Johnny," but, like, nobody actually knows who Johnny is. Bummer.
« Previous | 1 | 2
- Comments