If anything were to be my karaoke jam, this would be it. For one, it doesn’t require great singing, because it hold together entirely on the lyrics, which are beyond brilliant. Nick Cave has always been a master of cutting through to the darkest depths of the human condition whilst also being wildly hilarious. Nowhere is this rare talent more brightly illuminated than here. Cave paints a picture of the stultifying, soul crushing fear and conformity that sometimes lurks behind the shiniest white picket fences. In a verdant, peaceful, god-fearing community folks are paralyzed with dread. Cave satirizes piousness and political correctness and the ongoing battles waged politically and personally over everything from sexuality to choice of kitten color. His voice ranges from sincere anguish to coldest sarcasm, dropping to a scary whisper or relishing lines about “goose-stepping, twelve-stepping teetotalitarianists”. The message may be, if there is one, that peace and prosperity bought at the price of self-expression is no peace at all but a hell made of good intentions.

We’ve laid the cables and the wires
We’ve split the wood and stoked
the fires
We’ve lit our town so there is no
Place for crime to hide
Our little church is painted white
And in the safety of the night
We all go quiet as a mouse
For the word is out
God is in the house
God is in the house
God is in the house
No cause for worry now
God is in the house

Moral sneaks in the White House
Computer geeks in the school house
Drug freaks in the crack house
We don’t have that stuff here
We have a tiny little Force
But we need them of course
For the kittens in the trees
And at night we are on our knees
As quiet as a mouse
For God is in the house
God is in the house
God is in the house
And no one’s left in doubt
God is in the house

Homos roaming the streets in packs
Queer bashers with tyre-jacks
Lesbian counter-attacks
That stuff is for the big cities
Our town is very pretty
We have a pretty little square
We have a woman for a mayor
Our policy is firm but fair
Now that God is in the house
God is in the house
God is in the house
Any day now He’ll come out
God is in the house

Well-meaning little therapists
Goose-stepping twelve-stepping Tetotalitarianists
The tipsy, the reeling and the drop down pissed
We got no time for that stuff here
Zero crime and no fear
We’ve bred all our kittens white
So you can see them in the night
And at night we’re on our knees
As quiet as a mouse
Since the word got out
From the North down to the South
For no-one’s left in doubt
There’s no fear about
If we all hold hands and very quietly shout
Hallelujah
God is in the house
God is in the house
Oh I wish He would come out
God is in the house

Just try to say Mick Jagger can’t rock it solo. I’m firmly convinced Goddess in the Doorway is a great album, and this is its finest moment. It’s got blitzkrieg guitars if you want noise, and self-aware lyrics. Jagger isn’t bragging, he’s being thankful, which is an endearing stance to take. I’m not crazy about the video. It must’ve looked cool in 2001, but doesn’t anymore. The attempt to seem edgy falls flat, but even that’s kind of endearing, and Jagger looks great. It’s a poor choice of costars, too. Though Lenny Kravitz made some good contributions to the album, we didn’t need to see his stupid face. (I find Lenny Kravitz really annoying.) Despite the nagging sense that the video could’ve been better, it’s still a perfect song, one of the best from Jagger’s solo career. It rocks, what more could you ask for?

Just as true as when Billie Holiday wrote it in 1939. Holiday knew well about the harshness and unfairness of being poor, and she knew about the fair weather friends money can bring. Holiday was one of those people born to endless night, as the poet said. She had a brutish childhood, and the wealth and fame didn’t make her much happier. She was addictive, self-destructive and unlucky in love, with or without money. She wrote God Bless the Child, perhaps in resignation to living hard, and sang it with knowing sorrow. It’s become a standard since then, covered by many. One popular version, which might sound light-years away from the spirit of Billie Holiday, is Liza Minnelli’s. While Holiday crooned as if to herself, Minnelli is not given to understatement – she starts out slow but by the final verse she’s belting it to the rafters. It might seem at first a cynical song choice for a glitzy star like Minnelli. She was, after all, born to a mama and papa who had it all (except happiness) and she is a broadway baby, all showbiz and spangles. But she and Holiday have a lot in common. Like Holiday, Minnelli has been an alcoholic and an addict, which caused her health and career to suffer. She went through a series of unhappy marriages, and her early life, though financially privileged, was dysfunctional and chaotic. Maybe she can’t resist turning every number into a show tune, but she knows what she’s singing about.

1977 was the year of punk. But while The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Stranglers, Patti Smith, The Damned and the rest were burning up the tabloids in New York and London, most folks were still listening to Fleetwood Mac. Punk made a revolution, but like most artistic revolutions, it was confined to a few main centers of civilization and its influence took years to diffuse into mainstream culture. Sid Vicious is who the history books remember, but he wasn’t affecting anyone in Oklahoma during his lifespan. In the broader world, 1977 belonged to the Fleetwood Macs – crowd pleasing middlebrow rock bands who didn’t suck exactly (well, a lot of them sucked but the Mac didn’t) but weren’t very exciting or innovative either. Fleetwood Mac started out as a blues band under Peter Green, but by ’77 Green was in a loony bin for shooting the messenger (literally) and Mac’s blues roots were practically indiscernible. But bashing Fleetwood Mac for the crime of not being punk is unfair. Though they pale in comparison to the innovative and game-changing (but little bought) works released that year by Brian Eno, Blondie, David Bowie, Sex Pistols or Ian Dury just to name a few, Rumours and its attending hit singles represented the best of rock’s mainstream. There was, as there still is and always will be, a wide disconnect between artistically significant and best selling music. Beside chart-toppers like Andy Gibb, Barry Manilow and The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac were obviously in the lead. Their music was not too hard, not too loud, but still recognizably rock, and they set themselves above the rest, especially on Rumours, with the raw emotion that seeped through the slick production and catchy melodies. The personal costs of the band members all being married to each other, and complete drug fiends, came out in songs of heartbreak, anger and regret. It was the internal turmoil (and the drug abuse that cost Stevie Nicks parts of her nose) evident all over Rumours that made that album so memorable, and why it remains a classic.

Pet Shop Boys’ Go West video – not gay at all. At least compared with The Village People’s original. Of course, none of The Village People’s songs made any pretense of being anything other than gay anthems. The Village People found ginormous success, partly thanks to gays who got the joke, but mostly because large swaths of the record buying public didn’t get the joke. Today it’s hard to imagine not getting it, but in the seventies most people weren’t even aware of the gay subculture that flourished in New York City, San Francisco and almost nowhere in between.   Go West is supposed to be an ode to San Francisco, a haven for gays fleeing their intolerant flyover home states. The Village People may have made a meaningful statement in their time, and perhaps a few listeners enjoyed them unironically in 1979, but their campiness has not aged well. So in covering Go West, the Pet Shop Boys couldn’t just go at it with a straight face. They had to come up with something entirely different to erase the image of the original artists prancing about in costumes that were already stereotypes in the gay community. One thing they did was make it slightly less gay. (Though Neil Tennant’s vocal is even more gay.) They’re just taking the bombastic imagery of Soviet propaganda and playing up the unintentional homoerotic subtext that patriotic marching-around  iconography often has. The political message takes on a very different tone, too. From merely celebrating the freedom of the American West, namely San Francisco, it’s gone to taking on the whole idea of an idealized Western society. Now the encouragement is towards, presumably, the liberated masses that were streaming West from the rubble of the USSR in 1993. But the video shows no signs that life in America is all that much better – everyone is still marching around in matching hats. It seems that Tennant and Lowe’s take on The Village People’s idealistic song is deeply ironic. Or heartfelt. Or both.

I know I promised not another Christmas song. Because I hate them. But here is one that I’ve always loved. Go Tell It On the Mountain is different from most Xmas songs, because for one thing, it’s actually about Christ being born, as opposed to insipid commercial pap like stupid Frosty or Rudolph the stupidass reindeer. It’s also head and shoulders above everything else because it holds up as a song. If you’ve noticed most Xmas songs have about as much musical substance as a TV ad jingle. This is a real song with real soul. Nowhere better than in the hands of gospel queen Mahalia Jackson. Jackson’s rendition is classic. She gives a stately performance over a rolling piano. While many singers going in the gospel style would have opted to sing it as big and loud as they could, Jackson’s singing is understated, only hinting at the vocal power she’s capable of. Going in an equally great but different direction, Simon & Garfunkel covered it barbershop style. It’s much faster, powered along by an almost bluegrass strumming. Paul and Art’s vocal harmony here is one of their best together. In yet a third, completely different iteration, The Wailers set it to a mid-tempo reggae beat. They also changed all the words but the refrain. “Jesus Christ is born” became “Set my people free” and it was just as good being a freedom song as a gospel one. In that form it became a signature anthem for Peter Tosh. These three performances couldn’t be more disparate, but in each one the spirit of the song remains, even if the words themselves are different. It’s one of those hardy classics that can be shaped into any style and not lose their power.

I couldn’t find a video of Joe Jackson performing Go For It, so instead here’s a bunch of teenagers at, I think, a German music school festival. Joe Jackson is a fine songwriter, but you don’t hear very many covers of his songs. That’s probably because he writes for his own vocal style, which is hard to copy. He has a choppy, almost rap-like delivery, not a melodic singing voice. Jackson’s songs are hard to sing. But this kid nails it. In fact this young group, Heart of Ice, has a whole channel on YouTube where they play the entirety of Body and Soul. Not bad, kids.

Is that a banjo? Man, I hate banjos. Usually. The real reason I can’t normally stomach bluegrass music is that those performing it tend to either have yee-haw hillbilly accents, or affect like they do, which is even worse. Total regional discrimination, I know. I’m from West Virginia, I’ve met a hillbilly or two in my time, I’ve got nothing against the lifestyle. It just irritates me to hell and back when artists in the bluegrass/country genres think they need to sound like hillbillys to sell more records or whatever. I’ve talked about that before. I think it’s almost as bad as blackface in terms of propagating stereotypes. But anyway my point is, though bluegrass music rubs me the wrong way most of the time, I can and do make exceptions, especially if it’s coming from people I admire and respect, like Neil Young and cohorts here. Yeah, Buffalo Springfield often had a heavy bluegrass element, but they did it well and they did it without resorting to silly accents.

You wont’ recognize this as Pink Floyd if you grew up hearing Another Brick In The Wall on the radio. (I have a real problem with douchebags who say they’re Pink Floyd fans but don’t know who Syd Barrett was.) Roger Waters certainly had a different worldview than Barrett. He may well be a charming fellow in real life, but on he’s long used his music as a means of therapy for himself. He likes to write about Mommy issues, shitty relationships, the trauma of WWII and other depressing things. Syd Barrett wanted to write about gnomes named Grimble-Gromble. It’s possible that besides the blinding drug abuse, Syd’s fall from grace had something to do with his disconnect from the other visionary in the band. They obviously had vast personality differences, and David Gilmour in his short overlap with Barrett was no help. Though Waters and Gilmour hate each other now, they made a brilliant partnership for many years. Those two were much more simpatico than Waters and Barrett. Perhaps Barrett’s decline was (like that of Brian Jones) precipitated by frustration of losing creative control and not liking the direction his band took as they gained increasing success. After Barrett dropped out, they did for a while carry on in a similar mystical, psychedelic vein. Then they got insanely popular, and increasingly depressing, and got no less pessimistic about the human condition after Waters took off too. I’m exactly disparaging their evolution, for it did yield a lot of classic material. On the other hand, I don’t like any Pink Floyd albums after The Wall, nor the solo work of Roger Waters. The misanthropy just lies too thick for my taste.

It was videos like this that got Bruce Springsteen his rep as a voice-of-the-salt-of-the-earth common man. The Americana of baseball and dive bars is and long has been a cheap, easy ploy to press the nostalgia button. On the other hand, the sweaty common man with his rolled-up sleeves has an appeal all his own that hasn’t diminished in the least since Bruce first adopted the image. The increasing irony of a song so brashly glorifying nostalgia and better days gone by is the baby-faced youth of all the players. Springsteen was in his thirties and in his prime, artistically and commercially. For a guy sitting on top of the world it might seem like an odd viewpoint to take, but Springsteen has made his name on writing about what goes on the opposite of ‘on top’. What would Springsteen know about pining for lost glory? I don’t know what Springsteen knows about it, but Clarence Clemons knew plenty – he only turned to music after injury thwarted his NFL career. He probably spent a night or two dreaming about sports glory he missed out on. Just for that we know the song is no pastiche. As for the video, I’m not sure if anyone was supposed to take it seriously in 1985, but we sure can’t take it seriously now. All of the faces are so familiar now from other venues that it’s kind of surreal. The guy from Conan, the guy from that Gaga video, and the guy from the Sopranos together on one stage. The three of them can almost outshine the main attraction. And everyone is so young, so dorky. We know that this is a band whose members would go on to even greater glory in their own right, that Bruce Springsteen is an icon, and it’s totally incongruous to see them ham their way through a video that’s supposedly all about how their best times are behind them.

And speaking of Bruce Springsteen, I hear he’s got a new album about to come out, and new single just dropped. I hear rumors about a great big summer tour brewing, too. I’ve always thought that Bruce would be a hell of a show to see, but I seriously don’t know if I would even want to see him without the Big Man riding shotgun. Clarence Clemons was half the show, and how on earth can anyone dare play those songs without him? Unless he decides not to play any of his old hits at all, Springsteen is up a creek. I mean, imagine some other dude playing sax. It wouldn’t be right.