#103 – 101: The Covers
I devoted a hefty slice of time to placing these songs in order. Not as much time as I put into selecting them, but still more than you would think. Like an Explosions in the Sky song to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song type ratio. I had to, how do you easily determine single-handedly where one song slots in amongst 150 others in terms of quality and impact? What makes one song one spot better than another and one spot worse than a third. And part way into this process, I realized that I was lumping covers in with everything else, all the originals. I'm not telling you which, but one of them was well into the top 50. I realized that it wasn't really fair - you don't write the song (at least some of the song) then you really shouldn't be included in the top 100 of the decade. I am a songwriting guy, my love of Dylan and my own creative endeavors of evidence, and I need to put some kind of weight on that. But, let it be known that all three of these would be mixed in the top century of this list if they were originals.
I'm not shitting on covers, ok? The beginning of rock was ALL covers. Seriously, go to youtube and see how many different versions of Unchained Melody there are. Before that, the concept of covers didn't even really exist in American blues - it was just assumed, EVERYTHING was a reinterpretation of other peoples' tunes. It still persists, with my high school jazz band playing the same arrangements Charlie Parker did. Those are all covers. And with mash up artists like Girl Talk and sample-happy rappers covering both the charts and the musical underground, a new kind of cover is developing, borrowing in a new way for a new generation. But these three traditional covers are each uniquely worthy of being included on the list. One is certainly better than the original. One is certainly covered by a better artist than the original. Two are radical modifications. One is a retro rave up, one is a stripped down ballad, and one is, well, Jack White. But all three are amongst the best songs of the decade and, in my opinion, the three best officially released covers of the '00s.
103. Mark Ronson ft. Amy Winehouse - Valerie (The Zutons)
So now she's a crackhead. And the music she writes herself is far from great. But with the help of Producer of the Millennium Mark Ronson (that was my NME impressions for the day. I don't believe that in the slightest) Wine-o took a bouncy jangle-pop original from British band The Zutons and made it into a slinky, sexy croon. Released only one year after the original, Ronson's version features the hottest retro horns in popular music and a girl-group-pop diva at her absolute best, throwing out that incessently catchy chorus melody like she's winking right through the speakers.
102. Johnny Cash - Hurt (Nine Inch Nails)
I still prefer the original. But to me, they are two very different songs at this point. Reznor’s ode to numbing self-loathing is one of my favorite songs of the ‘90s, a personal song with possibly the most enduringly positive epitaphs of his career. The song takes on a whole new meaning through Cash’s croak, though, and a weighty pall is layered over the song's stark and striking beauty as shovel after shovel of audio dirt is piled onto the man in black’s grave. Written after the death of the love of his life, in Cash’s hands “Hurt” is an acceptance of death from a man prepared to leave this world, accepting of whatever the future brings now that his one reason to live is gone. I know I talk about being moved by music a lot. At any age, though, listening to this song can and should be a moving experience, a rumination on our mortal tie and Cash’s mortal coil, and when the song reaches it’s haunting climax at 3:30, it’s impossible not to believe that Cash knew what was coming. This is the beautiful, fleeting swan song from an American master. And if you don’t get emotional when you see the old guy crying at 3:12, you’re not worth that heart pumping in your chest.
101. The White Stripes - Jolene (Dolly Parton)
Bump the Jack count up one more. I have to be honest here – “Jolene” might be my single favorite White Stripes song. I can’t help it, it encapsulates everything that’s brilliant about the band to me. And if you’re listening for White’s song writing, you’re doing it wrong anyway. Only one person this decade can take a hokey ‘70s country ballad and turn it into a minor-key crasher, a raging plea that would shake the Grand ‘Ole Opry down to its rafters. With a guitar lick from the darkest places of the heart, the depths of neurosis and jealousy and needing, the Stripes take an intense piece of songwriting from the underrated (by all of us, not your aunts and uncles) Dolly Parton. And when the chorus stomps with the grimiest plea in the Detroit duo's career, Jack White sings desperation better than any late night karaoke couple doing “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” ever could. The primal voice of pure wanting channels through Jack; painful, deep, burning wanting, and in a brilliant way only they can, the White Stripes bring you an emotion pulled directly from nerves and veins and with only the most minimal instrumentation bring us into the deepest recesses of hurting.
105. The Raconteurs – Carolina Drama
All right, who's keeping the Jack White count? What are we up to now? Three or four I think, doesn't matter because it's not stopping here. And for this selection, we have White's roots rock n' roll four piece. True, on the first album they sounded like a Midwest Nirvana for the nu age. But on their 2008 album Consolers of the Lonely, Jack White, Brendan Benson, and the support channeled "Squeeze Box" Who and Led Zeppelin 3 and created a late-'00s British Americana revival mud-stomper.
But on the album's last track, "Carolina Drama," Jack White and the boys channel something purely American in a down and dirty Dylan story of lust and betrayal. Personally, I think this is the best thing Jack has written outside of the White Stripes, better than any other Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, solo material, or guest spots with at least 100 other bands. This is the most successful branching out he's ever done, and it's the most traditional roots music that he's ever created. A forlorn tale about murder in a down home, South Carolina family? A confused ten-year-old and a drunk step dad? America, Fuck Yeah.
With a slow, deep twang groove, the song opens up and lays all the characters out immediately. At 1:40, we get the ethereal female vocals, what sounds like a harpsichord backed up by a fiddle, and a trademark super-affected Jack White guitar line. Like Dylan's "Hurricane," these brief sign posts are simply meant as breathing points in a heavy and heady story. Fiddle lines simply separate segments of a story being told as straightforward as possible, less a song and more a tall tale set to music. And after another respite, at 3:45 the music perfectly shadows the story as it hits it's stomping, clamoring climax, a murder scene portrayed through layers of roots strings and blood-dripped vocals. A Greek chorus begins to chant through the background, the deus Ex Machina of Jack's southern tragedy. And when they all join together to sing a melody only refrain and the instruments slow down like tires on a gravel road, White comes forward again to give a sly, somber coda to the story. Like many of the best American novels, our characters come and go, but what remains is the dark personal emotionalism with which the story is told.
131. Electric Six ft. Jack White – Danger! High Voltage!
Who knows what the Jack White count is at right now? Don’t worry, it’ll continue to climb. Here’s the intruiging part of this one, though – he’s the least off kilter part of the whole song - he actually makes it, gasp, a little more standard.
Have you watched this yet? It’s disturbing. We’re not talking about music videos here, this ain't VH1, but goddamn. Find me something creepier than an old dominatrix with glowing breasts singing in Jack’s voice. Then I'll get the Feds on you, because what you were looking through was probably highly illegal. Also, has any band’s singer ever looked more like he sounds than Dick Valentine (not his real name, but fits his ‘stache perfectly.)
So this is where music is allowed to be weird, funny, and oddly yet compellingly sexual. This is total kitsch, but unlike The Darkness a couple entries ago, these guys do it with a Talking Heads meets Saturday Night Fever panache. Which sounds like absolute shit, but with tongue in cheek and the saxophones this hot, how could you not grin and groove along?
Also, it’s in question whether or not Jack White actually sings on this song. But listen to it, that’s obviously him. And recently, Valentine openly talked about how much Jack got paid for the vocals in an interview, so that’s good enough for me. That rumor launched the band to underground stardom, but I really think it’s the quality of this song that got people listening. When is the last time you heard a guitar slink into a song like that? It tiptoes on the line between total goofball and 70’s disco-punk, and I hesitate to call it the sexiest guitar line of this decade. But it’s totally in the running. And when Valentine comes in with the gravelly, sex-crazed vocal intonations on “It’s high VOLTAGE,” you hear in his voice that even if we’re not buying it 100%, he’s getting down, and we should too. This is hot fire on the dancefloor, but it's not reggaton or Sean Paul or whatever other shitty music would classify itself that way. It's weird, hot, and also weird, and features the best(only?) sax solo in underground music this decade. Move over Clarence Clemons. Here comes Electric Six to rock your world. Awkwardly.
144. Loretta Lynn ft. Jack White – Portland, Oregon
Fair warning. Jack White is going to have his hands all over this list, liked an e’d out light show monkey following a chick in a smooth shirt. Apologies to Ms. Lynn for having that reference in her blurb.
This track is a fully formed clinical study of the most successful reaction from the chemical mixture of Old and New. A weathered country and western legend of the 60’s and 70’s who had released one album since 1988, and the Detroit renaissance man of the 2000’s. On paper, it’s bad math. Like switching the order of an inner product with a non-Hermitian operator in Hilbert space. But listening to the song, it all checks out. Maybe it’s Jack’s knack at making anything and everything better, or Loretta’s star power and decade upon decade of powering through and making hits from scratch.
One certain thing about their combination is that they are taking classic sounds and stories and making something utterly new. Yeah, that’s a one-minute tremolo-picked and reverb-drenched guitar intro. And it does not sound out of place AT ALL. Before Loretta even saunters in between sheets of fuzz and slide, Jack uses 5-second noise fills that for some reason mesh perfectly with the classic country leanings of the rest of the band. Jack and Loretta trade lines back and forth, souls from very different places and times, coming together to create a perfect singularity of music, outside the lines of genre or trends. If only something happened in the last two minutes.
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