KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER #12: RUSSIAN TEA
A Special End of 2019 Thanks--Hiding Songs--And We Bid You Goodnight
Happy New Year. It’s time for another Kentucky Meat Shower.
I’ve never had anything this regular, to be honest, nothing I felt like I needed to commit to and grow and make sure was correct and good, that would be a long term project.
Needless to say, this is one of the most rewarding things I write. I am the only person who could write this newsletter without news. And I’ve been pleased with the feedback this year, especially for a project that’s niche. The niche is: you like my writing. That’s it. I don’t have a beat. I don’t have a name, really. You’re reading the work of a writer who just writes. And every person who clicks on this or shares, I can’t thank you enough.
Because this is the most edifying thing I work on, I’m planning to get more serious about it next year. My goal for the year: TWO ISSUES A MONTH and FIFTY EMAILS SUBSCRIBERS. It’s pretty modest, but I think we can do it.
I remember starting my writing page for self-promo on Facebook in college and feeling like people thought I had too much sauce on me, like I was above my station. Since I was in high school, the one thing I believed about myself was I could write. Meaning, in relation to the experience I have, I can write well. Let’s put it in terms of athleticism: I could throw a fastball, but learning how to throw one is difficult. At the very least, I’ve thought I’m talented.
But there’s self-doubt there, too, and young writers especially can be a backbiting little bunch. Most of the writers I grew up around I don’t see doing it anymore. It’s hard not to feel a little like George Jones in “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes”: where is everybody? And that’s hard. It makes this feel like a fool’s errand, like I’m an ant in a paper boat in the middle of the ocean. But to go back on writing would be a betrayal of that little paper boat, so no matter how long it takes, I’m going to keep at it. I feel reinvigorated by this project, whatever it is.
This is all just news, but I’ll also let you in on a little secret: I’m planning something that’ll start in July. I need time to practice it, get good, and learn. But I think it’s going to be an exciting year, and I’ll keep on writing period.
I’m grateful for the followers I do have. What we lack in numbers we make up for in exacting taste, either in my friendship or my writing.
So consider what I’m about to do another little holiday gift: I’m going to make you a little playlist, in a mason jar, wrapped in gingham, of 28 songs. 28 because that’s how old I’ll be next year, with small capsule reviews. These are, roughly, my 28 favorite songs. I add a new one every year. You won’t like everything, but you’ll like something. Consider it a belated Christmas gift.
RUSSIAN TEA
If the gingham jar sounds like a little bit of a non-sequitur, I don’t blame you. It’s a reference to Baptist church lady phenomenon of mixing together Tang, Lipton tea, sugar, cinnamon, and clove together, mixing it with hot water, and drinking away. It reminds me of the old church my grandparents used to go to, at the bottom of the mountain, where the piano shook the room and fans with a caucausian Christ were under every hymnal. Maybe it’s because so many of my mom’s family reunions are at the banquet hall. But it makes me think of home, of cold evenings in Southwest Virginia, where snow looked like heaven.
A year or so ago, in Nick Cave’s mostly excellent Red Hand Files, someone asked him about “Hiding Songs”: the songs he listened to when he needed to batten down the hatches, the songs that communicate an eternal sense of comfort and drive. That’s what Russian Tea is to me.
As for these songs: when I started it last year I tried to put as many “songs of the year” candidates on here as possible. However, my major musical discovery of the year was the work of David Berman, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and the Necks (lot of Australia!). There weren’t any new songs I thought would join that list.
List and capsule reviews below.
HIDING SONGS
“Little Red Corvette” by Prince- I think Bomani Jones called it “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for freaks. The distance between chiding and a horny ode is thin; Prince sits on the razor between shame and salvation.
“Tumbling Dice” by the Rolling Stones- Loping. Stoned and drunk. Flirtatious. Perfect.
“Gilgamesh” by Billy Woods- If a drug dealer wrote Mrs. Dalloway.
“ATLiens” by OutKast- a cosmic lowrider anthem that introduced the idea that the two dope boys from Atlanta could become the greatest rap duo of all time.
“Ave Maria” by Joseph Schubert- When I used to work nights at a homeless shelter, one morning I decided to revisit Fantasia, even though I am staunch advocate of Looney Tunes superiority. When I saw the monks walk across the landscape with their lamps, I started weeping after “Night at Bald Mountain,” I started weeping.
“When We Two Parted” by The Afghan Whigs- Greg Dulli knicked the title of a Byron poem for this masterpiece of venom and hate about the abusive cycles in a bad relationship. “If I inflict the pain/then only I can comfort you,” is chilling, but honest. I used Gentlemen to help me understand ending a series of abusive relationships and hearing a villain’s ethos laid out helped me to heal, which is why I will never be on the side of people who think we should update the Hays Code for art.
“O Death” by Ralph Stanley- I once got my haircut in the same shop as Ralph Stanley at the same time. I had also heard “O Death” on the radio and it scared me to death. I saw him with Blue Highway as a kid and spent the whole time terrified of when this song would play. As a person who has spent way too much time worried he’d die early, I have a soft spot for the first time music scared the bejeezus out of me.
“Nothin’” by Townes Van Zandt- As far as sequencing goes, putting this song after “Rake” on Delta Momma Blues should have been illegal. No song communicates the end of carousing and a life led running away than this one.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Aretha Franklin- I’ve never got Simon and Garfunkel. Why would you listen to the wan piano led version when you can listen to one of the greatest singers of all-time turn it into a hymn?
“Desperados Under the Eaves” by Warren Zevon- One time, a woman I loved--somebody I really truly loved-- did something very cutting to me. The first time we saw each other again, I was hoping for some reconciliation. Instead I was so overcome with anxiety and emotion that I forgot what direction my apartment was in. She told me where it was. It felt like a repudiation of me. I had just realized I had PTSD and I was going to blame her actions on my PTSD because I thought what she did was my fault. When I finally got home, I listened to “Desperados Under the Eaves” on repeat until next morning. This is the truest batten down the hatches song I have.
“Codeine Crazy” by Future- Nobody has ever made chemical induced self-pity sound more monumental than Future Hendrix.
“The Drowners” by Suede- Hearing Brendan Butler play guitar was like what I imagine Johnny Marr was for a lot of people. This song is a glam display of lust. Mark Fischer wrote about how Loveless was an erotic, carnal album because shoegaze subsumed the listener. This song is the text version of that.
“Brando” by Scott Walker- we’ve had the idea of singer songwriters since Hank Williams and nobody pushes the form forward now that the good Scott Walker is gone. Backed by one of the cloaked guys from Sunn 0))) doing a Slash impression, Scott winnows into the brain of Marlon Brando to answer the question: why did this guy like getting beaten in all his movies, but doesn’t find the answer.
“The Shy Retirer” by Arab Strap- I’m not a very debauched person, though I’ve had my periods. Arab Strap’s best song bakes aching desire into a night of chemical excess, the sound of club kids trying to get at something they barely know how to.
“Blue Factory Flame” by Songs: Ohia- when you’re in an area that’s been destroyed to provide for other areas, there’s landscapes that never quite leave you, and you take them in with a mix of pride and sadness. The Rust Belt is just the Appalachian coal fields with less banjos. It is tempting to recreate the viking funeral from this song when I go, but I imagine everybody who is so married to the land and haunted by it has their own versions.
“Hit It and Quit It” by Funkadelic- How do you even write about Funkadelic? It’s just hard, apocalyptic grooving with a scorching Eddie Hazel solo--arguably his best in a non guitar showcase.
“Untitled (How Does It Feel)” by D’Angelo- Voodoo felt like somebody trying to make the ultimate r’n’b album. Everything stickier, everything denser. Prince was arguably trying to do the same thing earlier (though it was to become the ultimate pop star in all its guises), so it’s fitting this 7 minute erotic epic was a take off of his earliest work. Greg Levine called the lyrics the generic pop lyrics. So clearly, I’m correct.
“Hyperballad” by Bjork- A sweet little song about romantic insecurity with the Classic Short Story style device of throwing objects off a cliff. It sounds like an attempt to smother the destructiveness we all hold by going about it in the most innocent way possible.
“Diamonds and Wood” by UGK- Fun fact, I like Pimp C as a rapper more than Bun B, and I actually put Pimp in my top 5. . Bun B’s verbose classicism makes him the ultimate guest rapper but Pimp C anchored UGK’s music with his production: church organs, good drums, as obsessive of an ear to detail as Quik or Dilla. While he’s not as technically polished as Quik (anybody who tells you DJ Quik can’t rap isn’t your friend), he does get by purely on attitude and commitment to his beats and songs. The progenitor of country rap tunes gets off a filthy couplet in here as heartbroken and economical as anything Hank Williams wrote: “got to be so I could not tell day from night/she says she loves me but all we do is fuck and fight”.
“Please Stay (Once You Go Away)” by Marvin Gaye- 5 minutes of the most sensuous pleading you’ll ever hear in your life. Fellow list alumnus Greg Dulli’s version smokes too, but nothing beats the coda to this song.
“Saeta” by Miles Davis- I don’t keep up with the ranking of jazz solos but Miles’s sloppy but passionate trumpet on this song does justice to what he was trying to emulate: the cries of Mary after Christ was crucified.
“Anvil Will Fall” by Harvey Milk- There are some songs that artists do that are so good I never listen to anything else they do because it can only be a let down. I’ve never gotten past this song on My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be because how can you get past a crushing doom metal song that interpolates Gustav Holst’s The Planets that has lyrics about recurring masculine trauma?
“Blind” by Swans- Sure, I could have gone for one of the muso picks (if I were, it’d be “Helpless Child”) but Gira has never cut himself down to size more in a whole career of self-loathing. than he did on an acoustic ballad.
“Bloxk Party” by Sada Baby feat. Drego- 4 minutes of party-starting shit talk from rap’s most entertaining goon. Once or twice a week I’ll find myself unable to get “big ass shotgun look like Lauri Markkanen” out of my head because if your favorite rapper isn’t referencing Finnish centers. Sada Baby is one of the five coolest people on the planet, amongst Julia Fox, Jim Jarmusch, Drakeo the Ruler, and Brad Pitt.
“Baby, I’m Bleeding” by Jpegmafia- In an odd way this is a victory lap song for a guy who wasn’t really big yet. All bragging about the come up and talking about walking around Brownsville with a Kimber. When you add in he produced the beat that sounds like your pulse during an anxiety attack, you’re looking at one of the most interesting rappers alive.
“Random Rules” by Silver Jews [NEW ADDITION]- 2019 was the year I fell in love with David Berman. It’s also the year he decided he no longer needed to be here, for whatever reason, and hung himself in New York. In a way I feel like I failed him by only being into his music for so long, that it took me this long to understand, that it was an album that was to be his goodbye to us all that introduced me to him. There’s a novel by Thomas Bernhard about these two guys who get obsessed with Glenn Gould and realize they will never be as great as he will. Only one commits suicide and the other is around to tell the story. I struggled last year with depression a lot. But I’m sure Berman would be proud to know I’m resolved to staying to talk about his genius. “Random Rules” is a travelogue and a flirt, a bildungsroman-cum-ode, and in four minutes. The economy of writing in “before I go I gotta ask you dear about the tan-line on your ring finger” makes Carver look like Pynchon.
“Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine [NEW ADDITION]- Arguably the greatest song ever written? 3 minutes of dusty nostalgia and fury that comes with age? “How the hell can a person/wake up in the morning/come home in the evening/and have nothing to say” is how a dying relationship feels.
“A Good Year for the Roses” by George Jones [NEW ADDITION]- I did not get broken up with in 2019, in case you’re wondering, by my three newest picks. They also happen to be country music or country music inspired, which is the absolute hardest genre to write about, because so much of it’s about economy. You will write more words about a country song being good than a country song will use to be good. That being said: Sinatra said George Jones was the second greatest singer on the planet, and I think it works congruently to “It Was A Very Good Year”, but I put Jones over Sinatra, any day of the week. His voice communicates grandiose despair in a way finger snapping rat pack stuff never can to me. The song’s almost impressionistic: you have to listen closely to get it’s about divorce. But maybe you could just understand it listening to George Jones sing.
“And We Bid You Goodnight” by the Grateful Dead
This post is over! Hopefully see you yeggs in two weeks.