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Song of the Day #522: ‘Lonesome Tears’ – Beck

Beck’s fifth studio album, 2002’s Sea Change, remains his finest achievement, and I consider it one of the best albums I own. It’s up there with Blood On the Tracks and The Road to Ensenada as one of the greatest break-up albums of all-time.

Stylistically, Sea Change see-sawed back to the somber acoustic mood of Mutations, the polar opposite of the frenzied eclecticism of Midnite Vultures. Both musically and (especially) lyrically, Beck is at his most straight-forward on this album. It’s as if all the genre blending and cryptic lyrics on his previous records were a mask and he’s finally allowing his listeners to look him directly in the eye. And what we see there can best be described as beautiful heartbreak.

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Song of the Day #521: ‘Helter Skelter’ – The Beatles

Ben Folds once said that every band in the world formed by taking some piece of what The Beatles did and turning it into their own thing. According to his theory, The Beatles are the superset from which all popular music is derived.

It’s a good theory and one that’s easy to support when you listen to just about any modern pop or rock band. I’ve read a lot of praise of Radiohead recently, about how their output in the 00’s revolutionized popular music… but is there really anything on Kid A that doesn’t sound a little bit like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ ‘A Day in the Life’ or ‘Revolution 9?’ Give me a break.

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Song of the Day #520: ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ – The Beatles

It’s funny how now matter what Beatles song you pull up on YouTube or elsewhere on the Web, you’ll always find several people who consider it their favorite song.

I suppose, given the long tail of the World Wide Web, that’s the case with pretty much any song by any artist. I could probably post an obscure B-side by a band that put out one poorly-received album in the 90s and find somebody who wants it played at his funeral.

But when it comes to The Beatles, I can understand it. Just about every one of their songs is worthy of being somebody’s favorite.

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Song of the Day #519: ‘Must Be Santa’ – Bob Dylan

Merry Christmas to all!

I’m taking a break from the Beck theme to wish everybody a happy holiday and present you with Mr. Bob Dylan’s rendition of ‘Must Be Santa,’ a song I’d never heard before buying his Christmas album two months ago. Here’s a link to the original for the nostalgic among you, but I must say I prefer Dylan’s version.

The wily old Jew turned Christian turned who-knows-what has the cheek to perform this little-known Christmas tune in full Klezmer fashion. What better way to start the day? And the video’s a hoot, too.

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Avatar

I’m having a hard time deciding exactly how I feel about Avatar.

On the one hand, it has a shopworn plot, clunky dialogue, cardboard villains and heavy-handed messages about the environment and military imperialism. But on the other hand, it creates and inhabits an entirely new world to a degree I’ve never quite experienced before in a movie. The cutting-edge special effects bring to vivid life an entire ecosystem brimming with the fantastic imaginings of its creator.

That creator, of course, is James Cameron, the director of such enduring classics as The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Titanic. Cameron has spent many of the 12 years since Titanic won a crate full of Oscars and set the all-time box office record working on Avatar, specifically on the motion capture technology that allows flesh-and-blood actors to bring digital characters to life in a way that makes Lord of the Rings‘ Gollum look like a sock puppet.

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