Forever Young (Your Only Choice)

"Killing In The Name Of" by Rage Against the Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA7d0OYg0rI
I live alone in a sixth-floor apartment contained inside an apartment building located above and beside a riverside city park that for the last four days has been "rocked." That's what the goings-on have been called for the last several civic years: "Rock the Park." You know: loud, semi-competent, young guitar players and drummers and singers doing their over-amplified thing in front of intoxicated young citizens, very few of whom (you gotta figure) have ever heard (or heard of, probably) Ella Fitzgerald or Ray Charles or Frank Sinatra, or any other singer who knows that singing is really just fancy talking, usually about something really happy or really sad, in a listenable register.

But I have loved every atonal, wincingly noisy minute of it. It does me good, I think, to be so close to the fuck-you-Death energy of young people, because sometimes it can result in my snooping my way through the streetscape of youth and remembering the great, politically and musically sophisticated song on the marquee. Here are its last eighteen lines (the first eight spoken, the rest of 'em sung and screamed: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/ Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!/Motherfucker!/ Uh! Uh! Uh! . . .") 

I can scarcely remember what those lines feel like (never heard 'em when I was actually young), but I contend that they will lift every neck (even old ones) into a restorative, rhythmic bobbing and nodding that says, over and over again, Yes.

This band, when it made this song, was very young, very honest, very optimistic, very competent -- i.e., they fucking rocked. I hope they come to the park close to where I live next year.

Waste Not

"Blue Skies" as performed by Ella Fitzgerald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epRXoS_P0lk

It's her real birthday today, but we are the gift-receivers. The word "scat," in one of its usages, means shit. Here it's its own opposite. She does uncontaminated magic with the words and melody, too.

You don't need me to talk about this great performance. Just listen to it (more than once if I were you).

Happy Birthday (For Me)!

"Mack the Knife" as performed by Ella Fitzgerald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vXAtVbZbkI

I inadvertently discovered today that Ella Fitzgerald's birthday is a few days from now. She would've been ninety-eight. Normally, the birthday boy or girl gets presents and other extra demonstrations of love: cake, singing, smiles, forgiveness, attention. Death (especially long-ago death) obviously makes that a problem, but I guess the last of those gifts is possible, even with the recipient's absence from the festivities. In the case of Ella Fitzgerald, let my taking of her brilliance and beauty (my attention) be my giving. Happy Birthday, Ella Fitzgerald!

I've been listening to her all afternoon, and only because as a musical amateur I have no filter that might help me choose the greatest instances of her greatest singing (that's just too much sifting), I offer you (you get a present, too!) this tuneful, swinging, clever, immediately brilliant, brilliantly immediate performance. Digging into this great song, the forty-three-year-old Ella Fitzgerald starts by identifying herself as a girl (on April 25th, she's the birthday girl!) who's hoping to remember "all the words." By the second verse, you know she hasn't, which doesn't matter since what follows is so imperfectly perfect: scatting that puts sensible English vocabulary and syntax to shame, playful vocal shifts, witty self-mockery, ecstatic players -- an aural encyclopedia of casual, musically dazzling craft and execution, all of it in just four-and-a-half minutes.

(Rappers, take note: Ella Fitzgerald, right on the spot, some fifty-five years ago in Berlin, Germany, rhymed "recognize it" with "surprise hit.")

Two Hands Clapping (Now, Not Zen)

"Tighten Up" by Archie Bell and the Drells
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wro3bqi4Eb8

This song is so very simple and so very friendly. Archie Bell introduces himself and his Drells very politely, tells us where they're from and what they do: they sing, they dance, they play, they play tightly, they fall into each other, but they don't get too tight, they don't neglect the sound of two hands clapping. (Double-time hand-clapping is a neglected craft.)

I was a stupid teenager when this song first came out of my radio. It was effervescently chimey and dumb forty-seven years ago, and although I'm not happy to report that I'm just as dumb so many years into its future and mine, I still love its innocent, funky, elemental vibe, its proof that music is for everyone, whether you live in Houston, Texas or not. 

Anyway, good luck trying to sit still when you listen to it. 

Puppy Love

"Walking The Dog" by Rufus Thomas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3-tdrPkY7w

There are a lot of dogs in my neighbourhood, none of whom I would ever want to walk. They're all too small, too coddled by domestication, too distant and different from wolves. If I'm gonna walk a dog, I want its turd not to fit inside a mere sandwich bag.

No, if I were walking a dog, I would want one who at least reminds me of something wild and young, a dog that can't be contained by a bit of plastic. Which is why I don't like those small dogs -- they're fussy, and cautious, and weak, and too much like me. (I also use plastic a little at a time, but I still use a lot of it, so maybe there's still some wolf in me.*)

I've been listening to a lot of blues music lately, one song of which prompted the preceding paragraphs. I don't have a dog and have no plans to procure one, but "Walking the Dog" promises to teach me how to walk a dog, and it's such a frivolously cheerful flurry of saxophone and electric guitar and drums and a voice that means soulful business that it makes me think my owning a dog isn't as outlandish as I might immediately imagine. And, after all, how often do you get an offer to be taught something you don't know how to do? You usually have to learn on your own.

The song sounds like the result of everyone in one room, singing and playing and having fun together.

(* As a conscientious grandfather of a shiny new grandson who's going to live for a long time into a garbage-laden future world, I re-cycle all that plastic. Grrrrr . . .)

Mortality Sin

"I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wOK9yGUYM

At some point (points, the odds are) along the very short-lived journey between his two darknesses, a fellow is going to feel lonely and sad, but he must make use of it (them). Today started fine, but got sad pretty quickly: In a few minor, pathetically fallacious gestures, I opened the curtains and blinds to a gloomy damp day that I already knew was out there. The Internet and TV news had already informed me that almost one-hundred-and-fifty naïve customers of air travel had perished (had met their second darkness with almost no warning) when they had been slammed into a French mountain by a crazy airline pilot. They were on a plane that had been "pulverized," so you can imagine how they ended up. You never want your second darkness to be violently entered into, but, Jesus, does that happen to too many people or what? Every day, everywhere, violent phenomena crush the life out of so many people, so why should this most recent current event have bothered me so much? It reminded me (I think, I guess) that death is an insatiable and unacceptably careless motherfucker. Its cancer claws, its heart-attack jolts, its whooshing bloodlust for everything that isn't nailed to the floor (of which nothing is, it should go without saying) will not be denied, not nohow, not nowhere, not at no time. It's hard enough when someone you love disappears, but when the loss is as sudden and sad as a loved one being smashed to bits directly and immediately because of someone else's diseased brain -- well, you can't help but start thinking about a tall pile of unanswerable questions.

At times like this, you need a cheerful song, a song with sugar, with spice.

Something Instead Of Nothing

"Harvest" as performed by Rufus Wainwright and Chris Stills
https://soundcloud.com/dano123/rufus-wainwright-feat-chris

A lot of the lyrics don't make a lot of sense, but you gotta give credit where it's due: Dream up, dream up/Let me fill your cup/With the promise of a man is some awfully nice recombinant concision. The song is what I imagine a serenade is, full of hope and sadness and delivered from a place you can't see. I have no idea who is being serenaded, but I do know that the two beautiful human voices on this version are your heart's enemy (they break it mercilessly for three solid minutes and then some), but your brain's pal (they help it understand why evolution might have come up with lungs and tongues and teeth and larynges and vibrating membranes inside the dark safety of our bodies).

(No disrespect to Chris Stills, who is perfect in this number, but whenever I hear Rufus Wainwright sing, I want to bring him home and take care of him until one of us dies.)