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Tuesday, 10:49 pm in Music

Nothing cures the Monday blues like a little music… though maybe not this week, since it’s Tuesday.  Yes, that’s right; Music Monday is late this week.  Blame it on Heroes of Might and Magic V.

46. Wilson Pickett, “Land of a Thousand Dances” (watch)

Naa na-na n’naa na-na n’naa na-na naa na-na naa

You know this song.  You might not recognize the title (I didn’t), but you know it.

47. Genesis, “Land of Confusion” (watch)

Ooh Superman where are you now
When everything’s gone wrong somehow
The men of steel, the men of power
Are losing control by the hour.

I originally found this song when I was searching for how to spell ‘Todd McFarlane’ for Videoclip Monday the other week.  Apparently there’s a cover of this track done by some inane nu-metal band whose name I forget, with a videoclip that kind of looks like Cremator leading a violent revolution against a giant Penguin.  Not being a great advocate of violent revolution, it kind of washed over me, but while I was at it I checked out the original version.  Now, for those not down with the history of Prog Rock, back in the 1970’s, Genesis used to be the band of Peter Gabriel, who if you’ve been paying attention you will know is one of my favorite artists (no seriously and shut up).  Gabriel left Genesis in the 70s, but the band lived on under the aegis of (wait for it) Phil Collins.  Where 70s Genesis had been extremely… well, they don’t call it prog rock for no reason, Collins moved the act into slowly more and more mainstream Top 40 territory.  Nevertheless, they had one decent song and this, my friends, is it.  Please take note, as this is also the only time you’ll ever hear me admit to liking a Phil Collins song.  Not only is this the most awesome song in the universe, but it also happens to have the most awesome videoclip in the universe.  For those of you who are either, a) too young, or b) not English, the puppets are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher*, and they’re from a show called Spitting Image (Australians, you may remember a similar thing we had here called Rubbery Figures which was part of Fast Forward).  Spitting Image used to be a very caustic political satire, and one of their running gags was an affair-like relationship between Thatcher and Reagan.  Random Trivia:  Behind the puppets, Spitting Image boasted a kind of creme-de-la-creme of English comedy talent.  One of the regulars was a guy named Chris Barrie, who you all may know better as Rimmer from sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf.

48. Alice Cooper, “Poison” (watch)

I hear you calling and it’s needles
And pins (and pins)
I want to hurt you just to hear you
Screaming my name

I am deeply shamed to admit that this is the first Alice Cooper song that I’ve really listened to.  It’s so daggy and metal and it makes me think of Evil Ernie (and ergo my misspent mid-teens).

49. Peter Gabriel, “Games Without Frontiers” (watch)

Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside
Whistling tunes we piss on the goons in the jungle

Yeah, it’s about world politics; that one’s pretty obvious.  From what I can tell, it’s also kind of inspired by a gameshow called Jeux sans frontieres (literally “games without frontiers”) in which teams from various countries used to come in and play inane quiz-show style games against each other.  The English version of the gameshow was It’s a Knockout.  Anyway, I think it goes pretty good with the Genesis track, plus the videoclip is kind of cool too.

50. Patti Smith, “Land / Horses / Land of a Thousand Dances / La Mer (de)”

Life is filled with holes, Johnny’s laying there, his sperm coffin
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy,
Can’t you show me nothing but surrender?”
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket,
Taped to his chest there’s the answer,
You got pen knives and jack knives and
Switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred

Quite possibly the most intense song I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing.  And yeah, the reason I stuck the original “Land of a Thousand Dances” as the first song today was so that when you heard it in this song you’d realise what you were listening to.  Millennium fans may remember this song as playing in the finale to Season II in a nine-minute surrealistic extravaganza that leaves Twin Peaks for dead as far as artily pretentious things on TV go.  This is one of those songs that drives me bonkers because there’s this narrative going on inside the lyrics but buggered if I can figure out what it is, exactly.  I figure at a base level it’s about heroin use (shades of “Horse Shaped Pills” by the Dandy Warhols and “Ride a White Horse” by Goldfrapp), but I guess most bits of it fit in pretty well with a religious revelation, and I’ve even heard someone theorizing – based on some other Patti Smith songs – that it’s about Johnny killing a rockstar who has sexually abused his younger sister (no, seriously).  Mostly it just reminds me of the bad old days of the grungefurs, with all those pretty little boy-things covering in candy blood and syringes.

An-nn-nd that’s a wrap.  As usual, make sure to drop by ~H [h]’s blog to see what remixes he’s pushing this week.

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* For those of you who are really too American, she was the Prime Minister of Great Britain at roughly the same time as Reagan was the US president.  There are lots and lots and lots of Thatcher jokes, most of which revolve around words like ‘iron’ and ‘balls’.  Thatcher was one of the first neo-liberals, and it was her painful reforms of the British economy that, indirectly, lead to the rise of the punk rock scene.

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