Don't Think Twice, It's All Right - Bob Dylan (1963)

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don’t matter, anyhow
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on
Don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
I can’t hear you anymore
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem (2005)

the first track on each of the album's two discs references Daft Punk. of course this is a great album.



this is one of the few albums (up there with the White Album, Drukqs, etc.) that i think truly deserves to be two discs long. like the Beatles and Aphex Twin, James Murphy (he basically is LCD Soundsystem) just had too many things to do. the Beatles wanted to do surf rock, punk rock, folk rock, and even weird sound experiments. Richard D. James wanted drum & bass, eerie minimal piano pieces, ambient techno, and even a 30-second sample of his parents wishing him a happy birthday.

what does Murphy want? he wants to make you dance. there's slow stuff, fast stuff, soft stuff, hard stuff. something for everyone, as long as everyone likes to dance. an acid disco garage house pop psychedelic punk rock medley, LCD Soundsystem's debut/self-titled album is an electronic dance music masterpiece, still the best LCD five years later.

i'm not going to say anything about the music though. i'm not really going to say much anything actually. i just want to share some of this album's amazing lyrics, usually the least important factor of any music to me.

i'm really easy to please lyrics-wise. you can repeat "ooh baby the music sounds better with you, love might bring us back together" for seven minutes and i'll be in ecstasy. this doesn't mean i can't tell the difference between that kind of trite (though strangely elegant) couplet and, say, the poetry of Bob Dylan.

Murphy's lyrics fall everywhere between the two extremes. the lyrics for the song "Yeah" are pretty much just "yeah yeah yeah yeahyeahyeahyeah yeah. yeah hey hey hey hey" and "everybody keeps on talking about, no one's getting it done" (what the fuck is it?). the first track gets a little more complex. here's the first verse:

well Daft Punk is playing at my house, at my house
i'll show you the ropes, kid, show you the ropes
i got a bus and a trailer at my house, at my house
i'll show you the ropes, kid, show you the ropes

it's a song about Daft Punk playing at his house. what more would you expect? you gotta PA the house, Sarah's girlfriend is working the door, the robots descend from the bus, etc. etc. oh yeah Murphy loves singing about music, though he usually takes it a step further:

beats on repeat, beating on me
from every car in the street
there's constant repeat on repeat
of your paranoid, heartbreaking beats
on repeat

it's a five song repeat, beating on me
your favorite band helps you sleep
and here comes the new stylish creep
from every car in the street
on repeat
on repeat

.
.
.

i wish i could complain more about the rich but then
all their children would line the streets,
come to every show,
no one wants that

i wish i could complain more about the rich but then
all their children would flee the schools,
come to every show,
drugged and unwashed

i wish i could complain more about the rich but then
all their children would line the streets,
come to every show,
unwashed and drugged and
beats on repeat, beating on me
on the radio
on your radio
on your radio

music about music! "Daft Punk is Playing at My House," "On Repeat," "Disco Infiltrator," "Beat Connection," LCD Soundsystem is all about dancing yourself clean and being hyperaware of it.

the best example of Murphy's clever lyrics and super self-conscious irony comes on the first track of the second disc, "Losing My Edge." the song starts with a miminal thumping bass line backed by a couple snares and hi-hats. then comes Murphy's nasally singing. then come more hi-hats and a little flickering guitar. the vocals start whacking out, echoing like there are two James Murphys in the room. the guitar starts creaking like an electronic insect, still minimal. when we hit around 2.5 minutes, cymbals crash announcing a less restrained, more potent bassline, still playing the same old minimal phrase though. it won't stop until the song ends. the drums pick up a little more. the guitar gets a little whackier. slowly, always slowly building to a paranoid, anxiety-ridden, frustrated cry for help at the end: "look at all the good music i know!" here are the lyrics, in full:

yeah, i'm losing my edge.
i'm losing my edge.
the kids are coming up from behind.
i'm losing my edge.
i'm losing my edge to the kids from France and from London.
but i was there.

i was there in 1968.
i was there at the first Can show in Cologne.
i'm losing my edge.
i'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps i hear when they get on the decks.
i'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
i'm losing my edge.

to all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
i'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

but i'm losing my edge.
i'm losing my edge, but i was there.
i was there.
but i was there.

i'm losing my edge.
i'm losing my edge.
i can hear the footsteps every night on the decks.
but i was there.
i was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.
i was working on the organ sounds with much patience.
i was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band.
i told him, "don't do it that way. you'll never make a dime."
i was there.
i was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
i played it at CBGB's.
everybody thought i was crazy.
we all know.
i was there.
i was there.
i've never been wrong.

i used to work in the record store.
i had everything before anyone.
i was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.
i was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.
i woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.

but i'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
and they're actually really, really nice.

i'm losing my edge.

i heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody.
every great song by the Beach Boys.
all the underground hits.
all the Modern Lovers tracks.
i heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import.
i heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87.
i heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s.
i hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real.
you want to make a Yaz record.
i hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
i hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.
i hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that i know.

But have you seen my records? This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, The Trojans, The Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harrassment, a-ha, Pere Ubu, Dorothy Ashby, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League, the Normal, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Monks, Niagra, Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra, Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc, Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force ("just hit me"!), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron!, the Slits, Faust, Mantronix, Pharaoh Sanders and the Fire Engines, the Swans, the Soft Cell, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics.

you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.
you don't know what you really want.

i know i want to listen to every one of those artists now.

Music Sounds Better With You - Stardust (1998)

i found this classic at a tiny record store in San Francisco today.



it's one-sided. one 6:50 track of French disco house dance perfection. etched into the opposite side are the song's main lyrics:

MUSIC SOUNDS BETTER WITH YOU
LOVE MIGHT BRING US BACK TOGETHER

i don't even know what to say about the actual song.

four on the floor with a thump of a bass we now expect from Daft Punk.
delicious guitar/synth sample from a 1981 Chaka Khan hit.
liquid lyrics, straight to the point.
a decade later, on Alive 2007, it still killed.

dance/download/listen.

Zombie - Fela Kuti (1977)

everything Fela Anikulapo Kuti touches turns to gold. such is my analysis after listening to seven of his albums from the 70s. but there's one album in particular that flows, breaks, and crashes with the unmatchable fury of an unfathomable diamond ocean.



Fela Kuti's twenty-somethingth album, Zombie (1977), as far as i know, is afrobeat perfection. what is afrobeat? well, according to the infinite wisdom of Wikipedia, "Afrobeat is a combination of traditional Yoruba music, jazz, highlife, funk and chanted vocals, fused with percussion and vocal styles, popularized in Africa in the 1970s. Its main creator was the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Fela Kuti, who used it to revolutionise musical structure as well as the political context in his native Nigeria. It was Kuti who coined the term 'afrobeat,' which features chants, call-and-response vocals, and complex, interacting rhythms."

holy shit. you know how James Brown essentially invented funk? well, the JBs were famously floored when they took a little trip down to Nigeria in the 1970s. recalls bassist William 'Bootsy' Collins, "[Fela] had a club in Lagos, and we came to the club and they were treating us like kings. We were telling them they're the funkiest cats we ever heard in our life. I mean, this is the James Brown band, but we were totally wiped out! That was one trip I wouldn't trade for anything in the world."

we all have weaknesses. for some, it might be genre invention. here's mine:

1. Zombie (12:26)
2. Mister Folllow Follow (12:58)
3. Observation Is No Crime (13:26)
4. Mistake [Live] (14:47)

this album is four tracks long and none of them fall under the ten minute mark. holy shit x2. and don't think this is Fela's exception. i performed a little calculation with my seven Kuti albums from the 70s and it turns out the average song length is 14 minutes. the longest is 25 minutes (Confusion) and the shortest is 8:08 (Igbe (Na Shit) from Gentleman).

long songs rule. the vocals on the title track start at about 5:30. the vocals on the second track start at about 7:30. that's usually how it goes with Fela. epic, epic jazz jams that slowly, surely, so surely build up to Fela's scathing lyrics of political protest and ideological expression.

oh yeah, that's the other thing. this music might be relaxing, brilliantly composed, amazing to dance to, and joyous to jam to, but Fela ain't fucking around. if you want to hear a real story about polygamy, revolution, and the power of music, check out this Guardian article. here's an excerpt:

You could make a case for 1976's most revolutionary record being not 'Anarchy In The UK' but ['Zombie'], perfectly conceived slice of pop subversion, with its killer groove sounding like no one else, thunderous brass with wonderful trumpet from Lester Bowie and lyrics in pidgin English attacking the mindlessness of the Nigerian military ('Zombie no go turn unless you tell am to turn/Zombie no go think unless you tell to think...').

Fela's robotic stage moves had been copied by protesters in riots against the government he was banned from Ghana for being 'liable to cause a breach of the peace' and this song provoked an attack on his new commune, named by Fela the Kalakuta ('Rascal') Republic. Indeed, Fela had declared independence from the repressive Nigerian state. On 18 February 1977, more than 1,000 armed soldiers surrounded the compound, set fire to the generator, and brutalised the occupants. Fela alleged he was dragged by his genitals from the main house, beaten, and only escaped death following the intervention of a commanding officer. Many women were raped and the 78-year-old Funmilayo [Fela's mother, a political activist, and a feminist] was thrown through a window. She subsequently died.

the Nigerian government killed Fela's mother because his music was just too damn good. you're basically the enemy if you don't like this album.

download.