It is not just because I’m a middle aged white man that I know so little about hip-hop. The universe of music is large, and I tend to push backwards, even while new music piles up. But many years ago, I heard a hip-hop song that used what I could clearly hear was was “It’s a Hard Knock Life” off the original cast album of Annie. You could just hear Andrea McArdle’s powerful voice ringing out above the chorus. And the hip-hop song was probably my first indication that there really was something different about the music.

I decided to look up the song last night and I found out that it was by Jay Z. Understand: pretty much the only thing I know about him is that he’s married to Beyoncé (who I also don’t know anything about), and that they are friends of the Obamas. Oh, and I know that they are hugely wealthy and popular. So it is a little embarrassing that the song that really impressed me almost two decades ago turns out to be someone who is so widely admired that his net worth — even without Beyoncé — is over a half billion dollars.

Just the same, I have nothing against artistry and craft. And all this money is due to the fact that we have a broken intellectual property system combined with a really effective distribution system. Clearly, he ought to be rich. Just not as rich as he is. But he’s a whole lot more deserving than Bill Gates. Windows 2.01 doesn’t age like this:

Terry Callier was an amazing guy, because he crossed all kinds of musical barriers. Primarily, he combined jazz and folk. If you can’t quite imagine that, remember that the blues is basically a kind of folk music. In fact, it was the folk scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s was responsible for finding old blues greats and turning them into stars in their old age. Callier would later go on to do some really interesting music with the UK hip-hop band Urban Species. So we was a lot more any English description could ever express.

Here he is performing probably his best known tune, “You Goin’ Miss Your Candyman,” from his great album What Color Is Love. He’s got a totally kick-ass band. But I don’t know who they are. It doesn’t matter. Just enjoy:

I used to be a huge Elvis Costello fan. I still love his work. I just don’t go to his concerts or run out and buy his newest albums. But the height of my obsession with him was his 1986 album, Blood & Chocolate. I was looking for the best way to characterize the album, and I think that AllMusic nailed it: “controlled viciousness.”

And here is a live version of my favorite song on the album, “I Want You” — the most hateful break up song ever written. I wish I could say that I don’t understand the song completely — that I haven’t felt exactly the same way. The song consists of the fantasies that we partake of when dumped — or on the verge of it. I especially like, “Did you call his name out as he held you down?” It is all so self-destructive — so obviously counterproductive. But it is also the way we are. Or were. Now I really don’t care, but maybe just because I can no longer imagine being in love like that.

I did not like the first ‘Til Tuesday (or Aimee Mann) album. I still think it is amazingly weak and have no idea why it managed to be their only album that took off. It was their second album, Welcome Home, that grabbed my attention. I first noticed “What About Love” and thought it was really good. But then I heard the title track and I knew that this was a really great pop band. I still remember a great — really long — line from the chorus of the song, “But anything I could have said I felt somehow that you already knew.” You don’t much hear that kind of profundity in pop music. I love the idea of a dying relationship where you want to say so much but you know it is pointless. Basically, you’d just be saying, “Love me!”

On that album was a song that I especially liked, “David Denies.” It is a woman not listening to the advice offered in “Welcome Home.” She is in a relationship with a man who is on the verge of going back to the woman who dumped him. One thing that is true of most songwriters is that they will rework the same notion in different songs. This is what Mann has done with a number of themes. And that is what she did with the “you are going back to that bitch who dumped you” theme in “David Denies.” Here is one version of it off her 2005 solo album, The Forgotten Arm, “She Really Wants You.” I don’t like it nearly as much, but it is still a fine song. Here she is performing it on Late Show With David Letterman:

Some time back, I was working for a very ambitious Latina who was doing very well selling make-up and clothes to other Latinas in the area. And she was a really big fan of Shakira. I’d never heard of her before, but of course, she was huge. I didn’t especially care for her music, but there was one song that immediately captured me, “Animal City.”

I like the cynical lyrics. “It’s an animal city, it’s a cannibal world.” And: “Your family got bigger when they thought you were rich.” But mostly, it is the music. I love the use of semitone major chord changes. It’s very punk, but done with far more sophistication. For example, there is a riff after the chorus that goes back and forth between a D major and a C# major 7th. Very effective!

Fahd Ballan was a Syrian folk singer. I don’t know much about him, except that he was extremely popular in his day — both as a singer and as an actor (although I can find no record of his acting). He worked with the great Arabic composer and musician Farid al-Atrash in Egypt.

The following song is more or less, “Girls of Mukalla.” According to As’ad AbuKhalil, “In Arab folklore, the women of Mukallah are reputed to be most beautiful.” And the song has the lyrics, “Oh, the girls of Mukalla. You are the cure of every ill” — a typical sentiment in popular music everywhere, it would seem. Regardless, what he’s singing about, it is a very pleasant song:

When I was younger, I was mad about Talking Heads. They put out a fine debut album, Talking Heads 77. They followed it up with three albums, each better than the one before: More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light. When Speaking in Tongues came out, it was so disappointing. How could it not be? Even if it had been as good any of the three previous albums, it would have been disappointing. And it wasn’t nearly as good as any of those albums. And then it just got embarrassing: Little Creatures. It would have been embarrassing coming from Madness.

But it is great that we have those three albums. And recently, I’ve noticed that there is video of Talking Heads during their “Remain in Light” tour. So here is “Crosseyed and Painless” from a performance in Rome. What a great band!

The whole Live in Rome concert is available on YouTube.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Percy Sledge has died. He had liver cancer and was 74 years old. Not a bad run, but sad just the same. I’ve always liked him for two reasons. First: he has a really distinctive voice. Second: he was a really ugly man. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Actually, I mean it just the opposite. Being a short and ugly man, I have a great admiration for other short and ugly men. I can’t really be objective, but I think I’m slightly more attractive than Sledge, but he was slightly taller than I am. So that’s a wash. And he was, of course, ridiculously talented.

He is best known for the song, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” But I think it isn’t that great a song. What makes it work is his performance. I think this is why the song hasn’t been covered that much. It’s hard to make it work and no one is ever going to make it work the way he did. But ever since The Big Chill, no one needs to listen to the song.

Back in 1968, Percy Sledge released an album, Take Time to Know Her. The title song was one of the first by the legendary songwriter Stephen Allen Davis. And it is a great song. So let’s listen to Sledge perform it live back in 2006:

Since it is Bessie Smith’s birthday today, I figured we would listen to her do her hit “St Louis Blues,” written by blues legend W C Handy. For these Morning Music posts, I like to do live performances — and certainly avoid videos that simply include a single image. The problem with Smith is that she was only ever in one film, St Louis Blues — based on the song and produced by Handy himself.

The plot involves Smith catching her boyfriend (tap dancer Jimmy Mordecai) with another woman. Smith beats up the woman and then begs the boyfriend to stay. He leaves and Smith goes to a speakeasy to drown her sorrows. There she sings “St Louis Blues.” Afterward, her boyfriend comes back and they apparently reunite. But as they dance, he steals all her money and leaves. The film ends with Smith again at the bar sad and alone.

I remember once hearing Holly Near saying that she had never liked the blues, but eventually learned that it wasn’t the music she didn’t like. She didn’t like the tradition of “beat me, abuse me, I still love you” songs. That is definitely the nature of this movie, although not so much the song itself. I’ve set the video to start at the song because I don’t think the rest of it is all that interesting:

This morning we listen to the Jimi Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower.” It is a Bob Dylan song, of course — during that period where Dylan just couldn’t seem to do anything wrong. Clearly, the song relates to Isaiah 21:5-9. But more broadly, it is about a group of people waiting for some kind of attack or catastrophe. And because of that, some find it curious that the song ends just as “it” starts to happen.

To me, it seems like the siege of Troy. The people just wait around anticipating the inevitable. And there are two ways to approach that: look for an escape or accept death. Interestingly, it is the joker who looks for escape and the thief who is accepting.

Hendrix’s version of it is rightly considered the best. It contains the very best of his guitar work.

When I was 12 years old, Wild Cherry had a huge hit with “Play That Funky Music.” Like a lot of people, I did not think that they were saying “funky” — and that was doubtless part of the song’s appeal: the secret feeling that something not entirely reputable was going on. That isn’t to say that it isn’t a great song. It is, in fact, about as funky a song as there is. And I was surprised to learn that it was, in fact, a bunch of white boys playing such a funky song.

Wild Cherry is considered a “one hit wonder.” But I think that term should be reserved for bands that really only had one song to offer. Wild Cherry was a great band that put out four solid albums. What they lacked during the four years following “Play That Funky Music” was another strong single. I am surprised that the band didn’t do better on the R&B charts; they produced a lot of great music. But this is all they will be remembered for, although it is more than enough:

Yesterday, we featured The Dead Milkmen and even compared the song, “Punk Rock Girl,” to The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno.” Well, since then, I haven’t been able to get “Disco Inferno” out of my head. And it turns out that both bands are from Philadelphia. The Trammps might be better considered a soul band — they existed long before disco became a thing. But The Trammps are generally considered one of the first disco bands. And maybe one of the reasons I am so fond of them is because they were a real band and not something created in the studio. They could really play.

As I mentioned yesterday, the phrase “burn baby burn” was associated with the Watts riots. Of course, the song actually has nothing to do with that. Instead, it was inspired by the film, The Towering Inferno. I haven’t seen the film since I was a kid, but apparently, a discotheque catches fire in it. So the lyrics play with the idea that the music was so hot that it caught the place on fire. And the singer can hear the music coming from above, “Up above my head; I hear music in the air; That makes me know; There’s a party somewhere.”

It’s all good fun and music as fine as you will ever hear:

Burn that mother down!