Frank Kogan

Tonight's The Night
Frank Kogan, top 50 songs in reverse alphabetical order
Posted originally at Rockcritics.com

The Shirelles' "Tonight's The Night" isn't about the night, it's the need for the night. And Debbie Deb, from her other dance hit, "Lookout weekend, here I come," not the party but anticipating the party. "When I hear music it makes me dance, you've got the music, here's my chance." Something about to happen, something asking to happen, something needs to happen; longing and fear of what might happen. This song is the ache, the need. Say you're gonna meet me (tonight's the night), but I don't know, I just don't know, I might...

On the other side there's the Stones, something twisted, something off: I'm watching my TV, a man comes on and tells me he can't be a man, I can't get no, no no no, the drums, wham wham, pop-pop-pop, and the guitar, the (in its day) subversion, the daring fuzz noise, the great drama (in its night), aggression and excitement, anticipation... Fast forward to Brazil, DJ Guuga, don't worry about your ex-wife, come to the cabaré. DJ Wesley Gonzaga – my friend David Cooper Moore's description, "For a good stretch this song is propelled primarily by a gun being cocked and a synth piano line that sounds like what happens when you're about to change the battery in your smoke detector and it chirps right in your face. And it fucking rocks." So the dance is no longer coming up from the bass but down from that high annoying screaming beep. And if you forgot or never knew what 1965 was like, the impact of the guitar, it was the piercing smoke alarm, the noise that Keith Richard unearthed, a man comes on the radio... the need, the night in the distance, I can't get no.

This list. It's all Shirelles and Rolling Stones, in different times and places, inhabiting different bodies, wearing different clothes. That's the trouble with best-of lists; it's a highlight reel, but a highlight reel isn't the game. So my list (top 50 songs, hah) not only doesn't represent the world, or music, it barely represents me, either. You wouldn't know that at age 9 I'd memorized every silly song on the 1st Allan Sherman record and the 3rd Tom Lehrer, or that from 2004 to 2016 my end-of-year lists had almost all female singers (on this list they get superseded by 2003 earlier and male Soundcloud creeps later), or that funk didn't just reorganize my sense of musical relations but of human relations.



Methodology: I was going to take 5 songs per decade from the 1930s to the 2010s, no more than 2 from the Stones; only 2 or 3 from the 1920s, 'cause I know fuck-all about the '20s, and anyway the record industry didn't rev up big until '25; and 1 or 2 from 2020-21 – so that's maybe a total of 5 from the '20s! – and if there are a couple spots left I'll give one more each to the '70s and '80s. Anyway, I got 2 from the 2020s and only 2 from the 1920s, and it turns out I also know fuck-all about the '40s, so only 3 there, and I know fuck-all about the '30s but have no shortage – so with 3 spots in hand I give one extra to the '70s, pass over the '80s, and give one more to the '10s and another to the '30s – and since I know fuck-all about the '30s I don't know the grumpy old peak achievements so instead I have fun, Billie swinging and Stanley yucking it up on behalf of Anne Boleyn and all the joke songs and show songs and folk songs I'd otherwise left off (first heard it on a Kingston Trio record), and we finally get our party.

Here's the playlist.

In reverse alphabetical order:

Waring's Pennsylvanians "Love For Sale" (1931)
The Wailers "Jailhouse" a.k.a. "Good Good Rudie" (1966)
V.I.M. "Maggie's Last Party" (1991)
Hugh Roy (U-Roy) & Hopeton Lewis "Drive Her Home" (1971)
Trick Daddy & Trina "Nann Nigga" (1998)
Les Têtes Brulées "Têtes Brulées" (1990)



Teddy Yo "Gurage Tone" (2007)
t.A.T.u. "Kosmos" (2005)
T-ara "Lovey-Dovey" (2012)
Donna Summer "I Feel Love" (1977)
The Stooges "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell" (1973)
Spoonie Gee "Spoonin' Rap" (1979)
Britney Spears "...Baby One More Time" (1998)
Slade "Cum On Feel The Noize" (1973)
The Shirelles "Tonight's The Night" (1960)
Sheck Wes "Do That" (2018)



The Sex Pistols "Anarchy In The U.K." (1976)
The Ronettes "Be My Baby" (1963)
The Rolling Stones "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (1965)
Elvis Presley "Baby Let's Play House" (1955)
Playboi Carti "Magnolia" (2017)
Charley Patton "Mississippi Boweavil Blues" (1929)
Charlie Parker's Ri Bop Boys "Ko Ko" (1945)



( P through A )

Stubs of ideas, some of which may turn into future posts:

(1a) A punk votes for a punk (Johnny Rotten says nice things about Trump). Okay, he's not necessarily saying that he did vote for Trump, though from what he said it's a good assumption he did; but anyway, my armchair psychosocial analysis of the Trump win already had been "Punks voted for a punk," my using the word punks in a sorta pre-punk-rock sense, meaning people who compensate for subconsciously feeling weak by scapegoating and bullying and hurting the vulnerable; but such "punks" can include normally nice people too, people who let the punk aspect of themselves do their electoral thinking.



(1b) Only "sorta pre-punk-rock" given that original garage-rock punks such as ? And The Mysterians and the Syndicate Of Sound and the Seeds were indeed punks in the old sense, weak bully-type punks (and sexists as well),† but most of the great punk rockers — I'd start "punk rock" w/ Stones and Dylan, actually, with the caveat that the true punks, the garage rockers, weren't Stones and Dylan but the garage kids who'd dumbed Stones, Dylan, and Yardbirds down into punk, which'd be a fine explanation except that no one limits "punk rock" this way; most critics etc. would also include the Velvet Underground and MC5 and Stooges and Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Rocket From The Tombs and even more would include Ramones and Sex Pistols and the Clash and the Heartbreakers and X-Ray Spex and Black Flag and Nirvana and Hole, generally self-aware nonbully types, and if you're going to do this you've got to go back and count Dylan and the Stones — ...anyway, most of the great punk rockers (as generally defined) were about punk way more than they were punk; nonetheless, being self-aware, they drew the connection between actual inner true punk impulses and the punk rock they were playing, understanding their own weakness and that bullying and scapegoating were in there lurking, sitting dangerously inside. But anyway, of all the great punk rockers, the Sex Pistols, who were maybe the greatest ("They make everyone else sound sick by comparison," said my friend Bill Routt), were the ones who were true nasty punks as much as they were about punk. They were the band that made punk safe for fag-bashers (fortunately only somewhat safe).* None of which explains why Johnny Rotten would shit his brains down the toilet and support Trump (apparently, Johnny can't tell a racist from a hole in the ground). If you want to turn to social affinity and group identification as an explanation, Johnny's loyalty is to real punks, not to punk rock. (Yes, there's no way to come up with a unitary reading of the word "punk" in this paragraph. It'd be a stupider paragraph if you could.) I doubt that many self-identified "punks" — those who embrace the music as part of their social identity — voted for Trump. These people veer left instead. If you go by social category, Trump got many of the rocks and hoods and greasers and grits and burnouts — at least, more than he should have — but few of the punks. (Among whites he got a significant amount of the jocks and middle managers, too, and their psyches are probably as much punk as the hoods' are, but that's not relevant to Johnny Rotten's social identification.) I doubt that many Trump voters had ever bothered to listen to punk rock (not counting the garage hits they heard way back); if they had, the aboutness would've stung them, and they'd have been repelled. Nonetheless, I think I can understand that what makes the Sex Pistols sound true and real to me, the screaming squalling blind attempt to stand against anything acceptable and settled that can get you by, is what makes a lying hollow pathological bully like Trump sound transgressive and therefore real and true and honest and substantial to a lot of his fans.

(1c) Of course Trump doesn't win if he gets only the punks. And my armchair analysis isn't based on any actual research of mine into "the Trump voter." As I said two sentences ago, there's more than one type of Trump voter, and individual voters are multi-faceted in their urges and ideas anyway (so a particular Trump voter can be more than one type). I'm actually doing two questionable things: (i) reading the characteristics of the voter off of the characteristics of what they voted for, rather than actually asking the voters who they are and why they like what they like; (ii) using a psychological model that can apply to an individual person to explain the behavior of a group of people (the punk types who voted for that punk Trump), as if the group were an individual writ large. Obviously I think the analysis kinda sorta works, or I wouldn't have made it. It's a strong hypothesis, punks voted for a punk, strong in my mind anyway, though maybe someone more knowledgeable could beat it down with an alternative. ("Strong" analysis? Seriously? How so? It tells you what most of you already know: (1) that I don't like Trump, (2) that I think many of his voters voted for a lot of what I don't like about him, even if they don't understand the policy implications, and (3) that he's a punk. You already knew that. He's a punk. It's maybe a correct analysis, but not strong, since it doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. Maybe it makes you think harder about punk rock, and what I write below maybe'll help you think harder about social class.)

(1di) ( Trump got more working-class whites than he was expected to )

(1dii) ( The terms hoods, greasers, grits, and burnouts as stand-ins for current social identities )

(1diii) ( The class systems in people's immediate experience are not an exact match for the upper-middle-working class grid )

(1div) ( They voted against Clinton because she's a student-council type )

(1dv) ( Kids who bombed out of the classroom still hurt by it )

(1e) ( Middle class divided )

(1f) ( Want to hurt people and feel good about hurting them )

(2) ( The failure of education )

(3a) ( Duncan Watts criticizes idea of 'representative agent' )

(3b) ( How would we measure 'punks voted for a punk'? )

(4) ( The principle of the inferred et cetera )

(5) ( Top 100 singles of 2016 )

(6) ( A punk votes for a brat )

(7) ( Etc. )

Missed most of February (and most of everything else). Ash-B is the great discovery here, a strong and throaty rapper like Choi Sam but with a tone that's more supple and subtle. Will say more when I post my 2014 albums list. "The Song Of Love" is a low-rent slow dance from Core Contents Media (yeah, it's not Core Contents Media anymore, but in my dark heart it always will be). "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina" scrunches together two acts I never really got and it's catchy. Azin's the sort of respectable-type well-controlled quality singer I always intend to be indifferent towards except every year there's another one who gets to me. I can't tell if Rihanna's goofing. I'd have called it "Bitch Betta Have My Ice Cream." Red Velvet take the cake. Christine and the Queens sing "Christine." ZZBEst kinda go soul horny in the early evening. Lizzy trots. GFriend are trying to sound like early SNSD and kinda do. They don't dance remotely as well, unfortunately. Jason Aldean does rote party roteness with good guitars. J'sais pas, I dunno.

Looking forward to Crayon Pop, Miss A, Blady, Exo. What'd I miss?

1. Ash-B "매일"
2. The Seeya "The Song Of Love"
3. Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina"
4. Azin "Delete"
5. Rihanna "Bitch Better Have My Money"
6. Red Velvet "Ice Cream Cake"
7. Christine and the Queens "Christine"
8. ZZBEst "랄랄라"
9. Lizzy "Not An Easy Girl"
10. GFriend "Glass Bead"
11. Jason Aldean "Just Gettin' Started"
12. Brigitte "J'sais pas"

[EDIT: Video not available; Ash-B's "매일" seems to no longer exist on the Internet.]

Just came across J-Tong's Mohican And The Barefoot from last October: hip-hop but with rhythms that are hard rock more than they're R&B.* I like the album version of "개판" ft. Nobrain far more than the one from two years ago that gets streamed online, so here's a raw live clip of what I assume is the newer, better version:

[LIVE CLIP] SpeakShow9 Busan Tour 26. J-TONG - 개판


Question: Is there a lot of this rap-rock stuff in Korea, or is J-Tong the main guy?

*Of course, the people who invented hard rock in the '60s, the Stones and the Yardbirds most prominently, were saturated in R&B. That late '60s and early '70s groups like the MC5 and the Stooges were also saturated in R&B helped them to rock harder than most of their contemporaries. As did Miles Davis in the '70s, running together rock and funk and R&B and that other genre he's associated with (not to mention Sly, Isaac Hayes, Kool & The Gang, and a host of others). So I'm not saying that R&B and hard rock are opposites. But nowadays what's called rock and what's called R&B are pretty distant from one another (in genres like country the rock and the R&B do sometimes meld together, but they're rarely called rock and R&B); the broad area designated "hip-hop" is one place where rock and R&B do occasionally, explicitly rub shoulders.

Anyway, I've been arguing that over the last quarter century techno and acid house and rave more than rock have been playing the social role that rock once played.

What's going on with Rainbow's "concept"? And how do "concepts" work in general in K-pop? Even though performers do sometimes change 'em like costumes, that doesn't necessarily mean those very performers aren't committed in some deeper way to what the concepts mean. Or at least it doesn't mean that they're not committed in the audience's eyes, or that we don't hold them accountable on the basis of our (or someone's) sense of what they're doing with the concepts and who they appear to be behind the concepts.

I find Rainbow's switch from "the sexy dominatrix image"* of "A," "Mach," and "To Me" to the new one on "Tell Me Tell Me," whatever it is (cheery and serene and bright but at a half-knowing half distance?), jarring:

"A":


"Mach":


"Tell Me Tell Me":


Music seems to be included in the concept of "concept." As it should be. Except the music on "Tell Me Tell Me" is meh compared to what Rainbow were doing a couple of years ago in "A" etc.

( I don't believe that in Korea or America there's a split between authenticity and artifice; the two concepts aren't opposites )

While searching YouTube fruitlessly for some 2NE1/Big Bang couples action, I came across this live sitting-on-the-floor knockoff of the inferior reggae version of "I Don't Care," with G-Dragon writing, on the spot, a brilliantly half-assed, hilariously ineffective self-justification of the male attitude.

[video no longer available]

Unfortunately the dude who uploaded that vid compressed its width. Here's the same segment, with the correct ratio but without the Eng Sub:

Watch on YouTube

Read a lyrics translation of "Tonight" that made fear and misogyny seem casually rampant in it, in an interestingly conflicted way — the lyrics don't want to commit to the romance that suffuses the sound, with pain equally suffusing the sound — and I've been afraid to look further, at alternate translations, to confirm my theory that when T.O.P. romantically says "Good night" at the end he's really kicking her out of bed.

So today, I was puzzling over whether the album title Beggars Banquet has an apostrophe before the s or not, and I went to Wikipedia and looked and it did not. But then I thought to myself, "You can't trust Wikipedia, so maybe I should check discogs and allmusic as well." And I went to the address bar and started typing...

And only then, finally, did it occur to me that I own the album Beggars Banquet and it is on a shelf approximately two feet from where I am sitting, and I can actually check the actual album and find out for sure, taking no more than two seconds.

(No apostrophe.)

Erika brings up Didi's "Play With Fire" over on the Didi-Rhiannon thread, and I talk about it on the Freaky Trigger canon thread. Here's what I say:

Saw Crystal Bowersox and Didi Benami from Stones night on American Idol, and for the second week in a row I thought that, although Bowersox' vocals were stonger and richer and more self-assured, it was flighty quirk-and-curlicue girl Benami who managed to burrow deeper into the music, even while flubbing and flying around it too. It helps Didi that I way prefer "Play With Fire" to "You Can't Always Get What You Want." On the latter, Crystal didn't really communicate much beyond "good voice" and "jazz-soul command," nothing about wanting and getting; she has done and will do a lot better, whereas Didi is unsure and unformed but she's already given three gripping performances, this and "Rhiannon" last week (which you'd think would have been a suicide choice) and "Terrified" during Hollywood week.

The thing about the Stones' best material, which sold big because it meant a lot of different things to different people, is that, paradoxically, for me the material isn't open to a lot of interpretations, and I rarely like to hear it covered. If you can't do Jagger's tensions - e.g., "Heart Of Stone," which is the Stones' real can't-always-get-what-you-want song - can't totally deliver strength and menace while writing lyrics that expose the strength and menace as a fraud, with the singing and playing forcefully counteracting the lyrics and being as convincing as the supposed unmasking... if you can't prance along that balance beam, then what's the point?

Since this time it's Didi's voice, you get the sense that, though as the singer she's the narrator, she as much as the person she's singing about can be menaced and played with, but nonetheless she'll display bits of vocal strength that make the "don't mess with me" credible; and because the song's lyrics own the weakness a lot less than "Heart Of Stone"'s do, Didi's actually brought something to the song, walks along her own borderline between not getting what you say you can, and getting what you say you can't, and not knowing what you need.

( Play With Fire video )

EDIT: I say favorable things about Crystal Bowersox' appearance over on Martin's lj.

Hallelujah I'm a bore, or the Top 40 is, anyway, with a Haiti charity knock-off and a country disappointment the only newcomers on an already snoozing chart.

( Justin Timberlake & Matt Morris )

( Jason Aldean )

Speaking of Hope For Haiti, down at #72 Taylor Swift's Better Than Ezra cover is painfully out-of-tune, though the pitch problem is the musicians' at least as much as Taylor's; I seem to be erratic as to when pitch problems bother me. Taylor herself is erratic: Cis reported last year that Taylor's London show was completely in tune, and Himes wrote in his year-end essay that he'd witnessed her being pitch perfect. Maybe for all of Taylor's apparent poise, she actually chokes in the face of a national TV audience. (But my own pitch problems never have anything to do with choking or not, from what I can tell.)

I have made a decision for the remainder of 2009 to listen to no more Albums I Haven't Heard Yet. So, a trifle early, here is my decade's end albums list:

Top Ten Albums Of The '00s

1. Ashlee Simpson Autobiography
2. Montgomery Gentry Carrying On
3. Big & Rich Horse Of A Different Color
4. Britney Spears Blackout
5. t.A.T.u. Dangerous & Moving
6. Various Artists Global Hits 2002
7. Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP
8. Ying Yang Twins Me & My Brother
9. Fannypack See You Next Tuesday
10. Paris Hilton Paris

( Exuberance )