Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Higher Ground"

For Hari.

The Weepies, "Gotta Have You"

Last summer, two of my closest friends gave me the honor of creating a playlist for their wedding reception. One song that made it to the final mix was this one, which the bride had introduced to me months earlier. As much as I'm predisposed to dislike a twee indie folk-pop married couple writing love songs to each other, something about this one totally got its hooks in me. What can I say--I like it for the same reasons that I like Cameron Crowe movies. I even decided I liked it enough to put it next to Nick Cave and Stevie Wonder on the playlist, and now to post it next to GWAR on my predominately metal blog.

This week, the Weepies announced that guitarist Deb Talan has stage 2 breast cancer. From the band's social networking page:

Thank you for the outpouring of love and support. We are overwhelmed, we accept, and we intend to take all the help we can get!

A lot of people have asked if they can do anything. Sure! If you want to send Deb a love note or care package or a few words of encouragement via snail mail, we say yes.

The Weepies
PO Box 2776
Iowa City, IA 52244

Also, what you can do – make an appointment for yourself to get your yearly cancer screening, right now.
With love,
Deb & Steve

I'll be sending them a note this week, and I hope you will too.

G N' R Lies: "Move to the City"

The downfall of the original Guns N' Roses can be traced in "Move to the City."



On Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide, it's the Guns' best song, a hard-boiled but sympathetic depiction of life on the run. Future metal legends recasting Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" with a girl in L.A. You barely even notice the saxophone.

A few years later, Guns N' Roses were playing it with extended horns and keyboard solos, plausibly so Axl could smoke a cigarette and change his outfit. One saxophonist (yes, there's more than one) even plays a quote from "If I Only Had a Brain."



The biggest difference from these two GNRs is not the size of their audience, but the size of their egos. I avidly worship the Use Your Illusion albums and the videos from the Tokyo Dome, but this is clearly a band successful and powerful enough to do anything they want creatively. Even a band as singularly talented as Guns N' Roses can't thrive on 100% artistic control.

Yet at their best, Guns N' Roses were a perfectly imperfect band. And that's what you hear on "Move to the City," a sloppy, vulgar and antagonistic song that performed by a team of junkies and felons with enough magnetism to earn themselves the choice to let someone in their band play "If I Only Had a Brain" for millions of viewers. Some of us may wish that GNR had known better, but knowing what we now know about them, we were lucky that they ever played anything at all.

Metallica, "Don't Tread on Me"

President Obama's official inauguration playlist has been released, and most of it is garbage. Outside of the obvious Stevie Wonder and Beyoncé choices, it's the usual hodgepodge of blander-than-bland pop hits strategically picked to offend the least amount of people. Barack may have won the election, but whoever put this playlist together obviously still thinks he has to pander.

Unlike Congress, I won't criticize the President's actions unless I have a better idea. Here it is.



"Don't Tread on Me" is a patchwork quilt of American proverbs, taking its title from the Culpeper Minutemen, lifting its first eight bars from Leonard Bernstein's "America" and depicting our country as the rattlesnake on the Gadsden flag, which is also honored on the cover of the Black Album. "Liberty or death, what we so proudly hail...To secure peace is to prepare for war..." Hetfield must have had an ninth-grade history paper sitting around.

Upon its release, "Don't Tread on Me" earned a minor backlash for its staccato, two-note riffing and a simple-minded view of patriotism, heard as a disappointment for a band that had confronted social injustice, warmongering and anti-environmentalism on ...And Justice for All. "We got people calling us 'jingoistic,'" Kirk Hammett told Rolling Stone. "That was definitely a word we had to look up." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the band doesn't like this song, never playing it live until their Black Album anniversary shows in 2012.

But "Don't Tread on Me" is exactly the kind of underappreciated anthem that deserves a comeback on the inauguration playlist. What better way to celebrate the inauguration of a President than with a patriotic hymn from a band that has been independent-minded enough to dissent and loyal enough to cheer on separate occasions? Plus, it would help take the Gadsden motto back from the Tea Partiers.

Song of the Day: Faith No More, "Midlife Crisis"

What if David Lynch managed a rock band?



David Foster Wallace once took a shot at defining the word "Lynchian" as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." To me, that's Faith No More and "Midlife Crisis."

The song is from the record Angel Dust, named for the dehumanizing drug with a pretty name. The album cover, a lovely image of egret, opens up to display a cow hanging from a meat hook. Watch for the white horses in the video above, then stick around to see what they're doing.

See if you can also catch snippets of Simon & Garfunkel in the intro and the Beastie Boys in the bridge. Other than a New York base, the two don't have much in common, but they're snug together inside Faith No More's original score.

As with all FNM songs, I can't figure out what this one is about. They've always been more concerned with the sounds of the words in the melody than the meaning behind the lyrics, so don't try to make head or tail of couplets like "You're perfect, yes, it's true, But without me you're only you/Your menstruating heart, It ain't bleedin' enough for two." Just hear how they roll off Mike Patton's tongue, with the range of a choirboy and the lungs of a demon.

One of my favorite moments in any song I've heard comes right after the pause at 2:38. With brilliant aptitude, the band layers the vocal melodies from the verses and chorus on top of each other in perfect synchronization. When writers gab about how musicians see the world differently from the rest of us, this is what they should be talking about.

Two summers ago, I caught Faith No More's U.S. reunion tour and fell into ecstasy. I screamed along to every word while gearing up for my favorite moment of "Midlife Crisis." After two-and-a-half blissful minutes, the band drew out the pause almost longer than I could stand. They returned with "Sir Duke" by Stevie Wonder instead.

Boyz II Mom

My mom doesn't ask for much, except for a mix CD two days of the year. One of these days comes on a Sunday in May.



Boyz II Mom

1. The Beatles, "Mother Nature's Son"
2. Warren Zevon, "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded"
3. Mr. T, "Treat Your Mother Right"
4. Ozzy Osbourne, "Mama, I'm Coming Home"
5. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "Motherly Love"
6. Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson, "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys"
7. Bob Dylan, "Mama, You Been on My Mind"
8. Funkadelic, "Cosmic Slop"
9. Marc Rizzo, "Mamasita"
10. John Lee Hooker, "Mama, You've Got a Daughter"
11. The Rolling Stones, "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?"
12. Neil Young, "New Mama"
13. Danzig, "Mother"
14. The Jackson 5, "Mama's Pearl"
15. 2pac, "Dear Mama"
16. Pink Floyd, "Mother"
17. Merle Haggard, "Mother Tried"
18. John Lennon, "Mother"
19. Johnny Cash, "Send a Picture of Mother"
20. Paul Simon, "That Was Your Mother"
21. The Beach Boys, "Mama Says"
22. Stevie Wonder, "Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call)"

22 recordings of boys honoring moms in song.

With my mom's preferences in mind, metal is at a minimum. Ozzy was of course the first to spring up, and Danzig's "Mother" is almost as cuddly these days. Marc Rizzo from Soulfly pulls off an impressive flamenco number on "Mamasita," but Mom's tastes are more reflected in the Beatles and Stevie Wonder picks.

Of course a Mother's Day mix needs a lot of country ("Mama Tried" being the one I can relate to most,) and I got to rescue 2Pac and Pink Floyd tracks from records that I used to bother Mom with. I actually like both of them better in this context, and I'm hoping she will, too. With the Stones and Beatles, I shunned the obvious choices ("Mother's Little Helper," "Your Mother Should Know") and wound up with better songs. Not that I'm elitist enough to admit it.

Luckily, two of my favorite sources for music, Rob Sheffield and Sound Opinions, also came up with playlists for me to cherry pick from. This resulted in Funkadelic's terrific "Cosmic Slop," which I hadn't realized counts as a mom song, a wistful a capella number from the Beach Boys and most notably, "Treat Your Mother Right," which could not exist if not for mixes like this one.

Listening again, I'm wondering if the Zappa and John Lennon choices were appropriate. I guess that many boys have complicated feelings about their mommies.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom Apatoff.

Download here: Boyz II Mom