12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″

- Official website.
- From the album The Phenomenal Handclap Band

The Phenomenal Handclap Band is a music collective / supergroup of sorts from Brooklyn – jeez, aren’t they all from Brooklyn now at this point? – and their debut album is a happy mishmash of different genres, psychedelic soul jammed together with funky proto-disco. “15 to 20” is the knockout single for obvious reasons, but let me digress.

I remember one day trying to convince my friend Luna about the real reasons Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” became such a big hit: not just because of the amazing Bob Fosse-inspired video, but because “Single Ladies”, at heart, was a sped-up jump-rope song, and therefore appealed to people on some subliminal childhood level. I don’t think she was convinced. (For the record, though, one of my favorite things about the song, iffy gender politics aside, are the incongruous synth squiggles running throughout the whole thing.)

Speaking of incongruity (bad segue, I know), “15 to 20” operates on the same principle: take a chorus straight from Schoolhouse Rock (cf. Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.”, already mentioned earlier), plant it on top of a ridiculously funky ‘70s detectives-with-sideburns movie groove, and see if you can get the damn thing out of your head. I couldn’t. That’s Lady Tigra on guest vocals, barely keeping up with the band (especially in the second stanza) – not that her lyrics amount to much more than babble, really. There’s something about the local police, and a savings and loan, and arms and thumbs – whatever. It’s all about that retro-groove and that elementary school chorus. “So what’s it gonna take to get through to you?” A refrain from a multiplication table was all it took.

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The rest of the list so far:

13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009).
- Official website.
- From the album Speech Therapy.

This was my summer anthem of 2009, via a (still!) free mp3 from Amazon back in June. To be frank, it took a while for me to figure out the Cockney lyrics the lyrics websites to publish their iffy transcriptions, and even then I had to google the definition of the word “armshouse”. All I could really go on was the unassailable argument of a chorus “Overstanding is the key, key” — a mantra I associated in my head, somehow, with “What did you want to see / What did you want to be when you grew up?” from Atlas Sound’s “Walkabout”.

It’s a lot easier to enumerate what Speech Debelle isn’t about, which is basically the usual material obsessions of most hip-hop nowadays; there’s a little bragging on “The Key”, but still she addresses her absent listener, “truthfully you bright like me / The only real difference is you slyer than me.” One realizes quickly that Speech Therapy was, indeed, speech therapy; her lyrics sometimes read like slightly rambling journal entries written at the breakfast table, or confessional letters never sent, and it’s all part of the song’s utter charm:

I’m getting older now starting to make sense of it,
Seeing the signs, reading minds like hypnotist,
Understand the figures like arithmetics and my guess is,
People are bad, man,
Insecurity breeds hate it’s a fact find,
In fact I’m sure it’s uncurable,
Some people positive while some people are negative
and totally oblivious to the harm they cause

Alas, the backlash against her began immediately after she won the Mercury Prize later this year — inevitably, by people whose favorite bands didn’t win — and disappointing record sales and apparently poorly attended concerts didn’t help.

But listen to the song! A joyful declaration of independence on a bed of clarinets and oboes, like it emerged from a Tribe Called Quest album circa 1991. The sound of swinging South London.

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The rest of the list so far:

14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.”

- Official website.
- From the Best of Bootie 2008 compilation (free download from bootieusa.com)

Bad mashups are probably pretty easy to do: place a crowd-pleasing chorus over a familiar riff, add more than a dash of incongruity for effect. But good mashups, like good cover versions, aren’t just about beatmatching (though when done right, like marrying Timbaland’s stuttery production for Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” to the rockabilly rhythms of George Michael’s “Faith”, the result can be surprisingly inventive). The true test is how the mashed songs play off each other’s respective histories and cultural connotations and perhaps even illuminate each other through musical recontextualization. (In this respect, it’s far easier to do bad cover versions – think of all the superfluous bossanova and lounge music produced in the last decade, lazily done by slowing the tempo a notch.)

This track by the Parisian DJ named ComaR vaulted to the top of my list early this year with what might be one of the best song mashups ever — two dance hits, about a quarter-century apart. “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” doesn’t quite pass the test I mention above, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t sound tailor-made for each other.

In retrospect, the two are obvious choices; “D.A.N.C.E.” is a warped tribute of sorts to Michael Jackson, after all. ComaR strips all the spluttery trebly funk from Justice’s original and “returns”, as it were, “D.A.N.C.E.” from Paris to Motown and to RnB roots it never had before, with that children’s choir now an unironic echo of the kids who performed the older song.

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The rest of the list so far:

15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
- From the 1973 album Music and Me.

I’ve never been a big Michael Jackson fan, really. (I did tell my students once that “dance music was all about Side One of Off the Wall”, and was met with laughter — not because it was an album that came out at least a decade before they were born, but because I had said “Side One”.) Like many people, I had pretty much checked out by 1987; my last memory of participating in something communally MJ-related was John Landis’ video for the forgettable anthem “Black or White” back in 1991. The next was at a crowded sports bar at lunchtime in July of 2009. I ate a pulled pork sandwich while his funeral played on the TV with the sound turned off.

But I felt a little twinge of sadness as well, if only because I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a Michael Jackson. He was always on television when I was growing up, even on the Marcos regime-controlled TV stations during martial law in the Philippines, and of course there was no escaping “Beat It” or the inimitable “Billie Jean” (still an amazing track however you slice it). And perhaps one of my earliest musical memories ever – other than Stevie Wonder singing “Superstition” on Sesame Street — was “Happy” on the AM radio, though it was only in 2009 that I heard it again and remembered it even existed.

And what a song indeed – here’s young Michael in full Diana Ross mode, his girlish tenor positively angelic in its purity. Credited to Smokey Robinson (!) and Michel Legrand (!!), its subtitle is “Love Theme from Lady Sings the Blues”, but it isn’t featured in Sidney J. Furie’s film or its soundtrack. “Happy” is a ballad about “love and happiness”, he says in the out-of-sync YouTube video above, but it barely conceals the song’s profound melancholy. The first two lines of “Happy” begin with:

Sadness had been
Close as my next of kin

And you think to yourself, Good lord – especially now that we know how he suffered as a child — he was singing this was when he was all of fifteen years old? Lyrically, it’s a bit inscrutable; it sounds like he’s singing about a dog, and having “Happy” and “Sadness” personified as characters in the song is simply clumsy writing.

But when the song (and Michael) suddenly turns an oddly philosophical turn, it’s a little more than just teenage melodrama. There seems – at least from my perspective, writing from 2009 — to be an unbearable emotional weight in his plaintive and beautiful singing, a burden that even in his mere adolescence seemed all too real for this young boy:

Where have I been?
What lifetime was I in?
Suspended between time and space
Lonely until
Happy came smiling up at me

But enough of this cheap psychoanalysis, and on to the other reason I loved this song this year. My younger brother Happy supposedly received his nickname because as a child I kept saying the “happy” word over and over while touching my mother’s pregnant belly. After hearing this song again, I wanted to think my brother was named after the Michael Jackson song, all over the airwaves when he was a baby. But I subsequently did the math, and it proved impossible (it was released after Happy was born) – but that’s how I like to remember my brother (“My life began when Happy smiled”), and it’s how I like to remember Michael Jackson.

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The rest of the list so far:

16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Continuing a series I more or less started in 2008 (here’s my 15 favorites from last year), I’ll be counting down the rest of the year and into 2010 with my list. (Best to start it now, because the order keeps changing, and many other songs — “Laura” by Girls, Parov Stelar’s “Blind Alley”, Eulogies’ “Is There Anyone Here?”, Thom Yorke’s “All for the Best”, “Surprise Hotel” by Fool’s Gold, “What About Us?” by Mr. Lif, Atlas Sound’s “Walkabout” — keep threatening to crack the top 15, and I’ll never get this finished.)

Unlike last year, only six of the songs on the list were actually released in 2009. I’m sure no one would object.

We’ll start with what might be called a postscript.

Continue Reading »

Popularity: 3% [?]