This week I’ll take one of my favorite songs and rant on and on about why it’s so good. (In my best Dazed and Confused quotin’ voice) Sounds stupid, right? It works!This category could alternatively be titled Songs I Wish I’d Written. Songs so well done, dare I say, incendiary, that I’m downright pissed off I didn’t right the fek’in things…

To start with we’ll take a look at my current “Favorite Song Of All Time:” I Hung My Head by the late Johnny Cash.

This song, believe it or not (and you’re not gonna fucking believe this) was actually written by Sting. … Sting! Not the wrestler Sting, not the nWo-planted facsimile, “Sting,” but the singer/songwriter and former Police frontman. So, ironically, we’re starting off this little segment with a cover song. Usually, I’m a big fan of giving credit where credit’s due when it comes to songwriting, and I hate it, HATE IT, when people fawn over a punked-up cover of a song that was great to begin with. But there are exceptions. No one gives a shit about Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, and Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah drives all former versions into near-obselecence.

Johnny Cash’s version of I Hung My Head joins the shallow ranks of covers that are better than the original. Cash’s version is special, because he actually took a bad song and made it sublime. Sting’s version is eminently forgettable: the almost-dance-music is way out of place, and we just can’t take Sting seriously singing this song. Johnny Cash singing it, on the other hand… Well, this sounds like the song he was born to sing. So let’s dive in…

Early one morning
With time to kill
I borrowed Jebb’s rifle
And sat on a hill
I saw a lone rider
Crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him
To practice my aim
My brother’s rifle
Went off in my hand
A shot rang out
Across the land
The horse, he kept running
The rider was dead
I hung my head
I hung my head

I set off running
To wake from the dream
My brother’s rifle
Went into the sheen
I kept on running
Into the south lands
That’s where they found me
My head in my hands

The sheriff he asked me
Why had I run
And then it came to me
Just what I had done
And all for no reason
Just one piece of lead
I hung my head
I hung my head

Here in the court house
The whole town was there
I see the judge
High up in his chair
Explain to the court room
What went through your mind
And we’ll ask the jury
What verdict they find

I felt the power
Of death over life
I orphaned his children
I widowed his wife
I begged their forgiveness
I wish I was dead
I hung my head
I hung my head

I hung my head
I hung my head

Early one morning
With time to kill
I see the gallows
Up on a hill
And out in the distance
A trick of the brain
I see a lone rider
Crossing the plain

And he’d come to fetch me
To see what they’d done
And we’ll ride together
To kingdom come
I prayed for god’s mercy
For soon I`ll be dead
I hung my head
I hung my head

I hung my head
I hung my head

Let’s start with those gorgeous opening verses. This is pure, unadulterated folk. These two verses do nothing but tell a story. Nothing but recount a series of events; you could read them in the newspaper. No feeling, no inflection in Cash’s voice. The 1/3 rhyme-scheme is simple, but that’s exactly what this song demands. These two verses set a precedent: every rhyme is a “perfect” rhyme; no “girl” rhymed with “world” in this song. Simple, deliberate, powerful. We’re going to sit down and hear a story, and Johnny Cash is going to tell it at his own pace.

The second line of this song (With time to kill) is one of the most biting puns (and most subtle foreshadowing) I’ve ever heard in a song. And I usually hate puns!

There are so many details in these opening lines that only jump out at you after repeated listens. For one, the narrator borrows his brother Jebb’s rifle; this soon-to-be killer doesn’t even own his own rifle. How pitiful and ironic.

My brother’s rifle
Went off in my hand
A shot rang out
Across the land
The horse, he kept running
The rider was dead

The imagery in the above lines is amazing. Russian film director Eisenstein was obsessed with the Japanese culture. He believed that every aspect of their culture, from the emotion-masks of their theater, to their Japanese character writing set were indicative of film editing. Look at the lines above: thy’re more cinematic than most films. My brother’s rifle/Went off in my had: that’s shot one, a Close Up of the gun going off. Shot two: A shot rang out/Across the land. Super Wide shot of the green open plains; flock of birds explodes into the air at the crack of the gun. You can just make out the tiny figure of the rider on his horse in the distance, but he’s too far away to tell what happened. Shot three: The horse, he kept running/The rider was dead. The final shot is a medium of the horse, running riderless across the plains. That’s all we need to know. Cut back to our narrator, who can’t believe what he’s done. Filmmaking via song; the lyrics paint a singular and incredibly vivid picture of events in one’s mind.

I love the way the reversal of the usual “life” and “death” to death over life catches the listener off guard, but then rails us back in by rhyming it with possibly the most devastating line ever written: I orphaned his children/I widowed his wife. I love how, like all great storytelling, at the end we’re right back where we started, but for one significant change…

Moving away from the minute details of the lyrics, the reason I’m really so taken with this song is that it is the only piece of art, in any medium, that has ever convincingly portrayed the inner nails-on-the-chalkboard-scratching that is real guilt. This is a subject I’m marginally obsessed with: I’ve made films about it. Expressing guilt through artistic means accurately is a task I had thought near-impossible before I heard this song. I Hung My Head does it effortlessly. It perfectly walks along the fine line between representing the way the narrator is feeling through his actions and oblique imagery, and tentatively letting us get “inside” his head for a moment or two. Never too much of one or the other. The carefully chosen lines tell a story (and they never for a moment stop telling a story) in such a way that alerts us precisely of what the narrator is going through.

The one and only fault I find with this song comes from the narrator rhyming “dead” with “head” three times. I wish he could of gone without repeating already used lines. But hey, even Dylan falls into that trap quite often.

Otherwise, this song is perfection. Perfect length. Perfect musical arrangement (by none other than Rick Rubin); the guitar would not have been enough. Rubin inserts just the right amount of strings to create a ghostly atmosphere (listen for the For What It’s Worth string rip-off towards the end of the song).

All in all, my favorite song ever.

So, it’s (nearly) official: the long-awaited iPhone is coming out Q1 2007. We know next to nothing about it, just that the same company that builds the iPod is right now busy churning out millions of the little buggers.

People seem to have a lot of hope for the iPhone; they foresee a revolution in cell phone technology on par with the iPod– or some just want a PDA that can actually sync with their damn Mac. But what features are people expecting, exactly?

The most seemingly obvious feature, music and iTunes syncing/sales isn’t a sure thing as the iPhone would surely cannibalize iPod sales. But, personally, I think we’ll certainly see a 4-Gig flash card in the little bugger, making it level with the Nano. I think Apple will skip video for the first generation, and maybe forever: make the iPod (with its giant hard drive) the default Apple video device.

What else? It’s already been rumored that the phone(s) will have slick Instant Messaging implementation, which would have it compete with the Sidekick and its ilk. Web browser, contact book w/ pics and all the standard PDA do-dads are to be expected. I’m not sure if Jobs would sign off on a mini QWERTY keyboard; he’s not one for compromise, and the thumb-cramping plastic keys are certainly a compromise. This then is one glaring area where Apple could make vast improvements: it would be very cool to see the iPhone ship with a functional built-in lasar keyboard projector, though not very likely.

People have been speculating on a built-in iSight camera for video chat; now that would be cool.

Adding in new technological wowers like video chat, iPod capabilities, and some Apple-chic design is probably enough to sell a whole mess of iPhones. But I wouldn’t necessarily be very happy with such a device. As stated before, I’d rather see Apple tackle and creatively solve common phone problems (like typing) than add on superfluous features for technology writers to gush about.

As a Blackberry user, one big smart phone problem I think Apple could hit a homerun with is web-browsing.

Using the web with a PDA is a chore at the best of times. It’s slow. Moving around sites is clunky. You have to turn images off to achieve sane loading times, making navigation on many sites near-impossible. Even on mobile-ready sites like CNN.com, I have to scroll through 4 or 5 screens of side navigation links (which, of course, don’t fit on the side of my tiny screen and so are listed vertically) to get to the story I wish to read.

The tactic of phone designers thus far seems to be: get web designers to design for mobile standards. But we’re a decade into the game now and I’m ready to state that’s never, never going to happen.

But, luckily for phone designers, a solution has fallen into their lap. We very rarely visit websites anymore: instead, via RSS, we bring the information on websites to us.

The fact that my Blackberry doesn’t ship with an RSS feed reader is appalling. It should be constantly retrieving the FULL TEXT of blogs I subscribe to and storing the stories on the device for a few days.

I think an iPhone could do one better: Widgets. Imagine if the iPhone is capable of running the now-vast library of user-created Apple Widgets? No more scrolling around websites on a tiny screen, no more clicking through links and waiting on load times. Instead, on your iPhone’s “Dashboard Screen,” simply click on your ESPN Scoreboard widget and have all of the scores display via beautiful graphics perfectly fitted to your little screen. Instead of going to different sites to gather information, the information is brought to a widget you download once and formatted perfectly. CNN headlines, Netflix rental queues, and on and on. I think Widgets for the iPhone could be its most revolutionary feature of all.

One last note. With the ascendancy of YouTube, an iPhone that could play internet Flash video would be the ultimate waiting-in-line time killer…