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.

Welcome To Culture Fridays post #1. For now on, I’m going to try to put up a cultural piece (article on music, movie review, etc.) every Friday.

First off: Joe Peicott’s Favorite 5 Albums of All Time!

Here’s how my Top 5 methodology works: These would be the only discs I’d be able to have with me on a desert island. No others. What 5 albums would I trust to keep me company forever?

These aren’t what I consider “the greatest” Albums of all time, these are the 5 albums I’d want to have with me for all time (i.e., I feel no need to prove my street cred by filling this list with Dylan, Zepplin, and Pink Floyd).

5. The Streets - Original Pirate Material

Whenever I hear people spoutin’ off about how Eminem is/was the new Dylan, I cringe. Dylan was the voice of a generation. He tapped into a youth undercurrent of rebelliousness and anger and spoke for those who weren’t articulate enough to speak for themselves (then again, is as articulate/clever as Dylan?). Who, tell me, did Eminem speak for? Wife killin’, drug ingesting, wrist slittin’ assholes? Eminem tells stories in a clever way; but that’s all. It was, in fact, another white boy rapper who quietly became the over-looked voice of a generation; a British generation, perhaps, but none the less…

I’m not fluent enough in Hip Hop to understand why the hardcore American Hip Hop fans seem to dismiss Mike Skinner. His abrasive Garage beats take some getting used to, I’ll admit, but they’re much more interesting than anything I’ve heard coming out of American Hip Hop recently. He brings to the Hip Hop table a whole new verbiage, cockney slang, that is immensely refreshing, if perhaps only for the fact that it’s new. Most importantly, his stories are overflowing with a tremendous sense of uncertainty. Uncertainty about his actions, about his place, about his friends, about his society. Mike Skinner asks QUESTIONS. Modern American Hip Hop long ago dropped any pretense of being a simple window into black urban life: it now overtly celebrates the ghetto fabulous lifestyle. I think an important thing to remember is that timing is everything in culture; a throwback album that might have been dismissed as more-of-the-same 15 years ago comes out tomorrow and is hailed as brilliant retro. The Streets came on the scene to tell a story and ponder that story’s repercussions, while the rest of the rap world celebrated grills and Cadillac’s

4. Rancid – And Out Came The Wolves

Speaking of Cadillac’s, one has only to watch a football game this weekend to view a Cadillac commercial in which Iggy Pop and the Teddybears sing, “Cause I’m a punk rocker, yes I am.” Wow, who knew Cadillac was punk? Well, I did, because these days, everyone wants to be punk. Punk was always cool, but now it’s acceptable. So acceptable that a company known for selling cars to rich old men is claiming to be punk. And it’s all Rancid’s fault.

The castration of punk rock took hold in the early 1990’s, when Green Day and their ilk broke through with their catchy pop-punk sing-a-longs. True punk fans didn’t worry, “Let the little kids have their punk-lite, we’ll keep screamin’ about anarchy and cultural destruction… And skippin’ our showers!” But oh, what a sad, sad day for real punk rockers when the reggae-tinged ska band Operation Ivy, one of the few bright spots in the 80’s American punk scene, disbanded, reformed as Rancid (well, Armstrong and Freeman formed did) , and started putting out, gulp… Alternative rock records. Was Rancid punk? Were they pop? It didn’t matter. They were real punk rockers sellin’ out and playing to the masses. Soon thereafter punk stopped being a movement and became a brand. And Out Came The Wolves isn’t a particularly important album in the history of music, but it is an important album for fans of punk rock. A blatant sellout album made all the more aggravating by the fact that, shit, it’s really, really good. It was the album no punk rocker would admit to listening to, but that they all had in their collection. The end or the turning point? Punk or pop? Who knows. But it’s good music.

3. The Beatles – The Beatles (aka The White Album)

Far, far, far from a “perfect album.” The White Album has 4 or 5 songs that I promise you would rather pull your ears off than listen to. “Wild Honey Pie?!” “Piggies?!” Or, God forbid, “Revolution 9?!!!” Horrible, horrible, horrible songs. I defy you to name anyone who’s listened to “Revolution 9” after the first time they gave it the obligatory, “What the fuck is going on with this” listen.

But this is a Jackson Pollock painting of an album. Just throw songs against the wall and see what sticks. Some are good. Some are bad. Who says an album has to have a “sound?” This one’s got my favorite Beatles song ever, “Long, Long, Long,” and another George Harrison masterpiece, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” “Helter Skelter” is out of control, “Rocky Racoon” is fun… They take more chances on this album than you can shake a stick at, and most of them work. The Beatles at their most disjointed, jokey, and experimental.

2. Weezer – Weezer (aka The Blue Album)

My favorite album of all time, and by far the one I’ve listened through most. Flashback! Early 1990’s, circa 6th-grade. Lil’ Joey likes music and all… But, in the height of the grunge era, it’s all a bit, erm, depressing. Lil’ Joey figures that’s what music is all about: you listen to crunchy guitars, look at craggly old guys making faces and women pulling live fish out of their bellies in music videos, and you feel bad. Oh, the grunge era… But then, like a ray of sunshine bursting through a Seattle rain cloud, Weezer hits the scene with “The Sweater Song.” This wasn’t depressing. This wasn’t disgusting. This had… A melody?! Music was fun again, kids, and the 6th-grade Joey eats it up. Time moves slow in Middle School, and by 7th-grade it seemed I had forgotten all about Weezer, that band I liked from forever ago. It wasn’t until my freshman year of High School that I dug up the ol’ Blue Album again. Weezer had broken up, their second CD had disappointing sales. I popped the disc in and high school Peicott was blown the fuck away. This wasn’t just joke songs about sweaters and name checking dead rock stars. This was AMAZING ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC. Compared to the bullshit Korn, Limp Bizkit and Boy Bands crowding the marketplace at the time, Weezer’s Blue Album blew me away again, this time as a new kind of fresh air: really good music amongst piles of shit.

Like seemingly one out of every three guys of my generation, I rediscovered Weezer in High School and became obsessed. Rocked out drunk to the Blue Album, brooded over Pinkerton, downloaded the B-Sides (Suzannnnne) on the newly released Napster. I am always struck when I here a Blue Album song these days by how fucking good it is. There are many bands, more bands than I care to mention, who I rocked out to in High School, only to realize when giving them a listen a few years later that they were utter shit. Weezer is good music. The Blue Album is their most complete and kick ass work.

1. Beach Boys – Pet Sounds

The Blue Album is my favorite album, but if you told me I could only hear one album for the rest of my life, this would be it. How the hell this piece of pure beauty was created on a1960’s 4-track is beyond me, but, Jesus, it’s amazing.

You know, “Gone Only Knows” has been so overused in movies and TV that it’s nearly lost all meaning. I think it’s only when you listen to it in the context of Pet Sounds, let yourself get drawn into Wilson’s soundscape and forget the world around you, that you can be hit by this, as Paul McCartney calls it, greatest of all songs, and, to be a bit more vulgar than Sir Paul, just go “Holy Shit! That is a perfect song!”

Almost every song on Pet Sounds evokes a similar reaction from me. The song lyrics, co-written by Wilson and an advertising man, are disarmingly simple, all the more affecting for their child-like innocence.

This is a true album. The most beautiful CD on any rack, in any collection, ever made. Perfection.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!