The Joys of eMusic, Vol. 1

I joined eMusic in June and ever since I've felt like a mullet fancier at a Darryl Worley concert. It's heaven. I thought I'd quickly list a few of the more bizarre masterpieces I've happened on:

David Porter, Victim of the Joke? An Opera
You might could call this album Stax/Volt's answer to What's Going On?--an ambitious concept album released around the same time as Marvin Gaye's masterpiece, by a man who was Isaac Hayes's frequent songwriting partner. It's inward-looking and romantic where Gaye's album is a piece of social critique (except that this distinction is utterly spurious, as Gaye himself makes clear enough when he sings "Father, father, we don't need to escalate" and you know he's speaking to the man who eventually shot him). Porter's album is probably not as "socially significant." It's not as high in cultural relevance or beta-carotene or whatever. But it's aged just as well, if not better. That's a lot to say for an album that has skits, for heaven's sake. We begin with the spirited "If I Give It Up (I Want It Back)," which is just begging for seductive mix-tape usage; he also covers the Beatles' "Help" without embarrassing himself. Then there's "If You Have to Sneak (You Have to Sneak)"--love the use of parentheses in these titles. Then the woman starts cheating on the songs' protagonist (which really shouldn't surprise him, given the immediately preceding title, but this guy's as innocent of self-knowledge as any Saul Bellow hero) and we get the gorgeously, luxuriously lugubrious "I'm Afraid (The Masquerade Is Over)" and "Storm in the Summertime," which are both way too long, and not nearly long enough. At some point he sings that he's so sad he should just dress up as a sad clown and be sad. (It's something like that.) And there he is on the album cover art, dressed up like a sad clown. This album is just as wonderfully surreal as that little vignette implies.

Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice, Rip It Up: The Best Of ...
One reads about Orange Juice (melodic postpunk, Glasgow, same time as Aztec Camera, blah blah blah) but never hears them. I did know one Edwyn Collins song--"Never Met a Girl Like You Before" (think Empire Records, ca. 1994-5)--and it made me not want to download anything here, but the genre's important to me (short-lived melodic post-punk bands), so I caved and went for the five or six Orange Juice songs on here. They fucking rule. Especially "A Sad Lament," which is exactly that, and the title song, "Rip It Up," which is so good that Simon Reynolds chose it for the title of his history of this period (Rip It Up and Start Again).

The Go-Betweens, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
See, the Gobees are on eMusic; that really should be enough to send any sane person there. Especially since the one GB album demonstrably better than this one--16 Lovers Lane--is available too. (16 Lovers isn't my favorite album ever made--that honor belongs to Over the Rhine--but it's certainly in the top ten, and I think it's the finest pop album of the 1980s. Is that endorsement enough?)

The American Song-Poem Anthology
I read about this on Pitchfork years ago and have lusted for it ever since. Do you remember how in the very early 1980s, in the classified ads at the backs of comic books, there would be ads from this company that would promise to set your original words to music? You send 'em your "poems" and a check, and they send you an honest-to-goodness record of studio musicians singing your words. Well, somehow Bar/None Records got ahold of some of these. They will fuck up your brain more than an entire case of Robitussin, and there's no hangover.
A representative sampling:
"Can a government
Be competent?
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Can a government
Be honest?
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Can a government
Be truthful and open--
The thirty-ninth president
He has spoken:
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Jimmy Carter says yes."
(From "Jimmy Carter Says Yes.")
Now why is that not an all-purpose hipster catch phrase, and this album an ironic party favorite on the order of the Langley School Music Project? Search me. Keep in mind, that's not a campaign song. Some poor sap wrote those words down in a moment of Whitmanian effusiveness and then mailed it in for recording, simply to fulfill his own creative prerogatives. And the song comes just after the equally Virgil's-Fourth-Eclogue-idolatrous "Richard Nixon," a clear literary aftereffect of the Republicans' "Southern strategy." (The poet is thankful that Nixon "brings to us his heritage/a thing of priceless worth." He might as well have said "He'll get tough on those damn n****rs.")
This album also includes "I Like Yellow Things," "Rat a Tat Tat, America" (between this and "Nixon" you have an entire genealogy of Repub-rock), "Maker of Smooth Music" (you can just hear one of your more musical street alkies serenading the ladies with this one), "Pinch Me," "Blind Man's Penis," and "I Lost My Girl to an Argentinian Cowboy." Mute inglorious Miltons, every one.