max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#994: weezer - say it ain’t so (late night with david letterman, 1995)

with all due respect to the new musem’s nyc 1993: experimental jet set, trash and no star, the show is off by 24 months. ‘95 was always the year. there was something about being 11 years old in 1995: a time of bullies in jnco jeans and heroes in airwalks, when a young new york city was enjoying the second year of the giuliani administration, ira kaplan looked like my babysitter’s boyfriend, matt sharp was still in weezer, nick taranto and i organized an epic baseball card sale in mr. zoffness’ central school class to help fund a trip to our nation’s capital, and rivers cuomo looked like leon neyfakh. magic was in the air. 

#980: yo la tengo - autumn sweater (1997, msbnc)

it just isn’t fall until you’ve put on your favorite mohair cardigan, roasted up some acorns, nestled those footsies into warmed pumpkin, wrapped all your loved ones in grandma’s quilts, and everyone watches john hockenberry introduce hoboken’s finest. this is, without exaggeration, the single most important thing ever aired on msnbc. 

#972: wilco - new madrid (irving plaza, 1997, hbo reverb)

history’s most moving country song about charlatan geology, with a bonus point for lines about new york sung in the city itself, a second for full footage of the irving plaza concert online, a third for getting a nice long look at the late great jay bennett, and, after that, a bonus bonus point for jeff tweedy’s mid-90s shirt on top of a mid-90s shirt.

the past is a foreign country, people wear ill-fitting clothes there. 

#967: gillian welch and david rawlings with ricky skaggs - by the mark (1997, bbc)

ricky skaggs’ red jacket to infinity. where, if you’re ricky skaggs, do you go to get a jacket like that? and why is he so good at singing his high, sad harmonies while playing his sad, high mandolin? even though ricky is ancient and good (he says, “thank you gillian i appreciate you asking me on this song i love this one” almost exactly like tim heidecker) david rawlings and gillian welch, the queen of them all, the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, are better. halfway through this they sound like angels french kissing in the sun.

#959: pavement - shady lane (1997, dir. spike jonze)

you and me and the whole wide beautiful world are better off not knowing that spike jonze is a billionaire direct marketing catalogue business heir from maryland named adam spiegel. don’t even look it up, just forget you read this, it’s better that way. here’s something to distract you: i cried twice during where the wild things are.

#953: ali farka toure with ry cooder - goye kur (new orleans, 1994)

nine things that ry cooder, california’s finest guitar player, said about mali’s holy ali farka toure during the interview for talking timbuktu’s liner notes:

(1) he has a way of looking down into your throat in a funny way, even when he’s drunk, and knowing a few things.

(2) he’ll just come in and reset the molecules in the room… on the level of a faith healer. on the level of a shaman.

(3) the guy is a big, strong, important man… it’s an expression of his tremendous self-confidence, which is miles wide… you have to get to kind of a soft place with a guy like that, with him.

(4) all through the years, thousands, eons worth of years, what they must have known or had going was a sense that the music is all there, and all you have to do is just become a conduit for it.

(5) that stuff is kaleidoscopic, it all works together, but it’s very cozy… to me, it’s like lightnin’ hopkins backwards.

(6) i’d like to take bootsy collins and some other people and go to africa and see what the fuck’s going on.

(7) he rolls around like a sailor, he rolls, it’s real good… i’m sure they stay up all night over there.

(8) so he says, “wait a minute.” he’s stopped. he’s always speaking french. “where’s the ocean?” i said, “it’s about two blocks.” boy, he put the fiddle down and wouldn’t touch it. i said, “what’s the matter?” he said, “there’s a lot of spirit world in the ocean, and if they hear this and misunderstand, the ocean will come up and drown us right quick.” so i’m not going to argue with that. he’s not making a big thing of it, like “i have seen the vision” and being dramatic. he’s just saying, “no way am i going to play this fiddle two blocks from the ocean – period. don’t ask me to.” “okay.” then we got out in the studio in hollywood, and he began to play a thing and put the fiddle right down. i said, “what’s the matter now?” he said, “there are too many doors in here. the doors are a problem.”

(9) but you know me, i’m just a turnip truck driver from santa monica. i don’t necessarily have any real understanding of this stuff. 

#950: modest mouse - cowboy dan (live, 1997)

you’ll learn five really important lessons from the excellent new lonesome crowded west documentary: the first is that pitchfork media is apparently making very pretty 45-minute films now, the second is that modest mouse’s jeremiah green has the exact same sweet-soft talking voice as joe coscarelli, the third is that isaac brock is now nestled in a wood-paneled living room with terrific book cases, the fourth is that there’s a kind of pacific-northwest art—like kelly reichardt’s wendy and lucy or old modest mouse albums this is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about or building nothing out of something—that paints the region with such hieronymus bosch-levels of agony and degradation and dehumanized solitude that portlandia looks like jingoism by comparison, and the fifth is one you probably knew but may have forgotten, which is that for a band made clinton-administration exurban teen angst music, modest mouse was six times better than they had to be.

#947: blur - on your own (1997)

at what point will cultural anthropologists know enough about mid-90s british pop to be able to tell me whether the on your own video—with damon albarn’s white-fur kangol hat and in-your-face gesticulations for the camera—was a long and cruel satire of jamiroquai or just one of the blurry things blur was into back when blur was blur and making blurry blur?

#944: neil young - pocahontas (1992, wttv chicago)

neil young’s mtv unplugged is for uncultured dilettantes whose alphabetized vhs collections are missing the acoustic concert he gave in a small room for a station called wttv in chicago a year earlier—which is not a joke, because neil young singing about one thousand pelts and aurora borealis in small rooms is not something you should ever find funny.

#940: the fugees - killing me softly (1995)

four out of five scholars of gnostic soulquarian mysticism agree that the increasingly plausibility of d’angelo releasing some form of his more-than-a-decade-in-the-making james river means that the next mid-90s soulful genius to release her more-than-a-decade-in-the-making album will be lauryn hill.

#916: smog - i break horses (1999)

bill callahan writes obituary-bleak songs and sings them, sometimes under the name smog, in the best american baritone since johnny cash’s. it is an insult to describe his music as wooden, but his best songs will remind you of old trees that were here before your family, will last longer, and don’t care about who happens to be around at the moment. except even branches are doomed in smog songs: tired birds fill them up and then blacken skies. 

but what’s terrifying about his music isn’t morose lyrics or even minor chords. it’s the same thing that scares joan didion’s new readers every year: a wise person so disappointed in the most special people and the dearest things. wisdom? doesn’t exist! romance? ha. the cosmos? no, bill callahan has dived into the muck. his widow flirts with the mourners at his funeral. strangers’ living rooms are warmer. his watch is off. he feels you riding on his back. you.

that means you may have heard bonnie “prince” billy’s no more workhorse blues and thought to yourself that under no circumstances could you ever hear an american born as a william but releasing music under an obscure-sounding pseudonym sing a more upsetting equine-themed love song. then you hear i break horses and you weep.

but, reader, don’t worry: sometimes the weather lifts, and today bill callahan released a heaven hep the child cover. rejoice.

#901: wilco (jeff tweedy and jay bennett) - james alley blues (1999, austin)

#895: bob dylan and van morrison - crazy love (1991)

now that seven and a half years have gone by, is it alright to declare that chronicles volume one is one of the best books ever written? “the moon was rising behind the chrysler building, it was late in the day, street lighting coming on, the low rumble of heavy cars inching along in the narrow streets below—sleet tapping against the office window” is the first line of the final chapter. and is there going to be a chronicles volume two and even three or what?