max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#545: sparklehorse - saturday (1998)

the world didn’t need mark linkous’ suicide to know he didn’t mean it when he named his masterpiece it’s a wonderful life. he was the type of person who could write a song called sad and beautiful world that’s exclusively about ugliness. he named his home studio, where this upsettingly good version of saturday was recorded, static king. even when he talks about his guitars in the interview at the end, a surefire fun rockstar topic, the 60-second conversation turns to the smell of old ladies in church and the instrument that camper van beethoven’s singer left for him in a hospital and forgot about. but the music he played on the smelly and forgotten guitars was pretty, which is all anyone can ask. he died at 47.

#541: the roots ft. erykah badu - you got me (woodstock, 1999)

if i ever sit down to write a book about the soulful duets that perpetually blow my top, chapter one will be about ray charles and betty carter (i’ve been trying to listen to baby it’s cold outside as much as possible before it becomes seasonally inappropriate), chapter two will be on otis redding and carla thomas (with careful attention paid to the tramp intro about continental clothes and stetson hats), and chapter three will be about erykah badu and the roots, who are now well into their second decade of playing together exceedingly beautifully.

woodstock ‘99 didn’t deserve to have a song this intense. i wish my middle name were soulquarian, not joseph.

#537 - neil young - dead man theme (1996)

i’m getting a little bit worried about alice in wonderland. i wonder if it’s too late for tim burton to scrap all that cgi and just reuse johnny depp’s performance in jim jarmusch’s mid-90s western dead man? or at the very least avril lavigne’s alice (“when the world’s crashing down/ when i fall and hit the ground/ i will turn myself around/ don’t you try to stop me”) can be replaced by an entire soundtrack of neil young’s noodling.

#525: portishead - wandering star (1994, live on jools holland)

“are you ready and comfortable and lovely?” was not the right question for jools holland to have asked portishead just before they started playing a song that’s explicitly about blackness and darkness, and whose opening line goes, “please could you stay awhile to share my grief.” i wonder if any of the six million people who are going to be listening to portishead’s dummy during tonight’s carnal relations will be listening to the lyrics, which are about the masks monsters wear to feed upon their prey (those are actual words from this very song).

to be fair, jools holland was probably not thinking about portishead at the time he introduced them—i’ve always assumed he spends absolutely every single waking moment of his life regretting that he quit squeeze before they recorded tempted.

#520: glenn gould - bach’s goldberg variations (1981)

did you know that the internet in all its infinite awesomeness now has dreyer’s the passion of joan of arc? it’s a free stream of perfect light, holy shadows, clenched hands, sinning eyes, terrified mouths, arched eyebrows and quivering chins.

the only bad thing is that the silent film has been given a soundtrack recorded in 1994 (it’s called voices of light and you do not want to listen to it). so watch on mute while listening to glenn gould play the goldberg variations just before his death, the only piece of music as heavenly as the movie itself.

or if you’re really brave you can listen to the live soundtrack cat power recorded for the film in 1999 using sad and beautiful songs from her covers record. amen.

#517: stone temple pilots - big empty (mtv unplugged, 1993)

scott weiland was the hyundia elantra of 90s grunge stars, but where would we be without him? no one else can rhyme conversation with conscience laden.

#512: chrissie hynde (with nick cave) - i’ll stand by you (bbc, 1999)

it’s wrong that the 80s gets all the power ballad attention. with no disrespect to every rose has its thorn, it was in the 90s that stephanie seymour walked down axl rose’s aisle for ten and a half minutes while aerosmith outdid all the gems on get a grip with an interstellar slow jam. and then there’s the pretenders’ monumentally under-appreciated i’ll stand by you: this performance includes the velvet underground’s john cale looking on and nick cave slightly messing up key changes, plus there’s a joke about oasis. and god bless chrissie hynde, who came close to starting a band with the clash’s mick jones and marrying the kinks’ ray davies, but could beat both in arm wrestling.

#504: the cranberries - dreams (1994)

it would be good to take a really emotional picture of yourself everyday for one entire decade and then put them all together into a stirring montage set to the cranberries’ dreams. it wouldn’t pack the hilarious punch of this video’s finale (singer dolores o’riodran pouring warm water on a guy buried in mud) but then again nothing does.

#491: bjork - aeroplane (1993)

bjork is strawberry ice cream, and early-90s bjork songs with horns, excellent xylophone solos, bare feet and yellow dresses are neapolitan banana split sundaes with chocolate sprinkles, homemade whipped cream and rainier maraschino cherries served up by swimsuit models in the bells of rahsaan roland kirk’s saxophones.

#484: neil young - harvest moon (1992)

it doesn’t matter that the video takes place somewhere called the mountain house bar & grill, or that it has the plot line and production values of poorly financed soft core pornography (the red shoe diaries debuted in 1992, too!), or even that the drummer is wearing a wig, because harvest moon is just terrifyingly pretty. it sounds like blankets. the harmonies and pedal steel guitar make intervertebral discs spin.

#480: teenage fanclub & de la soul - fallin’ (1994)

the only thing better than the mid-90s action film judgment night, a heroically mediocre collaboration between emilio estévez, cuba gooding jr., jeremy piven and stephen dorff, is de la soul’s genuinely wonderful collaboration with the glasgow band teenage fanclub for the film’s soundtrack. not only does it manage to discreetly sample tom petty, but the second verse rhymes fandango with kangol, which is pretty much all you needed to make satisfying 1994 hip-hop. lil’ wayne should listen to this thrice to make his next weezer collaboration less atrocious.

#476 - emmylou harris - wheels of love (1994)

if you had to spend every minute of every day in a non-unionized underground longwall coal mine, but you had emmylou harris singing to you through a little transistor radio, life would be lovely. hearing her play old love songs with iris dement on harmony and jerry douglas on dobro and two elderly guys on fiddles and someone actually playing the triangle is better than listening to the yankees win the world series, which is pretty good too.