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This week, Flak's summer mixtape has a half-remembered tune in its head. Jason Henn — googler extraordinaire — is on it.

Posted: Sept 1st, 2008

September's upon us and summer jams like Rihanna's "Disturbia" and The Jonas Brothers' "Burnin' Up" are cooling off in time with the weather. But where do hits go once they're pushed out of heavy rotation? YouTube? Yes. Your most ironic friend's iTunes playlist? Word 'em up. But, like traumatic episodes from childhood, the best summer jams hide away in the deepest recesses of our memory, only to reemerge late at night during aimless googling. This is how I was re-introduced to "Steal My Sunshine," the 1999 hit by Marc and Sharon Costanzo, also vaguely remembered as Toronto-based one-hit wonder Len.

There's the chorus which states the song's title across an ass-simple two pitches. There's also a really smart sample of the instrumental break from The Andrea True Connection's pornographic-disco classic "More, More, More." The high school poetry class lyrics are pretty easily ignored if you just latch onto this sample and wait for the chorus's release.

In conversation, simply announcing the title evokes Len's hit. Once recognized, someone within earshot inevitably sings it back in an exaggerated Sharon-esque voice. And, as if Jimmy Fallon walked through the door sporting Bed Head brand hair gel, a stench of nostalgia for the late '90s wafts through the room.

Between views, I questioned why I was suddenly so powerless against this song and not the others I dug up during my YouTube binge. What began as a search for a song worse than Smash Mouth's "All Star" turned into an impassioned search for truth. Like Di Vinci hovering over a cadaver, I watched the video approximately 3-5 times a day for more than a week. It was as though the hook had burrowed into my mind, gestated for about ten years, and then suddenly broken out.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: August 18th, 2008

A confession: before the release of the soon-to-be-inescapable soundtrack to The Big Chill in 1983, I was only dimly aware of the Motown Sound and the acts who produced it. The only version of "I Heard It through the Grapevine" I knew was by Credence Clearwater Revival, and I would have told you that "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" was a Rolling Stones original. In my defense, the Indianapolis of my youth was hardly a garden of racial integration (my contemporaries south of 38th Street were likely equally ignorant of the Southern Fried Rock and heavy metal that dominated my part of the dial), and as Canadian socialist academics, my parents' tastes ran more toward folk, classical and the soundtrack to Godspell.

As a result, the 60's sounds that ruled my musical world had been recorded not a few hours north in Detroit, but across the sea in London, the Valhalla of white rock. Fully oblivious to their influences in American "race music," I worshipped the Beatles (see also: "Little Richard, Paul McCartney's imitation of"), the Stones (named for a Muddy Waters cut), the Who ("Maximum R&B;"), the Yardbirds (the hardest-working bluesmen ever to emerge from Kingston Art School) ... and of course, The Kinks.

Appearing on 1965's Kinda Kinks, the band's uneven third UK album, their cover of "Dancing in the Street" is unlikely to have made anyone forget the Martha and the Vandellas original; at the time, its main reasons to exist would have been the relative scarcity and expense of US imports in British record stores and the band's availability to play it live for local audiences. Over time, The Kinks' legacy would be rooted more in Dave Davies' proto-metal guitar distortion ("You Really Got Me"), Ray Davies' quirky parochial songwriting (The Village Green Preservation Society) and the band's sheer longevity against all manner of adversity (a 4-year ban from touring in the US, lethal sibling rivalry between the Davies brothers, revolving-door lineups, myriad problems with drugs and wives). There are few reasons to return to this slight chestnut from their formative years.

Except for the song itself. Unlike many of its British Invasion peers, the Kinks resisted the kind of too-literal tribute that strains credibility; few things are as excruciating as a well-fed white English kid trying to channel authentic Delta blues, much less a Motown girl group. Instead, they wisely trust the song's ability to survive translation into their native idiom. All the elements are here — the chugging bass-driven rhythm, the harmonizing "oohs" and "ahs" in the backing track, the "we-ell" that launches the bridge; more importantly, the song retains the lightness and joy of spirit that makes a spontaneous nationwide street party not only plausible, but inevitable.

At the same time, Ray Davies makes the song his own — if just for the moment — with the characteristic wry subtlety that would later imbue classics of his own like "Lola" and "Waterloo Sunset"; when he sings "Don't forget the Motor City," he sounds a bit like your mum reminding you to keep a close eye on your little brother at the seaside. Neither activists nor their persecutors would ever have interpreted this version as a civil rights anthem, as happened with Martha's. In The Kinks' hands, the song could be taken only as they intended: a call for harmless middle-class kids the world over to take to the streets and do that white-boy shuffle. It worked for me on those hot Hoosier days so many summers ago, and my subsequent discovery and love of the original did nothing to lessen its appeal. There's room for both Martha Reeves and Ray Davies at this party; if they can connect across such vast distances and differences, maybe we really can all get along after all.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: August 11th, 2008

In Signifying Rappers — a funny little 1990 book, now out of print, by Mark Costello and a then-less-infamous David Foster Wallace — the authors refer briefly to "pavlovs," their neologism for "everything we come to associate with music — and can re-experience in listening again — that isn't 'in' the music." The term is apt: there's definitely something bell-and-saliva about musical memories, something gradually yet solidly hardwired in. Everybody over the age of about ten has a few of them, the "summer jam" being a staple. What's weird — at once disconcerting and, in some strange sense, reassuring — is when your own personal pavlovs turn out to be shared; turn out not in fact to be pavlovs at all, but to have their subtle roots in the songs themselves. Rather than acting simply as a passive receptacle for arbitrary memories, the music interfaces with them, interpenetrates them.

My quintessential summer jam is the second track on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92. A nine-minute swim in indulgent, aquatic reverb, backed by rhythm so natural that its beat-breaks feel like cold showers, "Tha" is both compulsively danceable and completely chilled. In contrast to album-opener 'Xtal' — a five-minute celebration of the synthesized hi-hat — its beats are resolutely non-imitative, and the same goes for its classic analogue synth line, slurred with sumptuous legato. My pavlov with respect to "Tha" is an amalgam of the 80-mile teenage train journey from Ipswich, my provincial village's nearest town, to London, and the considerably shorter corollary journey from the stopped train, down the platform, to the doors of Liverpool Street Station.

Never having been a gastrically-stable reader by road or by rail, I used to spend the first of these journeys — about two hours, end to end — listening to electronic music and staring out of the window. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the IPS-LST landscape gets steadily more interesting as the journey progresses, the culminating point being a side-on view of Canary Wharf (cf. 28 Weeks Later), the tripartite skyscraper development that, until the 21st century, has been London's only real attempt at a Manhattan-style skyline. Prior to this climax, the world on the other side of the perspex is either heavily, industrially agricultural or dully suburban. In the grand scheme of things, Liverpool Street isn't a particularly spectacular train station, either. To the provincial English 15-year-old, though, its great iron pillars and clicking overhead "flapper board" are as good as anything that TV's Grand Central has to offer, and the commuter-cool walk from the train — down the packed platform, through the sunny concourse and out into heart of the Square Mile — really is a journey in itself.

Search for the track on YouTube, and this is the third result: a simple cab-view video of the train journey from King's Cross to Edinburgh. "The first time I heard this song my brain conjured up images of travelling on the train in the '80s," writes the most recent commenter. "Strange how the brain works really as I was obviously not the only one." An earlier comment confirms the link: "I always connected this song to trains, or a train station, anyway."

My surprise at finding the video wore off quickly. As one commenter notes, it's all there in the track itself, from the relentless beat of wheels on sleepers to the sampled fragments of speech: "the noises resemble those of a train station hall ... or those of the announcements made there." And, yet, finding the track's key doesn't ruin the effect. What it does is personally re-energize it for the individual listener, opening it up to fresh appraisal with memory and music simultaneously in mind. In the words of CaptainWombat, "I was absolutely mesmerised — trains and 'Tha,' what a fucking good connection."

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: August 4th, 2008

Third grade ended in complete humiliation. It was some last-day-of-school time-killing game which outed my favorite radio station. Somehow I had managed to nearly complete the year without learning what the kids were listening to, and until the moment the call letters left my lips I was not aware that wasn't it. As I walked out between the ginkgo trees to my bus that day in June, tail firmly tucked between corduroy knickers, I decided it was time to be cool — all-American sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll cool. Or rock 'n' roll at least; I was nine, after all, and Quaker.

My mentor took the form of an 8-year-old named Maggie. Even smaller and blonder than myself, she wore these traits with sass where I wore them with sweetness. In between swimming lessons at the park and cartoons on the couch, Maggie introduced me to the cool I sought, a couple blocks safely from my parents' ever-watchful eyes.

Lounging in the bed of Maggie's dad's beat up white pickup, "smoking" candy cigarettes, I heard the anthem for the new me. A couple Midwestern teens were struggling through the repression of their small town and longing for release on the radio waves, blazing a rock 'n' roll trail I now knew in my preadolescent bones. Our chains were not the same, but being a prisoner to the repressively familiar was our shared plight. This was rock'n'roll, my newfound savior, and John Cougar (né Mellencamp) was its prophet.

I rhapsodized in the corn-fed lushness "Jack and Diane" evoked. Had my family never left the small Kansas town in which I was born and moved to Portland, Oregon, this could very well have been me. I might have been someone's backseat debutante; I might have eaten chili dogs at the Taste-E-Freeze; I might have hankered for the city. I sucked on my candy cigarette with these visions swirling in its imaginary smoke and fell in love — in love with rock music, rebellion and an America I knew and to which I now felt I belonged.

For whatever reason, summer flings are confined to their season. I never hung out with Maggie once school started; I returned to my public school, she to her Catholic. Come September, I walked back through the ginkgo trees and up the steps to fourth grade feeling, like, totally awesome playing my best Valley Girl. Because that was cool. And cool is what I was. Or at least I was doing the best that I could.

Music

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Chandra Watson

This week, while our able interns flip the tape over to side two, we talk summer music with one-half of The Watson Twins.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: July 21st, 2008

There are many great summer songs. Some point to the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City." Heavy rockers may cite Alice Cooper's "School's Out." Still, others sing the praises of "Summer of '69," Bryan Adams's love ballad about the Tate-LaBianca murders. As for me, I always think back to the summer of '89; the season of the Tiananmen Square protests and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. But that summer there was one group who caught my attention like never before; a group who took on a nation; a group whose love songs touched a generation. That group was 2 Live Crew.

See, the summers of my pre-teen and teen years were spent with a friend — platonic, of course — named Robbie. He would come up to Massachusetts every summer from Florida. Each year we would hang out, play RBI Baseball on Nintendo, watch filthy movies on cable late into the night. Whatever.

In years past, Robbie had proven to have questionable tastes in music. Not that my summer of '88 playlist of Cinderella, Europe and Britny Fox wasn't itself atrocious, but Robbie, a full two years older than I, was somehow really into Rick Astley and Johnny Hates Jazz: yes, the deep-voiced, marionette-looking redhead (to be "Rickrolled," click here) and the one-hit wonder who gave us "Shattered Dreams." Come the summer of '89 it was more hideous hair bands for yours truly — White Lion, Mr. Big and Danger Danger — and whatever it was Robbie was listening to at the time.

Earlier that year, 2 Live Crew released their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, along with the single "Me So Horny." What followed was an embarrassing, Lenny Bruce-like witch hunt about censorship and obscenity. Needless to say, that record touched two young boys in a very special way, in a way that nothing else could — until Andrew "Dice" Clay's comedy double album The Day the Laughter Died came out a year later. But with songs as delightful and catchy as "Put Her in the Buck," "Dick Almighty" and "The Fuck Shop," how could this not have been the album Robbie and I would listen throughout the summer?

With this controversial release, the group had far outdone their previous album, Move Somethin', and was battling the likes of Public Enemy, N.W.A., and even the Fat Boys (with their past summer hits, "Wipeout" and "The Twist") to become my favorite hip-hop group, and Robbie's as well. As Nasty As They Want to Be brought me closer to my best friend.

Long story tragically short, Robbie ended up being killed by a drunk driver the night of the Super Bowl in 1992. That was the day the laughter, and the music, died. And not just 2 Live Crew, but Astley and Johnny Hates Jazz as well. They all just dropped off the face of the earth. But, when I think of summer music today, I think of Robbie. And then I think of 2 Live Crew, and I sing, whether I'm in the shower, at Chuck E. Cheese's or at Sunday Mass with my wife and her family, "Me So Horny." The dirty version.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: July 14th, 2008

Summer has more than a little to do with what the French call le petit mort: the "little death" one's fancy turns to now the days are longer and the nights are warm. Summer is seductive. You wear less by necessity. You go out more, talk to strangers — and they talk back. When the heat clings to you and people begin to mix, it's undeniably intimate. Throw in some deep beats and low rhythm and it feels like a certain kind of invitation.

I first heard "Paper Planes" when a friend played it for me at a party in D.C. Its opening sample — The Clash's enigmatic "Straight To Hell" — went unnoticed by my fellow partygoers. Later, when I listened again, the Clash-M.I.A. link seemed perfect; the Vietnamese refugee in Joe Strummer's lyrics is the prototype for the stateless characters which populate M.I.A.'s world.

Over the course of two albums, this Londoner (of Sri Lankan decent) has offered dozens of variations on what some critical theorists and trend-chasers call "terrorist chic." But on "Paper Planes," M.I.A. pitches her militant chorus, rife with gunshots and cash registers, as satire. It's a great reversal but is destined to be lost on some listeners; when M.I.A. appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman, the sound effects were a little too much for the producers who, without telling their guest, switched the gunshots to unidentifiable popping sounds.

As The Clash sample looms and crackles, the beat rises then shifts as M.I.A. enters with sarcasm, "I fly like paper get high like planes/if you catch me at the border/I've got visas in my name."

There's something about the cockney sneer of the chorus, which gains immensely from the accent. It might be my anglophilia, but changing money to muh-naaay is just right, even if it's merely a slip of the tongue. For the coda, M.I.A. slides in, intoning with the lethal groan we know from her debut, Arular. Third world subversion was rarely this sexy; pop music, seldom so antagonistic. Racism, imperialism and capitalism: all of these must die. As for her listeners? She'd rather kill us softly — le petit mort, indeed.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: July 7th, 2008

On the first day of summer, during a walk through an industrial stretch in my neighborhood, I heard the deceptively blithe Fender Rhodes figure which begins "My Baby's Got ESP." In the weeks since, I've come to know it as The Hook. "One of the things I try to do when writing music," Patrick Adams, who wrote and produced the record, later told me, "is find a repetitive melodic hook which stands up well through a chord progression. I guess that came from my love of Motown records."

The Hook did its job: on a random playlist of nearly 10,000 songs, this one got my attention. With curiosity piqued, I looked at the digital display: ostensibly by Four Below Zero, "My Baby's Got ESP" is more accurately the work of Mr. Adams, who co-founded P&P; Records in Harlem with music executive Peter Brown. P&P;'s activity peaked during the last half of the 1970s, ceasing altogether by the mid-1980s. While dance records from this period are known for leaning on mind-numbing repetition, Adams's compositions hid a structural sophistication built expressly for his asymmetric melodies. The Hook isn't what makes "ESP," but it does compress the full sumptuousness of the song's tune into three chords.

Like many P&P; groups, Four Below Zero existed as a rumor in the disco columns of trade papers Dance Music Report and Record World. They were no more a band than Issac Hayeswas a Black Moses. But their prophecies were no less real in their moment, before disco materialized as "a music phenomenon you could dress up to," to borrow Frank Zappa's sneer.

"At the time, I had 34 people working with me," Mr. Adams recalls. "There were producers, arrangers, singers and writers. On this particular day, drummer John Cooksey and producer Eugene Lemon were in the office. Everyone had such great ideas that the song only took about 20 minutes for the four of us to polish off."

Through the morning's drizzle, my iPod became a movie projector; the Rhodes filled my earbuds with focused heat, the street ahead accepted whatever scene I draped over it. I imagined passing a Harlem studio during the neighborhood's mid-seventies nadir. A courtly Mr. Adams arrives early, opens the studio door for his colleague. They speak with the casual comfort professionals tend to when in the midst of a task: maybe they're discussing the lyric or the latest Thom Bell record. All of this, it seems, in anticipation of The Hook.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: June 30th, 2008

While few can match Sinead O'Connor for soul-scathing earnestness, making her music the soundtrack for your summer is a little like going to the beach with a girlfriend who keeps wanting to talk about the relationship. Love is real, love is deep ... but sometimes you'd trade a lot of substance for just a little more fun.

Excessive credibility has never been a problem for the Dandy Warhols. Beyond the cover-boy looks of silly-named frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor and the frequent commercial use of the band's songs, The Dandys suffer in inevitable comparison to longtime rivals The Brian Jonestown Massacre, whose resident genius Anton Newcombe makes even their best stuff seem lightweight. Fair enough; if you're after intensity, integrity and timelessness, stick with BJM. But when it's 85 and sunny after a week of rain and you've got the top down, it's the Dandys who'll deliver the musical 8-ball you need to get the afternoon started right.

''Everyday Should Be a Holiday'' assembles itself quickly from simple materials: midrange sixteenths, shaker, overdriven Chuck Berry riff, bubbling synth, repetitively droning lead guitar, adenoidal vocals. Aside from a filling-rattling dive into the subsonic depths during the chorus, the next four minutes pass without anything terribly interesting or innovative happening; the song's momentum carries it along with crisp efficiency reminiscent of ''Let's Go'' by The Cars, without the humanizing hand-claps. Yet somehow, this slight pop confection manages to encapsulate the true essence of summer in both music and lyrics, which run in entirety as follows:

Summertime,
If I was getting paid
For getting drunk
And getting laid,

I'd grab a phone
Call you up and say
Quit your job
Cuz I got it made.

Anytime, baby let's go
Everyday should be a holiday.

Super cool,
The Dandys rule, okay!
Got the dough and
I got the raves.
Anytime call me up if you
Got the sun,
Cuz I got the waves.

Anytime, baby let's go
Everyday should be a holiday.

Such single-mindedness (or lack-of-mindedness) makes one wonder why any would-be summer jam would weigh itself down with romantic yearning, rebellion, nostalgia or even specific imagery (not to mention proper syntax ... "Everyday," "Every Day," what's the diff?). ''Cool as Kim Deal,'' another track on The Dandy Warhols Come Down, is no less catchy, but risks distraction: how's Kim getting along these days? What ever happened to her sister Kelly?

You've got all autumn, winter and spring to think thoughts, not to mention rainy days and workdays. There will be plenty of time to ponder the meaning of emo navel-gazing and singer-songwriter confessions and epic flights of imagination spawned by the young and ambitious. For now, just empty your head, fill your ears and let the summer take you where it may.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: June 23rd, 2008

Pleasure derived from pain is the essence of MTV's brand. Like a certain sub-category of sex worker, the cable television network knows this unlikely business strategy taps into an eager market.

These days, the common complaint about the first twenty-four hour music channel is it no longer plays music. Whether that's a bad thing, however, is questionable. The way I remember it, during my introduction to MTV in the late 1980s and early '90s, the majority of the music this spastic monolith played was by bands like Warrant and Winger. The fact their would-be progeny are denied this platform, even if it is by The Hills and Cribs, is perhaps not such a bad thing after all.

But in those days, when music video iconography doubled as cultural signposts (with a first look at Jesus Jones's "Right Here, Right Now," the enormity of the 1989 democratic uprisings finally reached a dumb kid like me), there was one video which justified all the spandex and Aquanet parading the channel's Top 20. Its strange allure was responsible for the summer I spent indoors, aged eight, waiting for it to play again and again. Combining a song by Prince, a video by director John Maybury and the large teary eyes and bare skull of the most bewitching video star in a galaxy of black holes was the first pop music which mattered to me — Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U."

There's a ritual I remember from that summer: rushing home after Little League practice, switching on the tube and sinking at the sight of three varying and meager alternatives to the intense woman from Dublin. If it wasn't some anonymous hair band shaking its scrawny collective ass then it was Tabitha Soren, MTV's News anchor, straddling the rock 'n' journalism line between unhip syntax and disreputable lip gloss. Most often, though, I was greeted on these afternoons by Madonna's "Vogue," the summer's inescapable hit. I sat through all of this and, on occasion, my patience was rewarded with the tear which welled up in Sinéad's eye throughout her video, finally falling with certain precision at the drop of a heart-rending, synth-stringed coda — which was, I learned, the appropriate time in a music video for your emotional walls to crack. Sinéad's plight and the daily effort I made to watch it foretold the relationship I was entering into with MTV, a bond sustained by the occasional glimpse of something as affecting as it was affected; videos like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," U2's "One" and, later, Missy Elliot's "The Rain." It's simple if you add it up: in one summer, for minutes of pleasure, I suffered an entire adolescence's worth of pain.

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Flak's Summer Mixtape

Posted: June 16th, 2008

Summer's a different proposition in Mexico City and all things Mexican are writ large, boldfaced and blink-tagged in the country's capital: a massive, sweltering and glorious cauldron of humanity stretching from horizon to horizon around two volcanoes. It's a metropolis where pigeons choke on the air and plunge from the skies; where at night you can watch the greenish haze of millions of streetlights rise up like a miasma over the volcanoes; where you can have a splendid party in the bed of a pick-up truck and leather-clad buskers wander around playing Rammstein on cheap acoustic guitars from Zacatecas. Mexico City sprawls over countless barrios and subcultures. Though some in this capital are too poor for running water, their streets are rich with footballers, punkers, housewives, hard-eyed students, bureaucrats, beautiful women, hardscrabble cab drivers and tourists panting up the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán.

These are the people of the sun and they make New Yorkers look as mild-mannered and provincial as characters in a Henry James novel. They are called chilangos, a sobriquet as fierce and explosive as ''redneck.'' But a chilango lives by his wits, perhaps more cunning than his counterpart in the provinces and certainly less trustworthy. He skitters on the razor's edge of life and is at once more worldly than the world and more Mexican than nopales y frijoles. In a word, he is a motherfucker. And his smile glitters.

On ''Chilanga Banda,'' the chilango rock band Café Tacuba slap together totally divergent veins of hip-hop, jazz and frat-boy shout-outs. Rubén Albarrán's signature Cheech-esque snarl calls out the carelessness of summer everywhere with no apologies: it's about skin, dope, sun and stupidness. Over the sleepy thrum of Quique Arroyo's electric upright bass, Albarrán spits Caló, the Mexican Cockney slang that bedevils linguists but sounds great in rock songs.

'Pachucos, cholos y chundos
Chinchinflas y malafachas
Acá los chompiras rifan
Y bailan tibiri-tabara
Mejor yo me echo una chela
Y chance enchufo una chava
Chambiando de chafirete
Me sobra chupa y pachanga.
(Gangsters, bangers and dipshits
Wise-asses and hobos
Around here it's the clowns who get ahead
And they dance tibiri-tabara
I'd rather tie on a beer
And maybe plug into a chick
Bustin' my ass as a damn driver
All I need is a drink and a party)

The band from Naucalpan love their ''Gangsters, bangers and dipshits" with all of their being and, in all likelihood, count themselves among them. It's a celebration of heat, of filth, of debauchery and swaggering Mexicanness. Even if it's not always summer in Mexico, the truck parties start to proliferate like mota this time of year.