Five Songs Worth Remembering From 2008

The machinations of the World Wide Web provide a double-edged sword for new music. It can create enormous hype, but it often at the expense of a reduced shelf life. Sometimes the breathless anticipation created online evaporates before said music is actually released. Remember Nas? The prospective title for his album created 8 months of media hysteria, but by time his ruminations on racism came out the Bill O’Reillys and Al Sharptons had moved on to other grievances, and Untitled sold a quiet 187,000 copies in its first week, barely half of what his previous album sold.

Listener amnesia has always been synonymous with music on the pop charts, but today it is also prevalent within the so-called ‘Indie underworld’; a place where fans are purported to have longer attention spans, and where bands like Pavement had careers that flourished over multiple albums in a supportive, nurturing environment. Pavement, however, never had to contend with today’s blogosphere, where something new is needed every week to drool over and discard. Which means that by the time MGMT get around to releasing a follow-up, their flock of ex-Animal Collective fans will likely have moved on to the next ‘best band since Nirvana’.

That being said, here are five songs from 2008 that I feel deserve a better fate:

1. Grizzly Bear - "While You Wait for the Others"

This may be the most perfectly constructed pop song of 2008, which comes as a complete surprise since Grizzly Bear’s last album was a disorganized mess. Or, as critics gushed, "a hypnotic deconstruction of folk-rock". Here, Grizzly Bear channel their creative ambitions into conventional song structure, with reverberated guitars and drums that sound equally reminiscent of both 60s psychedelia and Motown, and vocals that fuse Brian Wilson with Robert Smith from The Cure. The song’s actual hooks transcend these influences, standing apart in their originality. Clearly, Grizzly Bear’s stint as opener for Radiohead earlier this year did not hurt their songwriting instincts, and you can count me among those excited to hear their new album in 2009.

2. Randy Newman - "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country"

The premise of this song casts the piano-playing troubadour as the sole American in a room comprised of the rest of the world, saddled with the burden of explaining and justifying his country’s actions to the audience. The character reasons: 'Now the leaders we have / While they’re the worst that we’ve had / Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen".

From here, he struggles, to great comic effect, to find historical examples of worse leadership, citing Caligula's appointment of a horse as Consul of the Greek Empire, concluding "That’s not a very good example, is it?" He attempts to do better, bringing up Hitler, Stalin, the Spanish Inquisition, and King Leopold of Belgium: "Everyone thinks he’s so great / Well he owned The Congo / He tore it up too / He took the diamonds, he took the gold / He took the silver / Know what he left them with…? / Malaria."

Through historical comparison, Newman is able to put the record of the Bush Administration in proper perspective, legitimizing its futility while at the same time minimizing its apparent wickedness. He concludes that, "respect at this point is pretty much out of the question / But in times like these / We sure could use a friend."

3. Ben Folds - "Way to Normal"

Ben Folds wins for the most original way to combat the Internet leak of unreleased music. During the summer, while his contemporaries were sending in the FBI to arrest bloggers in their homes, Folds and his band quickly wrote and recorded ‘fake’ versions of six tracks from his forthcoming album, Way to Normal . Then he ‘leaked’ them on the Internet as legit cuts. Folds explains that this hoax turned out to be creatively liberating: "The word 'fake' came up when we started doing it and it takes all the responsibility out, you can just be free to write and let it go. I may be on crack, but I think if that was half the real record, it'd be good."

There is no actual title track on the real Way to Normal album, but as Folds reasoned, "if we're writing really bad songs, we got to have a 'Way to Normal' theme song and it has to be slightly, half-assedly political. It's about saving the starving children and how it's not the president's fault."

The song’s recurring refrain calls the listener to action, imploring "Show me the way to normal!", while the closing mantra soberly contends we have a "long way to go". Folds saves one verse for his detractors, and the media pressure he faces: "You can say my music's bullshit / In your uppity review / But if it was you here at this keyboard / With all the people waiting / To hear your next CD / And throw you in the garbage / Or hail your masterpiece".

I’d think he was serious if I didn’t know he was joking.

As Folds surmises: "This is what happens when you don't think. It's awesome."

4. Bob Dylan - "Dignity"

While Ben Folds contemplates the superiority of fake versions of his songs, Bob Dylan remains undecided, after 15 years, on which takes of his real ones he likes best. His 2008 release, Tell Tale Signs contains multiple arrangements of songs already released on prior albums, including "Dignity", which was left off 1989’s Oh Mercy .

Passages from Dylan's memoir "Chronicles", deal with the failed attempts to record "Dignity" with a Cajun band producer Daniel Lanois had assembled: "Once we started trying to capture it, the song seemed to get caught in a stranglehold. All the chugging rhythms began imprisoning the lyrics. Every performance was stealing more energy. Whatever promise Dan had seen in the song was beaten into a bloody mess".

Today, we have the benefit of sifting through Dylan's and Lanois’ competing visions for the song, as Tell Tale Signs contains a solo piano demo of "Dignity", along with the infamous 'Cajun' version. These takes can also be compared against the original Dylan-preferred 'rock take' on Greatest Hits Vol. 3 .

5. Radiohead - "Down Is the New Up"

The only explanation I have for why this song was left off 2007's In Rainbows , is it was too good. Perhaps, it made Thom Yorke uncomfortable, feeling he would be forced to explain the meaning of its lyrics in press interviews. The song’s actual subject is beyond me, but it does paint a world of moral ambivalence; one with ideologies that can be conveniently repackaged to meet the whim of the highest bidder. "Ladies and Gentleman / Without a safety net / I shall now perform a 180 flip-flop / I shall now amputate / I shall now contort", warbles Yorke’s sickly lounge character. He lets those with immutable convictions know: "Your services are no longer required / Your future's bleak / You're so last week".

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Hopefully, 2009 will be a better year for music (I’ve been saying this since 1996), with better times for everyone, and maybe even a soundtrack that outlasts the ever-quickening moment. If you can think of anything else out there from 2008 that I should’ve devoted 200 words to talking about, please let me know.

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