Jude

Years ago, TV Guide had an issue featuring their countdown of the Top 50 television stars of all time. I took great pleasure in memorizing the top of the list and then quizzing people about it. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most people could get most of the top 10 – number 11, as I recall, was Lassie, so I that seemed natural to break the list along species lines. Anyway, most of the top 10 choices were pretty easy and pretty obvious. Lucille Ball. Johnny Carson. Jackie Gleason. Those all came right away. Then, a little more thought and a couple of errant guesses would reveal Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke. A hint about ethnicity brought out Bill Cosby and Oprah and so on. All pretty obvious. But nobody got number four. And the more wrong guesses, the more perplexed the guesser. Finally, I would relent and tell them dramatically that number four on the list of all-time television stars was none other than…James Garner. James Garner? Number four? I mean yeah, he was great on The Rockford Files and he did seem to be in a lot of made for TV films and there were those Polaroid commercials with Anne Murray that everybody was supposed to love. But, come on, number four? I don’t think so.

Nothing fluffs my feathers up faster than somebody’s definitive list of the best films or books or TV shows or bands or whatever of all time. Even though I know it’s absolutely meaningless, I inevitably take great exception to their choices and will randomly accost passersby with my heated arguments about the relative merit of some overlooked genius or the inflated perception of some loser’s so-called talents. It must be insufferable for my friends, but it gives me a perverse pleasure to get so riled up about some idiot’s opinions. So, come Y2K, I was happier than a pig in poop. As they say.

For if the end of the millennium is good for anything at all, it’s a good excuse for everybody to come out with their definitive lists about the state of the arts and culture during the past 100, or 1000, years. I had a rabid orgy of contention when VH1 released their lists of everything from best band of all time (Beatles) and best album of all time (Rubber Soul) to best Danish instrumentalist of all time (Ygnwie Malmstein just barely beating out Victor Borge).

Recently, the Recording Industry of America, together with the National Endowment for the Arts, published a list of the 365 Best Songs of the Century (so you could play one a day for a whole year, I guess). The hubris and absurdity of such a list is breathtaking, and I licked my chops as I dug into it. Number one? Over the Rainbow. Okay. Two? White Christmas. Fine. And I can’t really argue with Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land or Aretha Franklin’s Respect, if you can even really compare the two. But American Pie is the fifth best song of the century? Are you kidding me? That endless, incomprehensible tribute to a plane crash? The irritating Boomer smugness of claiming that music died years before I was even born? And what the hell is a levee, anyway? I hate that song.

Anyway, down the list at number 201 (which you’d get to towards the end of July) is MC Hammer’s dance smash, U Can’t Touch This. I was always perplexed by this track. This was in the early days of widespread phrase sampling, and the laws and norms were still slowly changing, which led to some strange contradictions. When Vanilla Ice built a song around a musical phrase stolen from David Bowie and Queen’s Under Pressure, he was accused of ripping them off and got dragged through the legal and public opinion courts. When MC Hammer lifted Rick James’ supremely funky Superfreak motif and set it down perfectly intact and repeated it to death while saying “can’t touch this” over and over again on top of it, he was heralded as a genius (with a bad haircut and silly pants) and “his” song got on the list of best songs of all time. Meanwhile Superfreak, the song he lifted whole, isn’t even mentioned on the list. I don’t get it.

Although I did hear an interesting argument recently that the samplers didn't get into legal hot water until they started sampling white artists - therefore, Hammer biting James was fine, but Ice snatching Bowie was over the line (which makes some degree of sense, as the first album to really get in trouble for its liberal sampling was De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which samples a number of white artists.

Rick James was a self-proclaimed funk sex god who produced a number of albums that were righteously funky, in all senses of the word. His funk was freaky, like the elastic funk of Parliament over the precision funk machine of James Brown. At the height of his popularity, he once reportedly slipped out of bed post coital, ran over to the keyboard, played a couple of lines, nodded his head, and slipped back in the satin sheets, purring to his sex kitten that he just made another $100,000. He was, as they say, living large. Unfortunately, as his popularity waned, he got carried away with his persona and ended up getting in some trouble for kidnapping and drugging girls for him and his girlfriend to play house with. However it is that history ends up viewing him, he will undoubtedly be remembered for his contribution to the funk canon with one of the best riffs of all time, Superfreak.

Which is the long way around of saying that I really don’t know anything about Jude. He seems to be of that school of postmodern neo pop folk-tinged genre hoppers like Beck, at least on the strength of this song in particular and this album in general – a Christmas gift from Eric. I really like the way this song swerves from smart ass folk to hip shaking white boy funk and back again. And, although he doesn’t reference the song directly when he sings that “Rick James was the original superfreak”, he provides a head-noddingly funky riff that’s just as satisfying. And then it all devolves into a half-tempo jam session complete with wanky guitar solos and falsetto. Get down with your bad self, Jude.

I should also mention that there’s a brilliant cover of Superfreak performed by Big Daddy in a dead-on impersonation of the Everly Brothers, complete with twangy guitar and warbly harmonies. Hearing those gee-whiz voices singing