My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #440-431

It's Monday once again, time for me to list the next ten songs, in ascending order, from my personal all-time top 500 list.  Here they are...

440 AROUND THE WORLD...the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis and his old friend, bass guitarist Michael "Flea" Balzary, to me have always seemed like a couple of jerks, especially the latter who used to be a lowlife high school bully... a category of subhuman that I have little tolerance for.  Still, after filtering out my personal animosity I have to admit that this is a superb rock n' roll band that has done a masterful job over the years fusing different musical styles. In Around the World, from 1998, we get a mixture of rap, ballad, and hard rock that works well...and I dug their video, too: they are excellent showmen as well as accomplished musical artists...

439 THE CRUNGE...Led Zeppelin
A few years ago I ranked Led Zeppelin's songs from top to bottom on this blog and a dear old friend from high school strongly objected to The Crunge being so high on it.  I answered that it was a tribute to James Brown, the late "Godfather of Soul"...and a worthy one in my estimation, with Robert Plant delivering one of his best singing performances.  It's from their 1973 Houses of the Holy, one of my favorite rock albums ever. My only problem with this song was its confused ending about finding "the bridge", which really wasn't all that funny as it was intended to be...

438 DOG DAYS ARE OVER...Florence and the Machine
Although their original version of this song came out in 2010, I didn't hear it until 2014 after my local alternative radio station, WHHZ/100.5 "The Buzz" returned to actually playing alternative rock...enough of Nickelback, thank you.  Besides Florence's powerful singing, the overwhelmingly optimistic mood of this song...celebrating the end of a personal storm and a return to better times...is infectious.  Give it a listen and see if it doesn't raise your spirits...

437 NOBODY TOLD ME...John Lennon
Nobody Told Me came out as a singles release from John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono's Milk and Honey album more than three years after his murder in December, 1980...it was recorded shortly before that tragic event.  I've since read that Lennon wrote it for Ringo Starr but he didn't use it after his former Beatles bandmate's death...Yoko completed work on John's 1980 recording and it was released early in '84 along with a video showing compelling clips of John and Yoko. That's the backstory to this song, but I liked it for both its catchy music and the lyrics, displaying Lennon's often perplexed and witty take on what was going on in the world around him...as he sang, "strange days indeed, most peculiar, Mama"...

436 ONLY IN YOUR HEART...America
I associate this especially good song from the band America with going through an introspective and uncertain period in my life late during my junior year in high school in May, 1973.  Watergate was going full force with the televised Senate Judiciary hearings chaired by Sam Ervin, it looked as if we had given up on ever going back to the moon (which turned out to be true), and I had my own issues to deal with at the time...and here comes yet another song that transports me back to a special time and place whenever I hear it.  It's a sweet song of an offered hand of compassion to someone with their own seemingly insurmountable problems...

435 MY MATHEMATICAL MIND...Spoon
The title of this deep track from Texas alternative band Spoon's 2005 Gimme Fiction album intrigued me enough, and then I listened to this jazzy singular song with lyrics of someone who has caught on to all the self-deception and manipulation going on from people around him and has something to say about what he's going to do about it.  Pretty blunt words without adornment...like he has a "mathematical mind" that is "gonna see mistakes" and no longer sugarcoat life.  Are any of us that strong? An interesting message and great music...

434 GIVE IT TO ME...the J. Geils Band
A lengthy song with two vastly different-sounding sections, it's another one that hit the airwaves...mainly on album rock radio...in the spring of 1973.  Part 1, as singer Peter Wolf cajoles for some romance, has a catchy reggae sound while Part 2 springs into a long, savage instrumental jam session.  Back in '73 I would only listen to the singing/reggae part, but now I prefer the insanity at the end...I'm not sure what that says about me.  To me this was the J. Geils Band's best song, years before they achieved pop celebrity with hits like Centerfold and Freeze Frame...

433 SLEDGEHAMMER...Peter Gabriel
This is one of those songs that defy my ability to explain exactly why I like it.  Originally I would always hear it while watching the extraordinary 1986 video with Gabriel in claymation settings and photographic trickery...that scene at the end with the dancing chicken carcasses forever changed how I view grocery shopping in the meat department.  The song stands well on its own merits, though...I simply like Peter Gabriel's vocal style and the song's generally happy, bouncy...and funny...ambiance.  And yet I can't get my mind away from that video, one of the best of all time...

432 SUFFER WELL...Depeche Mode
I can't say I've liked everything this often dreary-sounding band from England has produced over the decades, but some of their stuff is pretty fantastic.  They've been around nearly forty years now, although here in the United States few know of them other than minor 1980s hit singles like People are People and Enjoy the Silence...they are much more popular across the Atlantic.  Suffer Well was played often on my local alternative radio station 100.5/"The Buzz" in 2005-06, and I think it's one of this band's better songs.  David Gahan is the morose singer and Martin Gore composes most of their music...although he didn't with this one.  Expect to see more from Depeche Mode on this list...

431 CAPTAIN JACK...Billy Joel
Captain Jack was Billy Joel's breakthrough song that first catapulted him to radio play and ultimate fame after his debut album Cold Spring Harbor was mixed wrong and came out as a disaster...his second LP, Piano Man, was a blockbuster hit in 1974...I didn't hear the entire album, including Captain Jack as the closing track, until four years later, though.  Joel speaks through most of the song to an unnamed spoiled young man whose narcissism, hedonism and immaturity obviously disgust him as he bluntly lays out what he has let his life degenerate into...the line "well, you're 21 and still your mother makes your bed, and that's too long" pretty much says it all.  This song is anti-drugs (although Joel himself partook of them) and an "in-your-face" plea for people to stand up and take responsibility for their own lives...about as intense as it gets...

Next week: #430-421...