Forgotten Album Track: Atom Tan/The Clash

Possibly my favorite track on the last album by The Clash is Atom Tan.

It's a strange stream-of-consciousness indictment of society in a very typical Clash fashion. While Combat Rock is best known for Should I Stay or Should I Go? and Rock the Casbah - for good reason - and possibly should be better known for Know Your Rights, it's Atom Tan that I queued up the moment I finally got this again on CD. It is, hands down, my favorite track off the album.



Now you've caught an even atom tan.

Bjork, MoMA, and Pagan Poetry

I've been a very big fan of Bjork, as I said before, ever since I saw her on 120 Minutes and saw "It's Oh So Quiet."

Lots of people have been telling me about the show about her at MoMA.

I'm planning to go, although it sounds like it's very poorly executed - this review is typical:


'Björk' at MoMA Is a Beautiful, Ill-Conceived Disaster

Short version: The show doesn't really do her justice.

Which is too bad, because she's a singular artist. Unique in the sense of having no one to really compare her to.

Here is one of my favorite songs of hers, from Verspertine - the song "Pagan Poetry." Kind of a sad counterpoint given that her current album is about breaking up with the person who inspired this song. But the song is powerful, all the more so for the ephemeral nature of love.

The song is SFW, but the video features a topless (and very pierced) Björk, which probably is NSFW but seems to fly on YouTube.

Television - See No Evil

The band Television had a pretty short career, although they've since re-united and do some touring. But they pretty much came and went in a flash.

They had some outstanding songs, though. This one is my favorite:

See No Evil



I like the lyrics, the rhythm, and especially the guitar over that baseline.

I recently stuck Marquee Moon on my MP3 collection for the car and was struck by how sharp and new this song sounds even today. It's like a sharper Strokes song, a more killer Killers song - you can hear its influence decades and decades on.

Layla, dismantled

This is a very cool post about Layla - with the layers of tracks separated. You can hear the backing tracks peeled away from the main part of the song.

Layla Isolated Guitar/Vocals & Separate Backing Track

That coda at the end always makes me think of a different song, but not one I can identify. It just brings up the edge of a song I think I heard when I was young but never fully registers.

Also, it makes me think of Goodfellas, but Scorsese song usages always do that. Janie Jones is linked to Bringing Out the Dead now, too, pretty much forever.