Nine Awesome Beatles Songs in No Real Order for 9/9/09

9. "Paperback Writer" The unsung hero of the Beatles' non-album work (damn that limelight-stealing "Lady Madonna"). "Paperback Writer" features Paul McCartney doing his best preemptive Bruce Springsteen impression, jamming far too many words in far too little space over a driving guitar line. Add in some aggressive tempo changes and trademark Beatles harmonies, and you've got the sweetest song about struggling pulp fiction writers ever sung.

8. "In My Life" No Beatles list can rightfully be published without including John Lennon's maudlin tribute to bygone days, especially after you've heard Johnny Cash's heart-wrenching deathbed cover. George Martin's faux harpsichord solo kills its top-three potential, but Ringo's deft stutter beat gets a hearty thumbs-up.

7. "Don't Pass Me By" I was always a fan of Everyone's Least Favorite Beatle before it became cool to like him anyway (thanks a lot, Zooey Deschanel), and this White Album filler track was always one of my dark horse favorites. The distant drumming, the persistent fiddle line, the bizarre lyrics about an expected guest losing all of his/her hair in a car crash, Ringo's six-note vocal range: it all comes together in a three-minute example of why he should have been featured on every Beatles album, if only to give the world more catchy goofball material like this.

6. "Yer Blues" John Lennon's attempt to spoof blues singers of course ends up being a damn good blues jam, with sloppy Ringo fills and Bob Dylan references and a blistering Harrison solo to boot. It's spontaneous and raw and imperfect, and it serves as a hilariously inappropriate segue into the most boring Beatles song ever written: "Mother Nature's Son."

5. "I Want To Tell You" George Harrison blah blah underrated blah blah Quiet Beatle blah blah blah blah should have been allowed more than one song per album by Lennon/McCartney blah. George laments that he's tongue-tied around the girl he loves, and in the process writes a song for lovelorn fifteen-year-old boys everywhere for the rest of time. Oh, and that vocal effect at the end is pretty cool, too.

4. "I'm Looking Through You" Here the Beatles progress from "I love you, and you love me, and that's great" to "Hey, I loved you, but now I realize you're probably just a groupie." Also I'm a sucker for organ blasts, and the general folky vibe that surrounds everything on Rubber Soul. Except "The Word." That song more than kinda blows.

3. "One After 909" Most people say they don't like Let It Be because you can clearly tell everyone in the band hates each other, and most people are basically right- with the exception of this track. Musically it's nothing impressive- a very simple romp written in 1963 but never officially recorded until 1969- but it's one of the fun bright spots in the Bataan death march that is Let It Be. Paul is already planning his solo career with cutesy, inoffensive outings like "Two of Us" and the saccharin-sweet "Long and Winding Road." George is warming up for the still underrated All Things Must Pass with the still underrated "I Me Mine" and "For You Blue." And John is talking about syndicating boats and wet dreams. But for three minutes of "909" they sound like a group of old friends having fun instead of the world's biggest band reaching a fiery supernova. And it's enough to warm a man's heart...until "Long and Winding Road" comes back on.

2. "The End" There really isn't a better way to end the Beatles' story than this. Completely inane lyrics in the beginning give way to one of the most-quoted lines in pop music history. In between, everyone gets a solo, even Ringo (fun fact to impress all your friends: this is the one and only Beatles song with a drum solo). Then it's over in one final burst of exquisite Beatle harmony. Turn out the lights, skip over "Her Majesty," and call it a career.

1. "Let It Be" (album version) For all my hatred of Paul McCartney, I just can't deny how straight-up beautiful this song is. Yeah, sure, it's sappy and overplayed and has Wings written all over it, but when George's blissfully hard-edged guitar solo kicks in, you just have to forgive the grace notes and heavy-handed Virgin Mary imagery.

Curses, Foiled Again

With Billy Penn's demon (oh so painfully) exorcised last year, and the Bambino finally back to eating ghost hot dogs, it's time for a new curse to fill the sports superstition void. Allow me to introduce the Curse of William Shea.

Shea was the decidedly ballsy lawyer who, in the late '50s and early '60s, helped return National League baseball to New York in the form of the expansion Mets. So when 1964 rolled around and the city had a brand-new stadium to name, they naturally gave the honor to the man who'd started it all. And, for almost half a century, Shea Stadium stood as a tribute to his pivotal place in New York baseball history.

But then the Wilpons decided to build their faux-Ebbets palace and demolish the House that William Built, destroying 45 years of history and selling off William's good name for 400 million of Citigroup's dollars in the process. In return, Shea (who, for the record, died in 1991) got the equivalent of forty acres and a mule: a "retired number" slot on Citi's left-field wall, and five tiny plaques in the parking lot marking his stadium's former bases and pitcher's mound. 

Did anyone really think the ghost of Billy Shea would stand for this? He gave the Mets life, and he's clearly set on taking it back. The signs have been too clear to miss in this star-crossed season, from Jody Gerut's first at-bat home run in Citi's opener to the overloaded disabled list to Sunday's game-ending unassisted triple play. Somewhere up there, William Shea is laughing. Hell hath no fury like a baseball godfather scorned. Wilpons and Mets fans everywhere, take heed: if a long-dead billy goat has kept the Cubs from baseball's promised land for a century and counting, there's no telling what the ghost of a cunning lawyer can do. We ain't seen nothin' yet.  

I Want You To

The new album may be called Raditude, and the new single may be called "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To," but as long as Rivers Cuomo keeps writing lines like...

"The rest of the summer was the best we'd ever had

We watched Titanic, and it didn't make us sad."

and

"The moon was shining on the lake at night

The Slayer tee shirt fit the scene just right."

...I will have no reason to stop making him the subject of 75% of my writing. 

Weezer's best single since 2005's "Perfect Situation" is here, and though it's too (two thousand and) late to unseat "Boom Boom Pow" as the Official Song of Summer '09, I can't complain about floating into September on a wave of clap-along pop. 

Rivers and the gang pull into town on 8/25 with Blink-182. Let the summer go out with a sugary bang. 

The Green Day Rock and Roll Circus

Much like the album, the Black Berry™ Presents Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown Tour Powered by Verizon Wireless was conveniently divided into three acts, here separated by my major thoughts about each one.

Act I: "Billie Joe Armstrong is a pompous asshole."

For a solid hour, starting right when the band took the Madison Square Garden stage to the prerecorded strains of "Song of the Century," Billie Joe was on complete rock-prophet autopilot. There he was, flailing around the stage like Howard Beale in guyliner and tight black jeans, "saving" a child from the audience preacher-style with a touch of his forehead and a push to the ground, and shouting various pseudo-revolutionary phrases ("This is our fucking moment, right now!"), all while dodging towering pyrotechnic displays timed to every downbeat and guitar explosion. The low point came during "Holiday," when Armstrong ordered the lights out and began to chant "Corruption in New Jersey!" while waving a flashlight around like a wand of justice...or something like that. 

Act II: "Green Day is awesome!"

Then, just as all seemed lost, Billie whipped out his trusty childhood guitar, launched into "2000 Light Years Away," and broke the bullshit spell. The tightly choreographed (lest one of the band members accidentally wander into a technicolor rainbow fireball) rock-'n'-roll revival meeting turned into...well, a Green Day concert: socially innocuous punk rock without all of that Kiss and President Bush detritus. Billie dedicated the obscure "Disappearing Boy" to the girl who'd requested it via scoreboard text message pre-concert, and he even played the guitar solo himself. He and Mike Dirnt bantered while playing every song they could with the same three chords, starting with "Sweet Home Alabama" and ending up at "Sweet Child O' Mine." And, in the show's most honest and rock-'n'-roll moment, Billie Joe forgot the words to "Castaway" halfway into the first verse and gave up on it entirely. The Christ-poser finally proved himself to be mortal.

For those blissful forty minutes, Green Day was three (or four, if you count poor Jason White) talented old friends who just wanted to play punk that would make the kids jump and the older folks sing their hearts out. And it was nothing short of magic. 

Act III: "This is the longest fucking concert I've ever attended."

It's important to note that at this point, Billie and Co. were only about two-thirds of the way done. And look, it was great to see them do a wacky rendition of "King for a Day" and then pull out the old standard "Shout" (and it was even better knowing they were stealing a page out of Bon Jovi's book), but I had a train to catch, okay? I definitely could have done without the main-set closer, "American Eulogy," and though they nearly brought the Garden down with "American Idiot" to start the encore, the four songs that followed- including all nine minutes of "Jesus of Suburbia"- just felt like a ladle of frosting atop a giant sundae. Plus the fireworks and cannon fire made their unnecessary return, and everything devolved back into the over-the-top rock theater that we'd escaped over an hour previously. Add in a second bloated encore from Billie on acoustic guitar, play "Good Riddance," and fade to black.

This final act did contain the night's best moment: Billie Joe, dressed for no particular reason as an NYPD officer and complaining about the pot smoke in the room, finally broke character and laughed at the overblown spectacle his band had become. "What the fuck am I doing?" he asked, briefly doubling over before regaining himself and channeling his punk-rock Freddie Mercury anew.

It was almost like he'd been reading my mind.

The Trouble mit Bruno

Let's get it out of the way: Bruno was hilarious. It's very difficult to top Sacha Baron Cohen asking a stage dad if his baby was okay working with burning phosphorous, or accidentally ordering Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium with his butt, or calling Mel Gibson "der fuhrer." But there is nothing- absolutely nothing- socially enlightening about it.

I'm tired of hearing Cohen hailed as some type of muckraker, using his sharp wit to expose deep-seated social problems like a comedic Jacob Riis. I'll admit that Borat did that some of the time ("In My Country There is Problem" comes to mind), but Bruno does nothing but affirm that normal people are going to be freaked the fuck out by a loud, tactless, and only coincidentally flaming Austrian.

You wouldn't be a homophobe if you got mad at an odd guest for bluntly propositioning you at 3 a.m., and neither is the poor Alabama hunter who must fend off a naked Cohen at his campsite ("a bear ate all my clothes...there's nothing left except for these condoms"). Neither is the police officer who arrests Cohen for chaining himself to naked costar Gustaf Hammarsten on a city bus. And neither is the very unfortunate Ron Paul, who deserves an honorary patience Oscar for reading the newspaper and looking at the floor while Cohen awkwardly attempts to seduce him.

I'll stop short of calling Cohen a comedic genius, but he's got balls of steel for putting himself through uncomfortable situations in the name of what's often only a cheap laugh. He's taken the awkward hidden-camera interview and made it into a default comedy art form. But he isn't proving anything this time around. Anyone who's seen "The Death Camp of Tolerance" should know that.

Explaining Heresy

I will do my best to take the John Lennon route: I never meant to say that Billy Mays was bigger than Michael Jackson as a person, or as an international music superstar. 

I did mean to say that in the past decade, Billy Mays blazed a cultural trail for himself, shouting his way from infomercials to internet phenomenon to legitimate television star. Jackson hadn't done any major culture-defining since he integrated MTV and broke down the barrier between R&B and rock...over two decades ago. Since then he'd only defined himself as a deeply troubled eccentric who may or may not have committed a series of very heinous crimes.

In short: Billy Mays carved out a comfortable niche in a new cultural world where internet fame is fleeting and TV recognition is even less so, while Michael Jackson produced no music and descended deeper into madness. Advantage: Mays.

(Certainly a generational issue comes into play here. While those who grew up with Jackson from "I Want You Back" to the heights of Thriller and Bad had the benefit of those warm memories to fall back upon, all I know is Wacko Jacko and molestation and anti-aging hyperbaric time chambers. Meanwhile Billy had been a comforting and bizarre low-culture icon of my younger years, and one who's honestly been more familiar to me than the much more traditionally famous Jackson.)

Heresy

Billy Mays's death was more culturally relevant than Michael Jackson's. Really.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm an amateur writer looking for attention through foolishly brash claims. Jackson was a fallen idol with a bunch of moldy, decades-old masterpieces and a tarnished legacy to his name when he passed this week. Nobody can ever take Thriller or "ABC" away from the former King, but answer honestly: when you look back at MJ's life, are you going to think first of the music, or Wacko Jacko and Bubbles and John Merrick's bones and all that other unpleasantness? 

Mays, on the other hand, was a new kind of surreal superstar: a loud bearded prophet who took the art of late-night infomercial salesmanship to a new level. He wasn't just Ron Popeil with a new blue polo and Grizzly Adams grooming cues. He was a cultural phenomenon who transcended the shit he sold to become a true advertising celebrity. You think Thriller bent genres? Mays hawked everything from yard tools to cleaning supplies to health insurance, all without changing hand motions or vocal inflection. He inspired remixes, parodies, and lame, whore-abusing Israeli imitators. Eat your heart out, Eddie Van Halen.

And most importantly, he knew exactly what he was doing and had no shame about becoming a caricature in the name of good business. Mays came to TV at a time when the line between advertising and entertainment had just about faded entirely, and he capitalized with a goofy look and improbably booming voice that would have fit snugly into a 12:50 SNL sketch. He was unique, self-deprecating, and probably the smartest businessman to ever grace the storied halls of Paid Programming. In short, he was the poster child for internet age America: with a little work, a classic shtick, and an eye for bullshit that thousands of people will buy with the click of a mouse, you too can drive a Bentley through a McDonald's drive-thru and bring joy hundreds of thousands.

So rest in peace, Michael and Billy. And don't be surprised if Jesus wakes up in six to eight weeks wondering what the hell he's going to do with all that Mighty Putty.