Today's Brew | Pitchfork's 1960s: Day 5

It's Day 5.
Covering songs from #20-1.

Thought I highlight some of the songs from the countdown with their lil' blurbs.
(The following excerpts are taken from Pitchfork)


16. The Stooges: "I Wanna Be Your Dog"
Having defected from the Velvets, the classically trained John Cale handles production by adding sleigh bells and an endlessly repeated single-note piano riff. Instead of deflating the grit and toughness of the music, it elevates the tension and enhances the mood of numbed detachment. And in the end, it's that unsettling sense of monotonous resolution in Iggy's pleas that makes this sound so dangerous.

4. Bob Dylan: "Like a Rolling Stone"
From its first double-drum crack (which Bruce Springsteen later described as the sound of someone "kicking open the door to your mind"), to its mythical opening couplet (a perfectly seething "Once upon a time..."), "Like a Rolling Stone" is one of Dylan's strangest and most enthralling moments, a big, shambling statement that hovers on the verge of total dissolution, threatening to shimmy your record player (and, potentially, your entire life) off the shelf and onto the floor.

1. The Beach Boys: "God Only Knows"
The first words Wilson sings, "I may not always love you," are already uncertain, so if you need a tie into the legacy of 1960s youth culture, glance no further than the naïve but strained optimism locked inside this song. Yet, Wilson made this uncertainty sound gorgeous. The voices that sail behind his might just as well be a quartet of violas and cellos playing counterpoint that'd already been obsessed over a few times before they got it.