"Präludium" by Jay (1997)

You know, it may be true that there are a certain number of songs whose praise is universal enough to be considered 'objectively' great songs. I'll never go wrong, or find people who disagree with me, if I fill his blog with the likes of 'Strawberry Fields Forever' or 'That's All Right Mama'. And they have their place here too, but ultimately this is my list, and the only criterion that matters is whether or not I like it. So that can lead to songs as obscure as this one.

I don't really know anything about this. It comes from a Def Jam release, so it's not exactly an obscure indie thing. The album also includes LL Cool J and Warren G on it, so again... seemingly high profile. But try finding anyone who's ever heard of it.

It's called The Rapsody Overture, and the terrible pun of the title comes from the fact that it's a various artists record of hip-hop / classical crossover stuff. Potentially horrible stuff, and a good amount of the songs on it are pretty bad. This one, however, is something the others aren't. Or rather, it isn't something the others are: overblown and ostentatious. Most of the other rappers on the collection seem to have felt that 'opera', or 'classical music' more generally, meant an exotic and wailing variation on the 'female voice to sing the chorus' cliché, with cheesy synthesised approximations of the musical score as background music. And then business as usual rapping over the top.

It's by Jay, and I have no idea who that is... it's not Jay-Z, who got his start at tround this time, but I have no information at all on him, and he's afforded two tracks back-to-back on this collection. Anyway, Jay takes Bach's Präludium #1 in C major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, the piece that would later become Ave Maria, as his starting point. It's not a symphonic piece, and it's not an opera piece. It's a two-minute long composition for piano (there also feature strings, probably synthesised, that may or may not appear in Bach's original; anyway they're understated). Beautiful, yes, but more importantly: simple. Understated, in fact. Jay takes this two-minute piano piece and, amazingly, resists the urge to pile stuff on top. A simple beat, slow, and his rapping. The track peters out as Bach does, and that in itself is remarkable: who's ever heard of a two-minute rap song?

Jay finds a kind of pathos in Bach's piece. He tells it as a story of two childhood friends who have fallen on wrong sides of gang warfare, and the narrator is tipping off his former friend, as a final favour, that he's 'getting touched'. Bach gives this tale a mournful, wistful finality. There's no anger, no resentment, no aggression. Not even regret: just a quiet, resigned tip-off and goodbye, in the same breath. Bach's piece has a beautiful ending, and Jay's song ends the same way, with a simple melodic turn and a satisfying resolution of the song's principal chord: a tiny ray of sunshine, perhaps, but a bittersweet one. The illusion of happiness, or peace, perhaps. Truth be told, there's none here. The best possible solution is that the childhood friend disappears, never to be seen again.

Gang culture is so mythologised partly because it is brutal barbarism dressed up in the must cultured of clothing. There's a reason gang life associates itself with the arts, with high culture, and there's a reason we find ourselves attracted to the accompanying dichotomy. In avoiding histrionics and going for simple, naked grace, Jay alone on this Def Jam vanity project understands.

A note: I found, a few weeks ago, much to my pleasure, that someone had uploaded this song onto YouTube. It racked up barely more than 1000 views. Now, YouTube is swimming with copyright violations. Huge uploads with millions of views use popular mainstream songs without permission, and get away with it. Here, this barely-viewed upload of an obscure song that is almost certainly out of print anyway... It's the one that gets yanked for copyright issues. Sigh. I have no idea why. But as I've already composed this entry, it'll go ahead. In its place, I present "Ach So Fromm", the other Jay contribution to the soundtrack. And my disappointment at UMG's pointless behaviour.

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"Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space" by Spiritualized (1997)

Jason Pierce should have known better. If you let your first band use a syringe as its logo and use "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" as its motto, it's going to be tough to convince people that your second band represents something different.

So when his group Spiritualized releaed the album that this song serves as opening track, title track and main title theme for, "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" in an album package that resembled a packet of prescription medicine, it was generally percieved as 'Jason Pierce returns to drug chic' - at least, by people who never bothered to listen to the album, or only listened to the lyrics.

To me, and maybe I'm just an optimist or an idealist here, this album - which I'd put in my personal top five of 'best albums ever' - is nothing as tacky as 'music to take drugs to'; it's packaged as it is because it aims to do what prescription medicine can: it aims to soothe, to medicate, to heal... If you think that sounds overwrought, you're right. But I believe that Jason Pierce genuinely believes in the power of music to heal. If not for the listener, at least for himself: apparently things were bad, romantically, for Pierce while recording this album, as his keyboardist and girlfriend Kate Radley married the verve's Richard Ashcroft, and Jason Pierce turned to heavier and heavier drugs to numb the pain. But, of course, the drugs don't work. Does the music?

Well, I can't say that this album has ever healed leukemia or herpes. But I can attest that, in a pitch black, empty, silent room at night, this album has the ability to alter moods significantly - to relax, to uplift, to transport. There exist in this album all kinds of emotional responses, but throughout there is a recurring haunting, spectral beauty that I find entrancing. I wasn't originally going to pick the title track, but then I realised it's not just the keynote of the album but also the piece I keep returning to in my head.

Launching into life with a female voice muttering the "Sophie's World"-referencing title and ending with a 'bleep' like a heart rate monitor, this song builds up, layer by layer, like a kids song done in 'rounds' a la 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat'. Famously, the Elvis people would allow him to interpolate "Can't Help Falling in Love" (so he merely evokes it by pseudo-plagiarising it), but even still there are several independent melodies riding on top of each other here. It creates a slowly-pulsating wall of sound that, unlike Phil Spector's dins, encourages you to focus in on individual bits of it and swim through its layers of sound at your own pace, picking up what you like an discarding the rest. If you sing along to songs as you listen to them, you'll find yourself building up your own version, flipping from melody line to melody line. As such, it can't really be said to have verses and choruses, and if it went on ten minutes longer than it actually does, it probably wouldn't do anything different except go through the cycles again and again and again. But it would still be wonderful.

I mentioned Phil Spector above. One thing Jason Pierce has in common with that murderous producer is that neither are embarrassed at all to make music that's unabashedly big. The scope of this music - which has nothing to do with prog and little to do with bombast - is at times amazing. This is 16:9 music, and even when he fails (as much as I love the album, it has many weak points), he earns top marks for setting the bar high. Few people truly believe in music as much as Jason Pierce does, though listening to this album and its lighter-than-air title track can convince you too.

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