While I found the movie Juno charming, I instinctively thought that the musical tastes of its teenage heroine—the old soul anti-folk charmer who upstages the cynical guy whose head is stuck in 1993—had to be an adult artifice, created for people over 35 (for example, me) to validate their own moldy tastes as “classic.” But generational truth is more complicated than that. It turns out that Juno herself, actress Ellen Page, was the one who touted the Moldy Peaches’ Shaggs-meet-Jonathan hardcore shoegaze to the film’s director, turning “Anyone Else But You” into a late-blooming sensation. (It could have been worse; they could have made the Peaches’ equally catchy “Who’s Got the Crack” the latest teen anthem).

Blowing away any remaining generational snobbery, I randomly discovered a recipe for Monterey Jack muffins on an intermittently updated music blog called Half a Person, whose sixteen year-old author, Nina, says she “likes music and long walks on the beach.” Nina’s accompanying “Muffin Mix” seemed uncannily close to home:

Stay Positive- The Hold Steady
Two Halves- My Morning Jacket
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
The Sons of Cain- Ted Leo
Eraser- No Age
Sequestered in Memphis- The Hold Steady
Alex Chilton- The Replacements
I’m Amazed- My Morning Jacket
Constructive Summer- The Hold Steady
Sheila Take a Bow- The Smiths
A Little Bit of Feel Good- Jamie Lidell

This is how close I live to the Muffin Mix: Swap Bon Iver and Tinariwen for No Age and Jamie Lidell, and you would come very close to my own heavy rotation for the same week. Nor is Nina a guitar-rock one trick pony; her latest post displays precocious taste in rap both new (Nas, Lupe Fiasco, Lil’ Wayne) and prehistoric (De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest). And I doubt I’ll read a better review of Mamma Mia than the following from Nina: “I now have every ABBA song simultaneously stuck in my head. It was charming at first, but now I’m just feeling suicidal.” Nina’s hall-of-fame post thus far, however, is intriguingly titled “Sorry I Accosted You”, where she summons her teenage fortitude to defend Radiohead’s honor (details after the click-through).

Smiths, “Half a Person”

Replacements, “Alex Chilton”

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Putting together a summer playlist that has staying power is harder than it seems. A few shades too breezy and it veers toward unbearable lightness; a few shades too serious and it becomes leaden and ponderous. In what follows below, I’ve abandoned any attempt to follow a coherent pattern or unifying theme. In short, although I have no idea how to define my summer, I think I know what it sounds like.

Hold Steady, “Constructive Summer”

Craig Finn searches for reasons to believe in the Church of St. Strummer, while Mouldy guitars recall Hüsker Dü’s “Celebrated Summer” and mighty mighty Boss-tones echo Springsteen’s early days as a little hoodrat. Prayer theme: the “annual reminder that we can be something bigger.”

Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, “Misirlou”

The former Richard Monsour does his Lebanese father proud. Call it surf-rock if you want, but I prefer to think of it as oud-inspired heavy metal.

Tinariwen, “Cler Achel”

While journalists love the storied biography of these Touraeg rebels from Mali, it’s the music that continues to fascinate. The explosive “Cler Achel” leads off 2007’s Aman Iman (Water is Life), which ranks among my favorite albums of the Zeroes.

Magic Sam, “Magic Sam Boogie”

Whether you come from Chicago or Timbuktu, the extra hours of daylight are perfect for a little West Side soul.

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Becoming the favorite banjo-playing Episcopalian geography expert and Halloween costume inspiration of NPR listeners apparently wasn’t ambitious enough for Sufjan Stevens. Today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival—whose lineup also includes firebrand harpist Zeena Parkins— Stevens will present “The BQE,” a symphonic testament to that fount of poetic inspiration, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But why stop there? In what follows, I’ll list some of my own favorite urban planning disasters, with accompanying theme music for each.

As a fan of absurdly overconceived projects, I’m glad to see Brooklyn-based Stevens providing a soundtrack to one of his borough’s least-loved eyesores. The traffic-clogged BQE is a soul-numbing, neighborhood-dividing monument to master planner Robert Moses’ unchecked ego. But since it exposes the tension that comes with having a sense of place, it seems like an ideal subject for Stevens. Maybe his take on Moses will even surpass Alex Timbers’ surreal play “Boozy,” which portrayed Moses’ arch-nemesis—urban gadfly and community activist Jane Jacobs, a hero of mine—as a femme fatale time traveler who stalks Moses with an angry gang of rolling pin-wielding housewives.

Sufjan Stevens’ mannered chamber-folk divides the indie world into Sufists who hail his genius, and anti-Sufists who want to slap him silly. He’s too clever by half and could use an editor, as on The Avalanche. But I’d challenge the haters to write a song as moving as “Casimir Pulaski Day” or a rocker as fierce as “In the Words of the Governor,” Stevens’ Polvo-meets-White Stripes barnburner featured in The Believer’s summer 2007 CD compilation. The preview snippet of “BQE” below doesn’t suggest Stevens is the new Steve Reich, but I’ll give the piece a chance. Did I mention that “BQE” has hula-hoopers?

After the click-through, I’ll provide music for some equally soul-numbing missteps in urban planning. If you have your own stretch of paradise that’s been paved for a parking lot, tell us about it, and give us some music to get through the madness.

Sufjan Stevens, “In the Words of the Governor”:

Sufjan Stevens, “BQE, Part 6″:

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This week, Stuck Between Stations combed through a Denny’s shortstack of YouTube bookmarks to find videos that simply will not escape the brain, no matter how many times you call the sheriff to force their eviction. The visual equivalent of ear-worms, these A/V train wrecks take up residence in the corpus callosum, either because of or despite their badness, and lodge there for keeps, like grains of sand in your Juicyfruit. There are elements of awe and sadomasochism at work here. It’s not just that these videos are “so bad they’re good” (though there’s plenty of campy indulgence); we’ve come to genuinely love these “bad” music videos, and offer no apologies. In Vol. 1, Roger and Scot subject themselves to South Indian breakdancing music, the bizarre-but-relevant soul stylings of Tay Zonday, a troupe of angry geriatrics covering The Who, an airborne David Hasselhoff, the worst Star Wars theme song cover ever taped, and Leonard Nimoy’s foray into Hobbiton.

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When I think about Tom Snyder, the talk show host who passed away earlier this week, the first thing that comes to mind is his laugh, an old-school guffaw that bordered on self-parody long before Dan Aykroyd made it the centerpiece of a Saturday Night Live routine. Then I think about the eyebrows, twin black caterpillars that gave away his mood just as convincingly as Sam Donaldson’s as he made conversation with guests ranging from Ayn Rand to Charles Manson (and no, I’m not drawing any connection here). But most of all, I remember the music and interviews on Snyder’s signature program, The Tomorrow Show, which ran in my formative years between 1973 and 1982. At a time when even SNL had distinct boundaries on what could be played and discussed during the show, Snyder took risks with performers considered too edgy or unpredictable for most of the “alternative” shows of the day.

Superficially, the slightly haughty Snyder could come off a bit like the Mr. Jones of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” (“something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is”). But Snyder didn’t patronize the performers, wasn’t afraid to call them on their own contradictions, and got some unlikely subjects to stand and deliver. Many of the highlights (although conspicuously, not the Clash and U2) are included in Shout Factory’s recent DVD release The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which captures appearances by the Jam, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, among others. In the rest of this post, I’ll share a few memorable Tomorrow Show moments. (Also discussed below: the hidden connection between Martha Stewart and the Plasmatics.)

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One of our oldest and dearest friends, who goes by the name Rinchen, is a devout Buddhist currently two thirds of the way through a three-year hitch in a monastery in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he is studying with the teacher he’s chosen for life, and practicing almost total silence. Rinchen has no access to the outside world — no phone calls, no newspapers, no internet, no television… and no music. The latter fact is particularly striking, as Rinchen is one of the deepest listeners we know - a man who could spend an entire day tapped into an 8-disc Cecil Taylor free improv set, then put on some Parliament or Missy Elliott and jam the night away. Rinchen’s music collection was breathtaking — before he sold it all to finance his silent expedition.

A few times a year, Rinchen is granted a day or two to visit with family and to write letters to friends. We wrote him a few months ago asking what music runs through a monk’s mind in between the long periods of silence. Today we received the following poem/riff on Cage, Monk, Miles, The Meters and more (with bundled playlist).
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For the past 231 years or so, a favorite American pastime has been to pretend to hate the French, while secretly admiring French cuisine, art, architecture, philosophy, and yes, even its music. And the French have helped us become ourselves. It took French intervention to secure victory in the American Revolution, French theorist Alexis de Tocqueville to comprehend American culture, and French real estate in the Louisiana Purchase to give our country decent places to get barbecue. Years later, it took Brigitte Bardot to make us appreciate the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as an object of unbridled lust (sorry, Steppenwolf).

Recognizing that the original Bastille Day was literally a riot, we at Stuck Between Stations are coming out of the closet as Francophiles. To many Americans, “French music” has a limited reach, consisting of Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Johnny Halladay, and the anonymous Eurodisco that plays in the background at the Gap. A smattering of words from “Lady Marmalade,” “Games Without Frontiers” or “Psycho Killer” might also come to mind. I asked our regular contributors to put together playlists of music sung in French or recorded by artists based in France.

Four playlists appear below. Mine riffs off the global reach of French-speaking musical traditions, taking flight with a mix that moves from Paris to Algiers and Dakar, and then across the pond to Lousiana and Quebec. Malcolm Humes starts with France Gall’s most scandalous teen-pop anthem (a far weirder variation on the “I Want Candy” theme) before settling into a list that is heavy on adventurous prog and moody experimentalism. Christian Crumlish’s list celebrates the French role in Anglo-American music, and vice versa. Scot Hacker conjures an alternately loopy and romantic concoction that includes both jam and fromage.

There’s nowhere better to start than with Serge Gainsbourg, the genius, provocateur and pipe-smoking lothario who, according to Richard Gehr, still lived with his parents until he was 40. Gainsbourg’s “Couleur Café” is the obvious choice, because nothing says “liberty, equality and fraternity” to me quite like this video, which features an exotic dancer cavorting around the room and pouring Serge what has to be the single sexiest cup of java in music or film history. With all respect to the great Bob Dylan, next to “Couleur Café,” his “One More Cup of Coffee” sounds like something brewed at the AM/PM minimart.

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On the 231st birthday of an outrageous experiment in nation-building with a pretty decent soundtrack, I asked our regular Stuck Between Stations contributors to take time from their five-alarm barbecues and traffic jams and hissing summer lawns to answer a simple question: What songs would you like to hear on the Fourth of July, in any style and for any reason? Faster than you can say “Sufjan Stevens,” we all went to look for America, and I said “be careful, my laptop is really a camera.” (Thanks, Apple).

Our stable of beloved revolutionary sweethearts proved worthy of the challenge. In what follows after my opening playlist, Sal Reyes casts George Washington as our founding prophet of rage, tucking into his knickers a “battle-scarred iPod” loaded with classic Public Enemy tracks. Scot Hacker surveys the state of a nation under a groove bold enough to mix Dylan and MC5 with Parliament/ Funkadelic, and explains why Condoleezza Rice won’t serve in President George Clinton’s cabinet. Malcolm Humes passionately describes Robert Wyatt’s relevance to our era of self-evident “truthiness” and freedom with asterisks.Christian Crumlish puts the jam back in holiday jamboree, from the Dead’s slow stew to the Minutemen’s quick sizzle.

Since my list includes James Brown’s Ford Administration civics lesson, “Funky President,” I’ll get things rolling with a teaser—David McMillan’s classic rant about the cosmic connections between James Brown and Gerald Ford.

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I admit I was predisposed to dislike British soul chanteuse Amy Winehouse’s new album Back to Black until I finally listened to it. How could the future of R&B lie with a troubled diva who vaguely resembles a goth version of Barbarella-era Jane Fonda? But appearances can be deceptive. I played Back to Black right after my beloved Chess Sisters of Soul anthology, and while it’s not in the Chess league, it sounded surprisingly good. Winehouse’s voice comes somewhere between the two Ettas—the powerhouse belting of Etta James, and the sultrier shadings of Etta Jones, whose “Don’t Go to Strangers” she has covered in a live duet with Modfather Paul Weller. And while Winehouse isn’t going to set the world on fire with her lyrics, it’s hard for me not to love someone who sings, in the catchy Ghostface Killah collaboration “You Know That I’m No Good,” that “by the time I’m out the door/ you tear me down like Roger Moore.”

With Winehouse tossing f-bombs like a drunken sailor and name-dropping Slick Rick and Nas (aka “Mr. Jones”) alongside Donny Hathaway, nobody would confuse her with a Ronette or a Vandella. But at its core, Back to Black fulfills its promise of delivering sweet soul music that is both contemporary and classic. Best of all may be the haunting title track, which updates the Phil Spector-style Wall of Sound to lethal effect.

Still, I have to wonder about a young star whose biggest hit has her saying “no, no, no” to rehab because she can learn everything she needs from Ray Charles records. Yeah, that’ll straighten her out. I’m going out on a limb, but maybe Amy Winehouse resists rehab because she thinks it would have a boring soundtrack. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a twelve-step playlist that might help her stick it out next time.

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Tom Watson at newcritics calls Patti Smith’s cover of Van Morrison’s Gloria “the greatest rock cover performance (studio release) of all time.” Love how he doesn’t attempt to qualify or temper the statement by prefacing with the usual “All top ten lists are silly, but here I go anyway.” Just comes out and says it.

And onward it goes, every second fiery, living-breathing rock-and-roll. It feels incredibly live, with Jay Dee Daugherty’s singer-focused cymbals and fills and Lenny Kaye’s understated but omnipresent guitar. This song feels like it could only have been released in this performance, in this actual cut, in the recording that was made on that one day with this one band in this one studio. And to me, that’s what great covers are about: building on somebody else’s song, putting your own meat on the bones, creating a singular performance.

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