As we were driving around the other day, the iPod served up “Valerie” by the Crooked Fingers, which is a weirdly unclassifiable little song. It opens with a skiffle-ish acoustic guitar riff, adds a little steel guitar in the background, then thumping sort of jug band bass drum, with a the vocals coming in aheadlong rush, and just when that’s all beginning to make sense, the mariachi horns come in, and you just have to say “Fuck it,” and roll with the song. It’s a good tune, in an odd way.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that reminded me of a long-ago party in grad school (circa 1996), where we spent a great deal of time debating the merits of songs whose titles were just women’s names (prompted by Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” coming up on the cheesey 80’s mix tape I had contributed for the soundtrack)– proper names only, no titles, so “Veronica” and “Maggie May” make it but “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “Queen Jane Approximately” do not.<\/p>\n
I considered doing a big list of songs fitting that criterion (in the manner of “Prohibited Activities, According to My iPod<\/a>“), but, well, that comes to 116 songs out of my collection, which seems a little excessive. The five-star list is below the fold, though, and it’s pretty good company:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (I think the original list was restricted to one-word titles, so no “Eleanor Rigby” or “Sally Maclennane,” but I like those songs too much to leave them out…)<\/p>\n (For those who care, songs named after men only turn up 79 times in my collection, and that’s counting about six different versions of “Jack Straw.” The five-star list is just four songs: “Galileo,” “Conrad,” “Van Gough,” and “Buddy Holly.” <\/p>\n (This probably tells you more about the gender breakdown of pop songwriters than about the inherent merits of naming songs after women.)<\/p>\n So what’s the best song ever named after a woman?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As we were driving around the other day, the iPod served up “Valerie” by the Crooked Fingers, which is a weirdly unclassifiable little song. It opens with a skiffle-ish acoustic guitar riff, adds a little steel guitar in the background, then thumping sort of jug band bass drum, with a the vocals coming in aheadlong… Continue reading 116 Lines About 116 Women<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n