singable songs that are in and out in less than two minutes (The White Stripes' "Fell In Love with a Girl," Aimee Mann's "Just Like Anyone," Sam Phillips' "Is That Your Zebra?")
long songs that pile on catchy melody upon catchy melody (Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," Radiohead's "Paranoid Android," the Danielson Famile's "Deeper Than My/Our/The Government" trilogy)
songs with a hemiola rhythm (West Side Story's "America," numerous baroque pieces)
stripped-down music with no more than two or three instruments and one vocalist (all of Jan Krist's Decapitated Society, most of T-Bone Burnett's Criminal Under My Own Hat)
songs where the percussion rhythm is different than the instrumentalists and vocalists' rhythm (the last third of the Danielson Famile's "Let Us A.B.C.," where the snare drum is alternating between 4/4 and 5/4 measures, and everyone else is in 3/4)
sarcastic songs that are about something more than their sarcasm (Steve Taylor's "Moshing Floor" and "Smug," among many others; Mark Heard's "Faces in Cabs")
songs in time-signatures with prime-numbered numerators other than 2 and 3 (in 5/8, Iona's "Inside My Heart"; in 11/8, Iona's "Bí-se I Mo Shúil, Part II"; Iona in general, really)
songs with copious internal rhyming (the Newsboys' "Shine")
songs with a super-chorus at the end that supersedes the expected normal chorus (Radiohead's "Karma Police," The Beatles' "Hey Jude," Aimee Mann's "How Am I Different?")
female vocalists with unusual voices (Julie Miller, Victoria Williams, Gillian Welch)
songs that run into each other on the album (Sixpence None the Richer's "Anything" and "The Waiting Room," Daniel Amos' "Wise Acres" and "So Long")
songs with a Taize-esque repetition (the tag in Michael W. Smith's "All You're Missing is a Heartache," the slowed-down instrumental riff at the end of Steve Taylor's "Jim Morrison's Grave," all of Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Love Never Failed Me Yet)
songs that unabashedly promote social causes with neither humor nor self-effacement (Sam Phillips' "Black Sky" [environmentalism], dcTalk's "Walls" and "Colored People" [racism; the latter is catchily catchy, however], Bruce Cockburn's "The Mines of Mozambique" [the, er, mines of Mozambique])
songs with a simple upward whole- or half-step key change going into the final or penultimate time through the chorus (every Michael Bolton song, the Ragamuffin Band's version of "My Deliverer is Coming" [twice!])
songs that create a "musical tapestry" rather than having actual melodies (most of the last half of Björk's Vespertine, I'm sad to say)
live albums (the only two I like better than the same artist's studio albums: Peter Himmelman's Stage Diving [because his studio albums are overproduced] and Burlap to Cashmere's Live at the Bitter End [because their studio album was overproduced], and neither of those live albums I really love)
songs that use the words "baby" and "babe" (no parenthetical needed, I assume, except to exempt Mark Heard's "Long Way Down")
i sincerely do not know what you are doing here. are you lost? were you
looking for your delicate calico cat, and did you follow her up two flights of stairs
to this room? she is not here. she was here, yes. we gave her a warm bowl of milk, we talked with her about campaign finance reform for a time, and then she bid us good day. i believe she was
going to the post office two blocks down, but i don't quite recall.
for surely you did
not find your way from prinsiana, the least traveled site on
the internet. if you did, though, perhaps you are looking for humor. perhaps you are looking for profundity. perhaps you are looking for answers.
i'm sorry, but you shall go naught-for-three.
