Five on Friday: Canyons and Locusts' Justin Keane

I love these things – listicles, I believe they’re called in Dante’s third circle of the Inferno, or maybe on some future reboot of Lou Grant that I’m imagining. Note to future casting directors: Ed Asner left some pretty big shoes to fill… tread carefully.

5 movies. Awesome. 5 books. Yep, sign me up. 5 songs? Best of all. It’s like the looking glass into your buddy’s imaginary commute, curated one-way and with love.

Here’s mine:

‘Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,’ by Odetta

I’m not sure what sent me in this direction, but a few Friday nights back, I went looking for Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew on YouTube. I’d seen this deeply secular, impossibly spiritual film many years ago in a college 101 class and remember being struck, in particular, by its Adoration of the Magi. In his retelling, Pasolini lifts the manger scene and its component characters–Mary, baby Jesus, Joseph, the Magi, and a multitude of attendants–from its traditional holy night and drops them all into the middle of sunbaked southern Italy. In that light, you’re confronted with all the pockmarks on the underside of hope, and Odetta’s 1963 version of this old spiritual is the capstone on that emotional dissonance.

‘Men In Black,’ by Frank Black

In my universe, the Belligerent Nerd is a cherished archetype. He is twitchy, obsessive, and given over to rumination and the occasional vicious, serrated outburst. Here he is in prototype: Frank Black singing about aliens and greys, in league with his own conflict and possibly the extraterrestrials themselves. Disclosure Day, it must be noted here, begins with Frank screaming, “Do you believe it? You better!” in a voice that sounds like it’s feeding on itself. Let’s also note that the whole galaxy might also bear witness to Frank and Lyle Workman’s twin Telecaster attack here, all propulsion, zero landing.

“Helpless,” by Sugar

I wish I were a little bit older and cooler sometimes, in no small part because maybe I might have gotten into (and perhaps even seen!) Husker Du before Sugar, but alas, the year was Nineteen Ninety And Two, and the song was “Helpless” on 101.7 WFNX radio in Boston, and my world was never the same. I was leaving for college and ready for a world where urge and spittle and longing sounded like THIS, or “Nearly Lost You,” or “Somebody To Shove.” As of this writing, “Helpless” has appeared in approximately 78% of the Top 10 lists I’ve written, and I’m so glad Sugar is back onstage. Too much to ask for an album?

'Where Eagles Dare’ by The Misfits

1. When you need a pop song, you could do a lot worse than to knock on Glenn Danzig’s door and say, “ Hey, can you write us a pop song (about germicide and glands and that hatpin in the retina)?”
2. I bet if you called him Glennjamin he would get very mad. 2a. At that point, he would either start sulking or take a swing at you.
3. “I ain’t no goddamned son of a bitch” is beautiful but also an eternal half-measure without its rejoinder: You better think about it, baby.

’You Don’t Want Me Anymore’ by Steel Breeze

The ‘80s were weird. There was MTV, which was mostly awesome until it absolutely wasn’t. There was Solid Gold, which was mostly really sleazy and basically stayed that way with the dancers and Rex Smith around to ruin things that were already overripe. And of course, American Top 40 every weekend and sometimes off-air, Casey Kasem would apparently throw these fucking titanic fits and think I can speak for us all when I say, “I wish we’d have known, Casey. I wish we’d have known.”

Somewhere in the middle of THAT Venn diagram lives this weird small thing that kind of could have been a Ramones song underneath all of the synths and that trick they have where voices go “ahh” in the studio at moments that probably would have been coughs in real life. I love it to this day (close cousin, although harder rocking, is “She’s A Beauty” by The Tubes), and all I want to do is play it with downstrokes and barre chords and live inside of the moment just before the chorus launches.