Ok so there’s this song called “Waiting for a Train” by this Australian new wave band called Flash and the Pan. It was released on their 1982 album Headlines and is not to be confused with the Jimmie Rodgers song of the same name that was covered by Johnny Cash twice (though most of Cash’s later covers are really him covering his own cover, like his two, tellingly distinct versions of “Streets of Laredo”) and that was also covered by John Denver, in which the yodeling is very Mason Ramsey and the way he sings “water tower” very 1997, and Boz Scaggs, which stands out mostly because I didn’t even know he made music before his cornily-sleazy-but-undeniably-groovy yacht rock records of the 70s.
Anyway, there’s this Flash and the Pan track called “Waiting for a Train” and it’s new wave but in a sort of shallow way and they do this “choo-choo-CHA” thing at the beginning that’s kind of fun and that’s very Mick Jagger doing the “shufflin’ through the street” bit in The Rolling Stones’ 1978 track “Miss You,” which is not to be confused with the Alabama Shakes song of the same name, which is part of that great pantheon of songs about being a total shithead and loving someone who is also a total shithead and leaning destructively into it (I'm gonna miss you / And your mickey mouse tattoo / And you were living in your Honda Accord), a pantheon that includes such varied songs as Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears’ “Bitch, I Love You” and Frightened Rabbit’s “Modern Leper.” (The Stones’ “Miss You” belongs more in the creepy suitor pantheon, if you could call it that.)
Anyway, “Waiting for a Train”—the Flash and the Pan song—is a synth groove with some meandering lyrics about commuter tedium (Ain't it stupid how some people stare? / Not even, “How do you do?”) and aside from the title it has little to do with the song “Waiting for a Train” from Hans Zimmer’s score of Inception (2010), which doesn’t really have anything to do with any of this but which does have snippets of Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which has recently been in Allstate commercials about leaving stuff on the top of your car, and which is in Inception because Zimmer did this whole thing where the song is slowed down and looped and distorted as Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) & co. descend deeper into dreams. In some ways it’s cool to think that all the blaring horns of ten ponderous years of action movies actually owe their existence to an Édith Piaf sample but in some ways it’s a disheartening reminder that what originally worked in Inception has since been ruined by its constant application elsewhere. “Waiting for a Train” in Inception gets its name from the scene in which Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, who played Édith Piaf in a 2007 biopic) commit suicide by lying down on a railroad track, a coincidental nod to the blues standard “Trouble in Mind,” which goes: “I'm gonna lay my head / On some lonesome railroad line / Let the 2:19 train / Ease my troubled mind” and which has been covered countless times, for instance by Nina Simone in 1961 and Johnny Cash in 2003.
Anyway, there’s this song by Flash and the Pan called “Waiting for a Train” and in 1983 it was covered by a band called Moonbase, which I can’t find anything about online and which I came across in one of Spotify’s many mysterious compilation albums, 80’s Dance Story Original Italo Hits. I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out why I like the Moonbase version better than the Flash and the Pan version, even though both are kind of silly and the Moonbase version is in many ways messier and less concerned with creating a unified mood than the original. Most notable covers either polish a song (like Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Father John Misty’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”) or make more significant structural renovations (like Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” or Nina Simone’s cover of pretty much anything) or make it something entirely different (like Pet Shop Boys’ rendition of Wayne Carson’s “Always On My Mind”) or are made as a larger conceptual project, like Phish covering whole records live on Halloween as a “costume” or Angelique Kidjo covering Remain In Light, the Talking Heads record that owes its existence to Fela Kuti in the first place. (Then there are covers that cash in on nostalgia in a way that seems designed to make you think it’s not even a cover, like Ariel Pink’s “Baby,” which is actually a cover of Donnie & Joe Emerson, and besides, I only recently learned that Pink, despite that 2010 record that everyone, including me, liked a great deal, has apparently been saying bigoted stuff for years and on January 6 he went to the MAGA rally with fellow musician Jon Maus and his record label dropped him and he cried on Tucker Carlson’s show in what has to be the weirdest man-to-man victimization aesthetic of 2021 so far.)
Anyway, the Moonbase cover of “Waiting for a Train,” which I prefer to the original for reasons that are still unclear, doesn’t really fit any of these. It’s like Moonbase took a track that was already basically a stupid Italo disco song and made it stupider and more Italo disco-y and three minutes longer. Maybe I prefer it because it has that aura of intrigue, that feeling of digging through crates of records and finding something that’s confusing but also kind of groovy. Or maybe I like it because it represents how enjoying music can be as much about the song itself as the whole web of other songs and chance encounters and influences that led you to it, like someone dusting something random off and putting it on and saying, Hey, haven’t we heard this before?
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
I know I complained about needless power-rankings several weeks ago, and perhaps I owe the creator of that article that ranked every Springsteen song ever an apology, but every year my friend Henry and I do a little “Songs of the Year” countdown mainly as a way of forcing ourselves to take stock of the year’s music and to create a structured way of talking about our preferences. I’ll drop mine in 5-song bursts (here’s 21-25) but do take the ordering with a grain of salt.
Here’s the Moonbase cover of “Waiting for a Train” that I was going on and on and on about.
on the bookshelf
My friend Vita recommended They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to me a long time ago and I almost bought it in a San Francisco bookstore at the end of 2019—what did I flip through that made me not dash out of the store with it?—and I finally read it and it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. I can imagine an easy way to blurb the book that would be something like: These are only ostensibly essays about music; music for Abdurraqib is a way to get at larger questions. But that’s not it at all; music is a larger question and the essays are great because they don’t take music for one thing and life for another. It is all part of Abdurraqib’s way of keeping time, of being himself, of taking stock of the things that tried to kill him and didn’t and the things that still could.
from the wild
The New York Times ran a cool piece last week about ICARUS, a new system for tracking wildlife across the globe. In part due to advancements in GPS technology, ways of tracking animal movement have become much more sophisticated, and are leading to new conclusions about how far animals travel, how much energy they expend on different tasks, etc. It’s an odd application of big data and surveillance in the sense that it’s one of the few applications that isn’t obviously nefarious and dangerous, even if it’s still a little unsettling. At any rate, it’s a fitting way for understanding more about all the wildlife we’re constantly displacing.