I have to really respect that there's at least one or two people on the earth who have made a career out of non-rhyming spoken word, and I'm pretty sure Saul Williams and Laurie Anderson have at least brushed against it.

To do it, you have to be able to say some really smart shit, and deliver it just right.  Laurie Anderson has been doing this since, what, around the time of new wave?

What kind of person do you have to be to be married to Lou Reed?!

An easy entry to the album is Only an Expert, which just gets better and better as she develops her theme:

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And if you're willing to dig in a little more to Homeland, the long and strong, slowed down and creepy, where she does what she calls "audio drag", Another Day in America:

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I noticed recently that both The Morning Benders and Janelle Monae released songs called Cold War on their new albums.

Both are great:

Janelle Monae's:

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The Morning Benders:

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So, I started wondering what other songs were out there called Cold War, since it seemed like a potent theme.

Not surprisingly, there were quite a few in the 1980's, so I listened to all I could find, and thought Snobby readers might find them interesting.

First of all, the venerable Devo, who actually just released a new album, from their album Freedom of Choice:

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Then, The Vapors (of Turning Japanese fame), with a pretty damn likable Cold War song:

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And, a kind of lukewarm Styx (of Mr. Roboto fame) version:

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And an intense 2000 dark techno version by Funker Vogt:

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Also wouldn't want to leave out a remix of The Morning Benders version (Called the Winter Remix) that I really like:

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Last, and kinda least, but worth a mention, a rareish 11 minute The Antlers song recently called Cold War (a minor work, but still interesting for completeness):

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I'm really loving The Morning Benders, and crying that I didn't see them when they were here in Seattle at the Crocodile.

But, I'm on their mailing list.  And they actually have good stuff on their mailing list.  Case in point: they released a little free album of covers called The Bedroom Covers.  Here are a couple of my favorite Bedroom Covers:

Dreams, a pitch perfect Fleetwood Mac cover:

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and Lovefool, a Cardigans cover… and the perfect match for The Morning Benders… they should do an album version!

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Also, just a reminder that their recent album Big Echo is just the shit, and worth 100 listens.

Stan Getz – Focus

In my early 20's, I first got exposed to jazz, and still love most of those crowd pleasers, including one I'm sure everyone's heard of: the so-smooth-as-butter that even the Starbucks generation has it on their iPod: Getz/Gilberto.

Girl From Ipanema has been so played and covered and tastefully coffee shopped that it's hard to remember sometimes that Stan Getz did amazing and different stuff both before and after the Bossa Nova thing. He could have easily ridden that train until the end of his days.

But it's not Getz/Gilberto, or even his later work that I want to turn you on to.

It's his 1961 masterpiece: Focus.

Allow me to set the stage.  Another album I love is Joanna Newsom's 2006 Ys album.  In Ys (pronounced like "ease"), Joanna sat down on pedal harp and recorded 5 long original songs in very few takes.  Once the recording was finished, she worked with composer Van Dyke Parks to create an orchestral score to lay behind her recording.  It's an amazing accomplishment, and I think it's kind of cool that Stan Getz did kind of the reverse on Focus.

Getz commissioned big band composer Eddie Sauter, to make him an album of modern classical pieces for strings, bass and harp, which Sauter delivered.

Now, I don't have the liner notes in front of me anymore, and can't find them on the internet anymore, but as I remember it, Getz laid down his saxophone takes on his first listen of each track!!!

I liked the whole album, but I remember about a minute into Night Rider just having a feeling like all the air was being sucked out of my chest.  Have a listen:

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It's well known that the sax is improvised, but if it's true that he improvised the first time he heard the recordings, then it just blows me away, that he was able to create this level of excitement and invention without any planning at all.

Also worth listening to is another exciting track, I'm Late, I'm Late:

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And a mellower ballad, I Remember When:

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Ahmad Jamal – At The Pershing / But Not For Me

My dad turned me on to Poinciana the other day… holy crap, what an amazing jazz song.    So, for starters, just listen to someone take a jazz piano standard and turn it into something definitive:

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This is just a fantastic merging of percussion and piano.  I wish there was video so I could see if they had halos over their heads or something.

Another spectacular one, Woody'n You:

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A more chilled out but equally impressive Moonlight in Vermont:

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It was hard for me to pick out highlights, because I've just been listening to the whole album over and over again.

Forest Swords – Dagger Paths

I've been slowly but surely listening to this short-but-sweet album from the UK Band Forest Swords.

I'm a big fan of the spare, spooky music from the old spaghetti westerns and I'm sure Ennio Morricone would approve of Dagger Paths.  The album starts with Miarches, eerie echoing surf guitar and dubstep-like female vocals.

Holyoke Mist could seriously could be the soundtrack to a modern spaghetti western, with dramatic drums and spooky strings.

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What a sweet little song, and weird little video. If you like this, the rest of the "White Magic" album will probably work for you too.

Oh Jens, this is divine!

Jens Lekman, normally writes and sings his own lovely songs (and tells insanely cute stories about how they were written while he sings them).

But he also remixes other people's songs like Au Revoir Simone's song "Shadows".

While he was remixing it, he decided to convert the song from straight 4/4 time, into a more waltz-like 3/4 time.

While he was playing around, he started thinking of all these other songs in 3/4 and 6/8 time, and decided to make one big 28-minute Girl Talk-y-mashup-in-slo-mo of them all as a waltzy summer jam just for us.  Thanks, Jens, it is just lovely.  I love that he adds a significant part of The Morning Benders' Excuses, because I just love that song.

Feel free to listen to it right here:

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And it's also worth listening to the Au Revoir Simone remix itself.

(This post is rated R at least.  Good rap can be kind of nasty.)

Little known, but greatly loved by The Sweet Snob: Yoni Wolf of WHY? in By Torpedo or Crohn's beats Lil' Wayne in slow, easy rap by a mile.  Sure, anyone can rap about being so badass they have it all figured out, but Yoni IS a badass rapper and he's willing to admit he doesn't have it figured out.  He'll be proudly mouthing watermelon every song.

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The one man who finally made it possible for a white guy to actually be respected as a rapper, he had to do it by being the harshest smartest fucker in a while.   It's unbelievable to think he could be so coked up and be so unbelievably cogent

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And if you're a little less sensitive, then it's worth listening to the profound statement of paranoia that is Marshall Mathers.   All the faggot talk gets old for sure, but he's obviously cooled it with that since this album.  But, this is some amazing lyricism.   It's mostly just a razor sharp slice to anyone who steps into his eyesight.  Amazing, bitchy storytelling that's tops but you're like, fuck man, seek help.  Luckily it looks like he did.

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The Beastie Boys are a huge part of white rap history.  As bratty little fuckers in High Plains Drifters:

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and as bratty bodhisattvas in Do It:

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Atmosphere goes on any white boy rap list although I guess he's not exactly a white boy, but pretty close   Every rapper has to brag some, and even a self-hating dude like Sluggo can talk big.  He's gonna be bigger than anything that's ever hit these little kids.  Bigger than guns, bigger than cigarettes.  Good luck with that, Sluggo.

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I'd be amiss if I didn't mention local rapper Macklemore showing us how hard he has to think about it before he hits that:

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I'm ready to call Janelle Monae the Andre 3000 replacement for the new decade, and these two albums the new Speakerboxxx.   Big Boi appears on Janelle's new album, and Janelle of course appears on Big Boi's new album, and the production is so mind-blowing and consistent you could put these two albums together on shuffle and call it a new wonder album.

Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (which you can listen to in its entirety on his myspace page) is a wonder, and an easy sequel to his half of Outkast's Speakerboxxx album.  He finally realized Andre was not going to get his shit together and just went ahead and released a beautiful, smart, sexy, dirty album the continues along the same frame as some of the best of Outkast.

Janelle Monae's album has been out for about a month, and I still get frustrated with how unbelievably talented she is.  She can sing, rap, write, and just generally kick ass with her own weird, robotic style.  I think Tightrope is the most amazing hip-hop/pop song since Hey Ya.  I have been wearing this song OUT and just finally saw the video, which only enraged me more because I was like, "Oh, she's an amazing and unique dancer too?!"

And lesser but also cool is the video for the remix:

So get these two albums and bump them, because there's so many enjoyable songs between the two of them that I want to barf.  I've been waiting for Chico dusty for a year, and didn't realize I was going to get a double album of Big Boi style goodness.