F*** You to Faces and Names

"F*** You"  Lily Allen  It's Not Me, It's You
"F*ck Hodges [Don't Know Nothin JH Mix B]"  Jason Hodges/Mark Farina  Live At Om
"F*cking Boyfriend"  The Bird & The Bee  The Bird & The Bee
"Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)"  Otis Redding  The Complete Stax/Volt Singles, 1959-1968
"Fa-Ce-La"  The Feelies  Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The 80s Underground
"Fables Of Faubus"  Charles Mingus  Mingus Ah Um
"Fabricoh"  Archers Of Loaf  Vee Vee
"Face It"  Ed Robinson  What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves
"Face to Face/Short Circuit"  Daft Punk  Alive 2007
"Faces and Names"  John Cale & Lou Reed  Songs For Drella

   Our first collection of songs about fucking.  None of them are actually about sex, but it is such a great word with so many wonderful uses, some folk just find it irresistible.  Of course the artists here, or their producers, balked at actually writing the word in the title.  They all say it with reckless abandon - Lily Allen and Inara George both give it a lilting cheer incongruous to the excoriation in the lyric itself.


  My older son hates Lily Allen, and I fall a little in his esteem every time he hears one of her songs come out of my speakers.  I can see how she could annoy, but I find her amusing.  My son won't budge, and holds this is a moral failing.

   There are a handful or artists that make me cry nearly every time I hear them.  When I hear "Beautiful Boy" or "Watching The Wheels" by John Lennon I think about the hope in those songs and how shortly after they were released he was killed, and suddenly I am weeping.  There is a point in "Little Wing" when I am overcome by the feeling that I am standing in the presence of something greater than myself.  For both those reasons, just thinking about an Otis Redding song makes me cry. 

   Now seems a good time to sing the praises of Rhino Records.  From 50s rock & roll, through  60s soul, 70s funk and punk, 80s indie music, as well as "pop culture" boxes from both the 80s and 90s, Rhino has provided my collection with literally hundreds of songs.  The two songs on Rhino boxes here are representative.  "Face It" is the b-side to a 1971 cover of "Temptation's 'Bout To Get Me"  The artist has almost no internet presence at all.  Wiki brings up nothing.  Allmusic has only cursory and incomplete references to a discography.  The 45 itself was not listed on an Atco discography, and is selling for $100 on eBay, yet here is Rhino, giving Ed Robinson the same stage as brighter lights such as Cyril Neville, Rufus Thomas, and Little Richard. The Feelies and "Fa Ce-la" are better known than that, particularly to people of a certain age (approximately mine), but Rhino helps to keep those alt bands of my adolescence from being drowned out by an 80s "revival" that embraces the same bands that kept them off the radio the first time around.  Rhino traffics in nostalgia and marginalia, yes.  But it is nostalgia and marginalia that consistently speaks directly to me.  (Of course I recognize that they play both sides of the table - they are currently peddling remastered copies of Van Halen's 1984 and ZZ Top's Eliminator, and they are the also the only reason I have a copy of "Working For The Weekend.")