There are a couple of things that even Pitchfork and I can agree on. #1: the Hold Steady is awesome. #2: you won’t “write a song as good as Tom Waits’ very worst song. Sorry, you just won’t.” They wrote that about the first Tom Waits album I ever heard, 1999’s Mule Variations. And, to this day, it’s the one sentence in all of Pitchfork’s history with which I agree word for word.

I first encountered Mr. Waits on an episode of VH1’s Storytellers and I was immediately struck by how awesome his stories were and how little they had to do with the songs he was performing. And the songs! Sweet Jesus, the first time I heard “House Where Nobody Lives”, I think I had an experience like the Mormon missionaries try to sell you about divine revelation. Here was a dude who was speaking the truth in a way I’d never heard anyone speak it before. I ran out and purchased Mule Variations immediately. That was ten years ago and my copy has seen better days, but it spins just fine and still resonates just as deeply.This album, like many Tom Waits albums, is the real shit – the deep down, bloody, muddy, messy, broken, gospel of sinners, whores, bums, ruffians, ne’er-do-wells, and basically everyone else.

What is it about Waits that’s so goddamn impressive? His songs are journeys, for starters. And, though they are full of specificity (including street names and weather, things Waits views as essential to good songs), they strike a universal chord. Take “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, for example: you don’t have to have actually been somewhere where no one speaks English and everything’s broken to understand exactly how he feels. Right? Waits intuitively understands broken-hearted, busted-ass loneliness and the anguish he howls from the rooftops is our anguish – a friend of mine in college said that Waits is crying so that you don’t have to. You couldn’t do it that well anyway. And that’s due in large part to his voice. I know, I know, a lot of people are all “Tom Waits can’t sing” or “his voice sounds funny” or “he sounds like Cookie Monster” but what they don’t understand is that for what Tom Waits is trying to tell you (about you, about us, about nasty, brutish, and short fucking life), ordinary voices are useless. I’d go so far as to say that they are insultingly inadequate. For the heartache and, yes, the joy that Waits is bringing on his tunes, you need a voice that’s a still-beating heart being tossed into a wood chipper in the middle of a nuclear war. You need a voice that took a stiff shot of whiskey and chewed up the glass. You need exactly the voice that only Tom Waits has. Do you really wanna hear Josh Groban inviting you to come on up to the house when “the only thing that you can see/ is all that you lack”? No. No, you don’t.

Mule Variations is full of some of Waits’s best busted-ass moments, too. On “Get Behind the Mule” (this is how Waits encourages perseverance – he’s not gonna tell you you’re beautiful no matter what they say and that words can’t bring you down; there’s no time for that in the Tom Waits universe. You’ve gotta get up and get to work, just like the rest of us), he gave me a line that resonated through pretty much every failed romance of my life since I first heard it: “Big Jack Earl was 8 foot one/ and he stood in the road and he cried/ he couldn’t make her love him/ couldn’t make her stay/ but tell the good lord he tried.” Again, a lot of people have probably stood in poor Jack Earl’s giant shoes. On “Cold Water”, Waits feels the pain of “pregnant women and Vietnam vets/ out there beggin’ on the freeway/ ’bout as hard as it gets”. That’s a line Bruce Springsteen would’ve sold (and/or had sex with) his mother to write.

But Mule Variations isn’t all gritty, bone-tired heartache, either. It also features a fair amount of that magical Tom Waits weirdness. “What’s He Building?” reads like a list of rumors Waits’s neighbors might cook up about him. “Eyeball Kid” is a circus-freak anthem complete with a telling autobiographical element: the Eyeball Kid was born on December 7, 1949, the same day as Thomas Alan Waits. Like the Eyeball Kid, Waits came here to show us how to really see. And “Filipino Box-Spring Hog” is a recipe for awesome disaster and possibly also a terrible dinner.

The thing (if there is indeed only one thing, which I kinda doubt) that makes Mule Variations a masterpiece (in a career full of them) is how easily the oddball tunes sit along side some of Waits’s finest ballads: “Picture in a Frame” features a line that I find so honest and so simply romantic that it has caused me, upon reflection, to give up writing love songs myself: “I’m gonna love you till the wheels come off.” Maybe that doesn’t grab y’all the same way it grabs me, but when the radio is crowded with people singing about how someone is their whole life or their everything or whatever, Waits’s lyric cuts me to the quick. I want to love someone till the wheels come off and, luckily, I get to. Sorry, Portugal. The Man fans, someone out there really loves terrible ol’ me. No one said life is fair.

And then there’s “Georgia Lee”, a piano ballad about a girl who was murdered. I love that Waits doesn’t just make a tug for your heart strings here. He does nothing less than call God out for dropping the ball: “Why wasn’t God watching?/ Why wasn’t God listening?/ Why wasn’t God there/ for Georgia Lee?”  It’s clear, then, that Tom Waits doesn’t just understand romantic loss. He understands the feeling of being massively, cosmically fucked over, and he can howl that pain for you too. Is it overstating it to suggest that Waits is out there, strolling the universe, absorbing some of the hits for all of us? Maybe; but when I listen to his stuff, I’m not so sure. This is my gospel music, kids – and Mule Variations closes with a kick-drum stomping spoonful of raw spirituality called “Come On Up to the House,” where Pastor Tom tells us to “come down off the cross/ we can use the wood” and reminds us “the world is not my home/ I’m just passing through.” Is that corny? So be it; after my sister died last year, this was one of the songs that picked me back up, that let me laugh and cry at the same time. So for me, Tom Waits’s music has real healing power, the kinda stuff some people find in church and other people find in a bottle.

If a major criterion for being the voice of your generation (or any generation) is being able to tap into the hopes, joys, loves, and fears of that generation with a profound understanding (is that a major criterion? I should hope so), then it might be time to consider that Tom Waits is the true voice of at least one generation and probably of many generations. Sure, he’s not as glamorous as Kanye West and he doesn’t want the job nearly as bad as Kanye does, but his music is 9000 times more honest. In my lifetime, Tom Waits has made some of the most heart-wrenchingly meaningful music I have heard and Mule Variations is my favorite of his albums not just because it’s amazing, but also because it was my gateway into the man’s entire body of work. It has shown me the way to songs that have seen me through pretty much every high and low point of my life for the last ten years.

If you listened to Naturally, the 2005 release from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, you heard Lee Fields on “Stranded in Your Love.” And if you didn’t listen to that album, what the hell is wrong with you? In an era of computer-generated pseudo-soul, Sharon Jones is bringing back the old school with a vengeance, picking up a ball that was dropped when Marvin Gaye died (perhaps this ball was buried with him and Ms. Jones dug it up and ran with it. This metaphor is getting icky – moving on). And Lee Fields is running right along with her, which is fitting since she was discovered while singing back-up for Fields in the 1990s.

Fields has been doing this funk/soul thing for a long time (he cut his first record in 1969. He was pretty inactive throughout the 1980s, and I’d like to think it was out of disgust), which may be why his new album, My World, sounds so deliciously old school.  And being a member in good standing of the old school lends a lot of credibility to this album. I mean, it would be preposterous if someone like Justin Timberlake tried to put out something like My World (yet I do not think it would be preposterous if Cee-Lo tried to); this is grown-up soul, and there’s no gimmicks. No one is gonna mistake My World for the kitschy throwback stuff of, say, the Brian Setzer orchestra. Lee Fields is the real shit, and he’s simply making the only music he knows how to make. For those of us who have been dying for a slice of real soul here in the 21st century, Lee Fields is also providing us with a hot, buttered mug of awesome with a side order of hash browns (sorry; I haven’t had breakfast yet). As far as I’m concerned, he and Sharon Jones could tour the country forever, holding old-timey revivals but with less religion and more ass-shaking music. Or they could both make an album with Danger Mouse – it’ll be a brilliant disc and, somehow, EMI will keep it from coming out. Just you wait.

My World would be right at home between your Otis Redding and Sam Cooke records, but it rides a heavier, funkier rhythm – which you can credit to drummer Homer Steinweiss and bassist Quincy Bright who, along with their fellow Expressions, provide a solid instrumental groove over which Fields deftly struts and wails. In other words, My World can be summed up in three words: “The. Real. Shit.” Every single teenage r&b diva you see on American Idol owes a considerable debt to the music of people like Lee Fields and the only way they can ever possibly repay it is to stop what they’re doing right now, go home, and get jobs more suited to their talents. Like maybe clerking the night shift at the 7-11.

Granted, Fields’s stuff will come off as a bit cheesy to some (for instance, on “Ladies,” he actually mentions “sugar and spice/ and everything nice), but good funk and soul has always been a bit cheesy. “Try a Little Tenderness” is cheesy as hell, but it is also phenomenally badass. If you don’t think so, Zombie Otis Redding and I would like a word with you.  (Zombie Otis Redding only knows one word: “Braaaaaiiiiins.” But even undead, he’s still got one of the all-time great voices.) Fields and the Expressions are on a mission to get heads nodding and possibly also to get bras unhooked. That’s what this music has always been about and I’d be hard-pressed indeed to object to that. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon (that’s never happened before, certainly not here at Bollocks!), I’ll say this: maybe today’s kids can conjure up that lovin’ feeling while Rihanna prattles on about her umbrella (ella ella ella ella – seriously, that’s really fucking annoying. But that doesn’t mean you had to hit her, Chris Brown. That’s dirty pool no matter what), but I’ll take Lee Fields and Sharon Jones and that old school stuff every time. Even the instrumental tracks on My World (there are two and they are excellent) have an organically sensual vibe to them that I just don’t find in the drum-machine propelled pop/soul that’s so popular today. Not that I’m trying to get these over-produced kids to round up some session musicians and attempt something like My World; they would fall flat on their faces if they did that. The fact is, Lee Fields (and this is true of all the great soul singers) possesses the right mixture of sorrow, joy, lust, faith, and plain ol’ grit to carry an album like My World. You forgive the cheesier moments because the album is pretty much a wall-to-wall groove.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine someone disliking this record. Soul may not be your cup of tea or whatever, but if you’ve ever liked chill-ass music, you’d do well to check out My World. Some people might dislike how old it sounds or how cheesy some of the lyrics are, but anyone who puts it on, pumps up the volume, and lets the beat roll is in for a good time. After wallowing in mediocre indie for the last week, My World has provided me a refreshing blast of funk and soul to haul my ass up out of that rut. Stephen Malkmus once observed (I’m paraphrasing here) that he tries never to spend more time reading about music than he spends listening to it and I’ve worked hard to listen to more music than I read or write about (not bragging, but it’s no mean feat). It’s albums like My World that make that effort worth it and remind me why I love music to begin with.

I don’t think I’ve been excited about a skate video for quite some time. Well, I was mildly excited about Lakai’s Fully Flared. The first video from the The Green Diamond crew, on the other hand, compels me to actually fork out money for a skate video. I do not really know why I look at some random blog of New York skaters and their antics. Well, yes I do know. They make skateboarding fun — the proper way.

Link to trailer.

Blessed with an insatiable hunger for fame, fortune & food, WoffDan decided to expand her activities and add music to her portfolio. Renaming herself into Method Dan, the first album in collaboration with hip-hop legends Ol’Dirty Hairy & Ghostface Nillah, will soon be released. The song “Hey, Dirty, Danny I got your fressi…” promises to become an earworm in clubs all over the world.