Talking music

Seeing as there’s so much hellfire, damnation and slimy things with slimy legs crawling upon a slimy sea, I thought I’d really wind my neck in and talk music.

Or rather the music you just gotta get, ’cause in the magical list below exist the latest, finest and most versatile stuff today. Seek you the doef-doef pollution that makes living on Ontdekkers Road in Roodepoort feel like you’re on a homing skateboard in Dante’s inferno, read no further.

Nor is this sublime collection for the semi-sentient carbon-based life forms that react on a primal level to rap, hip-hop, kwaito or house (whatever the hell that is) or Afro-jazz-fusion-slam-blah-fishpaste-traditio-delarey noise. This is for the cognoscenti, the Euterpian epicures, apassionata of the ethereal realm where dwell the gods of perfect aural bliss.

They should be in your CD rack — in no particular order.

Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino
By far the best tribute package this century to one of the greats of the last one. A double CD featuring John Lennon (Ain’t That a Shame?), Elton John (Blueberry Hill), BB King, Paul McCartney, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson and an inspired combo of Robert Plant with the Soweto Gospel Choir doing Fats’s Valley of Tears.

Chrome Dreams II
By Neil Young, now losin’ his hair and surviving prostate cancer. The archetypal outrider has put together a scrapbook of his favourite genres in his inimitable style. From the opening number, Bluebird, there is something for the fans of Crazy Horse or Emmylou Harris or good old CSN&Y.

Magic
Shows The Boss is still The Boss and he’s singing songs for the workin’ folks. This is Springsteen from Nebraska and The River through Philly via Vietnam to Tom Joad, dust, devils and the damnedest rock this side of the asteroid belt.

Songs of Mass Destruction
Despite its Black Sabbath-sounding title, it’s like rich steaming oxtail in the Drakensberg in mid-winter and pinotage and good people all around. And it’s all home-grown, home-cooked and served with feeling by Annie Lennox at her sensual, superlative supremacy.

Mothership
Aah, what can we say but welcome back Led Zeppelin, the greatest rock band never to have released a single. Jimmy Page is still as mesmerising as he was when he blew The Yardbirds away in 1966 and Plant’s voice is better than ever shining through the universe like a vocal Silver Surfer. This double CD ranks up there with all Led Zepp’s amazing predecessors.

… and on that subject …

Raising Sand
An almost unthinkable combination of Plant and Alison Krauss, poster-girl of country music for years with Union Station. But it works and it works really fine, with neither ceding to the other, but identifiable and idiosyncratic in each number. Whether background to a braai or the focal point of your senses, you won’t find many to rival Raising Sand.

Theology
Sinead O’Connor at her haunting, mischievous, grey-blue, conflicted, searching best. If the lyrics alone don’t get her a Deon Maas award and simultaneous nomination for canonisation, there ain’t many folk this side of the divine that’ll manage mixing oil and water as well as the Celt does.

Road to Escondido
If you haven’t already got it, put on a National Geographic polar suit, say you’ve been away a while and get into a music shop, because this is as good as it gets. Eric Clapton and JJ Cale — say no more!

Into White
The kind of musical masterpiece aficionados often talk about, but which, like braai-fire fantasies, just never gets off the ground. Carly Simon doing cover versions of, among others, Cat Stevens, Judy Garland, The Beatles and the Everly Brothers sounds so bland, doesn’t it? This album, released last year, is anything but bland. You’d swear you’ve never heard these numbers before.

Finally, two wild cards — one a jackpot certainty, the other a beautiful symbiosis of two quintessential masters of their craft.

Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
This mammoth compilation opens with Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and closes two days later with Boston’s More than a Feeling.

And in answer to the question: “I wonder what’s happened to …?”:

The world’s coolest guitarist, Mark Knopfler (yea, the unflinching deadpan oke with the bandanna who sings the Dire Straits’ songs), and the most sought-after duettist in the world, Emmylou Harris, have been waking up the West Coast (of the US, man!) and putting its savage heart to rest. And the fruits of their most comfortable liaison is called All the Road Running.