The Beatles & the Stones

• Happy Cat, “We Fuck You Like Superman”
• The Weather Prophets, “Well Done Sonny”

Today’s theme is song titles borrowed from rock & roll arcana. “We fuck you like Superman” is allegedly a backwards-masked message at the close of “A Day in the Life.” And “Well Done Sonny” is a line spoken by Charlie Watts in the Gimme Shelter movie, breaking up a charged silence that follows a radio call-in rant about Altamont from Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels. It’s Watts fending off the darkness by reasserting his own dry, snug & smug unflappability – least, that’s how it always looked to me.

The Weather Prophets tune gets bonus points for actually being about Altamont (“searching the crowd for the the man in the lime-green suit”); it captures the horror, the horror but delivers it with a mighty rollick & shine, plus a bass hook so sturdy you could hang onto it with both hands if the ground fell away on you. The Happy Cat song seems to be about, um, fucking you like Superman. But it’s mesmerizing, & the washes of vinyl static make for their own callback to the, er, source text.

(“Well Done Sonny” is from a solid old Creation Records sampler, Doing It for the Kids. “We Fuck You Like Superman” is from a great early-1990s comp called Soluble Fish, a tie-in to Chemical Imbalance ’zine put together by this guy, who currently propriets one of my fave mp3 blogs.)

On another note....

Moistworks has been hosting “Writers Week,” in which a number of authors post songs of their choice. My favourite, I think, is Jonathan Lethem’s survey of poultry-themed songs (“Chicken Strut,” “Turkey Walk,” “Eat the Goose,” etc.).