Brevity isn't chief among Mike Barthel's qualities as a writer. Just reading the first page's worth of posts at Clap Clap Blog could keep you busy until July 4th if you started right this instant. Creating that amount of content would burn out most other bloggers, but Mike still finds the time to write for Flagpole, contribute when asked to at Stylus and post all day and all night at I Love Music. Better yet? None of it's junk. It's inspired writing through and through.

It's a simple set-up. Mike was sent six untagged, generically named, mp3s and instructed to simply write a few sentences after listening to each one. Whether he recognized any of the songs or not, I wanted him to comment honestly and succinctly on three current songs and also on three songs from the past. What you see below are Mike's responses, as well as mp3s of the three older songs for you, the reader.

King Biscuit Time, "C I Am 15"

This song is funnest if you pretend they are saying "CIA, 50 Cent," because there's a connection that needs to be drawn out, li'l Curtis as a government conspiracy I mean, BROUGHT INTO THE GHETTOS by Robert Mueller himself, who is a notorious NYC partisan tired of the hegemony of Southern rap, so upon coming to power he spikes the market via a product designed to hook you and then fail, thus dragging under the whole game and...oh yeah, the song. It's funny how it takes what I think someone would describe as a "baille funk" beat and puts a bunch of really boring things on top. It also explains why I am so hesitant to sing in my lower register even when people want me to, but mostly it makes my head explode. I think I could really like this song if I put it on random and heard it a bunch of times, but I didn't.

Delays, "Valentine"

Let's stop for a second. I've had this song for a few months now, and it's part of a regular rotation at the top of my playlist along with Marit Larsen, Amy Diamond, that I'm From Barcelona song, and a few others in that vein. But where it used to give me a huge rush, now it not only fails to do that, but actually sounds a little pale, wan, worn-out. And I don't think this is from overexposure: tracks and albums I've listen to as much if not more over the same time even seem a bit fresher, and those things happen to be the actual US chart hits: "L.O.V.E.," "Pump It," "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)." I've always had the sneaking suspicion that the things that are the most popular are so for a reason, one generally having to do with their durability, but it seems churlish to put into practice. Still, I woke up this morning and got a particular feeling from looking out the window and seeing that saturated blue sky and trees grown almost bright with rain and wishing I was back upstate, just for a little while, just to drive, and then I had to go into work, inside, and even when I go back outside you can't get that view anymore. I wanted to put the day on pause, and where this song used to do that, it doesn't anymore, and it hasn't been around for so very long. It's still a great song, though, and I am still hit by the giant choral part that comes up in the back of the verse that hits around the two minute mark. Maybe it's just that when you spend your life seeking pleasure, the failure to find it feels more disappointing that it really should. Forget everything I said.

Sonic Youth, "Jams Run Free"

For the first bar this could be "1979," and it isn't, which I understand, but given the mood I'm in (see above) and how well that Pumpkins song works as a driving-around song (it's one of the few Pumpkins songs I actually like) this can only come as a bit of a disappointment. Of course, Sonic Youth are actually a remarkably effective driving-around band, too—I have great memories of driving to practice over the Williamsburg bridge with the windows open and "Silver Rocket" blaring on an early summer day—but the comparison that comes up at the beginning makes me frustrated with the blunted arrangement, here, the drums not popping and the guitars making noise, yes, but sorta sounding like they're missing notes, and Kim too, of course, not really singing. It's a really nice song, and I understand that putting in all those weird touches is what makes Sonic Youth what they are, and if they went too gentle and summery they'd turn into goddamn late-period Yo La Tengo (I remember Summer Sun mainly as a beachball floating around our apartment) and that noise crescendo is fantastic, but still. I look forward to playing this in a car while driving on a sunny, somewhat empty section of interstate, ideally on some sort of transitional stretch of road with lots of curves and trees.

Fleetwood Mac, "Big Love" (MP3)

This is the kind of song that I might hear on the radio and actually stop and listen to it, even though I don't know what it is, although admittedly once the vocals come in I might've turned it off. I'm assuming this was a pop song at the time, and from listening to a two-CD set of power ballads I downloaded sometime or other, I am constantly shocked by the weird production tricks they used to use on pop songs ("In the Air Tonight" starts off really interestingly!), ones you generally don't find today. Here there's the panning trick done on the drums that's most apparent at the beginning, the way the main riff seems to float around you, and of course the utterly unexpected appearance of the claves in the chorus, which is awesome. Even the guitar sounds pretty cool and odd until the totally pointless solo. It seems less concerned with taking a series of disparate elements (programmed parts, recorded performances chopped up and cut-and-pasted in ProTools, multiple takes edited into one) and forming them into a cohesive, trompe l'oiel whole than with making those distinctive bits really stand out. It's one of the many retro things that I think are sadly unresurrected, and with different songwriting and vocal touches over it, this could've been a really neat song. I get the sense this is all going to sound really embarrassing once I find out what this is.

The Police, "Be My Girl/Sally" (MP3)

I don't know if I'm being sent this purely so I can say, "it's a Max Martin song, but it's not!" but man, seriously. Take that first palm-muted part, take off the flange and throw those distinctive drum sounds under it, and bam, girlpop gold. Oh, and then there's a really lengthy spoken-word part that's sort of dirty and it gets cross-faded into the Max Martin part again but at a different tempo and I'm gonna go ahead and assume this is the Homosexuals, who I never really liked despite everyone's insistence, but if this is them, I might be persuaded otherwise. Remind me to tell you that story about the Cars I was going to tell you before the naughty poem bit kicked in sometime.

The Platters, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" (MP3)

Remember what I said in #2 about popular stuff? I downloaded Johnny Mathis' "Chances Are" back in the glory days of Morpheus, and I don't even know why, but I eventually grew to like it, and then I found out it was the song our parents' generation was conceived to, and it made more sense. Listening to this one, it's interesting to note how non-distinctive the verses sound, and the chorus doesn't get announced the same way it does in a modern pop song, but it pops out at you nevertheless, because it's highlighted melodically rather than by the arrangement, which all makes me wonder if the seemingly distinctive parts we hail in our current favorites will all mush into a goo to ears 50 years hence, and why they do so, and how fast it happens. I blame the goopy musical numbers in Marx Brothers movies for making songs like this signal "fast forward" to me, but still, what's the process by which distinctive sounds get diluted? How do we keep pop fresh, and what's it going to do next to stand out? Also, I listened to the last note about twelve times, just to try and figure out why he sings "eyes" like he's decided to be Trent Reznor all of a sudden. "...eeeeEEEYYYYYEZZZZZZ FUCKER!"