#obit

I feel like I've been posting a lot of these RIP things lately. The Specials were, in hindsight a big deal for me. Ska was a sound that was punk-approved. And other than hip-hop, it was the first music I got into on my own that wasn't "loud guitar music." That certainly opened up the way for so many of the things I love, from James Brown to Autechre. Arguably the only band more important for my branching-out was Joy Division.

And I can't get enough of watching them play in their heyday. They looked impossibly cool, a wild mass of energy and high pants cuffs. And there was Terry Hall at the center, totally serious and almost menacing while chaos erupted.

The guy had a terrible life story with great pain in his childhood, but he translated that into a great thoughtfulness and empathy for the less fortunate in the Thatcher era. It was through him that the great contrast of the Specials — fun Jamaican-inspired music with black-humor or straight-up dark punk lyrics — manifested, and without him they've been only half of their glory.

Instead of a classic Special song, here's the video for "Our Lips Are Sealed," which Hall cowrote, and in which he looks like Robert Smith.

Not much else to say. An iconic voice inextricably tied to something I love, though her feelings on that were mixed.

This one is tough. Mark Hollis recently passed, and that was difficult to process but in the musical sense he was already gone, having left a near-perfect legacy of forward-thinking avant-pop that to most people's minds invented post-rock.

Scott Walker on the other hand, despite his age, was still fairly prolific, especially considering his attention to craft and detail.

I can think of at least 4 moments where he defied expectations: Quitting teen idoldom to write music, Scott 4, his songs on Nite Flights, and Climate of Hunter, which really established the rest of his career. There was nothing else on earth like them. There was nobody on earth like him. And there never will be.

Probably doesn't come as any surprise to anyone that I am, and have been for as long as I can remember, a David Bowie fan. I heard the news early on because I was up late on Sunday night. We all regarded the first tweets skeptically, because people "die" on Twitter all the time and there was a big death hoax with the release of The Next Day. But it was verified sadly by his son, the director Duncan Jones. Suddenly his new album took on a new significance. The lyrics aren't cryptic anymore, just like that. And in roll the thinkpieces and tributes.

It's only in hindsight that I realize what songs like "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" and "Life on Mars?" did for me as a nerdy, weird, depressed kid. Bowie probably changed my path — for the better.

Somehow the ultimate outsider hero also cut across so many types of people that the response was near-universal. I suppose everyone feels like an outsider, and he managed to tell them "oh no love, you're not alone."

I'll be honest, I wasn't sure that Stan Freberg was still alive when I heard the news he'd died yesterday (from Weird Al Yankovic's Instagram). But I spent a great deal of my childhood listening to him, thanks to my parents' taste for vintage comedy.

Of all the things that played in our house — like Paul Simon or Dave Brubeck or Louis Armstrong — Spike Jones and Stan Freberg stand out. Simon's inscrutable lyrics are not something a kid can identify with. But if you're even remotely aware of Dragnet, then Freberg's "St. George and the Dragonet" is a hoot.

So maybe I get just a little extra sad thinking about Stan Freberg than the average celebrity death. My mind free-associates his voices and sketches with my mother. But at the end of the day, his work is funny. It's clean, but not cheesy. It references pop culture of its time, but feels timeless.

Check out the entirety of his radio show on the Internet Archive.