Let’s do another one of these.

1. Choose three songs you think everyone should know. These should probably be songs that most people here don’t already know (you be the judge). They don’t have to be your favorites, and they don’t have to be the Best Songs Ever. They just need to be songs you think more people should know.
2. Find YouTube vids or MySpace links or something for the songs – so that other people can hear them too! (important!)
3. In as many or as few words as you want, tell us why you think we should know these songs.

Since I run the joint, I get to go first.

1. Stereolab - Ping Pong, from "Mars Audiac Quintet". 1994.(sorry for the ad - YouTube's ad-free copy of this has disappeared)

This is my favorite Stereolab song, but I think it's also a good example of what Stereolab was all about. You've got the slick, retro-futuristic lounge sounds ("Space Age Batchelor Pad Music" was the name of an early EP), the heavily French-accented (or actually in French, sometimes) lead vocals, lyrics that sound like they could have come from a graduate course in leftist political theory - and it's all super-catchy. Here are (most of) the lyrics:

it’s alright right ‘cos the historical pattern has shown
how the economical cycle tends to revolve in a round of decades
three stages stand out in a loop
a slump and war then peel back to square one
and back for more

bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery
huger slump and greater wars and a shallower recovery

you see the recovery always comes ’round again
there’s nothing to worry for things will look after themselves
it’s alright recovery always comes ’round again
there’s nothing to worry if things can only get better

there’s only millions that lose their jobs and homes and sometimes accents
there’s only millions that die in their bloody wars, it’s alright

it’s only their lives and the lives of their next of kin that they are losing
(repeat, mostly)

I happen to love those lyrics, and hardly a week goes by that I don't find myself singing them in my head, in response to some news story.

2. Robyn Hitchcock - Glass Hotel. From "Storefront Hitchcock". 1998.

To me, it's the perfect version of the perfect acoustic Robyn Hitchcock song. His lyrics here are typically surreal, whimsical and clever: there's a story in them but there are just enough pieces missing that it's difficult to know what's really going on. It's rather opaque, which is ironic since you'd expect everything in a glass hotel to be rather clear. But this is fun-house glass, I suppose. There are free-floating, disassociated images: people are there, but not there at all; a geranium comes out of a telephone; someone is laughing; someone is crying. Everything seems; he's not quite sure. It seems like a dream.

Whether he's describing an actual dream, a pure fantasy world, or if the words are an allegory for something that happened in his real life, we can't really know from the words, of course. And I don't really want to know. I like it as surrealist fiction.

I love Hitchcock's acoustic playing, I much prefer it to his electric playing in fact. And this is my favorite example. The song is mostly based around a seventh-fret B chord, but with the two high strings left open to act as drone strings. Hitchcock uses drones often, but usually in solos. Here, they ring out through (nearly) the whole song, high above the rest of the notes; they remind me of wind chimes. Glass wind chimes, I suppose.

3. Pavement - Gold Soundz. From "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain". 1994.

It's from Pavement's most-accessible album. They turned down the random bursts of noise, sanded-off some of the rough edges, brought the melodies up-front and focused on the hooks. If you don't know Pavement, this is the album to start with. But it was still too weird for MTV or commercial radio.

Like Hitchcock, Stephen Malkmus writes lyrics that are often difficult to follow literally. Sometimes you just have to go along for the ride and enjoy the scenery as it flies by. His lyrics are free-associations of images, words, random rhymes, winks at the listener (last line from the first verse: "and they're coming to the chorus now!"). He leaves a lot of room for interpretation. But, also like Hitchcock, Malkmus has the ability to wring emotion out of words that only barely make sense together.

This my favorite Pavement song. It's one of his more direct. It's about... well, I'm not exactly sure. It seems to be a note to a woman, offering advice and encouragement ("It has a nice ring when you laugh / At the low life opinions", "Believe in what you wanna do"), while asking her to not tell anyone that they met ("keep my advent to your self", "I keep your address to myself cause we need secrets", "keep my address to myself because it's secret"). And it's not sure if all the advice is for her: "Is it a crisis or a boring change / When its central, so essential" seems like it could be for both. But it doesn't matter. If he wanted us to know, he would've been more explicit.

And whatever the first two verses are talking about, it's the last verse that gets me:

So drunk in the August sun
And you're the kind of girl I like
Because you're empty and I'm empty
And you can never quarantine the past
Did you remember in December
That I won't eat you when I'm gone
And if I go there, I won't stay there
Because I'm sitting here too long
I've been sitting here too long
And I've been wasted
Advocating that word for the last word
Last words come up, aw, you've got to waste

I don't know if it's the words or if it's how he sings them, but those first six lines hit me, every time I hear them: a rush of bitter-sweet. It's a weird reaction, I know, to a song I don't even understand. But that's why I like it. Fifteen years later, I still get it. I'm afraid to dig any farther - I don't want to ruin it.

So what about you? Which three songs should I, and the other ones of readers here, listen to ?