February 2026 (playlist)

I'm going to try something new: I'm going to start sharing  a playlist of music I've been listening to at the end of each month. I only use Apple Music currently, but if there's interest I might figure out a way to make a YouTube playlist of the music. Enjoy (if it works)!

The Five Worst Beatles Songs

I had this one sitting around in my drafts for a while. I'm sure every fan has made one of these lists before. Don't think any of my picks are too controversial...

1. "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" b-side of "Let It Be"

On April 11, 1970 Paul McCartney issued a press release which said he was no longer working with the Beatles. Thus this single, released exactly one month before this statement, is the Beatles' final single as a group of four living beings. The A-side is great: though written and recorded in early 1969, it is my personal favorite of Paul's allegories for the end of the greatest group in popular music history. The b-side, actually recoded in 1967 is the opposite of the a-side in every conceivable way. People will say that "Revolution #9" is self-indulgent (it isn't on this list. I like it!) but at least any sympathetic Beatles listener will recognize it as a work of genuine experimentation and curiosity. This is just a bunch of stoned British guys (including Brian Jones) making an audio collage of unfunny parodies of something stoned British guys might find funny.

This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact, as the b-side of their final single as a group of 

living individuals, this is technically the FINAL Beatles song. 

2. "Ballad of John and Yoko" a-side of "Ballad of John and Yoko"/ "Old Brown Shoe" 

One of the wonderful things about the Beatles is that there is no "leader" of the group. Yes, Lennon and McCartney hold "leader-like" positions but, as the b-side makes obvious, they weren't the only songwriting geniuses. Anytime one of the group tries to ascend to the leadership position, i.e. I am the most Beatle, it usually doesn't work. I refer people to the various quotations people not named Paul McCartney provided for their opinions of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." This is John's turn to imagine himself "bigger than the Beatles" within the Beatles. I love Yoko Ono as an artist and there are moments of John's solo catalogue that are transcendent. They both deserve their musical dues. But they also kind of seem like insufferable people, and mix that in with heroin withdrawal, a publicized wedding plus honeymoon "in bed for peace" or something and you have the very insufferableness described above. Now put all of that self mythologizing in a single in which only two of the Beatles played on. I mean, John really does sing "the way things are going/ they're gonna crucify me" really? Bigger than Jesus much? Listen to "Old Brown Shoe" instead. 

3.  "Run For Your Life" on Rubber Soul 

I just finished listening to a podcast, after having read a lengthy article, about the 9-hour 

Prince documentary that we'll never see. A good part of the reason why we'll never see it is

because, to the surprise of no one who actually has engaged with Prince's art for the last 

forty years, Prince had a very complicated relationship with women. He was abusive like 

his father (something he readily admitted in both the film and album Purple Rain) and eventually used his religious awakening to shame females in his audience (all the while 

becoming increasingly addicted to pain killers). John Lennon was abusive like his father, 

but his hatred of women really comes from his mother, who seems to have been one of 

the most negligent parents of all time. Such early childhood trauma might make me 

forgive Lennon this song but it's the final song on Rubber Soul, one of their greatest and

most significant records. The casual misogyny of "Norwegian Wood" is fascinating and, 

arguably, quite radical in its reversal of gender roles. This, on the other hand, is just 

standard, straight up, "look at another guy and I'll kill you" kind of misogyny. 

4. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" from Abbey Road

Hard to decide whose misogyny is more fucked up: yes, John's threats to kill his paramour are disturbing, but Paul constructing a little ditty about a serial killer who bludgeons women to death might be more disturbing. Add the fact that the song might be the most annoying thing the Beatles ever recorded only makes it creepier. Yes, reading each of the Beatles complain about having to spend several days recording this thing is quite funny (so is, honestly, Paul's response of "big deal" in response to the rest of his bandmates' complaints). The fact that Abbey Road has both this and "Octopus' Garden" should automatically disqualify it from being a great Beatles record. That's a lot of work "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" are doing there, but George had built up so much unheralded credit at that point that we can give it to him. For those people who claim to have wondered what happened to Paul during his solo career (I am not one of those people tbh), they clearly memory holed this thing because, honestly, this is worse than anything he recorded on his solo albums.  

5. "The Long and Winding Road" from Let It Be

If you're noticing a pattern here then all I can say is that the Beatles broke up at the right time. There's the possibility that the Beatles would have released one more great album 

in the early 70s, combining the then unreleased Get Back songs with some of the solo 

songs the individual members started writing towards the dissipation of the group. However, it's probably for the best that those songs ended up on solo records rather than a 

final Beatles record, because they would have most likely have had to share space with 

crap like this. As I mentioned above, in the last year of the band's existence, with the writing on the wall, McCartney started writing songs about the group, which is never 

really a good sign. Lennon started writing songs about himself and Yoko (see above) so

it was up to Paul to mythologize the group in real time (I have a much longer piece I want 

to write about how Paul ultimately "won" the Beatles, insofar as he's still alive to mythologize their story). This is the worst of them: "Let It Be" is the best, the half-side long suite at the end of Abbey Road isn't as good as people think it is, but it's good enough that I can forgive its more treacly moments. But this is just pure saccharine. The Phil Spector version is even worse: laying on the strings and choir and Paul choking up at the idea of being left outside the door (like a cake left out in the rain or some shit). It's a big reason why the Let It Be record wasn't very fondly thought of for a long time (almost as long as that winding road).    

Some thoughts on songs that often get put on this list, but, in my opinion, don't belong there

"Mr. Moonlight" from Beatles For Sale

This one gets brought up and I understand why: they sound tired, it's an old song that they played live for years, it's much closer to pre-Beatles pop than what they were recording at the time, etc. however,  it's hard to get mad at the song. The covers on Beatles for Sale are lacking compared to the leaps in songwriting evidenced by "I'm a Loser," "No Reply" (creepy misogyny that's kind of interesting rather than being merely violent), "I'll Follow the Sun," and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party." I kind of like the exotica vibe of the organ on the song, and, at this late date, its the last vestiges of the pre-fame Beatles at least until the covers and early songs on Let It Be. 

"Revolution #9," "Wild Honey Pie," "Honey Pie" from The Beatles (the White Album)

The Beatles is their most indulgent album, as if they four of them had enough ideas for solo albums for each member with songs left over. So, if you're throwing everything you've got at the wall to see what sticks, some things will work better than others. It's clear that these three "songs" are the ones that often get singled out. "Honey Pie" is Paul's final song in his music hall trilogy that started with "When I'm 64" on Sgt. Peppers. I don't like this song, but I don't think it's one of their worst. Paul always charms me in this mode and as someone who lost his mother young I can understand why Paul would want to write so many songs about songs his mother would know. "Wild Honey Pie" is barely a song, so you can just admire its goofiness for the minute or so it plays and quickly forget it. "Revolution #9" doesn't quite live up to the musique concrete and Fluxus sound art which influenced it, but it sounds expensively mixed (especially if you hear the blu-ray mix from 2018) and I love the curiosity that the Beatles always brought to their recordings. 

"Yellow Submarine" from Revolver

No. We're not taking "Yellow Submarine" off of Revolver. It's as much part of what makes the Beatles as "Tomorrow Never Knows." And, for those who have kids or have been around kids when this song is played, this is the Beatles' sub specie aeternitatis: this song is why you can imagine the end of civilization but can't imagine the end of the Beatles' influence on music. Children will know how to sing the chorus of this song before they know how to speak. And then they will inevitably ask to hear other songs by the Beatles. And the cycle begins anew. 

Reposition the Cup (David Thomas 1953-2025)

At first I thought I was too late to write this tribute to the late, great David Thomas from Pere Ubu but I just received an email for a Thomas tribute organized by what's left of the band Pere Ubu so I figure if the band itself took this long to organize a tribute, it's not too late to write my own.

Pere Ubu, Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection (Rough Trade 1985)

Pere Ubu, Cloudland (Fontana 1989)

Pere Ubu, Worlds in Collision (Fontana 1991)

Pere Ubu, Story of My Life (imago 1993)

Pere Ubu, Datapanik in Year Zero (box set, DGC 1995)

Pere Ubu, Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red 2023)

The first album I bought with my own money was Pere Ubu's Cloudland. I had a job during the summer of 1989 or 1990 working for a company that sold industrial staircases and tree grates manufactured in Nenah, Wisconsin. Ever since having that job at the age of 15 or 16 I instinctively look for the Neenah, WI marking on every tree grate I see. It was a strange workplace, a basement office that barely fit the four of us who worked there, and when the summer was over there was an absurd assumption that I would decrease the amount of time I spent in high school and increase the amount of time I worked there. I told the boss politely that my parents wouldn't exactly be thrilled at the idea of me dropping out of high school to work for a corrugated stairwell and tree grate middle man and that I would have to quit. The road not taken. 

There is something exciting about the first albums you buy with the money you've earned from a job. Basically, it means you don't have to beg your parents to buy an album (in most cases a cassette--the cheap, portable medium of choice growing up) or be with them when you were music shopping. Since I had mostly moved past toys (including video games at this point) buying cassettes with my own money was an important symbol of independence. It also meant that I was old enough to take the train into Boston and Cambridge to go record shopping. There were three conduits by which I discovered music: MTV (mostly 120 Minutes), Rolling Stone and music books. Pere Ubu was a band that covered at least two of those bases: "Waiting for Mary" was in heavy rotation on 120 Minutes and Lester Bangs, anthologized in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, sung the praises of the early Pere Ubu.

In 2024, I wrote an article about the television program Night Music (https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2024/06/night-music.html). A performance from that show which stayed with me was Pere Ubu's appearance in 1989: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYqvtHzr48&list=RD1hYqvtHzr48&start_radio=1). If you want to see Philip Glass jamming with Deborah Harry and Pere Ubu (while Sanborn plays some sexy sax): (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiK-Lvwanq0&list=RDTiK-Lvwanq0&start_radio=1) I had already fallen in love with concert films by Talking Heads and Tom Waits, which demonstrated how lead singers/performers could take physical performance to new and undiscovered (at least for me as a suburban teenager) places. Yet, both Byrne and Waits were George Michael compared to Dave Thomas. As an overweight, awkward teenager who always seemed at two with my pubescent body, Thomas was a projection of what I felt each day. More so than any other "rock star" I had ever seen, he seemed blissfully unaware and/or unbothered by the audience's expectations. Watching the performances and "interviews" on this episode of "Night Music" one senses that Thomas isn't standoffish so much as not wanting to be misunderstood. Spending most of his career up until that point gyrating in the world of Cleveland's underground music scene, Pere Ubu's late 80s/early 90s ascendency to network television and MTV required Thomas to be a media presence who had to convince the uninitiated why they should listen. 

My favorite interview from this initial promotional push in 1989 comes from the British television program "Rocking in the UK" (jfc what a generically terrible title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQsqFiyw9k. When asked if there was any part of their previous work/career that they/he now regretted or if he liked playing in Pere Ubu more then or now, Thomas answers simply that Pere Ubu is a way "to establish a language and develop things over a period of time." Like the great artists and musicians I had come to admire as I was getting into music as a teenager, Thomas didn't understand his career the way critics and journalists seemed to understand bands and musicians. It has always seemed to me that the greats think of their careers as continuums rather than individual periods marked by certain styles. He then switches tone to explain it only as Thomas could: "I don't care if you don't have enough time. You ask me these questions and I try to answer them." This might be understood as an example of Thomas' standoffishness but, as someone who has always been drawn to the margins of what language can express, I understand Thomas as searching for a way to discuss something he has only had to embody previously. He uses a paper cup to illustrate what Pere Ubu is like. Sometimes you look at a cup straight on and understand its use value. However, sometimes you only see the bottom of the cup or the top of the cup or what's printed on the cup and have no interest in it (technically, no interest in buying it, as Thomas emphasizes). Pere Ubu, according to Thomas, is making a career out of all of the various ways the cup can be repositioned and understood, regardless of its use value (my words, not his). Or, to quote a late 80s album title from fellow 70s travelers Wire, a bell is a cup until it is struck. 

The period in which I discovered Pere Ubu is one in which Pere Ubu looked an awful lot like a band in the  pre-Nirvana/grunge era of "alternative" music. Of course, Pere Ubu didn't just pre-date this era, but pre-dated the era that pre-dated the era which influenced the alternative bands of the early 90s. In fact, you could make the argument that Pere Ubu pre-dated everything. The band's first single "Heart of Darkness"/"30 Seconds Over Tokyo" was released in December 1975. Though Pere Ubu would come to be associated with punk rock over the following years, the truth is they had more in common with "proto-punk" bands like the Stooges, the Velvet Underground and CAN then their assumed contemporaries the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. This isn't just due to their single being released before all of those bands but what they chose to emphasize in their music. Their influences came less from the usual Nuggets-era garage rock and pre-Beatles pop (although they did cover the Seeds "Pushin' Too Hard" in the early years and expressed a career-long love of The Beach Boys), than from a dark metal sound heard on early Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and the Groundhogs (a personal favorite of Ian Curtis from Joy Division). The songs on their first single were long, with "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" being over six minutes in length, once again breaking with the short, sharp song lengths of most punk singles. 

The early singles are collected both on the 1978 EP "Datapanik in Year Zero" (included in the 1995 box set Datapanik in Year Zero, which collects their then long out of print early work) as well as the expanded Terminal Tower, which I purchased along with Cloudland back in 1989. Though their early music was less pop than the material they would release in the late 80s it wasn't without its pop pleasure. "Cloud 149," "the Modern Dance" and, especially, "Heaven" all skirt around the limits of pop, keeping the value conscious, legible cup firmly within its sights. This mixture of the experimental and the almost, could have been, radio friendly single in 

the inverted world of Jarry's Ubu Roi (the absurdist play from which the band took its name) is the template for Pere Ubu's first two albums The Modern Dance and Dub Housing. As Pere Ubu moved into the 80s, their music became more difficult and abstract, although never without its nods towards pop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw9DsEay6Ak&list=RDBw9DsEay6Ak&start_radio=1). By 1982 the band seemed to call it a day and Dave started working on solo projects. 

Then in 1989 (after one "comeback" album The Tenement Year) Pere Ubu released Cloudland, an album partially produced by Stephen Hague. Hague spent the 80s producing bigger pop bands such as The Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and New Order. Though all of those bands had more experimental pasts which might have placed them in the same orbit as Pere Ubu, its clear that Hague wished to add some British chart production to Pere Ubu rather than attempting to ditch his pop sound for the underground. Songs like "Breath," the aforementioned "Waiting for Mary" and, perhaps most explicitly, "Bus Called Happiness" could have (and in the case of "Waiting for Mary" did) top the alternative charts (Pere Ubu was still too spiky to simply show up on the pop charts). And yet, as the MTV and Night Music appearances attest, the band still refused to become a facile pop presence. As I mentioned at the beginning of the piece, the combination of greater accessibility with a stubborn refusal to play by the public's rules prefigured a number of alternative bands that would be more successful in the 1990s. Case in point: the Pixies' Doolittle was released the same year as Cloudland with the minor alternative "hit" "Here Comes Your Man," a song that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Cloudland. When I saw the Pixies live for the Tromp Le Monde tour, Pere Ubu opened for them. 

There's a longer essay I have always wanted to write about when experimental musicians and/or musicians who come out of an experimental music community decide to write "pop" music. A foundational example for me is John Cale. When Cale left the Velvet Underground in 1968 to start a solo career, it wouldn't have been unexpected for him to return to the experimental, drone based music he made with La Monte Young and Tony Conrad earlier in the 1960s. However, his first solo record Vintage Violence sounded more like The Beach Boys, the Band as well as any number of "sunshine" pop from studio bands based out of L.A. than any of the minimalism out of which Cale started. This continued throughout the early 70s for Cale: Paris 1919 was produced by Procol Harum's producer and featured members of Little Feet on the album. Slow Dazzle opens with an homage to Brian Wilson. There are many other examples besides Cale that I hope to write about someday.

I would place the run of albums that Pere Ubu released between 1989-1993 in the category of experimental musicians making pop music. Ironically, none of these albums are currently available on streaming. Fire Records out of England reissued Cloudland and Worlds in Collision on vinyl recently, but 1993's Story of My Life remains an album lost to time. Released on the ill fated Imago label, it has never been reissued and as far as I can tell there's no plan to reissue it any time soon. This is a shame since it's one of my favorite Pere Ubu releases, with some of the strongest songwriting the band had ever done. The band has slowly been releasing concert recordings from David Thomas' personal tape collection and there is a great live recording of most of the songs off of Story of My Life available here (https://pereubu.bandcamp.com/album/the-lost-band). 

Shortly after releasing Story of My Life, David Thomas wrote a review of the Beach Boys Pet Sounds box set for the Wire Magazine (I can't seem to find it online so it must have been a fever dream I made up). Much like Cale's fascination with Mr. Wilson (and Krautrock legends Faust's declaration on their debut album "I like the Beach Boys!") Brian Wilson seems to be a conduit between the experimental world and pop music. David Thomas might have been his greatest acolyte. You would think that the Cleveland influenced industrial sounds made by Pere Ubu would be a world away from the Southern California fantasias imagined by Wilson, his brothers, cousins and others. Yet, as evidenced by any of the music Wilson created after Pet Sounds, he has much more in common with the skewed upside down cup perspective of Pere Ubu than the surfing and car music that made the Beach Boys famous. This Friday we are blessed with the latest Beach Boys archival release The Brother Studio Years (https://shop.thebeachboys.com/collections/box-sets/products/the-beach-boys-we-gotta-groove-the-brother-studio-years) a box set which contains songs such as "Honkin' Down the Highway," "Johnny Carson" and "Solar System," all of which would not sound out of place on a Pere Ubu or David Thomas solo project. I plan on writing something about this box set later, but if you want to hear Brian Wilson's fascinating response to the musical world of 1977, and how remarkably close he was to the DIY and punk ethos of the time compared to many of his contemporaries, listen to the box set. 

After Story of My Life Pere Ubu left the world of major labels and pop production to return to the underground. I stopped listening to their new albums and lost touch with whatever David was up to. He seemed to get more cantankerous in his older age and I put him in the category of difficult lifers like Mark E. Smith, who seemingly would never die and would always be around to either see live or dip into a latest release if the curiosity arose. Of course, that's not how life works. Smith died in 2018 and, last year, Thomas passed as well. That makes Trouble on Big Beat Street his last will and testament. A song like "Crocodile Smile" (https://youtu.be/HVK_aOydWS0?si=QMXTqwP7itWkJz3S) proves that the band never lost their love a spiky, synth heavy pop, while later on the album the band covers the Osmonds' "Crazy Horses" (https://youtu.be/iXcj8dFOd1E?si=tqTgPmu3YpnKeTFg) demonstrating their continued love of pop detritus (fwiw, "Crazy Horses" kicks serious ass for a bunch of Mormons). 

Apparently in the band's final appearance around the LA area, they, like Cale back in the 70s, covered "Heartbreak Hotel" finding new meanings in a song that is now 70 years old. David Thomas aka Crocus Behemoth seemed to come from the depths of a cave in mid 70s Ohio, but, as his entire career has shown, he is another iteration of a sound, a feeling, a presence that has been part of the American voice for a long time. As the critic Robert Cantwell wrote about "Heartbreak Hotel" in his unpublished memoir Twigs of Folly Presley's performance: "opened a fissure in the massive mile-thick wall of post-war regimentation, standardization, bureaucratization, and commercialization in American society and let come rushing through the rift a cataract from the immense waters of sheer, human pain and frustration that have been building up for ten decades behind it." 

As much as this can be said for Presley, it can also be said for Thomas. "I don't see anything that I want" Thomas sang on the first Pere Ubu single "Heart of Darkness," rejecting the convenient world of mid 70's consumerism, while the flip side "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," is as much a "suicide ride" as Presley's suicide note from the Heartbreak Hotel twenty years earlier. Yet, like Presley and Brian Wilson, the howl of pain that comes from being "so lonely you could die" sits along side of dreams, solar systems, barbecues and raisin fields. To give David the last word, I'll quote the final line  from Pere Ubu's "Last Will and Testament," (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujRVMs0GhY&list=RDQujRVMs0GhY&start_radio=1) a song that I often think is Pere Ubu's greatest and, therefore, a song as great as any Presley or Wilson ever recorded:

"Hope is a razor's edge/ a razor's edge calls to me/ I fear I know the things I hope"