Top 10 Favorite Cover Songs by Jasmyn Wong

Joshua Tree National Park by Channone Arif

Hey, hey, hey, let’s have a drum roll for my first guest blogger!

My coworker, Jasmyn, is a Bay Area drummer who has contributed her subtle beat-keeping to an array of bands including The Skygreen Leopards, Paula Frazer & Tarnation, and The Sarees. Nowadays, you can find her laying down beats for Oakland’s Dawn Riding. Born in Santa Monica to artsy parents, Jasmyn grew up in San Francisco listening to a variety of music, from punk and oldies to jazz and R&B hits. (In case you’re interested, her favorite holiday song is Dave Brubeck‘s “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.“) She worked in curations at Pandora Radio for nearly seven years, and has also worked at Fandor and the Bay Area Video Coalition. She’s been a part of our office for just a little over two months, but she has already proven that she is indeed quite an exceptional source when it comes to discovering new outstanding musicians and films, which is why I was eager to find out what top 10 list of favorite cover songs she could drum up (oh, I couldn’t resist!)

Without further ado, here’s Jasmyn’s top 10 favorite cover songs. I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I have; I’ll write up my accompanying post for the new year.

10) Buffy Sainte-Marie – Helpless (original composition by Neil Young)
Neil Young is one of my favorite singers of all time. In my most humble opinion, nobody compares to him. However, this particular cover really hits home for me. Buffy gives a soulful gospel approach in contrast to Neil’s folky melancholy version. I think Buffy’s vocal abilities really stand out in this song. 



9)    Nina Simone – I Ain’t Got No/I Got Life (James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Galt MacDemot-Hair)
I’ve been digging into the Nina Simone’s vaults lately to get me through these difficult times. This song is my ultimate favorite from her and has become a personal mantra for me. I still get tears every time I hear it. It reads as more of a serious political statement than the original to me.

8)    Bratmobile – Where Eagles Dare (The Misfits)
I was a huge fan of Riot Grrrl music and culture as a teenager. Bratmobile enlightened me to take feminism more seriously. This song still remains one of my life anthems. I also love how goofy Slim Moon’s lyrical deliveries are against Allison Wolfe’s scratchy angry vocals.

7)    The Flying Burrito Brothers – The Dark End of the Street (James Carr)
I have a big soft spot for hippie outlaw country folk bands from the late 60s to early 70s. This band is one of my favorites along with Gram Parsons’ solo projects. I always loved how raggedy and loose this version is compared to the soulful James Carr original. It reminds me of a nice smooth aged whiskey after a long hard day of work. For long drives through California and New Mexico’s landscapes, I highly recommend this song. 



6)    Quix*o*tic – Lord of this World (Black Sabbath)
I had been a long time fan of the DC all-girl punk band Slant 6, so when I heard one of the members formed a new band in the early 2000’s, I immediately grabbed a copy of this album. The one track that stuck out on this album was this cover of Black Sabbath. I normally don’t like covers of Black Sabbath, but this one takes the cake for me. I like how heavy they were able to do this song with just drums and guitar with Mira showcasing her tough-as-nails vocals. A job well done in my book!

5)    Siouxsie and the Banshees – The Passenger (Iggy Pop and Ricky Gardinier)
In high school, I caught my first glimpse of the goth world by attending my first darkwave club for our school’s newspaper. I heard Siouxsie and the Banshees’ version of this song on their sound system and was instantly enamored. This rendition has a more fancy yet careless vibe than Iggy’s. I’ll never forget the twirling of long black lace gowns and arms waving in the air to the beat of this tune.



4)    Phyllis Dillon – Woman of the Ghetto (Marlena Shaw)
Phyllis Dillon is one of my favorite female reggae artists. This version is tougher than leather and will inspire you to keep moving through these dark times. I also love how this rocksteady reggae song was still able to maintain strong classic soul R&B roots.

3)    Nico – These Days (Jackson Browne)
It was hard to decide between Ian Matthews and Nico’s version of this song. Of course, I had to pick the darker version of the two. I love how unique and eccentric Nico’s voice is. She contains a strong masculine tone yet soft around the edges. I also love how tasteful the string arrangement is orchestrated against the guitar parts.



2)    This Mortal Coil – Kangaroo (Alex Chilton)
I first heard this song while working at Urban Outfitters in the late 90’s. I literally stopped folding clothes and fell in love. This version almost sounds like a completely different song than the original from Big Star. The structural experimental music pauses after each verse are beautiful. This song also reminds me of a song that could have been on a Twin Peaks soundtrack. I love the way the guitar and violin keep swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Gordon Sharp’s vocals are a perfect blend of anger and sadness.

1)    Sandy Denny – Milk and Honey (Jackson C. Frank)
This is the song I want to be played at my funeral. When I first heard it, it gave me shivers up my spine. Her voice is like a thick soft velvet that you want to be wrapped in on a cold winter’s day. I think her version contains a much more haunting ghostly presence compared to Jackson’s rendition. Perhaps it’s the way the guitar has an emotional breakdown dueling against the rise and fall of Sandy’s vocals. Fun fact: she was also the only guest vocalist to record on a Led Zeppelin album and was also the front woman for Fairport Convention and Fotheringay.

My (First) Trump AmeriKKKa Moment

No wonder Jesus hasn't come back.

A week and a half after the election, I sat on my bike and waited for the light to turn green at the intersection of Broadway and Grand Avenue. Downtown Oakland. Friday morning. One foot was planted on the curb, the other on my left pedal when an old—and I mean old—white man started to trudge across the street in my direction. He was the only person traversing the crosswalk in either direction. Broadway and Grand is a major intersection, so the crosswalk is at least nine feet wide—and he had it all to himself. But what did he do, when he was halfway across Broadway? He hugged the big fat white line demarcating the crosswalk, where vehicles are supposed to line behind to make space for pedestrians. My front bike tire was right over the line. At most, it was maybe two inches over the line, but this man stared at me from across the street and walked straight at me. In the eleven years I have been cycling on a near daily basis to commute to work, this has never happened before. I didn’t know how to react. As he glared at me, I furrowed my eyebrow, stared down at my front tire to confirm that it wasn’t obstructing him from walking up the curb ramp. It didn’t. He had gone out of his way to walk within inches of my bike tire. I didn’t give move. And I didn’t say a thing to him because I was so stunned by his behavior. He just continued to walk down the sidewalk.

Over that weekend, I wondered if he was just some cranky old fuck who has a thing about bicycles hovering anywhere near a pedestrian crosswalk. But on my morning bike ride the following Monday, I looked at the crosswalk’s ample spacing. I studied the curb ramp and saw how wide it was—and how far it was from where I had stood on my bike that Friday morning. That’s when I knew this was one of those quietly racist incidents that white people have become adept at in this country.

Since the election, I’ve read a handful of other similarly peculiar incidents on my Facebook feed between white folks and people of color. Every day there seems to be a new story. A new incident. Like this woman in Chicago (what a surprise) who yelled at black Michaels employees. Or this piece of shit for a human being who threatened Standing Rock tribe members in North Dakota. Although I already have a fairly low opinion of humans, it makes me sad to hear and read about this shit. Basically, some white people are going fucking crazy now that Trump’s the president-elect. Like they can get it up after years of not being able to get hard.

Now that I know the score—even in Oakland, California of all places—I’m prepared for a next time.

And I’m not going to stay quiet.

And I’m not giving a goddamn fucking inch.

(And the next time some dumb cunt pulls shit like this, I’m going to be the one to yell, GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! (If they even know where they came from.) My blood’s been on this hemisphere longer if they want to play that stupid game of first dibs on something inherently boundary-less like our Mother Earth.)

How Its Been To Not Watch Football

“Baseball is a 19^th century pastoral game. Football is a 20^th century technological struggle…. In football, the object is for the quarterback—otherwise known as the field general—to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing his aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.”

-George Carlin on Baseball and Football

Before this NFL season began, I decided to stop watching football.

I had spent the previous twenty seasons being a devoted Oakland Raiders fan.

So how has it been not watching football after all these years of fandom?

Even though the Raiders are 9-2 and currently #2 in ESPN’s NFL Power Rankings—which is fucking remarkable!—I do not miss watching football at all. Half a year ago, when I was still talking myself into giving up what had been my favorite sport for decades, I would have been surprised to imagine myself saying that. It’s been weird not watching, though. Although I was unaware when the first week of the regular season began, which was a delightful surprise, once I knew that the season was on, it was strange being at home on Sunday during those first weeks of the regular season between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. PST and not once turning on the television to watch a game or snippets of its coverage. I also felt a bit aimless, and, yet, at the same time, free to plot how else I would like to spend the day. Now that I’ve gotten used to not tuning into the games, I no longer have that I-feel-like-something-is-amiss feeling on Sundays, but I have continued to feel unburdened in not having my day tethered to a Raiders game, or another contest that looked like it would be a great matchup.  

Now that I no longer want to support the National Football League—a reprehensible sports organization that is the only one I can think of that can sit at the same table with FIFA—I’ve become acutely aware of just how prevalent it is in our American society. I see a shit-ton of articles all over the interwebs about football, especially fantasy football. I notice advertisements everywhere: at bars. Stores. My former gym. All the license plate frames in which people stake a claim to their chosen football tribe. If you’re out and about on the town on a Saturday or Sunday during this time of the year, it’s challenging to find a TV that is not showing a college or NFL game. Football is God in AmeriKKKa. And stadiums across this land are like national shrines come Sunday.

For the most part—sans necessary cyclical life errands (like washing my dirty chonies, or gathering & buying groceries)—Sundays feel like free days for me now. My daily rhythms aren’t noosed to the NFL’s schedule. Making time to write on Sundays is no longer the weekly, regimented struggle it had been in years past. My wife has appreciated the change, too, because now her Sunday rhythms aren’t also tied to the NFL’s schedule since I no longer hover about our living room for significant portions of the day watching a barrage of commercials and a sport she never took a liking to, despite my interventions. (Two years ago, I tried my darndest to teach Mari some basics of the sport, such as the difference between a 4-3 and 3-4 defensive alignment, and the names of the various positions—but we found it wasn’t so simple to explain. Not like soccer. Or basketball. Or even hockey.)

Perhaps most significantly, I’m not reading as much about football like I used to when I was a fan. Last season, I once remarked to Mari that what I probably most liked about football was reading and listening about it: the post-game analysis.; the pre-game analysis; and the podcast debates and discussions about football. But what I really fucking loved was devouring all the statistics, all goddamn season long. Even though I haven’t watched one game this entire season, I am still reading about football. Not nearly as much as before, though. Last year, I wrapped up most of my Sundays, for nearly half of the year, reading for an hour or more about all the NFL games—and that would bleed into Mondays with the updated Power Rankings on various sites and the subsequent lengthy articles from my favorite NFL writers (Barnwell! Mike Silver! Tim Kawakami!) Not reading about football has been harder to completely forsake, especially when it comes to the Raiders. On Sundays, while I’m writing (or trying to write), I still periodically click onto ESPN’s website to glimpse at the scores for their games (and other contests). I often click on the box scores to inhale some player stats. It’s hard to shut off the valve that followed one team for twenty years, even through many, many shittastic seasons. It’s not like that allegiance has dissipated; I’m just no longer okay with watching these mighty men—some of whom I had grown to admire (I’m thinking of you, Junior Seau, and Thurman Thomas)—irreparably destroy their minds, their lives, their bodies—and their families—for my entertainment.

Random Shit I Learned in Chicago & New York City

I had a recent trip to Chicago and New York City and learned a few things about both cities:

• Both Midway and O’Hare Airports are connected to the city’s above-ground train system. A ride from Midway to downtown Chi-town cost $2.25. I say, good for you, Chicago! Fucking BART charges a whole lot more from either SFO or OAK. (AirBART to the Coliseum station alone is six fucking dollars.)

• You can easily see the Willis Tower or Hancock Center once you board a Brown line train from Midway. That’s how gargantuan those buildings are. From afar, the Willis Tower inevitably makes me think of the Tower of Sauron. And, of course, I’m not the only one who has had this thought:

The Blue Towel

Back in 1984, at the beginning of the school year, my kindergarten teacher gave us a note to hand to our parents. It asked them to provide us with a towel to use for our daily afternoon naps. Two years before, my family had moved to a suburb of Orlando from Guadalajara, Mexico. My mother couldn’t speak much English. Her reading skills weren’t so great either. She read the note and thought the towel was for drying our hands. And so, she bought this towel for me. It is just over 2 feet long by 1 ^1/3 feet wide. She stitched my name on a corner, and I took it to class.

One day, near the end of the school year, my mom came early to pick me up. She came right after lunchtime when my classmates were sprawled out across the air-conditioned classroom, listening to soft lullabies for our naptime. I was curled up on the floor, resting my head on the blue hand towel, while my classmates slept on top of their towels. That’s when my mother realized what it was meant for. She felt awful, seeing my little body resting directly over the floor. 

When we left the classroom, she asked me in Spanish, “Why didn’t you tell me you needed a bigger towel?” My mom told me I looked up at her, then away, before I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s okay.”

Many years later, I still recognize myself in that moment.

I hope I will never lose this towel and the story it contains.

self-portrait with blue towel, 2016

Top 10 Favorite Music Videos from the 1980s (Part II)

Here's my top five music videos from the 80s:


5. Judas Priest “Breaking the Law” (1980)

Why I Love This Video:

Rob Halford has hair! I like the shot of him in the backseat of the car dramatically delivering his lines. This shit could be out straight out of a Spanish soap opera.

When Judas Priest storms the bank totting the guitar cases like guns. It's a fun and cheesy touch. Plus, I love the symbolism. Like Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” as well as one of the songs in my honorable mention, the rock guitar overtly symbolizes a weapon. In “Breaking the Law,” their music is akin to the truth that the strata of conservative, older British citizens didn’t want to accept about the social problems tied to their youth and lack of employment opportunities. The shattering of the man’s glasses at the 0:48 mark alludes to that, methinks. 

I love how the band is basically delivering a sermon about youth angst tied to unemployment. “Breaking the Law” finds the young rock gods railing against authority, against conformity. This is rock ‘n’ roll at its root—or at least what it should be. 

When Halford holds up the gold record and shatters the security cameras between the 1:37 – 1:42 mark.

It’s kind of thrilling when the band piles into the car for the getaway just before the guitar solo. It looks like it was fun to film.  

The shot of Halford and the band playing in the back of a car on the freeway (or whatever they call them in Britain) is pretty fucking cool. That’s no green-screen-studio shot! This is raw. This is rock distilled.

Favorite Part:

When the sleepy guard—the video’s supposed authority figure, infected and perverted by the shattering spirit of rock—picks up a cardboard cutout of a Jackson V guitar and proceeds to execute what might possibly be the cheesiest and awesomest air guitar solo committed to film. For me, the absolute delightful peak of the song is seeing him rock out to the Priest. 

Top 10 Favorite Music Videos from the 1980s (Part I)

Launched in 1981, MTV quickly helped to shape our popular culture with their music video programming. The 1980s churned out a number of outstanding and bizarre videos. Here’s my top-10 favorite videos from that era.

10. Rick James “Super Freak” (1981)

What’s a top-10 list of 80s music videos without one from Rick James? A piss-poor one, I say!

Why I Love This Video:

Rick James’ smile and wink at the beginning of the video; he was a dirty, charismatic motherfucker.

His glittery vest—or is it a blouse?—is fucking amazing. You know Marie Antoinette would have loved that shit.

From an aesthetic standpoint, I think the stark white background was a great choice. It’s a simple backdrop but it allows everyone to stand out in close-up shots no matter what color their skin is. (And it works great with the group shots, too.)

The scene of Rick in the back of the limousine with his ladies starting at the 1:44 mark. It looks like a mobile plain of heaven. (The boy from Buffalo, NY, did well!)

The way Rick James wields his big white bass like it’s an extension of his dick. (And man, that bass looks regally sweet.)

The cutaway to an archival clip of The Temptations is nifty.

Favorite Part:

The lewd tongue lick at the 2:09 mark when he sings “I’d really like to taste her” is pure Rick James; in a way, he was a part of the musical-sexual evolution bands like The Kinks started in the 1960s with songs like “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night.”