Jens Lekman

No one writes songs like Jens Lekman, the baby-faced Swedish singer-songwriter who's headlining the Fillmore tonight. Lekman expresses his heartsickness in details so personal and minute that his songs become superreal, almost comical in their trueness. His best songs are tearjerkers you can't help but chuckle through. And they sound gorgeous, too, led by Lekman's pristine voice and the lush orchestral arrangements that seem to expand and contract from massive to whisper-quiet.

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Mom and Dad are baby boomers. Though they're not just any kind of boomers. They are an underrepresented type, a minority voice within their generation. My parents never liked Bob Dylan and thought the White Album was too weird. So the 1960s that Mom and Dad passed down to me was different from the one Rolling Stone rehashes with each issue. It's less chest-beating, more shut-mouthed, altogether less narcissistic, and, sure, more bourgeois than the Sixties that spawned a million revivals. In my Mom and Dad's 1960s, Lennon and McCartney were fine songwriters. But the tunesmiths they revered were Bacharach and David, the Pipers of the Pan-Am Age of upward mobility. "Walk on By," "What the World Needs Now," "I Say a Little Prayer" -- that was the nostalgic soundtrack of my '80s childhood.

Hal David, right, with Burt Bacharach

Hal David died on Saturday. In his partnership with the more famous Burt Bacharach, David wrote the words and Bacharach wrote the tunes. Had rock 'n' roll not morphed into the self-mythologizing beast we now simply call rock, Bacharach and David's phenomenal popularity would today be a common fact of their time, the kind of historical signpost everyone knows and takes for granted, like moon landings and "Mrs. Robinson."

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The Vaselines: Sex sucks, some of us are going to hell, and being dumb is fun.

If the U.S. was an emoticon, it would be that frowning, teary-eyed yellow face. If it was a meme, it would be "Sad Keanu."

According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which measures overall national contentment, Americans are becoming increasingly miserable. The index scores the well-being of each state on a scale from 0 to 100. The most recent national average was 66.2, down from 66.8 the previous year.

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The cover of Fang Island's self-titled debut.

Tonight, Brooklyn-based weirdos Fang Island are playing the Great American Music Hall. Zechs Marquise supports, show starts at 8 p.m., tickets are $15. We strongly suggest you go watch these guys -- here are five reasons why.

1. Fang Island is Responsible for the Greatest Patrick Swayze Tribute in History

Observe:



From the "Time of my Life" whistle and the dead president masks to the Dirty Dancing T-shirts and Vaya Con Dios flag, this single-shot, super-surrealist accompaniment to "Daisy" was one of the most memorable videos of 2009. It's proof that sometimes, having no budget can produce magnificent results -- even if they are totally absurd.  

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Outpourings of grief and gratitude flooded the Internet yesterday after news broke that No Use For A Name frontman and underground Bay Area hero, Tony Sly, had passed away suddenly at the age of 41. As a key member of the pop-punk scene since the heyday of the 1990s, Sly had been a long-respected and much-loved figure in his community and beyond.

"He was an incredibly talented musician and a really wonderful guy," says Dominic Davi, ex-bassist for Bay Area pop-punk mainstays like Tsunami Bomb and Love Equals Death. "Touring with No Use For A Name was a fantastic experience, and it's heartbreaking to know that yet another gifted artist would be taken from the world so young."   More »

Twenty-five years ago today, Johnny Marr disappointed over-thinking 9th graders everywhere by loudly, abruptly leaving The Smiths to begin the journeyman second act of his career. Marr has since continued honing his impeccable ax chops with bands like the The The, The Cribs, and Modest Mouse. Singer and co-songwriter Morrissey has released nine albums -- each of them exhausting, fiercely funny and usually brilliant -- with song titles like "Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed."

To mark the anniversary of The Smiths' self-implosion -- which was first made public in a now-infamous Aug. 1, 1987 New Musical Express story headlined "Smiths to Split" -- All Shook Down has compiled a list of the band's 25 best songs of all time. Here they are:

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See also:

* Muse's Official Olympic Song "Survival" Is Decidedly Not a Victory for the World

* Five Olympics Theme Songs That Are Especially Terrible (Because Most Are Fairly Terrible)

* Olympics 2012: Underworld and the Chemical Brothers Raise Hopes for Good Music at London Games

On Monday, you may have seen us talking about how things at the London Olympics were looking up, music-wise, thanks in no small part to The Chemical Brothers' "Theme For Velodrome." Turns out that although Muse's cacophony of cliches got the biggest fanfare, there are in fact five official Olympic songs -- and the best one got unveiled yesterday.

Dizzee Rascal's "Scream" is, hands down, the best Olympic theme song we have ever heard. Ever. This, ladies and gents, is what an Olympic theme is supposed to sound like. It gets you pumped within the first fifteen seconds. It makes pretty great work-out music. It's about triumph over adversity. It makes you want dance your ass off by the light of the Olympic flame. But the thing we love most of all is that it's the first theme for the Games that we've ever heard that ain't afraid to get real.

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Dear Bikini Kill,
 
Do you have any idea how much we've missed you? We just wanted you to know how thrilled we are to hear that you're launching your own record label -- Bikini Kill Records -- and re-issuing your back catalog on CD (we'd love it if you could do some vinyl too, but one thing at a time.)

Has it really been twenty years since you released your amazing self-titled EP? We still listen to it all the time -- "Suck My Left One" is a modern classic, if you ask us. So very much has happened in music since then. But sadly, as we're sure you've noticed, outspoken women playing heavy, angry music have not survived well since you've been gone. No disrespect to Le Tigre or your other projects, but we really miss the level of rage expressed in Bikini Kill's music.


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There are songs that mention hands, touching numbers that express feelings of giddy togetherness and devilish desire: "Put Your Hands Together" by Eric B. & Rakim, "I'm Throwin' up My Hands" by Rev. Gary Davis. There are songs that mention feet and how they hastily whisk us away or keep us rooted in place: "Will My Feet Still Carry Me Home" by Elf Power, "Music Moves My Feet" by Liam Finn. There are songs that mention hearts, wonderful little ditties that articulate all the untamed love and loathing within ours: "I'm Hanging up My Heart for You" by Percy Sledge, "You Blew Out the Flame in My Heart" by Coleman Hawkins, "A Place in My Heart" by Orange Juice.

And then there are songs that mention asses. Thick and juicy asses.

Twenty years ago this month, Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" began its five-week reign atop the Billboard Hot 100. An ode to curvesome, full-figured women -- not those with a "straight up and down 10-year-old boy look" -- the song cleverly mocked our image-obsessed society and brought attention to the cultural pressures women face when it comes to physical appearance, all while gleefully reveling in chauvinism and racial stereotypes, and trotting out stunningly awesome couplets like, "My anaconda don't want none / Unless you've got buns, hun." Naturally, "Baby Got Back" was highly controversial. MTV, for example, stopped playing the song's video before 9 p.m. due to complaints from viewers and cable operators.

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Girls and girls on Muni.

Yesterday, Girls singer-songwriter Christopher Owens announced that he was leaving the band, apparently to make music on his own. "My reasons at this time are personal," he wrote on Twitter. "I need to do this in order to progress."

We can't say we know exactly what's going on here -- other than that it seems to mean that Girls, arguably the most famous young San Francisco indie rock band of the last few years -- are over. We're saddened by that. As we struggle to get our heads around the end of Girls, let's look back at some of the key moments from the band's roughly four-year career.

May 27, 2008: All Shook Down posts the video for "Morning Light." Music editor Jennifer Maerz says Girls keep popping up around the city.

July 1, 2008: Then-fledgling label True Panther Sounds releases the "Lust for Life"/"Morning Light" 7-inch.

July 2009: The "Hellhole Ratrace" single gets posted as a Best New Track on Pitchfork, despite being almost seven minutes long.

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