An astute reader has drawn our attention to an error made in one of our early posts about the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy." After doing some more research, we can confirm...we were wrong! My thanks to "tonyc" for giving us the heads up - like a good friend, he's let us know when we've got food in our teeth:
I just discovered your blog, and it's really good, but it pained me to read this:
"Heck, he even throws in Love Bug and Starsky and Hutch references just to remind you he likes crappy television, too."
Biggie wasn't referring to "Herbie the Love Bug" and "Starsky and Hutch" -- He was referring to fellow MC Lovebug Starski:
You nailed the rest of the post, though, and this blog is really an entertaining read. Keep it up!
Instead of correcting the original as if the error had never been made, I rather just commit the mistake to record. This blog was always intended to be a discussion about the stories behind the music, and sometimes, what finger on the steam has held to be true for so long, was always off target. Like your well-intentioned friend who sometimes has too much to drink at parties, there will be those times where finger on the steam starts wildly singing along to the music "Excuse me, while I kiss this guy!", as those around smirk knowingly. We can only hope that later on you'll take us aside on the patio with a cold brew and let us in on our buffoonery, before, of course, adjusting our collar so we can get back in there and go talk to that brunette.
Jay-Z dropped his first greatest hits compilation this week and finger on the steam has put together a wish list of five songs we'd like to have seen on the disc; think of them as the greatest misses.
Let us know if we're totally off base with our selection, and what other omissions you just can't do without as part of Hov's musical memoir.
1) "Change Clothes" feat. Pharrell, The Black Album, 2003 - Apparently from Jay-Z's final studio album, this initial single would be his greatest hit until the recent "Empire State of Mind". S'pose he came out of "retirement" to make sure he finally got that #1 single, but it's hard to forget a classic like "Change Clothes".
2) "Girls, Girls, Girls", The Blueprint, 2001 - How does he go about explaining these tracks to Beyoncé? A rather promiscuous tale, this one is just too fun to pass over for some of the lesser material Hova included on his Hits collection.
3) "Takeover", The Blueprint, 2001 - A diss track that took on Prodigy from Mobb Deep before Jay-Z focused his magnifying glass on that other king of NYC rap, Nasir Jones. Forcing NaS to respond on his track "Ether" from the Stillmatic album, the beef would be a launching pad for the resurrection of NaS' previously unmatched wizardry in the booth.
4) "Jigga What, Jigga Who" feat. Big Jaz and Amil, Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life, 1999 - Jigga at his visceral best, with speed to match. Maybe not a club banger, but a stone cold lesson in clutchin' the mic.
5) "Can’t Knock the Hustle" feat. Mary J. Blige, Reasonable Doubt, 1996 - Greatly overshadowed at the time by the belter singing his chorus, Jay-Z was fortunate to get Ms. Blige on wax for his debut album.
Apple Computer Inc. made a big stink this week by posting a teaser on their homepage suggesting their iTunes service would add something new and exciting on Tuesday morning. Well, it's been a long and winding road, but finally The Beatles' catalogue is now available for digital download on the music service. It took until 2009 for The Beatles' catalogue to be digitally remastered from its original stereo analogue recordings, leaving fans salivating and yearning for nearly two decades longer than they had to wait for the remasters of other contemporaneous rock acts.
While it is inevitable that these canonical tomes of modern popular music eventually become reduced to a floating binary of kilobytical ephemera, there are those that pine the loss of sound quality, aural fidelity, and visceral connection that came with unwrapping a 12 inch disc of weighty vinyl from illustrious spans of cover art and dropping the kinetic needle on the groove. There is something to be said, as well, for the way in which digital downloads have facilitated the hyperactive hashing and repackaging of music to the point where a song in a tiny .mp3 file is completely severed from any notion of the album to which it was once intended to be a part. That said, there is a bit of revisionist history in this view, given the entire music industry of the 1950s was premised on the 45 rpm single. Of course, even The Beatles owe their great fortunes to that rapid wave of early singles, before they dabbled in their more ambitious projects suited only for long playing records.
While I believe that the current paranoia suggesting "The Album" has met its death as an artform is rather premature, there is no denying there was a Golden Age for the self-contained LP, of which this era only retains a flaxen patina. Yes, that Golden Age was borne of the Progressive Rock movement of the late-60s and early-70s that attempted to elevate rock music to the credible and immortal station of classical symphonies and arias. Popularized by the likes of King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Deep Purple, there is no group that has left its mark so indelibly upon this movement as Pink Floyd. It is nigh impossible to breath the words "concept album" without hanging your hat on the Floyd's 1973 opus The Dark Side of the Moon. In wanting to protect the integrity of their music as part of a larger whole, Pink Floyd brought a law suit against its longtime record label EMI in 2010, attempting to block the sale of the group's songs individually on services like iTunes. A High Court in the U.K. agreed with the Floyd that the band could "preserve the artistic integrity" of whole albums by not breaking them up into individual song sales.
With the entire Fab Four catalogue being released this week for your splicing and dicing pleasure, it seems an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the argument made by Pink Floyd's legal victory. It is not to say that what works for a Prog Rock band is what's best for everybody, but there is some value in taking stock of the fact that music is capable of grander statements when its part of a cohesive whole than when it is severed into one-off snacks of pop delight. And with that, this week's finger on the steam Hump Day Hitslist will not present an assortment of 5 tracks from various artists, across multiple albums. Instead, we feature a full five song, 42 minute LP from Pink Floyd entitled Animals, without breaks or track separation.
Pink Floyd - Animals Side One
1. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 1"
2. "Dogs"
Side Two
3. "Pigs, Three Different Ones"
4. "Sheep"
5. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 2"
Released in 1977, Animals was a concept album loosely based on George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, with lyrical depictions of various social classes as different kinds of animals: the political dogs that wage war, the ruthless pigs who devour in the name of wealth, and the mindless and unquestioning populism that reduced the masses to a herd of sheep. This concept was developed by Pink Floyd's bassist and co-vocalist, Roger Waters, who felt great disdain at the social and political conditions of 1970s Britain. In a sense, this was Waters' response to the U.K. punk movement that had risen in the previous two years, by demonstrating that Progressive Rock bands who filled stadiums and sold millions of records for their labels could be equally as political as anti-establishment punk rock acts.
Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, famously wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words "I hate" scrawled above to demonstrate his contempt for the arena rock giants. Rotten wasn't wrong in pinning the Floyd as a bloated behemoth that far transcended the four members of the group; the Floyd had indeed become large to the point of nation-state status. The live shows for the Animals album were part of the massive In the Flesh tour that saw the Floyd playing to crowds nearing 100,000 strong in vacuous stadiums. David Gilmour would later intimate that by the end of the tour he realized the band had finally achieved all of the success he could have dreamed of and that there was nothing left to do; a feeling that saddened, rather than pleased him. Similarly, Waters would feel increasingly alienated by the large crowds, leading to his famously erupting on stage in Montreal and spitting on a fan that had annoyed him. These depressive and estranged feelings would become Waters' source of inspiration for writing the Floyd's subsequent album The Wall, that was symbolically represented in later theatric concerts by the building of a great white brick wall between the band and its audiences.
The cover for The Beatles' 'Yesterday'...and Today release is perhaps the best known banned album cover of all time, and is certainly among the most sought after. Produced as a sampler of singles from the previously released Help! and Rubber Soul albums and the upcoming Revolver, this album quickly garnered massive attention by way of a public outcry over the cover. Dubbed the "Butcher Baby" cover, Capitol Records was forced to withdraw nearly 750,000 copies it had already printed and made ready for distribution. To save a dime, the company decided not to destroy the records, but opted instead to paste over a much more tame photograph of the Fab Four looking rather bored around a piece of luggage.
Before long, enterprising teens discovered they could peel off the milquetoast photo in such a way as to preserve the Butcher cover underneath. Those who did it best began hocking their skills to assist others, and soon it was possible to say you had had your copy "professionally peeled". The obsessive bunch that are collectors of rare vinyl records have developed a taxonomy to describe copies of the album in its various conditions: "First State" being one of the original uncovered versions that survived the Capitol recall, "Second State" being a still-covered luggage version, and "Third State" being a peeled copy. Due to the fact so many people have opted to peel their personal copies over the years, and many damaged the covers in the process, a mint copy of the "Second State" non-peeled version has now, oddly, returned to being a particularly prized possession. Of course, the rarest of the rare, a "First State" never-covered Butcher cover remains the most valuable of the bunch.
As legend has it, the Butcher cover was shot in 1966, when photographer Robert Whitaker asked The Beatles to pose for a conceptual art piece entitled "A Somnambulant Adventure" -- referring to the state of sleepwalking. For the shoot, Whitaker had the lads dress in butcher smocks as he draped them with pieces of meat and body parts from plastic dolls. Bored with their usual photo shoots, and playing to their inclination for black humour, the boys were more than happy to oblige. Though not originally intended as an album cover, when The Beatles were asked to submit pictures to accompany a sampler album before the release of their next studio LP Revolver, they included shots from the Butcher shoot. The president of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston, claims it was Paul McCartney who was most vigorous in asking for the photo's inclusion on the cover, stating that it would be the band's commentary on the Vietnam War -- a fact that might surprise Beatles' fans given it is John who is most usually associated with such political commentary and noir satire. Though the cover may have caused Capitol a major headache in the late-1960s, Alan Livingston's son, Peter, would make good for himself in 1987 by arriving at a Beatles convention with a crate of 24 sealed original "First State" Butcher records that he had no doubt pilfered from his father's credenza. These "Livingston copies" have since become the crown jewel in the heraldry of banned album covers.
If you happen to own a copy of the record with the steamer trunk cover you might be lucky enough that it is one of the 750,000 Butcher covers that had to be pasted over. The "Second State" covers are discoverable by looking for a small black triangle of colour bleeding through the white background of the conservative cover about mid-way down the right edge. This triangle is Ringo's black turtleneck that he sports on the Butcher cover. If you are fortunate enough to see this black triangle, don't go peeling away, as the "Second State" version has become more prized than a peeled away version. If you don't discover a black triangle, then you likely have one on the later prints of the album after the Butcher covers had all been unloaded, and you will just have to enjoy the music.
The first posthumous album of original material from Michael Jackson, entitled simply Michael, is due out on December 14th, and the lead-off single "Breaking News" has quickly become breaking news across the music world. Several members of the Jackson family have come out publicly denouncing the authenticity of the track, suggesting the voice on the recording is not that of the real King of Pop, but is rather a product of mixing board trickery by a smooth criminal. Okay, lousy puns aside, have a listen and judge for yourself.
Michael Jackson - "Breaking News"
Given that the vocalist on "Breaking News" has yet to be verified, this week's Hump Day Hitslist brings you five superb tracks where we're sure it is not the Moonwalker doing the singing. Indeed, this week finger on the steam presents our favourite cover versions of MJ's biggest hit, "Billie Jean".
1. Aloe Blacc & The Grand Scheme: New soul sensation Aloe Blacc cools it right out on this jazz club version while his hip cat band shows immense restraint.
2. Shinehead: Employing rattlesnake whistles from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, this reggae stalwart provides us with a cover fit for the dancehall.
3. Scott "One Mand Band" Dunbar: A talented busker gives a compelling open air performance of the danceable hit using found items as his backing band.
4. The Roots ft. Erykah Badu: ?uestlove channels his best impression of Seu Jorge on this samba-inspired version by hip hop collective The Roots.
5. Chris Cornell: Reinterpreting the biggest pop smash of all time into a contemplative acoustic ballad that begs you to focus on the lyrics and infuses the story with strong emotion.
A few years ago, I received an awesome gift for my birthday from a dear friend -- a plain blue t-shirt emblazoned with only the following:
Ordered from this hilarious website that takes famous rap lyrics and turns them into mathematical diagrams, the shirt was a fitting gift, given it is an ode to my favourite hip hop song of all time: "'93 'til Infinity" by the Souls of Mischief.
To my mind, there are a wealth of reasons for this song to be considered in the very upper echelon of the best hip hop recordings of all time. Emcees Opio, A-Plus, Tajai, and Phesto each get three verses on the track, keeping all three and half minutes constantly fresh as the lyrical flows change every handful of bars. But instead of each member stepping on the verse behind him in a stage-stealing bid, the trade-offs here are like telepathic baton passes in the chillin'est relay ever run.
Produced by a group of 18 year old kids from Oakland, California, "'93 'til Infinity" redefined the art of lyrical technique for the West Coast. Full of youthful exuberance, the four brash MCs deliver story raps with wry wit and clever asides, that escape the typical violent melodramas of their G-Funk counterparts like Ice Cube and Snoop, and recall the effortless fluidity of jazz rappers A Tribe Called Quest. The easy breezy vibe of the track is amplified by the exceptional video, where the Souls are found miles from the grimy streets of Oakland, dropped into pristine dioramas of rivers, boulders and beaches as Tajai informs you that "sometimes it gets a little hectic out there. But right now, y'know, we gunna up you on how we just chill." While the efforts of the MCs go a long way in supporting a bid for this track's immortality, it is the warm and ethereal backing beat that puts it over the top. Twinkling piano keys, passing horn bellows, and the potato chip pop of a rhythmic snare drum invite the listener along to break out one of those icy beers and kick back. And it's here that I really fall in love with this song, and with all quality hip hop. As true masters of reinvention, the best rap producers draw inspiration from unlikely sources and present old material in unforeseen ways. For "'93 'til Infinity", A-Plus took a small snippet of "Heather", a nine minute glacial jazz melody created by Billy Cobham in the mid-1970s, and re-cut it into a rap classic. Fast forward to the two minute mark of Cobham's recording and try to figure out how A-Plus would've heard hip hop gold waiting in the middle of that floating cloudscape of a song. For me, its feats like that performed by A-Plus which elevate catchy tunes into something entirely more engrossing.
Where the similarity between "'93 'til Infinity" and Cobham's "Heather" can be difficult to discern at first blush, rap production is often more obvious in revealing from where it has plucked its samples. For instance, on another one of my personal favourites from the Souls of Mischief, "Cab Fare", you can recognize the theme song from the 1970s sit-com Taxi within the opening bars.
However, there is often more than meets the ear in any hip hop beat, and "Cab Fare" is no different. To give "Cab Fare" the pacing and energy required, the Souls of Mischief dropped the drum beat from the Taxi theme song, and spliced the left overs with this killer back beat from "Zimba Ku" by 1970s funk band Black Heat.
For what it's worth, there's something charming about the notion that your favourite rap beats are cobbled together from bits of found treasure buried in the vinyl grooves of old and obscure records. So the next time you sit down with your cherished hip hop hooks, think about whether they are more than just a collection of bass plucks and drum pops, and that maybe they've come from somewhere special.
Just days after posting the Hump Day Hitslist dedicated to American political songs in the wake of the U.S. mid-term elections, this piece was published in the Toronto Star, a prominent Canadian newspaper. Writing about a recent wave of insensitive, belligerent, and downright bigoted incidents in which citizens had used symbols from the Ku Klux Klan in ill-advised attempts at humour, or worse, author Royson James pleads with his readers that they refer to Billie Holiday's powerful and affecting song, "Stange Fruit", to understand the seriousness of these racist symbols. A gripping exposé of the mid-century lynchings of African-Americans in the southern United States, "Strange Fruit", was featured in the most recent finger on the steam playlist for its historical gravitas; a fact only further evidenced by James' news piece.
“Pastoral scene of the gallant South/ The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth/ Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh/ Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.”
The mid-term elections for Congress and Senate in the U.S. closed yesterday, and official estimates are that campaign spending on these elections will quadruple the previous record spent on a non-presidential vote thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; corporate funding of independent political broadcasts is now without limit due to First Amendment rights of free speech, the Court held. There are strong arguments on both sides for the way in which the Court's judgment helps and hurts democracy, but those are discussions not meant for this humble blog. Instead, we will celebrate these heady times by rounding up 5 of the best political songs about America ever written for this week's Hump Day Hitslist. Limiting the Hitslist to all things States-side means there will be no "Redemption Song", "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" or "God Save The Queen", but there's a cornucopia of other delights representing political messages from a variety of genres and from every class and corner of that historic and proud patchwork called the United States of America. Bear in mind that because there are so many excellent protest songs out there, not only are there glaring omissions within the genres selected, but there are whole genres of fertile political ground that had to be left off the Hitslist in the interest of brevity. Feel free to add your other favourites in the comments section, but be sure to let us know why that's the song for you!
Psychedelic Soul Edwin Starr- "War": Originally written for The Temptations on their Motown label in 1969, the song was eventually released as a single with Edwin Starr as vocalist to avoid alienating The Temptations' more conservative fan-base. Breaking all lyrical rules of 'show-don't-tell', "War" is about as in-your-face as an anti-Vietnam War song can get. Reaching number one on the Billboard pop singles chart in 1970, it is one of the most successful protest songs ever recorded. In a rather political move of its on, Clear Channel Communications placed "War" on its controversial "No Play List" following the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. Issued to the more than 1,200 radio stations owned by Clear Channel, the list contained 166 songs, including any song by Rage Against the Machine, which dovetails nicely into our next playlist entry.
Rap Metal
Rage Against the Machine - "Killing in the Name": While used more recently in a Facebook campaign to stop the winner of Simon Cowell's t.v. talent show X Factor from gaining the Christmas number one single in the UK, "Killing in the Name" has served more serious purposes since it was released in 1992 on Rage Against the Machine's eponymous debut. With only six lines of lyrics, this recording is one big howling expletive reviling against the American military-industrial complex that justifies killing in the name of, as Zack de la Rocha belts, the "chosen whites".
Jazz Blues Billie Holiday - "Strange Fruit": Billie Holiday possesses oneof the most magical voices in music history, and uses her famed pipes to spellbinding effect on this haunting track. Derived from the lines of a poem by Abel Meeropol in response to the practice of lynching African-Americans in the Southern states, "Strange Fruit" uses its central metaphor to detach the lyrics from their ghastly subject, bringing this taboo subject to the public discourse decades ahead of the civil rights movement.
"Southern trees bear strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/ Strange fruit hanging from the popular trees"
Rock Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Fortunate Son": Where Edwin Starr's protest song is a damning indictment of the entire venture of the Vietnam War, CCR's "Fortunate Son" castigates the American authorities that conscripted the poor to a distant war, and questions the classist foundations of the country itself. Contrasting the individualistic selfishness of fortunate sons born with "silver spoon in hand" against the patriotic generosity of the poor, John Fogerty's leathery voice encapsulated an entire generation's sentiment over music that could be from none other than the heartland.
"Some folks are born to wave the flag/ Ooh they're red white and blue/ And when the band plays "Hail to the Chief"/ Ooh they point the cannon at you, Lord"
Folk
Woody Guthrie - "This Land is Your Land": Though 24 years later Bob Dylan would capture the spirit of the 1960s counter-culture movement with "The Times They are a-Changin'", the archetypal folk protest song belongs to Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land". As a direct response to the jingoistic "God Bless America", Guthrie wanted to write a song that spoke frankly of the real problems facing America after he had traveled the States through the 1930s Dust Bowl exodus. Guthrie used his guitar, famously stickered with the slogan "This machine kills fascists", to tackle the definition of liberty, individual rights and property ownership in this patriotic creed for the Everyman.
"...and that's why I'll never play shuffleboard again. But enough about me, what are you in to?"
"Um, well I like to ride horses..."
"Really, that's so interesting." (I'm not really sure if it is at this point, but she's cute, so I do my best.)
"Yeah, I ride at a farm outside the city. I was just training this sort of wild horse to amble the other day..."
"Sorry, amble?"
"Yeah, it's like the right way for a horse to trot..."
"Like, if the horse was doing it right, they'd be 'ambling'?"
"Right...." (I don't pay attention for the next few minutes. I just nod and mm-hmm approvingly. It's crossed my mind that I never knew what the title of Yeasayer's "Ambling Alp" meant. Not just that I didn't know what it meant, but that there was even a word like 'ambling' out there, and that I could be using it in all sorts of conversations! And then I remembered the dark horse from the Yeasayer video, and it all started making sense. I didn't know then, but I'd later find out that the song had little to do with equines and much more to do with Nazis and boxing, but we'll get to that in a minute.)
"...but Tanya's an Appaloosa and she's so gorgeous."
"I thought Tanya is your friend."
"No, that's Christine. Tanya's her horse. Haven't you been listening to me?" (Well, no, but I'd never got to have written this blog post if I hadn't of daydreamed about it first.)
Describing their music to a Washington Post reporter as "Middle Eastern-psych-pop-snap-gospel", Yeasayer hail from Brooklyn, but they tote their music like a weathered suitcase, collecting trunk labels from the far reaches of the globe. Drawing on "Bollywood soundtracks, Chimurenga music, and a lot of Sacred Harp singing", Yeasayer holed up in a snowy cabin in Woodstock, NY to record their sophomore album Odd Blood in 2010. After putting in a day of recording the band's nightly ritual was to pile up on a bed together to watch a movie. Studying filmmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, keyboardist and lead vocalist Keating says he crafts his songs the way a director would a film: "every time I think up a song or a cool sound I have to kind of have a visual in my mind. If I think the sound is good it'll definitely cue some kind of visual idea. Sometimes you can have a little narrative going on and then you can start to picture it as a little movie." So for the opening track of Odd Blood, Keating sponged inspiration from David Cronenberg's 1979 psycho-horror movie The Brood. In the film, Samantha Eggar spawns a brood of evil mutant kids, which Keating found to be "an appropriate precursor to the overall tone of the album: this very alien landscape, and these kind of maniacal little devils running around." That Keating is serious about all of this is evidenced potently in the mutating meta-narrative that is Yeasayer's video for hit single "Ambling Alp".
While the video features cryptic imagery, psychedelic Nickelodeon goo, romping nudists with huge plumes of pubic hair, and faces that stretch out on waves of metallic liquid à la this scene from Jame's Cameron's 1989 deep ocean sci-fi epic The Abyss, there is a richer context being played out that transcends this lysurgic mish-mash of eye candy.
A rallying cry for sticking up for justice in an unjust world, "Ambling Alp" opens with the following verse:
"Now kid, I know I haven't been a perfect man/ And I've avoided doing things I know I can/ But if I learned one thing, to tattoo on my arm or burn into my thumb/ It would be that"
Its a fantastic lyric, but its unclear whether Keating means he has always avoided the things he has the ability to avoid, or rather, that he has avoided doing things he knows he is capable of accomplishing. Perhaps its both, and he'd canonize it in needled ink on his arm as a reminder you might not always be inspired, ambitious, and successful in using your talents to their fullest, but at the very least you can do the right thing, and avoid causing other people harm. Keating's not naive though, and he recognizes that even if you try to live with fairness, you might still be treated unfairly:
"Now, the world can be an unfair place at times/ But your lows will have their complement of highs/ And if anyone should cheat you, take advantage of, or beat you/ Raise your head and wear your wounds with pride"
These lyrics illustrate the overarching theme of the song, with its wildly noodling synth-organ flourishes and wave crashing cymbals: that to bring justice to an unjust world you must first fight your self-doubt. And so it's while Keating sings "You must stick up for yourself, son/ Never mind what anybody else done", that mirror faced prize fighters slug at each other in a battle of self.
But these boxers weren't just chosen for the video as a ham-fisted analogy of personal struggle. The begloved brawlers are a visual cue to the song's most interesting verse:
"Oh Max Schmeling was a formidable foe/ The Ambling Alp was too, at least that's what I'm told/ But if you learned one thing, you've learned it well/ In June you must give fascists hell/ They'll run, but they can't hide"
Maximillian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling became the world heavyweight champion in 1930, but his boxing success would reverberate far beyond the squared circle as the National Socialists used his achievements as symbolic vestiges of their own strength. Schmeling was not a Nazi party supporter, and it became known long after the Second World War that Schmeling had risked his own life to save the lives of two Jewish children in 1938. His popular identification with Nazism, however, would lead to a Rocky-like microcosmic battle of democracy versus fascism when Schmeling faced the great American heavyweight Joe Louis in the late 1930s. After defeating Louis in 1936, Schmeling was denied a shot at the heavyweight title as the American boxing association was afraid of the possibility of a Nazi champion. After Louis regained his title from another American fighter, Jim Braddock, he offered Schmeling a rematch for the belt in what would become the most anticipated fight of the century. When the hulking German walked to the ring at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, he did so under a hail of garbage thrown from the stands and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Louis.
The Yeasayer lyric is a clear tribute to Joe Louis' symbolic victory over a fascist opponent, but its historical references don't stop with Schmeling. Primo Carnera was a towering Italian heavyweight of six feet five inches--at a time when the average height in Italy was a full foot shorter--who earned the nickname "Ambling Alp" because of his size. Before his epic battles with Schmeling years later, Joe Louis was a promising up-and-comer with something to prove, and he got his shot against the gargantuan Carnera at Yankee Stadium on June 25, 1935. Fittingly, the fight was a parallel of the same geopolitical tensions the Schmeling fights would take on later, as Carnera was exploited as a symbol of the might of the fascist regime in Italy under Mussolini (who dressed Carnera in military uniform and distributed pictures of him executing the fascist salute). Italy had recently invaded Ethiopia in the lead up to the fight, and ethnic tensions were high in New York City, where the bout was to be held, as spectators took up sides for either the African-American Louis or the Venezian Carnera. While Carnera had a significant weight and reach advantage over Louis, the fight was a brutal clobbering in favour of the fleet-footed Louis. This, along with the fact that many of Carnera's earlier victories were called into question as rigged fights, explains why Keating hedged his lyric that The Ambling Alp was a formidable foe with the qualification that "at least that's what I'm told".
That Louis' fights with both Schmeling and Carnera were in June is in keeping with the Yeasayer lyric that "In June you must give fascists hell", especially when the context of those fights as analogies of the war between democracy and fascism is extrapolated to the real wager of war on the shores of France; the D-Day invasion by the Allied Forces of mainland Europe hazarded, of course, on June 6, 1944. Further, using Louis as an example of fighting for justice in an unjust world is well-suited given that the "Brown Bomber" was an African-American who struggled against racism in his native America and broke down barriers with his athletic prowess much the same as baseball legend Jackie Robinson would a decade later.
These pugilistic details simply enrich what it is a bubbly psychedelic dance-charmer, so that hopefully the next time you have an underwear dance party in your bedroom, they'll give new meaning to the words "Keep your fleet feet sliding to the side, to the side".
