#398: Topher Florence, "Some of My Best Friends are Black" (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUc0vbSlanM

I warned y'all up front that I, unlike a real rock critic, will periodically declare -- not just declare, defend -- the greatness I perceive in some goofy novelty song or other. I haven't done that to you until now, but we might as well dive in at the deep end. "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is a hip-hop song by nobody I've ever heard of; or as portrayed, a hip-hop song by an argumentative computer refuting the nobody-I've-ever-heard-of's offhand dismissal of a TV show. The computer briefly describes, in rhyme, each of the two dozen black characters to have a speaking part in the 10-season run of the sitcom Friends. For extra topicality, the song came out six years after Friends was canceled.

I will talk about the lyrics -- and, it turns out, about the entire culture of gender- and race-based criticism, the nature of human memory, and two of my favorite non-sitcom TV shows, whee! -- but the beginning of my case is simple. I think "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is ridiculously catchy.

#402: Penetration, "Lovers of Outrage" (1978)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJjLUPBXAm4

In my Joni Mitchell write-up, I noted how the history of pop/rock music through the early 1970s had been, overwhelmingly, one in which only men had felt free to innovate. Punk rock arrived in the late 1970s, and in the usual histories, it too was a tale of white men -- or teenage boys, spiritually if not always calendrically -- blasting fresh hot air into stale, stultifying arenas (note to self: steal better cliches next time). In Britain, for example, we read that it was led by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Stranglers, Gang of Four, the Jam, the Buzzcocks.

#414: Joni Mitchell, "the Jungle Line" (1975)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2_1Jfgo4I

For most of the 20th century, songwriting innovation in the Western world was an extremely male enterprise. This is, of course, a way of saying that there was only half as much musical innovation as a saner society would have allowed. Or at least, judging by *my* studies, the modern history of pop music, through the end of the 1960s, featured women largely in roles as singers, and as mainstream or genre songwriters (Patsy Cline, Carole King, Loretta Lynn, Judy Collins -- all except King were more noted as interpreters than writers anyway, although at least King stood out, according to Joe Queenan, as the harbinger of the Yuppie Apocalypse).

Joni Mitchell first came to attention writing folk songs. She wrote strong, unconventional melodies and strikingly well-observed lyrical details,