The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #255

#255: "Psychotic Girl" (2008) - The Black Keys

Misogynistic much? Well, yeah! Maybe. It's a blues song, so it's got that for an excuse. Except it doesn't sound like a blues song; it's much too clean and crisp for that...if you don't count, uh, like one of the most popular blues songs, B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone." The thrill isn't gone from this one, though, as producer Danger Mouse (we'll hear more from him Friday)--hired by the Keys to produce their seventh album (in as many years)--smoothes out the jagged edges of this dynamic duo (from Akron, Ohio) while adding additional (redundant, much?) instruments (for the first time ever on a Keys' record, all of which have been superb) to give the band a fuller sound...not that the band needed it--as they didn't--but possibly to garner them some mainstream airplay (which didn't happen). Danger Mouse's work here takes the Keys' song of a dangerous femme fatale (redundacies are fun, admit it) and gives it not just a sense of menace, but also a sense--what with that opening Deliverance-allusion of a banjo; and the spare, piano plinking; and--most of all--the haunted house harrowing of choral voices singing "ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo" like a creeping gaggle of ghosts that mean business because of your own personal rotten business in which they're coming to wrap you until you scream and smother--of something untoward, a pre-primal (is there such a thing? sometimes, when I'm alone, I get the feeling that their just might be--don't you? A Lovecraftian type of feeling? Maybe that's just here in the Deep South, where there still exist some places where technology and moderninity have not only not gained a foothold, but where they have been deliberately booted--or excised) feeling, that not only is this girl bat-snit crazy, but there's also subliminally something supernatural or subnatural about her--she's a witchy woman; she's a devil woman; she's a black magic woman; she's Marie Marie LaVoodooVeau; she's Baba Yaga on a bad day; she's Christina Ricci and Barbara Steele and Ingrid Pitt and Bette Davis and Margaret Hamilton; she's the woman in the tub in the Overlook Hotel and Sadako climbing out of the television and Bradbury's Dust Witch and the unseen Blair Witch; she's Lillith and Carmilla and Vampira and Elvira, but she's no blithe spirit. Nope. She's a kind-hearted woman--she studies evil all the time. I won't be a part of her world no more. Except this one more time. Because she's calling me. And I can't resist.