"The Ruling Class!" Jeff Tweedy

I troll a bunch of MP3 blogs during the course of my day, but my favorite is easily the hardest one to read. Save for artist names and song titles, there are few recognizable words on Finland's Katosblog.com, but you don't need to know a lick of Finnish to appreciate its surprising gems. Like this live acoustic Jeff Tweedy song posted there last week. The tune—which'll be on the next Loose Fur record, Tweedy tells the crowd—has a light melody and a fun "Sweet Georgia Brown"-ish whistling lead, which is always a good hook. Then you'll notice the lyrics, which have Jesus returning to Earth as a crackhead junkie; "He's back, Jack, shootin' smack/ find him if you wanna get found." Your ears can't help but latch onto the crowd's divergent reactions: part mild offense, part overt hysterics. I'm with the hysterics. Tweedy caps the song with about three minutes of banter describing how he played it at a string of Christian colleges earlier on that tour because "I'm out on an ambassador-type mission for the Dark Lord." An appropriate cut from the part of the world that gave us death metal.

You can download this song at www.katosblog.com/2006/01/loose-fur-born-again-in-usa.html. And if you can translate some of the Finnish for me, that would be awesome.