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This week’s track is a quick detour from Statlersville (also known, evidently, as “urban areas are the devil’s playgroundville”). Last week’s cut from Los Hermanos Statler was “Streets of Baltimore,” and a little trivia for the zero point zero of you follow these posts has it that this was not the first track to find its way to the Baltimore area. Because this week’s track is also about Baltimore. It’s Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” (written by Randy Newman, sans the animated cowboy who cracks wise).

It may or may not surprise you to find that Ms. Simone sees Baltimore in much the same way that poor dope in The Statlers’ song does — a bleak, cold, grey wasteland. Give or take. But in truth The Statlers’ protagonist (P) was indifferent until he lost out romantically to the city and moped his way back to the farm in Tennessee. The Newman/Simone track takes a different approach, one could say.

The song eases in cold and moody and Simone wastes little time before she socks Baltimore right in the nose:

мебели софия

Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Tryin’ to find the ocean
Lookin’ everywhere

Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain’t nowhere to run to
There ain’t nothin’ here for free

Eesh. It’s like a postcard. And it essentially just gets less and less poetic from there, so I won’t bother to…oh, okay, here’s a little more:

And they hide their faces
And they hide their eyes
‘Cause the city’s dyin’
And they don’t know why

Oh, Baltimore
Man, it’s hard just to live
Oh, Baltimore
Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live

Meanwhile the music itself ebbs and sways with a string arrangement that never, ever gets hopeful and in fact is rather theatrically morose, meaning it sounds like the stuff you’ll hear at the end of a tragedy. Which is fitting, because if this song is anything, it’s a tragedy. I don’t know what Baltimore ever did to Randy Newman (is that what turned him into an quasi-adult-contemporary novelty song writer?), but Baltimore got theirs in this sneering anti-paean. Do note that it’s interesting that in Simone’s, P’s sister Sand and little brother Ray, like The Statlers’ P, seems to thin everything will be much better on some farmstead upstate. Maybe. Maybe not.

So it’s“Baltimore,” from 1978’s Baltimore. Dropped right down in — why not — Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

And the geoRSS and kml for all mp3s of the week.