Various Artists: Wish You Were Here: Love Songs For New York

After Sept. 11, the Village Voice issued a call for New York love songs by placing ads in weekly newspapers across the country. The bounty—800 songs by a range of famous acts and bedroom amateurs—represented an intense creative hiccup in the big-picture narrative of American folk music. As described in Douglas Wolk's brilliant, aptly titled Voice article "Clichés For A Reason," the songs covered a gangly range of emotions, but most drew from a shared, awkward language dictated by shock, sadness, and a defiant lack of perspective. Wish You Were Here, an 18-song benefit CD culled from the project, largely steers clear of such raw immediacy, offering an even split of time-specific heartbreakers and all-purpose polyglot anthems. Taking a cross-cultural view of city life, the disc pairs genre-crossing notables like Moby, Cornershop, Mekons, and Andrew W.K. with worldly obscurities such as Senegal's Baaba Maal, jazz pianist Uri Caine, and Egyptian vocalist Hakim. The most uniquely affecting songs address Sept. 11 head on. Throbbing over a meathead trip-hop/rock groove perfect for a Sopranos episode, Joseph Arthur's "Build Back Up" features a laughably bad lyric ("You can't destroy our love / New York is tough") that's all the more endearing for its clumsiness. The same goes for Moe Tucker's Velvet Underground facsimile "Fired Up," which nails down months of anguish with the simple lines, "I'm fired up, pissed off / I'm tired and I'm mad." Only two of the songs were wholly conceived after Sept. 11, and many feature rewritten lines and/or recontextualized sentiment. Some are just boring, including Moby's bland Play B-side "Memory Gospel" and Cornershop's languid "Returning From The Wreckage." The disc's highlights trade on simple, unassuming moments: Caine stretching "New York, New York" into brooding and giddy extremes, Loudon Wainwright III riding the A train under the WTC wreckage on "No Sure Way." Wish You Were Here features some confounding selections, but it ultimately goes a long way in sealing a fate best articulated by Andrew W.K.'s smartly stupid line, "You can't stop what you can't end."