Spike Jonze had eight entries on the list, including “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys, and “Buddy Holly” by Weezer (coming in at 8 and 7, respectively), though it’s a pity that NMEVideo had to launch today. If they had waited until later in the month, they could have included Jonze’s newest collaboration with The Beastie Boys, for their single “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win….” (which the band announced on Tumblr last Friday).

“I don’t know those songs,” replied Cash, “but I got a few of my own I can play for you.” Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of “Okie From Muskogee.” With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer’s rendition of the explicitly antiwar “What Is Truth?” and “Man in Black” (“Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”) and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash’s fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself — a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

Years later, “Man in Black” is remembered as a sartorial statement, and “What Is Truth?” as a period piece, if at all. Of the three songs that Cash played for Nixon, the most enduring, and the truest to his vision, was “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The song was based on the tragic tale of the Pima Indian war hero who was immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, and in Washington’s Iwo Jima monument, but who died a lonely death brought on by the toxic mixture of alcohol and indifference and alcoholism. The song became part of an album of protest music that his record label didn’t want to promote and that radio stations didn’t want to play, but that Cash would always count among his personal favorites.

The story of Cash and “Ira Hayes” began a decade before the meeting with Nixon. On the night of May 10, 1962, Cash made a much-anticipated New York debut at Carnegie Hall. But instead of impressing the cognoscenti, Cash, who had begun struggling with drug addiction, bombed. His voice was hoarse and hard to hear, and he left the stage in what he described as a “deep depression.” Afterward, he consoled himself by heading downtown with a folksinger friend to hear some music at Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Café.

Onstage was protest balladeer Peter La Farge, performing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” A former rodeo cowboy, playwright, actor and Navy intelligence operative, La Farge was also the son of longtime Native activist and novelist Oliver La Farge, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1930 Navajo love story, “Laughing Boy.” The younger La Farge had carved out an intriguing niche in the New York folk revival scene by devoting himself to a single issue. “Pete was doing something special and important,” recalls folksinger Pete Seeger. “His heart was so devoted to the Native American cause at a time that no one was really saying anything about it. I think he went deeper than anyone before or since.”

Cash never pretended that music could stay immune from social, but he tried his best to “not mix in politics.” Instead he talked about the things that unite us like the dignity of honest work. “If you were a baker,” he told writer Christopher Wren in 1970, “and you baked a loaf of bread and it fed somebody, then your life has been worthwhile. And if you were a weaver, and you wove some cloth and your cloth kept somebody warm, your life has been worthwhile.”

Raised in rural poverty on the margins of America, Cash empathized with outsiders like convicts, the poor and Native Americans. But his identification with Indians was especially deep — even delusional. During the depths of his early ’60s drug abuse, he convinced himself, and told others, that he was Native American himself, with both Cherokee and Mohawk blood. (He would later recant this claim.)

At the Gaslight, once he had listened to “Ira Hayes’ and La Farge’s other Indian protest tunes, including “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” and “Custer,” Cash was hooked. “Johnny wanted more than the hillbilly jangle,” Peter La Farge would write later about meeting Cash at the Gaslight. “He was hungry for the depth and truth heard only in the folk field (at least until Johnny came along). The secret is simple, Johnny has the heart of a folksinger in the purest sense.” In fact, Cash had written an Indian folk protest ballad of his own in 1957. “I wrote ‘Old Apache Squaw,’” Cash later explained to Seeger. “Then I forgot the so-called protest song for a while. No one else seemed to speak up for the Indian with any volume or voice [until Peter La Farge].”

Cash, like many in the 1960s, could see that everything that was certain, rigid and hard was breaking apart. Social movements were blossoming. But the thunderous American choir that was singing “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall All Be Free” drowned out the cry of the loose-knit Native movement. As Martin Luther King and other leaders steered their people toward legislative victories that would further integrate them into a society they were locked out of, the rising tide of Native youth activists wanted something different.

“In my mind, Native people could not have a civil rights movement,” American Indian Movement activist and musician John Trudell says. “The civil rights issue was between the blacks and the whites and I never viewed it as a civil rights issue for us. They’ve been trying to trick us into accepting civil rights but America has a legal responsibility to fulfill those treaty law agreements. If you’re looking at civil rights, you’re basically saying ‘all right treat us like the way you treat the rest of your citizens’. I don’t look at that as a climb up.” Rather than pursue assimilation into the American system, Native American activists wanted to maintain their slipping grip on sovereignty and the little land they still possessed.

By the early ’60s, the burgeoning National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was attempting to stake its own claim for their equal share of justice. With the expansion of fishing treaty violations and the breach of two major land treaties that led to the loss of thousands of acres of tribal land in upstate New York for the Tuscarora and Allegany Seneca (the story behind La Farge’s “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”), the NIYC, led by Native activists like Hank Adams, responded by adapting the sit-in protest. Rechristened as the “fish-in,” the NIYC disputed the denial of treaty rights by fishing in defiance of state law. Fish-ins were held in New York and the Pacific Northwest.

The fish-in tactic worked in helping build some public support, but it did little to stop the treaty violations. Instead, the U.S. government ramped up its efforts to crush any momentum the Native movement was building. Oftentimes their tactics were brutal and violent. “This was the time of Selma and there was a lot of unrest in the nation,” remembers Bill Frank Jr. of Washington state’s Nisqually tribe. “Congress had funded some big law enforcement programs and they got all kinds of training and riot gear-shields, helmets. And they got fancy new boats. These guys had a budget. This was a war.”

By 1964, the Native American cause had attracted the interest of another celebrity. On March 2 the NIYC gained national attention as actor Marlon Brando joined a Washington state fish-in. Already an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement, Brando’s very public support and subsequent arrest for catching salmon “illegally” in Puyallup River helped to boost the Native movement. Brando’s involvement with the Native cause had begun when he contacted D’Arcy McNickle after reading the Flathead Indian’s book “The Surrounded,” a powerful novel depicting reservation life in 1936. Brando’s involvement in Native issues led to government surveillance that lasted decades. His FBI file, bursting with memos detailing possible means of silencing the actor, quickly grew to more than 100 pages.

Three days after Brando’s arrest in Washington, Cash, fresh off the biggest chart success of his career, the single “Ring of Fire,” and having just finished recording a very commercial album called “I Walk the Line,” began recording another, very different album. When Cash left Sun Studios for Columbia in the late 1950s, he believed his rising star would give him the creative capital to produce and record something a little outside the pop and country mainstream — albums of folk music and live prison concerts. He was alternating folky albums like “Blood Sweat and Tears,” a celebration of the working man, with commercial discs laden with radio-ready singles. “Ring of Fire,” which had reached No. 1 on the country charts and had crossed over to pop, had bought him the permission of Columbia to make an album of what he called “Indian protest songs.”

In the two years since Cash had first met La Farge and listened to “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” Cash had educated himself about Native American issues. “John had really researched a lot of the history,” Cash’s longtime emcee Johnny Western recalled. “It started with Ira Hayes.”

As Cash explained, “I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage.”

But Cash felt a special kinship with Ira Hayes. Both men had served in the military as a way to escape their lives of rural poverty longing to create new opportunities. Plus, both suffered from addiction problems; Cash and his pills and Hayes with alcohol. He decided to anchor the album with “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” And since the song had provided the spark for Cash’s vision, it just felt right that he should learn more about the song’s subject.

Cash contacted Ira Hayes’ mother and then visited her and her family at the Pima reservation in Arizona. Before Cash left the Pima Reservation, Hayes’ mother presented him with a gift, a smooth black translucent stone. The Pima call it an “Apache tear.” The legend behind the opaque volcanic black glass is rooted in the last U.S. cavalry attack on Native people, which took place on Apaches in the state of Arizona. After the slaughter, the soldiers refused to allow the Apache women to put the dead up on stilts, a sacred Apache tradition. Legend says that overcome by intense grief, Apache women shed tears for the first time ever, and the tears that fell to the earth turned black. Cash, moved by the gift, polished the stone and mounted it on a gold chain.

With the Apache tear draped around his neck, Cash cut his protest album. He recorded five of La Farge’s songs, two of his own, and one he’d co-written with Johnny Horton. All were Native American themed. “When we went back into the studio to record what became ‘Bitter Tears,’” Cash bassist Marshall Grant says, “we could see that John really had a special feeling for this record and these songs.”

Yet the album’s first single, “Ira Hayes,” went nowhere. Few radio stations would play the song. Was the length of the song, four minutes and seven seconds, the problem? Radio stations liked three-minute tracks. Or maybe disc jockeys wanted Cash to “entertain, not educate,” as one Columbia exec put it.

“I know that a lot of people into Johnny Cash weren’t into ‘Bitter Tears,’ ” explains Dick Weissman, a folksinger, ex-member of the Journeymen and friend of La Farge. “They wanted a ‘Ballad of Teenage Queen’ not ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’ They wanted ‘Folsom Prison.’ They didn’t want songs about how American’s mistreated Indians.”

The stations wouldn’t play the song and Columbia Records refused to promote it. According to John Hammond, the legendary producer and Cash champion who worked at Columbia, executives at the label just didn’t think it had commercial potential. Billboard, the music industry trade magazine, wouldn’t review it, even though Cash was at the height of his fame, and had just scored another No. 1 country single with “Understand Your Man” and No. 1 country album with “I Walk the Line.”

One editor of a country music magazine demanded that Cash resign from the Country Music Association because “you and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs.” Johnny Western, a DJ, singer and actor who for many years was part of Cash’s road show, recalls a conversation with “a very popular and powerful DJ.” According to Western, the DJ was “connected to many of the music associations and other influential recording industry groups. He had always been incredibly supportive of John.” Western and the DJ started discussing Cash’s new album and the “Ira Hayes” single. “He asked me why John did this record. I told him that John and all of us had a great feeling for the American Indian cause. He responded that he felt that the music, in his mind, was un-American and that he would never play the record on air and had strongly advised other DJs and radio stations to do the same. Just ignore it until John came back to his senses, is what he told me.”

“When John was attacked for ‘Ira Hayes’ and then ‘Bitter Tears,’” explains Marshall Grant, “it just ripped him apart. Hayes was forced to drink by the abuse and treatment of white people who used and abandoned him. To us, it meant Hayes was being tortured and that’s the story we told and it’s true.”

When “Bitter Tears” and its single did not get the attention he felt they deserved, Cash insisted on having the last word. He composed a letter to the entire record industry and placed it in Billboard as a full-page ad on Aug. 22, 1964.

“D.J.’s — station managers — owners, etc.,” demanded Cash, “Where are your guts?” He referred to his own supposed half Cherokee and Mohawk heritage and spoke of the record as unvarnished truth. “These lyrics take us back to the truth … you’re right! Teenage girls and Beatle record buyers don’t want to hear this sad story of Ira Hayes … This song is not of an unsung hero.” Cash slammed the record industry for its cowardice, “Regardless of the trade charts — the categorizing, classifying and restrictions of air play, this not a country song, not as it is being sold. It is a fine reason though for the gutless [Cash's emphasis] to give it a thumbs down.”

Cash demanded that the industry explain its resistance to his single. “I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes. Just one question: WHY???” And then Cash answered for them. “‘Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine … So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam.”

As Cash later explained, “I talked about them wanting to wallow in meaninglessness and their lack of vision for our music. Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on.” In reality, however, as Cash noted in his letter, “Ira Hayes” was already outselling many country hits. Ultimately, thanks in part to aggressive promotion by Cash, who personally promoted the song to disc jockeys he knew, “Ira Hayes” reached No. 3 on the country singles charts, and “Bitter Tears” peaked at 2 on the album charts.

Later, long after “Bitter Tears,” and after he’d won his battle with drugs, Cash would dial back his claims of Indian ancestry. But he never wavered from his support for the Native cause. He went on to perform benefit shows on reservations — including the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee in 1968, five years before the armed standoff there between the FBI and the American Indian Movement — to help raise money for schools, hospitals and other critical resources denied by the government. In 1980, Cash told a reporter: “We went to Wounded Knee before Wounded Knee II [the 1973 standoff] to do a show to raise money to build a school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation” and do a movie for “Public Broadcasting System called ‘Trail of Tears.’” He joined with fellow musicians Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Robbie Robertson to call for the release of jailed AIM leader Leonard Peltier.

Since Cash first recorded “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” in 1964, many musicians have recorded their own versions. Kris Kristofferson is one of those musicians. He summed up the spirit behind Cash’s now nearly forgotten protest album in his eulogy for Cash, who died in 2003. Cash, he said, was a “holy terror … a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings.” Four years before his famous concert at Folsom Prison, four years before the American Indian Movement formed, and at the pinnacle of his commercial success, Cash insisted on producing an uncommercial, deeply personal protest record that was a close as he could come to truth. He would always cherish it. “I’m still particularly proud of ‘Bitter Tears,’” Cash would say near the end of his life, while talking about the topical music he recorded in the 1960s. “Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making any moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.” 

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Antonino D’Ambrosio is the author of “A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears.”

Cash, 71, died Friday as the result of complications from diabetes; his health had been precarious for years, although it rarely stopped him from working. (His fourth collaboration with producer Rick Rubin, “American IV: The Man Comes Around,” was released last November.) Many of us have long been preparing for the death of Johnny Cash, but I suspect most of us aren’t finding the reality of it easy to take. And there are many of us out there, of all ages: Cash got his start around the same time Elvis Presley did (and, like Elvis, got his big break through Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios). But his career outlasted Elvis’ by more than 25 years. His fan base spanned hipster punks and old-time rockers who hadn’t bought many new records since 1966. I remember seeing Cash perform live around six years ago, at a rock club in Boston — in the middle of a snowstorm, no less.

Making our way home, still blissed-out from the show, my husband and I ran into a neighbor of ours, a rather taciturn-looking guy in his late 50s — who still sported the remnants of 1950s greaser hair — out in his yard supervising the nightly jaunt of his elderly blind poodle. It was snowing like heck; our neighbor, who’d always been cordial but never exactly friendly, asked us what on earth had brought us out on a night like that. When we told him, his face lit up. Was it a good show? he wanted to know. How did Cash look, how did he sound? The subtext of his questions bubbled up to the foreground: Of course Johnny Cash was worth braving a godawful snowstorm for.

Cash wrapped a world of subjects in that big bear hide of a voice. His love songs could be mournful or witty or both, and many of them were steeped in a deep consciousness of mortality, direct descendants of old English and Scottish ballads about dead sweethearts and infants. “I Still Miss Someone” outlines the shape of the hole left behind by a lover who doesn’t care anymore. “I Walk the Line” quivers with restraint — it’s the sound of a very bad boy on his best behavior (and probably not for long, but he sure is trying). “Ring of Fire,” which was written by his wife and colleague, June Carter Cash (who died in May), and Merle Kilgore, is one of the most hard-nosed songs about falling in love ever written or sung.

Songs like “Tennessee Flat-Top Box,” “Five Feet High and Rising” and “Pickin’ Time” are stunning evocations of rural (and often impoverished) life. Cash was a prolific songwriter, but he loved a great song, period, covering the work of Kris Kristofferson, the Rolling Stones, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Nick Lowe and Bob Dylan (who cites Cash as an essential influence), among others.

But Cash’s most lasting contribution may be his rough-and-ready sense of social justice. He wasn’t political in the strictest sense of the word. But when something in the world struck him as unfair or wrong, he spoke up with an urgency unmatched by nearly any other artist. His “Singin’ in Viet Nam Talkin’ Blues” is a rambling account of the trip he and June took there in the late ’60s to perform for the troops; the song is rambling not because Cash’s thoughts are unorganized, but because even as he’s telling us the story of what he and June saw there, he still can’t make sense of it — there is no sense to be made. In “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” (written by Peter LaFarge), he tells, with unvarnished bitterness, the story of a whisky-drinking Marine, a Native American who helped raise the American flag at Iwo Jima, only to return home to a country that couldn’t care less whether he lived or died.

And although Cash’s signature tune, “Man in Black,” isn’t technically a protest song, it’s still one of the greatest protest songs ever written, a song written and sung in pure anger and defiance. We often sentimentalize the American folk music of the ’60s, hailing it as a generation’s plea for change, even as we conveniently forget how preachy and finger-pointing most of it was. Cash, perhaps our greatest protest singer (as well as one of our greatest folk singers, although we don’t often think of him that way), was never sanctimonious. Instead of just moaning about the troubles of the world, he decided to bear responsibility for them by making a symbolic sartorial gesture, one he stuck to until the end of his life: “I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back/ ‘Til things are brighter, I’m the man in black.”

Cash was a religious man, a staunch Christian. But I think you get the best sense of that not from his heartfelt recordings of gospel songs like “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)” and “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (for Me),” but from the songs he recorded live at Folsom Prison in 1968.

Consider the moment — a famous one, and one that’s both exhilarating and chilling, whether you’ve heard it once or 100 times — when Cash sings, in “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

A great wave of cheering rolls forth from the audience, all of them convicted criminals. And although we can’t know for sure exactly why they cheer — and each of them may be cheering for a different reason — we can make a few pretty good guesses: First of all, the line is grimly funny. Second, some of them may have actually done the same thing themselves, for approximately the same reason — not a pretty truth, but there it is.

But I wonder if some of them didn’t cheer for this reason: Here was a man who freely stood before them, singing in the voice of a character who had committed a crime that was probably colder, and worse, than any of the things they themselves had done. Cash’s message wasn’t “I’m better than you are.” It was “I’m lowlier than you are” — and with this, he handed them back some of their dignity. Cash sang in defense of the poor, the downtrodden, the unjustly punished. But he also sang in defense of the humanity of murderers. For that fact alone, I hope that the God Johnny Cash so believed in is right there to greet him. If anyone deserves to find peace in the valley, he does.

What a strange time to do this interview.

I know. I feel, actually, it’s somewhat ludicrous to be talking about a record. I mean, I’m really heartsick, and I can’t stand CNN, although I have it on right now. I’m going to turn it off now. I think they’re part of the problem. They take 30 seconds of important information and stretch it into six hours.

They just shouldn’t exist. We should go back to the days when there was no news! Let’s try to talk about “Rules of Travel.”

OK. I’ll try.

The week before last, I was on a road trip, and it was such a great driving-down-the-highway kind of record. Not every record works that way.

That’s good to know, since I rarely drive. I won’t have a chance to find that out.

That’s because you’re a New Yorker now. How long have you lived there?

Twelve years.

Any regrets about that decision?

No. Not for a second.

Then what took you so long?

Well, it’s like I had to run an obstacle course. I grew up near Los Angeles. Then I moved to Nashville and then I moved to London. Then back to Nashville, back to L.A., back to Nashville. And then finally I got to New York.

But you were heading to New York the whole time?

I think so. Even when I wasn’t conscious of it. I wanted to leave Nashville for about five years before I actually did.

It’s taken a while for this one to come out, in part because you lost your voice for a few years.

Yeah, I had vocal polyps. That’s part of the reason. And I had a lot of stuff going on. I did the demo record (“10 Song Demo,” released in 1996) and then there was just a lot of other stuff that didn’t involve music. My life was just unfolding and I didn’t feel that I had to make a record. But then when we first started working on this, I lost my voice for two and a half years. So it’s been seven years.

Was there a reason your voice went out like that?

I was pregnant, and I had these hormone-related polyps. The hormones of pregnancy just made them grow until I couldn’t speak. I was just a rasp. I had no volume. It was like having a really bad case of laryngitis for two and a half years. The first year I was kind of like, “No big deal, I’m having a baby, I want to spend time with the baby anyway.” And then the second year I started getting a little concerned. And then I had a full-blown identity crisis.

What did that involve?

Well, I had never really thought that I identified myself as a singer. I thought of myself as more of a songwriter. Singing was just an addendum. I was struck by the sense of loss at not being able to sing. I was so sad about it. My self-esteem was pretty shaken. So I thought, if I get my voice back, I’m going to enjoy it.

Well, it sounds great on the record. It sounds like old Rosanne Cash. Pre-”Interiors.”

Particularly “Closer Than I Appear.” That could have been on “Seven Year Ache.” But lyrically, I think it is more mature.

Lyrically it is more grown-up, but there’s a sense of fun, even when the lyrics are serious. It’s an entertaining record. “Interiors” is one of my all-time favorite records, but it’s not available anymore.

It’s not? Did you check on Amazon? Interesting. I’m going to have to call Sony about that.

You’ve written short stories too, and done a collection of them. I was wondering about the difference between assembling a collection of prose and assembling an album of songs. You include outside compositions on this one. How do you go about choosing the material that isn’t your own that you are going to include?

Well, for the Craig Northey song (“Beautiful Pain”) and the Joe Henry/Jakob Dylan song (“Hope Against Hope”), we asked them to write something for me. And that’s what they sent. There’s always that moment when you go to put the tape in and think, “God, am I going to like it?” They were both perfect. I was so gratified. And I knew “Three Steps Down,” but it was kind of a druggie song and I really didn’t want to do that because I hate drugs with all my heart. So they changed the lyrics so that it’s more a relationship song. But it was a mood I didn’t have on the record.

What about your dad? How is your dad, anyway?

He’s better. He’s in the hospital now and I just got back from Nashville seeing him, but he’s better today. He’s going to be fine. He had another case of pneumonia.

Everyone seems to be getting it these days. I’ve had young friends with two-month bouts with pneumonia.

The whole world, it seems. I had a bronchitis/pneumonia last year. It’s weird, isn’t it? I think it’s partly New York, what we were breathing in after 9/11.

What about having your dad on the record? You duet on “September When It Comes.”

I did not intend that. I recorded the song by myself. And John said, “You should ask your dad to sing on this.” I was really resistant at first. It was a knee-jerk reaction at first, because that’s what I’ve always done in my career: I don’t want to use my dad, I don’t want to invite comparison. John said, “You have to look at the song. It’s perfect for him.” And it is. I’m so glad I waited for this song at this time.

Where did those lyrics come from?

Well, when he was first sick, and you get that first glimpse of your parents’ mortality. It was inspired partly by that and partly by the knowledge that maybe you just get when you are older that not every question has an answer, that maybe some things you just need to close the door on and they will be unresolved forever. It’s not necessarily bad; it’s just the way it is.

Then there’s “Closer Than I Appear.” I love that song.

That’s the oldest song on there. “I learned a lot of rules of what a man is made of …” I thought I’d written it for a man to sing, but I couldn’t get any men to sing it! So it just languished for years. It just wasn’t working. We tried a lot of different arrangements and now I’m happy with it.

[Call waiting interrupts, briefly.] That was the guys at MoveOn.org, the antiwar group I’m a part of. People are getting beaten up for saying they oppose the war.

I’ve been wanting to ask you about this …

I was talking to Janeane Garofalo the other day, and we’re both concerned about poor Natalie Maines [of the Dixie Chicks]. What can we do to help this poor girl? I could not believe when I was in Nashville last week what they are doing to her: tractors running over the records, insisting that she go on TV to recant …

And then she did go on to make some apology, which pissed me off!

I know, it pissed me off too, but I also understood it. Just don’t say, “I was wrong.” I think she’s sort of out there alone and I think she’s probably scared to death. I mean, I’m used to getting hate mail. [Laughs.] She’s not.

It annoys me to no end when people think it’s OK to express their own point of view, but someone with a different point of view shouldn’t say it. Particularly if that person has the ability to get attention. Why, because someone is famous or accomplished, does that mean they can’t have a point of view?

I just wrote a column for my Web site and I said, “Why can’t teachers and plumbers and musicians all have an opinion?” The people who scream the loudest about the American way and freedom, they seem to be the least tolerant about different opinions.

We’ve gotten back to the war now, haven’t we? So what are you doing about it?

What I’m doing now is having the courage of my convictions, which is to say I’m against it and to say why — because I really think my grandchildren are going to be cleaning up this mess and I have to face them. I have to at least be able to say, “Well, I was against it.” That’s the way I was brought up. My dad opposed the Vietnam War; that was very unpopular. My dad took on the Ku Klux Klan. He never backed down. You know, ultimately I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror. If you don’t have the courage to say what you believe, then what good are you?

As far as what active things we can do? At this point we’re all a bit dispirited, but there’s talk of a concert at Madison Square Garden in the next couple of weeks, to fund humanitarian aid.

Are you doing anything to promote the record now?

Talking to you. Talking to a few other guys. Not a lot until summer, when my little boy gets out of school. We’re filling in the [tour] dates now. West Coast. England. It’s fun in summer with all of these festivals outside.

What do your kids think of you?

[Laughs uncontrollably.] What a loaded question to ask a mother! Actually, my daughter Chelsea answers my fan mail. And she came across some really rabid hate mail. And she’s not supposed to do this but she wrote one of them back and said, “If you ever talk to my mother like that again, I’ll hunt you down.” [Laughs.] She said, “I’m not peaceful like she is.”

And I said, “Chelsea, oh my God, you shouldn’t have done that. You didn’t say you were going to kill him did you?” She said, “No, I just said I’d hunt him down.”

She knows where to draw the line.

I have so much fun with my kids. They were such horrible, evil adolescents; I didn’t think any of us were going to make it through it. But they’ve each turned into the most incredible women. Of course, the youngest aren’t through it yet, so we’ll see what happens with them.

There was a lyric on the record that made me think, “What would a kid think if it was their mother singing this?”

Was it “Next time a woman’s on her knees, don’t try to make a deal”? You know, they know I’m a writer, and they grew up with it, and they all think like artists. They’re very broad-minded kids. I got permission from each of them to get arrested for civil disobedience if I have to in the next couple of weeks.

Shannon McArdle is all flesh, still trying to wash off the stains after all these years. She makes her voice small and flat for the difficult shifts in timbre, removing any hint of professionalism. She’s as off-the-street as the woman in the middle of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” and the naturalism of the performance — carried from the beginning by a solemn church organ that is even more damning when it plays pop changes — is almost unbearable. The woman has her satisfaction over the soldier’s death, but that’s all she has. He and the rest took everything else.

That a woman is singing makes all the difference. Costello himself could go all the way into the song, but McArdle goes out the other side.

2) Boomtown Rats, “I Don’t Like Mondays” (Columbia, 1980)

Southern Tip reports from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina: “‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ was playing in a cab in Ushuaia. It sounded better than ever. I asked the driver to turn it up and told the person I was with he couldn’t talk. It made me think that radio is the farthest reaching, most democratic medium for art there is. How bad can it be to live in the southernmost city in the world, which is on an island — a city that to reach by car you have to cross the Straits of Magellan and twice cross the Chilean border — how bad can it be when the DJ plays ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’?”

3) Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer, “24″ (Fox, Tuesdays)

If Bill Clinton was not, as Toni Morrison famously claimed, the first black president, then Dennis Haysbert — who has, for reasons not unrelated to the racism that is the deep subtext of the Palmer character, received far more praise for his Sidney Poitier turn in the lifeless “Far From Heaven” than for his work here — is playing the first black Bill Clinton. It’s in his apparent naiveté, the way he carries his size, and most of all in the angry self-control in his face as he realizes once again that he’s been betrayed by one of his own, whatever “his own” means. As his estranged wife Sherry has been arguing since halfway through the show’s first season, there’s no such thing.

4) New Order, “Retro” (Warner Bros., 1980-2002)

Across four CDs of hits, remixes and live recordings, it doesn’t matter that the Manchester dance band’s 1983 “Blue Monday” remains the biggest selling 12-inch single ever. Compared to the Shep Pettibone mix of the 1986 “Bizarre Love Triangle” (where again and again, in moments memory can’t hold, the sound shifts faster than a fast cut in a film), “Blue Monday” remains a soap jingle. And compared to the full, 8 minute 41 second version of the 1982 “Temptation,” probably the best 12-inch single ever made (a journey comparable to the Boz Scaggs/Duane Allman version of “Loan Me a Dime,” moving from delirium to contemplation and, so violently, back again), the Shep Pettibone remix of “Bizarre Love Triangle” is very nice.

5) Touré, “The Portable Promised Land” (Little, Brown)

The author bio promises the Brooklyn writer’s first novel, “Soul City,” “soon enough,” but the best of the stories in this first collection are pieces of a novel reaching for each other, then backing away. There’s a lot of padding — credibility lists of negritude on the order of “The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame,” or “101 Elements of Blackness (Things That’ll Make You Say: ‘Yes! That There’s Some Really Black Shit!’)” that were done better in Darius James’ “That’s Blaxploitation!” There are stories that don’t take off. But the book drops all pose for the mystery of what happens when the borders between black and white begin to dissolve. In “Attack of the Love Dogma,” “The Playground of the Ecstatically Blasé,” the three-part “Black Widow Story,” “The Commercial Channel” and “They’re Playing My Song” Touré stops moving characters like toy soldiers and lets them move him. “The Black Widow Story” is a superhero comic book, a trash race novel, Chester Himes influenced by Lester Bangs — you have no idea what will come next. Is Charisma Donovan, high-school queen turned femme fatale turned porn star, a version of the Black Widow, a white woman who becomes the female Tupac “on a dare after drama class,” or are they the same person — and could either tell if either were? “You remember,” Touré says as he sets the scene, “how things were last summer when Jamais was brand-new and like, the only thing the city was talking about. The French Bistro décor. The barefoot girl in the glass case behind the bar sitting on a pillow reading Paradise Lost, all night every night …” — and somehow you do remember. You’re right there. And you don’t like it when the author lets you go, too soon.

6) Joshua Clover, “Modest $100 Million Proposals, for Better or Verse” (Village Voice, Nov. 27-Dec. 3)

On the $100 million-plus gift by rejected amateur poet Ruth Lily to Poetry Magazine: After three sensible notions on what to do with the money (“lobby for pro-education candidates,” “buy a million poetry books every year and give them away,” “free medical coverage to every poet accepted for publication”), Clover pulls out the stops. Such ideas, he says, “would burn a tiny fraction of the bequest: Instead of investing the remainder, Poetry could secede from the Union, purchase the Republic of the Marshall Islands (GDP: $99 million), and appoint their very own poet laureate, who would then meet the U.S. laureate in a battle to the death, wreaking unfathomable destruction across the landscape.”

7) “The Jimmy Show,” written and directed by Frank Whaley (First Look Pictures)

Whaley as a New Jersey man with a dead-end job who lives for open-mike nights at local comedy clubs, where the heartfelt cry “YOU SUCK!” is the most response he ever gets. Or, Bruce Springsteen, the Bizarro Years.

Johnny Cash, “American IV: The Man Comes Around” (American/Lost Highway)

The fourth time around for the Old Man Sings New Guy Songs concept is not too many, especially when so many old songs are part of the show: Could anyone else let the line “Sometimes in the saddle, I used to go gay” from “Streets of Laredo” slip by without a hint of self-consciousness? There are stunning duds, most notably a version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)” that reveals how horrible the song actually is (though there’s no footnote about how it inspired “Killing Me Softly,” which is even worse). Cash does best with a strong melody and a light, insistent beat — and here, with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” he goes deeper into the composition than Trent Reznor ever did. As with U2′s “One” on his “III,” Cash understands the piece as a weight; he assumes it, and then, as you listen, lets it crush him. When “V,” “VI” or “VII” comes out posthumously, it won’t sound any more posthumous than this.

9) Duke Mitchell, “The Lion,” from “‘Gimme Dat Harp Boy!’ — The Roots of the Captain” (Ozit Records)

On a label named for the leading lights of London’s 1960s underground press, a heroically diverse collection of strange records that prophesied Captain Beefheart — a word like “influenced” is just too paltry — a very hot late ’50s-early ’60s fuzztone stomp. With the fuzztone played by saxophones.

10) Homer Quincy Smith, “I Want Jesus to Talk With Me” (“Tangled Roots,” Princeton University, Nov. 23)

At a conference on old-time music, Dean Blackwood of the “raw musics” reissue label Revenant talked about the idea of “phantom artists”: people whose names can be found on the labels of old 78s, but about whom nothing is known, including whether the names on the labels are real. He played a 1930 recording by Elvie Thomas, and the 50 or so people in attendance (including Brett and Rennie Sparks of the contemporary country Gothic duo the Handsome Family, whose performance would close the conference, and Tony Glover and John Koerner of the 40-year veteran Twin Cities roots band Koerner Ray & Glover, who had opened the event with their last concert — guitarist Dave Ray would die six days later) shook their heads in wonder.

Blackwood played a 1926 Paramount release by Homer Quincy Smith and mouths dropped open in shock. “I want Jesus to walk with me” — a man sings in a slow, measured cadence, making it plain he understands how much he’s asking for. The performance begins with the tinny sound of a calliope, which as Smith’s voice goes down to the bottom of a mine turns into a huge pipe organ. At the end, Smith lets his voice rise, until it seems a thing in itself, on its way to Jesus, leaving the singer behind. Another participant had prepared a response to Blackwood’s presentation, but as an instance of the great game of “Follow that, motherfucker!” I never saw anything like it.