One baroque scene in this worthless New York mob 'n' junkies movie: Evil low-level mobster Vincent and noble pretty boy ex-junkie Ryan, one-time rivals over ex-junkie Carla, now married to Vincent, give each other dirty looks in the local bar. Vincent's thugs have Ryan pinned to a chair; Vincent, in a fancy suit, waltzes Carla around a table gleaming with blue stemware. Wearing a matching blue cocktail dress, Carla, who Vincent has shot up "for old time's sake," flops on his shoulder as the jukebox plays Terry Cole's rendition of Bobby Bland's 1959 "I'll Take Care of You," one of Bland's most delicate and painful recordings. "I know you've been hurt/By somebody else," Cole sings as Vincent lays Carla on a table and sodomizes her, grinning at Ryan until his face breaks up in orgasm: "I can tell by the way you carry yourself." "This really takes me back," Vincent says.

2) Trailer Bride, "High Seas" (Bloodshot)

Melissa Swingle, singer and multi-instrumentalist leader (saw, guitar, banjo, harmonica, piano) of this country band, which sounds like an old motel on Route 66 looks, is going to have to change her "I Used to Be Disgusted, Now I Try to Be Amused, But Usually It's Not Worth the Effort" T-shirt sooner or later. But not just yet.

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3) John McCready, "Room at the Top," Mojo (May)

The story of Joe Meek, the UK's first real independent record producer. The Tornadoes' 1962 "Telstar," which alone among period pop songs playing in the "Les Années Pop" show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris this spring came across as a match for the best of the pop art on the walls, was his biggest hit; he killed himself in 1967 after shotgunning his landlady to death. McCready on Meek's work with songwriter Geoff Goddard: "Like Joe, Goddard was an amateur spiritualist with a Buddy Holly obsession. Goddard's interests pushed them to attempts at contacting dead stars -- Al Jolson, Mario Lanza, and even Buddy. The sessions prompted Geoff to pen Mike Berry's 'Tribute to Buddy Holly.' Joe and Geoff decided to call up Buddy and see if he thought the record would be a hit. His reply? 'SEE YOU IN THE CHARTS.'"

4) Colson Whitehead, "John Henry Days" (Doubleday)

Anthropologist Harry Smith found the ballad "John Henry" -- or the story of the ex-slave and spike driver who dies in a race with a steam drill -- bottomless. No less than four versions are included on the four volumes of Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" -- by the Williamson Brothers and Curry ("Gonna Die With My Hammer in My Hand," 1927), Furry Lewis ("Spike Driver Blues," 1928), J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers ("John Henry Was a Little Boy," 1936) and the Monroe Brothers ("Nine Pound Hammer Is too Heavy," 1936). Scattered through this novel about a young journalist on a junket for the release of a John Henry stamp are Whitehead's versions of the way the song generates versions of itself: tales of how singers find the song, or how the song finds its singers, be they a present-day crackhead or a Jewish song-plugger a hundred years ago. Whitehead's hero stands in the way of a story trying to tell itself, but there is deeper writing here than in novels that have nothing wrong with them.

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