My MP3 Player on Shuffle, No. 3

A third kick at the can, then. Why am I kicking at a can? What a crude thing to do. I've added shedloads of James Brown songs to my MP3 player, but I'm not including them. The majority I'm just slowly discovering.

1. The Bangles - Manic Monday: How much of a genius is Prince? He comes along out of nowhere, completely repeats his melody from '1999', giving it a new set of lyrics about an urban professional who has a hard time waking up for work after her unemployed boyfriend spends the whole night, ahem, 'getting down'. He builds the sturdiest 1980s pop chassis and gives it to a California popwer-pop all-goup band who sounded nothing like this before it and nothing else after it. Oh, that nasty little Prince.
2. Isaac Hayes - Theme from Shaft: This song can't be entirely kitsch. Okay, the spoken lyrics and female interjections certainly are. That flute probably is. But that wah-wah? That's not kitsch, that's what the primordial ooze from whih life on earth sprang sounded like, several millions of years ago.
3. Freda Payne - Band of Gold: This is Holland, Dozier and Holland proving that without them Motown were nothing. Hard to disagree on the basis of this song built entirely around an insistent stomp of a groove and Freda Whoever's astonishing method acting. This is an amazing song.
4. Paula Abdul - Cold Hearted: Okay, this is kitsch, especially in the American Idol era. This was pretty inescapable at the time, though, and the best song on Forever Your Girl. It didn't really need to be any longer than two minutes, however.
5. Velvet Underground - Femme Fatale: Yeah right, you say. Nobody really listens to the Velvet Underground; they just claim to. Nope - it's sincere. I absolutely adore a small handful of VU songs and absolutely loathe many of the rest. This is in the former category, one of the only Lou Reed songs that really fit Nico's acquired taste of a voice. And major sevenths ahoy!
6. Public Enemy - Fight the Power: One of the very small number of rap songs I can recite along to from start to finish. All these years later, a few comments: one, those beats really are mighty. Two, Flavor Flav was a way better MC than I gave him credit for back in the day when I saw him as a superfluous Bez. Three, still though, Chuck D's science is jaw-dropping from start to finish. Four, I must throw my cred straight out the window by admitting one reason I know the words is because the Barenaked Ladies covered it. At least I'll admit I prefer this version. Five, this version on my MP3 player is censored - what the hell? Six, I did a 'film report' on Do the Right Thing in high school, which in retrospect was pretty cool.
7. Daryl Hall & John Oates - Maneater: I would have argued that Hall & Oates tied Huey Lewis and the News for the title of Great Eighties Unmentionable, the taste-lapse that it's best to pretend never happened. But it seems that these slick and greasy purveyors of whatever the hell 'blue-eyed soul' is are taking tentative steps toward rehabiliation. God help us all, but this sexist drivel is all about its bassline. Whatever is on top is mere Miami Vice soundtracking.
8. Maceo & the Macks - Soul Power '74: Somehow this is not quite an instrumental exactly. Funky party stuff, though Maceo's horn isn't always what I'm looking for. At times I wish he'd just sit down and let the rhythm section do their thing. James knew you needed a bit of space; Maceo never even stops to breathe. Something to prove?
9. Sloan - Everything You've Done Wrong: When I was in high school, Sloan played at a dive located, miraculously, at the top of my street. I was underage, but I could sit on my balcony and hear them. Good times. That was 'Underwhelmed'-era though - this particular frug is a few years later. Fabulous though, with the Herb Alpert horns being a heresy at the time. It is, in retrospect, very very good stuff.
10. Gordon Lightfoot - If You Could Read My Mind: Yay! Cram that legally-required CanCon in at the end, eh? I'm so Canadian. This is not about ironic rehabilitiation of hopelessly square oldies; this is genuine. It's those moody strings, the hyperactive acoustic guitar lines, Gord's fabulous maple syrup voice, that melody. This was one of the first things I learnt to play on a guitar. Not well, mind you. But since when does that matter?

My MP3 Player on Shuffle, No. 2

So I've been working more on this. I feel like a much more normal MP3 player user now. I now have 785 songs in one huge directory. So here are another ten on shuffle.

1. El Debarge - Who's Johnny?: Okay, this is just kitsch. Uncritical nostalgia for the 80s.
2. Madonna - Into the Groove: This isn't. This is, in my sincere opinion, one of the best things Madonna ever did. Amazingly, it was a b-side, to the much more forgettable 'Angel'. But it's dance music as euphoria, both in that that's what she's singing about and in that that's what that bass line evokes. Now I know you're mine, she squeaks in her innocent early-eighties voice, and it's victory at its sweetest.
3. Stereolab - Ping Pong: Sterolab exist in a works of their own creation. This is most obviously Brazilian-influenced, but it doesn't sound Brazilian at all really. No idea what I'm listening to, but I like it.
4. Bobby Byrd - I Know You Got Soul: The greatly expanded playlist has a lot more funk on it, which makes me happy as I'm zoned out on the subway. This isn't even five minutes, which is no length for a funk song. But in addition to its fabulous groove, its message is really quite uplifting, for those of us who listen to funk as jealous outsiders, who for reasons of our upbringing see ourselves as on some level 'unable' to genuinely be as funky as the greats of the genre. Nonsense, Byrd says, you're listening to this, right?
5. Jay - Präludium: Long story here, longer than the two-minute song itself, so I'll probably have to pause it. After university, I moved abroad, a kind of imagine-no-possessions thing that I still look back on as maybe the most important part of my life. I slowly accumulated some possessions, but among the first were a bunch of cassettes I could play on the clunky yellow 'underwater' Walkman I'd bought myself (I'm a Sony whore from way back, it seems). One was The Rapsody Overture, a strange little Def Jam project they didn't even release in North America. It combined rap artists with opera songers for the most part. Warren G got a hit out of it, buth otherwise it's a pretty obscure project. One thing I fell in love with was this tiny little ditty by the complete unknown Jay. Based on a piano piece by Bach as opposed to an OTT operatic aria, it's understated as hell, a tiny little piece of gangland regret, a kiss on the lips to a childhood friend. It's absolutely gorgeous, and years after losing the cassette I was happy to find it again.
6. George Baker Selection - Little Green Bag: Yeah, with the Stephen Wright introduction from the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack. Why not, right? Even though it came out twenty years early, this is the theme song to that movie - it's quite impossible to hear this song any other way. Building soundtracks around existing songs is one of Quentin Tarantino's unique abilities, and I can't imagine anyone doing it better. How the hell did he find so appropriate a song gathering dust in someone's curio cabinet?
7. Burning Spear - I and I Survive (Slavery Days Dub): The headphones I'm currently using (which I don't love) advertise themselves as being for dub music. Well, they do a decent job. But you could play this through a metal pie plate and it'd still be enchanting. I do love me some dub, and this is exactly the sort I like most: mystical and profound. How could you not fall in love with that bassline?
8. Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan - Tell Me Something Good: This random playlist didn't start off very funky, but as it progresses... What is Rufus like from 2011 looking back? Well, you have to love Chaka Khan, right? Even if it's just 'I'm Every Woman' and 'I Feel For You', you've got to love that sexy diva spirit. In fact, for me it's the more understated divas that take my heart, and Chaka's one to compete with my all-time favourite Gladys Knight. So imagine suddenly discovering that this disco diva happened to make some deliciously dirty funk in the 1970s. Take awesome and multiply it by two... This is funky as hell, but it's a real composition, which a lot of funk isn't. Flat-out fabulous.
9. Ray Charles - What'd I Say, Parts I & II: Ray Charles inventing modern music right there in the studio. This has nothing to do with 'rock and roll' at all: it's simultaneously something much older and much more modern. Six and a half minutes, but it could be twenty. Not kitschy, in my opinion, though I know why it's seen as such.
10. Pink Floyd - Arnold Layne: Meh. A bit out of place, eh? Of course, that's what 'shuffle' is supposed to get you. It's good, though I'm not in the mood as I write this paragraph. It's endearing to hear how different a band 'The Pink Floyd' were in Syd's day.

My MP3 Player on Shuffle, No. 1

There are a lot of chain-letter type things out there that want you to list the first songs that come up on your iPod on shuffle mode - in many cases with the implication that the randomly-selected song title means something.

I'm intrigued by them, because they suggest that everyone's iPod contains a kind of massive playlist of songs they like, whereas I've always tended to use my own MP3 player (not an Apple product) as much for 'testing out' stuff as for listening to old favourites.

But I decided I should do that too, so I've been rooting around CDs, DVDs, and God knows what else for a kind of 'playlist' of songs I can listen to without thinking. Songs that, were someone to swipe my MP3 player, would on some level indicate something about my taste.

So I put in on shuffle. And here are the first ten to come out:

1. Ruby Blue - The Quiet Mind (for Joe): I had this moody little obscurity on a various artists compilation years and years ago. I knew nothing about it or Ruby Blue themselves and never paid it much attention, but it creeped into my subconscious and here I am all those years later listening to it more intently. It's a great piece with completely unexpected choral vocals tossed into the mix.
2. Ini Kamoze - Here Comes the Hotstepper: Dancehall's not really my thing, but with the hip-hop-sample drumbeat and Wilson Pickett tagline, it's an infectious piece of silly nonsense. Harmless and playful.
3. 2Pac - California Love: The album version, unfortunately. I have to get my hands on the much superior remix. Still, awesome awesome awesome no matter what the bassline is. Brilliant party music, all these years later.
4. B.J. Thomas - Hooked on a Feeling: The sitars here are better than the hooka-chukkas in the 1970s version, but everything else is superior on the latter one. Still, this is the original, and it's the song itself which really matters. And a hell of a composition it is.
5. Neil Young - Southern Man: I'm not always in the mood for Neil Young, but his whine of a voice (distorted here for extra whine) suits the righteous indignation here perfectly. This is from all the way back when he didn't view his musical career as two parallel careers, one acoustic and one electric.
6. The Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday: I have a few Stones songs on here. I'm not a big fan, but there was some worthy stuff. This one is all about the instrumentations. Ignore Mick Jagger's overly delicate enunciation and check out that buzzsaw cello instead.
7. The Sugarcubes - Motorcrash: How I'll probably always prefer my Björk, young and poppy. The Sugarcubes' début is amazing, and this tiny little rush of a song is the first I ever head of it. Her 'Where have you been all this time?' is about as compelling as she's ever been.
8. The Cure - Just Like Heaven: One of the best songs ever, and I think I've realised why: Robert Smith can't really be expected to overcome his inherent pessimism, so the best way to get simple joy and beauty from him is to ask him to paint a picture of a tragic moment rendered all the sadder because of the joy he could almost-have. It's irresistable for the professional mope-merchant and the result is musical ecstasy for the rest of us.
9. The Wailers - My Cup: This is Lee Perry era, with Bub, Bunny and Peter covering James Brown without mentioning to anyone that that's what they were doing. They took a lot from James Brown, and the results were generally scintillating. Funk-reggae ought to be the single greatest genre in the history of everything.
10. Ass Ponys - Peanut '93: I'm glad this little curiosity happened to be one of the randomly-selected ten. Like the first track, I got it on a VA compilation back in the day - in this case, a music magazine covermount. I plyed it a lot my first year in university and won a lot of fans over. I wound up buying the Ass Ponys' album and finding it a bit one-note but with a handful of other gems. This queer little rural go-nowhere story remains the best, though.