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Do Not Pass Go
1. Bob Marley & the Wailers: “Exodus” (7:40), from Exodus (Tuff Gong/Island 1977).
Been awhile--been too long, well over a week--since I started/updated this muhfuh, so let’s get this party started quickly, right? Got the Deluxe Edition reissue of thie album yesterday, not that I necessarily wanted the five-song live set or the dub versions or the radio ad (for a funny rant against the supersizing of CD reissues, click here), but it’ll be a bit before the single-disc version’s out, and I needed the title cut (for another CD-mix project that I’m doing). Plus I’ve always been curious about “Punky Reggae Party,” the Lee Perry collaboration that saluted the Clash and, uh, Dr. Feelgood (it was a Jamaican 12-inch and, I believe, title single’s b-side in England). Turns out it’s pretty good, though not as incendiary as I might prefer. Then again, Scratch’s Black Ark-era stuff (‘74-’79) has often struck me that way, only to burn itself in on third or fourth listen, so that may be the case here as well. And the first couple plays flew by--not bad for a record surpassing nine minutes in length.
Title track needs no help in the burn department, though: it’s pretty much a monster on its own terms from the jump, the most circular groove Marley ever cooked up, and even if you’re massively skeptical of the man’s latter-day work (and you really should be), this one’s impossible to resist. Of course, unlike, say, Kaya, Exodus the album has been afforded its Deluxe Edition status not by popular acclaim but because Time magazine declared it “Best Album of the Century” (runners-up: Kind of Blue and Are You Experienced?). To which I say: not a horrible choice (the way that, say, a piece of adolescent folly like The Dark Side of the Moon or a populist sop like Thriller would be), but WHA?! I’m assuming the decision was made by Time music writer Christopher John Farley, whose general stodginess is pretty well established--though I must say, his infamous-for-a-minute review of Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out not only limns the band’s limitations as well as anything I’ve read, it also provoked a hilariously stupid response from Addicted to Noise’s Michael Goldberg that I unfortunately can’t locate at the moment. (Anybody have a link? Let’s have ‘er.) But I mean, I don’t think it’s decades of overplay or generations of trustafarians that make “Jamming” sound unbelievably limp--I’m willing to bet it’s because that’s what it is. Anyway, onward.
RUNNERS UP:
Funkadelic, “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” (Shit! Goddamn!)
Blondie, “Dreaming” (My favorite of their singles, and the best lyric about class ever written.)
--30 October 2001
2. Big Youth: “I Pray Thee Continually” (3:25), from Natty Universal Dread 1975-1979 (Blood & Fire 2000).
More Jamaican church music. I love the way he says the opening lines (“Peace and love is what we want in the ghetto/Peace and love is what we need in the ghetto!”)--there’s so much openhearted gravitas in his voice, and when the horns swell up behind him he sounds like he’s on the mountaintop, inviting the rest of us up there to enjoy the view. (Yesterday I played the first 30 seconds five times in a row just to bask in it.) The track (from Gregory Isaacs’ “Your Smiling Face”) is brill, the horns just gorgeous, but the way Big Youth rides it--intoxicated with his message, transported by the sound of the great day coming from a distance within earshot--is what makes me come back to this one again and again.
--1 November 2001
3. The Allman Brothers Band: “Revival” (4:03), from The Road Goes on Forever (Mercury 1975, reissued 2001; originally released 1970).
From one church to another. 31 years after the initial release of this simple, stated-just-right piece of utopianism (“People can you feel it/Love is everywhere”), it’s as convincing as ever--not in the “God, they’re right!” sense (uh, not right now they’re not, though I’m stubbornly optimistic-cum-head in the sand stupid enough to believe it anyway), but in that they make you believe they did. Sometimes, that’s enough.
RUNNERS UP
Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” (Considered for a minute as some kind of ultimate church song, and it is--I’m starting to wonder whether it isn’t the greatest single ever made--but ultimately it would have upended things.)
U Roy: “Stick Together” (More great deejay madness.)
--3 November 2001
4. Daft Punk: “One More Time” (5:20), from CD5 (Virgin 2000).
And from your church to ours. Or mine. And since I’ve already said too much about 9/11, let me just add that this is one of the records that helped things afterward, as it has every in every other situation I’ve heard it.
RUNNERS UP:
Moby Grape: “Fall on You” (Similar beat, production, hard country-cum-acidic rock feel, but garagier and less churchy.)
Daniel Kamau: “Mumbi Ni Wakwa” (From Guitar Paradise of East Africa; extends the Allmans’ joyous [har har] spirit-lift into harder, antsier, chatterier, more raucous territory. Sort of downsizes the idea of “Love is everywhere,” too, and not just because the trot says the song’s about a prostitute.)
Derek & the Dominos, “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad” (More high-concept: brother Duane’s on this, it’s got much the same shuffling boogie only at a higher velocity, and lyrically it’s an answer song.)
The Rascals, “Good Lovin’” (Separated at birth?)
--6 November 2001
5. Michael Jackson: “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” (6:03), from Off the Wall (Epic 1979)
It’s sobering to realize that, once upon a time, this guy really was all things to all people. Reading the features on him in the new Mojo (David Fricke’s true and honest if a little obvious to anyone paying attention anymore, Gerri Hirshey’s interesting and then frustrating for all the questions it raises but doesn’t satisfactorily answer [exactly in what way did his impending megalomania frighten his mother--couldn’t you get her to elaborate? quotes maybe? and OK, he took meeting with cartoons running in the background--but what kind of meetings?], the J5 one I only glanced over) made me sad, once again, for the blown opportunity, put better nowhere than in a circa-1991 Playboy Q & A with Chuck D. Quoted from memory: Mag: “What’s the difference between Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan?” Chuck: “Michael Jordan’s face isn’t shifting...Michael Jackson could have really changed the way America though about black people.” And, I think the rest of the answer said without using these words, he blew it.
This is important to remember, not just as the preface of the long, drawn-out third act of the saddest public decline since probably Elvis Presley’s, but because there was a point when what he had to offer was so much greater than can be reasonably stated anymore. That is, he didn’t merely seem like someone who’d have a long, popular career and be meaningful and maybe even keep making good records, the way Madonna and U2 have managed to do (well, even if I don’t care about Madonna’s albums anymore she still makes good singles). He was the most popular musical figure since the Beatles, and his popularity was so immense that he seemed capable of potentially changing that role itself. And obviously he didn’t: as Greg Tate noted while interviewing George Clinton, it must have been brutal to deal with that much adoration without three others to help him take the weight, and in retrospect I’d add to keep him honest.
The remastered edition of Off the Wall is an interesting case in point. Haven’t gotten to the bonus trax yet, though given how frequently R&B is looked at as mere “pop” in the Joe Carducci sense, it’s fascinating that these are included. (Clinton Heylin, in his book Bootleg, went into a hilariously granddad complaint about how rock and roll differed from most pop because it was about a process, not finished product--as if R&B, even the most produced stuff, just appeared without anyone putting any fucking effort into it.) What bothers me, a LOT, is the photographs. The original pics from the original Off the Wall album have been removed and replaced by semi-lookalikes from circa Thriller. Gone is the Afro, the old nose, the bursting-with-giddiness grin, the uneven chocolate-brown skin tone; replacing them are the semi-Jheri curl, darker, more even skin, and a beleaguered scowl. It’s fucking insane--as if he’s repudiating his OTW self because he didn’t sell 47 million albums, just nine or so, so he’ll just wipe him, Stalin-like, out of HIStory.
As for the CD itself, the sound is, not to put too fine a point on it, AMAZING. It was already one of the cleanest-sounding productions ever; now it sparkles even brighter. And “Don’t Stop”--his greatest achievement? “I Want You Back” aside, I’d say yes, though all votes for “Billie Jean” will be counted (and doubtless outnumber mine, ah well).
RUNNER UP:
Luomo, “Market” (Didn’t go with this partly because it’s something like 15 minutes long, and I already have enough long songs on here as it is (I know, the six and change of “Don’t Stop” doesn’t help, but fuggit), and partly because writing it would necessitate my writing the semifictional epic I’ve been imagining since I heard the record the first time one August night in 1999. Obviously I need to do this...but, master procrastinator that I sometimes be, not, just, yet.)
--19 November 2001
6. King Sunny Ade & His African Beats: “Sunny Ti de Ariya” (3:47), from Juju Music (Island 1982)
A sonic segue, sorta--the chattering rhythm guitar/handclaps that end “Don’t Stop” blend in pretty nicely with the deep, groaning talking drums that kick this tribal number off. Ade’s guitar chats pretty nicely itself, and when it comes in a couple minutes into the song it’s like a sunshower. Not to mention the subconscious connection of Michael Jackson having swiped one of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”‘s hooks from Manu Dibango--not the same thing as Ade at all, but seemed appropriate anyhow.
--22 November 2001
7. The Supremes: “Come See About Me” (2:43), from The Ultimate Collection (Motown 1997; originally released 1964)
The superfast drumroll out of the bridge is pretty heartstopping; so’s the chord progression, the melody, the background vocals (particularly those semislurred “heyheyheyheyhey”s just before the chorus), the opening drums/guitar marching inexorably out of the fog and straight into the middle of the psychodrama of the lyrics--little wonder that soul-angst student Greg Dulli covered it w/the Afghan Whigs, right? Right. So now that this has been noted, allow me to home in on the moment that has seemed to carve its own space out and float over the whole thing and hangs in the air ever since I can remember.
For Christmas of 1979, Santa Claus got me a Fisher-Price record player and a copy of the Grease soundtrack. On December 26, my mother went to Target and bought me what I consider my “real” first album, Off the Wall. For my birthday the following February, Mom bought a two-LP Supremes best-of. It was as much for herself as for me; Diana Ross was her favorite singer. I loved it too, of course, and it provided what I think may have been the first inkling of a complex, “adult” response to a piece of music I ever had.
In this case it was a lyric, from this song: “No matter what you do or say/I’m gonna love you anyway.” Part of it was that syntax was a little skewed--those words’ popular order was generally “say or do,” and I remember thinking that switching it to “do or say” was really clever, though being five years old chances are I wouldn’t have put it quite that way at the time. But I hope I don’t sound like I’m investing too much intellectual pride in my younger self to say that I understood that those lines were a lot more emotionally complex than a simple I-love-you--that I caught onto their swooning romanticism as well as their simple romance, their embodiment of passion in addition to simple statements of it, and that it was part of what I responded to, and what I liked. When you’re a kid, unconditionality is pretty damn alluring. I didn’t know how desperate that kind of sentiment was, how unhealthy and possibly dangerous throw-yourself-off-a-cliff statements like that one can be; I’m in my mid-twenties and I still feel like my head isn’t all the way around it. When I was five, blessedly, I didn’t have to worry about it yet, even if I did recognize the emotion.
Now, of course, I not only notice the line, I more clearly hear the one that sets it up, which as composition are certainly more elegant and probably more perfect: “No peace shall I find/Until you come back and be mine.” (If I thought “do or say” was syntactically odd and interesting when I was five, I’d have done backflips over “No peace shall I find”--if I’d been able to decipher what she was saying, that is. That line is a little muffled even now--the whole track’s got some clopping echo on it--and having no church training whatsoever probably assisted in my inability to figure out what the words were; the phrase, in whatever order, hadn’t really entered my vocabulary yet.) And I notice the perfectly calibrated vocal pauses fore and aft the “do or say” lines--that’s part of what makes them jump out, that they occupy these fairly empty sound fields, so that they can sound as arresting as they do. Which means, if nothing else, that Diana Ross was a hell of a canny singer.
RUNNERS UP:
Manu Dibango, “Soul Makossa” (Of course.)
The Flamingos, “Golden Teardrops” (The Ade ends with vocals fading into the distance; this begins with them rising out of the ether--and staying there for three impossibly pained, impossibly pretty minutes.)
Tricky, “Aftermath” (Nothing fancy or, um, tricky here, just a really nice segue, though if you wanna get conceptual there’s that whole business about Maxinquaye being a cross between his mother and a lost African homeland....)
--23 November 2001
8. Freda Payne: “Band of Gold” (2:56), from Can You Dig It? The ‘70s Soul Experience (Rhino 2001; originally released 1970).
Obviously the greatest song ever written about wedding-night impotence, even if some people don’t catch on right away. The dead giveaway, of course, being the lines, “I wait in the darkness of my lonely room/Filled with sadness, filled with gloom/Hoping soon/That you’ll walk back through that door/And love me like you tried before.” Emphasis, of course, on tried, which indicates failure, which indicates failure of something in particular. The song’s as good a piece of late soul as anything I’ve heard on musical/vocal value alone, but given that studies show that the problem the song addresses is one that everyone’s experienced at one time or another, I think it’s a hell of a lot more relatable than “Your Precious Love,” say. (Not that, cough cough ahem ahem, I’ve ever had that problem myself or anything--I’ve just read that everyone else has....)
--26 November 2001
9. Althea & Donna: “Uptown Top Ranking” (3:54), from Tougher Than Tough: The Story of Jamaican Music (Mango 1993; originally released 1977).
In contrast, this is one of the most saucily ready (wanted to say “virile” but for some reason that comes across as too male, which this definitely isn’t) records I’ve ever heard; the singers are not shy, or in any doubt of their own abilities. That is to say, I find it incredibly sexy, in large part because it’s so wicked-mean, especially if you know Trinity’s “Three Piece Suit and Thing,” which this record answers. (Bitchy women chatting cattily amongst themselves...ah, paradise!) What’s especially ironic--and appropriate--is that it’s not about sex or men at all--it’s about clothes.
--27 November 2001
10. Timeblind: “Dubsturnt” (4:03), from Rugged Redemption (Orthlorng Musonk 2001).
One of the original objectives of this Project was to try as much as possible to include stuff fresh off the audition stage (i.e. records I’ve just recently heard for the first or second or third time as opposed to old favorites all the freakin’ time). But not every opportunity presents itself that way; sometimes you’ve just got to plan things out ahead of time in order to get stuff to work that way. Which is my way of saying that I cheated here; though “Uptown Top Ranking” was and is a terrific choice to follow the Supremes, I threw it on, in this case, more as a bridge between “Come See” and this hypno-dub track by this well-respected techno guy, a.k.a Chris Sattinger, like myself a former Minneapolitan now residing in New York (well, Brooklyn). The album is really good, and this is my favorite cut from it, analagous to Twilight Circus Dub Sound System’s stuff in its authentic feel sans self-conscious straining for “authenticity.” Or that’s how I hear it, anyway. Furthermore, Timeblind itself is a ploy to get to the next song, which I’ve been plotting a way toward for awhile now.
--27 November 2001
11. Luomo: “Market” (11:59), from Vocalcity (Forcetracks 2000).
“I’ve been to this place nearly a dozen times and it hasn’t gotten any less alien. If anything it just gets more so every time. I can never remember where anything is located, but I’m here to get lost tonight anyway so that’s perfect. Usually I try to follow the candlelight on the countertops and the bottles backlit green against the mirrors I can barely see into, feel the music’s direction and map the roaming spotlights with my eyes. But I’m not paying attention to that, or to anyone in particular. I want to feel, don’t want to see; usually my arms are folded but right now I’m going to let my hands lead me around the room’s perimeter.
“Alien/alienated. I came by myself tonight. That’s unusual for me; I’m usually here with my friends who are all having a better time than I am. They know the people and I don’t; they know who to score drugs from and I don’t; they have money for drinks and I don’t. I don’t have a bad time; I just don’t have the same kind of good time they’re having. They’re here because it’s just popular enough to be comfortably full and far enough out of the way that nobody knows about it that shouldn’t, as they put it. I’m here because they’re here. I smile a lot, I play nice, laugh at the right things and dance a little bit and leave when everyone else leaves, but I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with myself afterward, and I’m never sure why. I lay in bed at night after coming home and get angry, decide that I hate it here, hate the people, hate the music, hate the liquor and the open drug-taking, then start rationalizing to make myself feel better: nothing’s really gone wrong, people are nice to me, attractive men flirt occasionally, the dancing is actually pretty fun once I’ve been on the floor a little while and have gotten comfortable.
“It seesaws around my brain as I fall asleep and tugs at me occasionally during the day. And in the middle of one of my internal back-and-forths tonight, I snapped. My head cleared completely out; it wasn’t until I caught my reflection in the train window that I realized what I’d done. I’d forgotten that I owned this outfit, that I’d bought it to go out in the city with; I’d forgotten how much I wanted to go out in the city, and how infrequently I actually do now that I’m here. For a split second I panicked, but it passed really quickly; then dread, apprehension, childlike curiosity and an odd sense of benevolent, all-embracing calm began bumping up against each other and coupling off in different combinations. Finally I just emptied my head out again by reading every single word of every single sign within eyeshot. I haven’t had to do that in years. I almost missed my stop that way.
“Now I’m near a wall made up of glassine blocks that look like giant ice cubes and miniaturize and distort and turn upside down everything behind them. I half-close my eyes and let them bump against my fingertips. There’s a laser-flash riff flickering toward me out of the speakers, like a lizard’s tongue aiming at a fly, and the further I move toward it, the more detail it takes on. There’s a dozen little rippling hesitations fore/aft/within each note; the woman’s orgasmic gasp in the background gets clearer with every step. It sounds rickety, but each iteration is somehow stronger, more resilient, the groove it suggests locking into place, both stiff and elastic. I’ve left the wall and can see the dancefloor clearly; I step onto it just as a beat emerges. Are those handclaps or snares? My eyes shut completely.
“Now I’m moving the way I hear the sound move: the drums thicken slightly and my shoulders dip down further; a falsetto-voiced man singsongs in the background and my head bobs wider and more freely. The beat goes away for a few moments, comes back slightly; over in the corner swathed in deep red and dark blue and purple light, my whole body feels looser but there’s something still straining at me, and in the music too. The beat goes away again. Then I hear a woman singing quietly, almost to herself: ‘There’s nothing in the world that you can do.’ I open my eyes and look up. The lights are gone; the dancefloor’s just full enough that the people on it have some space to themselves, and they’re all moving alone, no pairs, like chess pieces in battle formation only with melancholy replacing the sense of threat.
“There’s a tall boy with a shaved head in the queen’s position; he’s wiping his face with a heavy cloth, his lips moving in what looks like prayer. The woman to my immediate left--she looks like my friend Roxanne, with her short tight pitch black curls and square jaw--has her mouth fist-tight and eyebrows squenched, like she’s training for a fight, but the rest of her is ethereal, barely on the ground, like the wind is blowing it back and forth. Everybody seems to be moving in slow motion; it scares me for a second. Then I acclimate. The woman comes back on, deliberately: ‘There’s nothing in the world that you can do.’ Again, at the same tempo: ‘There’s nothing in the world’--the beat clops ahead--’that you can do’ (do for whom?), then twice, faster (do for WHAT?). She trails off for a moment and finishes: “For me.” The suspended rhythm picks up where it left off before the foreground singing began; I finally let my breath out and am able to move again.
“She said it. She said what it took her days if not weeks of practice in the mirror and late-night discussions with friends and siblings and in her head during the quiet moments after they’d fucked so well and so rightly that she could toy with forgiving him anything again, to him. She cracked the dam. And I can move again. I can see everyone around me right now the way they are instead of how I’m afraid they think I see them. The groove is retrenching itself, suppler, steelier, focused. It’s all there now--now I just ride it out.
“‘In life there’s nothing in the world that I need from you/In life there’s nothing in the world that I feel for you/I want everything from you/I take everything from you.’ Of course she’s contradicting herself. She cracked the dam; now everything comes out, and none of it makes any sense, or has to, because all of it is true. The second time she sings it I sing it with her. Then the words break up, echo slowly mid-line; the music cuts in and out, tones wrinkle like a heart murmur on an EKG chart; the beats double back and right themselves. The groove keeps bubbling up; the singer goes away, but her mark is permanent.”
--7 December 2001
12. ESG: “Moody” (2:30), from The Perfect Beats Vol. 4 (Tommy Boy 1998; originally released 1981).
I was gonna put this next anyway, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out its placement on Nate Patrin’s 1981 CD-R (part of his superb every-year-of-his-lifelong CD series). The term “mutant disco” has been thrown around a lot lately to describe the punk-funk hybrids that have been coming back into vogue of late, and it’s a perfect description of this song, which even more than the aptly-named “UFO” sounds like it was beamed down from the Planet X. If we overlook the Starbucks on every corner, you’d think from walking around Manhattan that we were back in the ‘80s again: fashion mullets and loose-fabric shirts with slits up the arms everywhere; every new band sounds like the Slits or the Gang of Four or the Soul Sonic Force; a Reaganite is in the White House (direct all anti-Clinton bile to the email above) and we’re living under threat of nuclear war. Anyway, change le beat, as their contemporary Fab Five Freddy would say.
--10 December 2001
13. Public Image Ltd.: “Poptones” (7:29), from Second Edition (Virgin 1980).
I can’t be the only person who wishes this were the one titled (in what would be the greatest instance of onomatopoeic song-titling in pop history had they done it) “Death Disco” instead of the 12-inch that’s retitled “Swan Lake” on Second Edition--though the beat’s nowhere near as supple (a relative concept here, to say the least), or as driving as it would need to be in order to make that phrase stick (it moves about an inch at a time, and after each movement it bellyflops, rebounds and starts again, over and over), it would feel right with that name. Or maybe Lydon should have just called this one “Death,” since it’s almost as overwhelming. (Well, actually I have no idea what death is like, but grant me my poetic license here, will ya?) It’s an incredibly methodical record; the crawling guitar like the leaves of the forest in which Lydon’s horrifying scenario takes place, the bass bludgeoning through like the headlights of the car, the drums keeping you hyperaware even though you’re hoping to God you can nod off so you don’t have to watch, Lydon himself registering as much fear and loathing as he ever did before or would again at about a third the volume. For more (and better), see Douglas Wolk’s superb column about the song from a few years back, and Greil Marcus’s Metal Box/Second Edition chapter in In the Fascist Bathroom.
--10 December 2001
14. The New Pornographers: “Letter from an Occupant” (3:40), from Mass Romantic (Mint 2000).
“Wait, I know--what about this?” The guy at the organ wiggles two fingers into alternating keys, producing a sound so cliched, so cheesy, that it prompts the lead singer, the only woman in the room, to crack, “Didn’t Blondie use that on...?”
“...every other song they ever recorded,” finishes the drummer. The room laughs; the organ part stays.
---
We’re coming to the last verse and as good as it sounds, I’m sick of just chopping that chord up. You know what? Everything else we’ve been doing on this song, from that “What the last ten minutes have taught me” line to those idiotic ooh-oohs Dan stuck onto the end of the choruses, has been done to try to crack each other up, and this is the first time we’ve gotten this far without laughing, and if I have anything to say about it, it won’t be the last. So fuck it. Here goes.... [skronk-diddling ensues] ...Jesus Christ, everyone else is just pushing harder! Holy shit! This isn’t going to stop, is it? Fuck! Fuck YES!
---
The purple lawn needs mowing. The ambitious world tour behind The Rainbow Chidren, complete with cloth-bound Witness bibles on each seat of every hall played, had bankrupted him; the half-full shows in the southwest and, shockingly, San Francisco were the biggest drains, since the venues’ cleaning crews threw away all the untouched books before his tour management could recycle them for the next stop. He’d had to sell the studio and retire to a house he got cheap at auction in the middle of Eden Prairie; only his hairdresser and cook stayed on, for loyalty’s sake. At first he was petrified and a little nauseated by all the tourists when the word got out; no one wants you to be who you are today, he fumed, but after awhile he had to admit that it did feel nice to be appreciated again, on whatever level. If nothing else, waving and occasionally signing an autograph through the security gate provided something to do between updating the website and demoing those songs Santana had asked for, and he’d even become friendly with some kids driving around in a school bus painted--what else?--paisley.
Today, though, the grass had gotten out of hand, so he changed into a green pantsuit and lime waistcoat (the hairdresser asked if he was supposed to the Lucky Charms mascot, a comment that would have gotten her fired a year earlier) and headed out. Going over the lawn in perfect vertical lines, he took a deep breath and smiled. Just after the rain is the only time he likes to be outside during the day; it takes at least a half-hour for curiosity seekers to start ringing the buzzer after a downpour.
Next door, the neighbors, a couple in their early 30s, were playing music loudly, as usual. Some of it was interesting but not completely to his taste; more often, though, they liked a lot of what he liked, and sometimes the music was his, which was both gratifying and weird. This time, he could hear a woman’s voice, blurry with double-tracking but clarion anyway, over the mower, and there was something about it that reminded him of...wow, a few people, really. He finished his final line and stopped the machine to listen closer. The first chorus was just starting. He narrowed his eyes for a second and smiled wide; they were throwing change-up after curveball, and he nodded in assent.
“God,” he thought to himself as he pushed the mower back toward the garage. “I need to write a song like that.” He shut the garage door and headed back downstairs, toward the studio.
--11 December 2001
15. Basement Jaxx: "Where's Your Head At" (4:00), from CD5 (Astralwerks 2001).
Several amusing remixes--I especially dig the Stanton Warriors 2step lick-up, which I first heard a couple months ago when Shut Up and Dance ended a Centro-Fly set with it--none of which touch the original, one of the head-bangin'est records of the past decade. Most amusing of all: the EP this comes on is longer than Rooty itself.
--18 December 2001
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