Prompted Post 11 - The iPod Shuffle
Well, I don't have an iPod but here are the 10 that show up on the MP3 player I am using most right now, written in the time during the song played.
Wire - Kidney Bingos: I liked Wire from back when I got into music. One of the best "art students with guitars" bands, they had a nice clear sound and semi-surrealistic lyrics that I liked; the tunes stuck in my head too. "Kidney Bingos" is one of my favourites and the album from which it comes, A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, is my favourite Wire album. They released a new one, Object 47 a few years ago and it was as if they had never been away.
Tommy James - The Commies Are Coming: This is something I found from Atomic Platters, a record of 1950s era music featuring Atomic Age paranoia and Civil Defense PSAs from various celebrities. This is one of the weirder ones, a genteel sounding country singer with a subdued guitar and autoharp in the background sings and then goes into this a cappella denunciation of America as it then was.... "we must stand firm for the sake of our beloved country with which God has so blessed us...." and crush Communism under the American heel, under "the few strong and able leaders who can rise up unite us against this threat".
Dick Dale - Surf Beat: I really got into surf music a while ago, not a collector or aficionado but I have a few disks lying around. Dick Dale was and is an amazing guy, I think he got robbed as he was just starting to make it big when those stupid Beatles came along and derailed American popular music, or shoved it onto a tack I liked a lot less. If you have ever seen film of Dick Dale or even better live playing, you can understand what a shreddin' maniac he was. His big hit "Misirilou", which reanimated his career when it was featured in the movie Pulp Fiction, is actually very Middle Eastern (Dale was half Lebanese) and you can hear this influence in his playing. An earlier version of the song even has violin in it.
PiL - Careering: I found out about John Lydon the same way everyone else did, as he was Johnny Rotten, leader of the Sex Pistols... but what came after Never Mind the Bollocks was much more interesting. The whole album Second Edition is quite something, and this song is one of the stand-outs... also very good is "Poptones". Lydon's nasal singing over this weird dub-style bass and odd electronic tones and warbles, telling fragments of an odd story you really would rather not listen to.
Nash the Slash - Glass Eye: Just a short bit from his hit album Children of the Night. Nash was and is an amazing character, a guy with a weird persona who played with his face wrapped in bandages and dark glasses on stage like the Invisible Man.... one of Toronto's finest and another guy who never got his lasting due. Crazed strings, mutated electronic violin producing sounds you had never heard before or since. He recently quit music entirely, citing music piracy as the last nail in his professional coffin, but I dunno - his output needed to be a lot higher to claim this I think. Still, I will miss this mad perfectionist, who played and mixed everything by himself until he thought it was perfect and he was right.
Front 242 - Operating Tracks: Great early Electronic Body Music (EBM), I play this sometimes at Circuit Breaker. I like early EBM/industrial at least partly because it took so much work, there were no computers or sequencers or samplers, or what was available was pretty crude. This forced the better acts (and there was lots of dull derivative crap back then, just as there is now) to put more thought into what they did and how they did it... this song is a good example, at its base it is a pretty basic beat laid over a tape of some radio chatter (about you don't know what but it sounds official) but it makes your feet start moving in those improbably tall and ornate Goth booties.
Gary Numan - Metal: Second track off The Pleasure Principle, the first album that came out under his own name (before he was co-credited with Tubeway Army). Another artist i liked from the beginning, icy cold SF inspired lyrics and remote-sounding synthesizers, it fitted perfectly the kind of alienation and separation I felt when I was in my late teens... it did not surprise me at all when i found out later that he also has Asperger's Syndrome. "I'm still confusing love with need...."
DOA - World War 3: sometimes I like raucous punk, and these guys were some of the best Vancouver produced. A couple of years ago I saw a double bill of them with Dayglo Abortions, a Victoria punk group that's also stuck together over the last 30+ years. They capped off their set with "General Strike", one of their best songs, and looking at the people my age in the audience, i thought how so much had changed in the province since that song came out (when there was about to be a genuine general strike against the right-wing government), but also how nothing had changed (as the strike was averted at the last moment by a Grand Bargain between organized labour and government that we're all still paying for). Joey "Shithead" Keithley ran for office in the last election, unfortunately did not get elected. I would have been pleased to serve Minister Shithead.
B-52s - Mesopotamia: I loved the B-52s from the get-go, they were fun. Fred Schneider's honking vocals are unmistakeable, and even though lately he's been getting a little annoying with novelty projects ("Who Threw That Ham At Me?") he made a lot of the fun. But Kate Pierson was/is wonderful too.
Polyphonic Size - Winston and Julia: A genuinely weird little nugget of Belgian post-punk synthpop I found only recently, though they are from the early 80s. Hard to find them, even in this era of Youtube and sharing blogs. I first heard their "Nagasaki Mon Amour" on some compilation album and that's where you're likely to encounter them too. "Oceania Oceania... no place to live, no place to love.... Eastasia, Eurasia.... Winston and Julia...in this world of no-no-no...."
Aw, that's ten already? Gee, that was fun.
On the slate:
Day 1 - your current relationship
Day 2 - where you’d like to be in 10 years
day 3 - your views on drugs and alcohol.
day 4 - your views on religion.
day 5 - a time you thought about ending your own life.
day 6 - write 30 interesting facts about yourself.
day 7 - your zodiac sign and if you think it fits your personality.
day 8 - a moment you felt the most satisfied with your life.
day 9 - how you hope your future will be like.
day 10 - discuss your first love and first kiss.
day 11 - put your ipod on shuffle and write 10 songs that pop up.
day 12 - bullet your whole day.
day 13 - somewhere you’d like to move or visit.
day 14 - your earliest memory.
day 15 - your favourite tumblrs.
day 16 - your views on mainstream music.
day 17 - your highs and lows of this past year.
day 18 - your beliefs.
day 19 - disrespecting your parents.
day 20 - how important you think education is.
day 21 - one of your favourite shows.
day 22 - how have you changed in the past 2 years?
day 23 - give pictures of 5 guys who are famous who you find attractive.
day 24 - your favourite movie and what it’s about.
day 25 - someone who fascinates you and why.
day 26 - what kind of person attracts you.
day 27 - a problem that you have had.
day 28 - something that you miss.
day 29 - goals for the next 30 days.
day 30 - your highs and lows of this month
Wire - Kidney Bingos: I liked Wire from back when I got into music. One of the best "art students with guitars" bands, they had a nice clear sound and semi-surrealistic lyrics that I liked; the tunes stuck in my head too. "Kidney Bingos" is one of my favourites and the album from which it comes, A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, is my favourite Wire album. They released a new one, Object 47 a few years ago and it was as if they had never been away.
Tommy James - The Commies Are Coming: This is something I found from Atomic Platters, a record of 1950s era music featuring Atomic Age paranoia and Civil Defense PSAs from various celebrities. This is one of the weirder ones, a genteel sounding country singer with a subdued guitar and autoharp in the background sings and then goes into this a cappella denunciation of America as it then was.... "we must stand firm for the sake of our beloved country with which God has so blessed us...." and crush Communism under the American heel, under "the few strong and able leaders who can rise up unite us against this threat".
Dick Dale - Surf Beat: I really got into surf music a while ago, not a collector or aficionado but I have a few disks lying around. Dick Dale was and is an amazing guy, I think he got robbed as he was just starting to make it big when those stupid Beatles came along and derailed American popular music, or shoved it onto a tack I liked a lot less. If you have ever seen film of Dick Dale or even better live playing, you can understand what a shreddin' maniac he was. His big hit "Misirilou", which reanimated his career when it was featured in the movie Pulp Fiction, is actually very Middle Eastern (Dale was half Lebanese) and you can hear this influence in his playing. An earlier version of the song even has violin in it.
PiL - Careering: I found out about John Lydon the same way everyone else did, as he was Johnny Rotten, leader of the Sex Pistols... but what came after Never Mind the Bollocks was much more interesting. The whole album Second Edition is quite something, and this song is one of the stand-outs... also very good is "Poptones". Lydon's nasal singing over this weird dub-style bass and odd electronic tones and warbles, telling fragments of an odd story you really would rather not listen to.
Nash the Slash - Glass Eye: Just a short bit from his hit album Children of the Night. Nash was and is an amazing character, a guy with a weird persona who played with his face wrapped in bandages and dark glasses on stage like the Invisible Man.... one of Toronto's finest and another guy who never got his lasting due. Crazed strings, mutated electronic violin producing sounds you had never heard before or since. He recently quit music entirely, citing music piracy as the last nail in his professional coffin, but I dunno - his output needed to be a lot higher to claim this I think. Still, I will miss this mad perfectionist, who played and mixed everything by himself until he thought it was perfect and he was right.
Front 242 - Operating Tracks: Great early Electronic Body Music (EBM), I play this sometimes at Circuit Breaker. I like early EBM/industrial at least partly because it took so much work, there were no computers or sequencers or samplers, or what was available was pretty crude. This forced the better acts (and there was lots of dull derivative crap back then, just as there is now) to put more thought into what they did and how they did it... this song is a good example, at its base it is a pretty basic beat laid over a tape of some radio chatter (about you don't know what but it sounds official) but it makes your feet start moving in those improbably tall and ornate Goth booties.
Gary Numan - Metal: Second track off The Pleasure Principle, the first album that came out under his own name (before he was co-credited with Tubeway Army). Another artist i liked from the beginning, icy cold SF inspired lyrics and remote-sounding synthesizers, it fitted perfectly the kind of alienation and separation I felt when I was in my late teens... it did not surprise me at all when i found out later that he also has Asperger's Syndrome. "I'm still confusing love with need...."
DOA - World War 3: sometimes I like raucous punk, and these guys were some of the best Vancouver produced. A couple of years ago I saw a double bill of them with Dayglo Abortions, a Victoria punk group that's also stuck together over the last 30+ years. They capped off their set with "General Strike", one of their best songs, and looking at the people my age in the audience, i thought how so much had changed in the province since that song came out (when there was about to be a genuine general strike against the right-wing government), but also how nothing had changed (as the strike was averted at the last moment by a Grand Bargain between organized labour and government that we're all still paying for). Joey "Shithead" Keithley ran for office in the last election, unfortunately did not get elected. I would have been pleased to serve Minister Shithead.
B-52s - Mesopotamia: I loved the B-52s from the get-go, they were fun. Fred Schneider's honking vocals are unmistakeable, and even though lately he's been getting a little annoying with novelty projects ("Who Threw That Ham At Me?") he made a lot of the fun. But Kate Pierson was/is wonderful too.
Polyphonic Size - Winston and Julia: A genuinely weird little nugget of Belgian post-punk synthpop I found only recently, though they are from the early 80s. Hard to find them, even in this era of Youtube and sharing blogs. I first heard their "Nagasaki Mon Amour" on some compilation album and that's where you're likely to encounter them too. "Oceania Oceania... no place to live, no place to love.... Eastasia, Eurasia.... Winston and Julia...in this world of no-no-no...."
Aw, that's ten already? Gee, that was fun.
On the slate:
Day 1 - your current relationship
Day 2 - where you’d like to be in 10 years
day 3 - your views on drugs and alcohol.
day 4 - your views on religion.
day 5 - a time you thought about ending your own life.
day 6 - write 30 interesting facts about yourself.
day 7 - your zodiac sign and if you think it fits your personality.
day 8 - a moment you felt the most satisfied with your life.
day 9 - how you hope your future will be like.
day 10 - discuss your first love and first kiss.
day 11 - put your ipod on shuffle and write 10 songs that pop up.
day 12 - bullet your whole day.
day 13 - somewhere you’d like to move or visit.
day 14 - your earliest memory.
day 15 - your favourite tumblrs.
day 16 - your views on mainstream music.
day 17 - your highs and lows of this past year.
day 18 - your beliefs.
day 19 - disrespecting your parents.
day 20 - how important you think education is.
day 21 - one of your favourite shows.
day 22 - how have you changed in the past 2 years?
day 23 - give pictures of 5 guys who are famous who you find attractive.
day 24 - your favourite movie and what it’s about.
day 25 - someone who fascinates you and why.
day 26 - what kind of person attracts you.
day 27 - a problem that you have had.
day 28 - something that you miss.
day 29 - goals for the next 30 days.
day 30 - your highs and lows of this month