Listened to The Slider, among others, on my flight from Orlando to Phoenix. Put me in the mood to post some T. Rex.
Deciding just what to post, I stumbled into this cover by The Shins. There are a lot of bad T. Rex covers out there, but this isn’t one.
The video pushes the borders of too hipster, but slides in just under the bar.
In anyMy Facebook friend Darren Viola posted this clip today of Boston’s Lyre’s playing somewhere haughty. My guess is Newport, but they rock as anyone would hope they would.
In any case, no matter what this is, it is a pretty sweet documentary look at people dancing. Go!
Frankly, my defense of disco would last about 100 words. It was unapologetic dance music that was the soundtrack to a great public flowering of gay and interracial utopias, hedonistic, aspirational, happy, at a time when really the whole world was going to hell.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t too long before this culture, so flamboyant and energetic and just plain wonderful, was destroyed by the darkness of AIDS.
The music, which started out as dance music by Kool and the Gang and the Ohio Players and the Commodores among many others, really straight up R&B, evolved into that pulsing 128 BPM sheen, a music that sacrifices swing for relentless intensity and pistonlike movement. This wasn’t music for sitting around and contemplating, this was music for getting sweaty on the dancefloor and sweaty in the bathroom and more sweaty at home, if you know what I mean. Utilitarian music, dance music, sex music.
Alright, that’s 154 words. Here’s a link to a story by a younger guy from Macon who explains it more, if you’re interested. The story starts out at Duane Allman’s grave, which is kind of cool.
Here are a few songs I think of as liking from that time, when you would go into a club and everyone would feel like they were in the minority. Everybody felt like they were venturing out, being a little dangerous, and also connecting to a world that hadn’t ever really existed before, to people they may not have seen before. Oh, I should also mention cocaine and amyl.
I guess my point is that you can freely hate all this music, these tunes, the beats, the arrangements, the crappy clothes the singers wore, but it really isn’t fair to say Disco Sucks. That’s because Disco was so much more bigger than the music.
This one is in honor of Mad Max Fury Road, another Australian export. There is great tension in the buildup here, and after the dance starts it goes away. Nice.
This seems to be a thing.
This one is called insane, but it seems a little sad.
This is funny.
Here’s a fun one. Enter your birthday into this site and they’ll tell you what song was No. 1 the day you were born.
I doubt your song can be much cooler (or classic) than mine.
They’ll also tell you what song was No. 1 the night you were conceived, a real rock ‘n’ roll moment for sure. (I’ve posted about this song twice before, with various versions but not the giant hit that was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s.)
Good old YouTube.
It is like looking through the old Macmillan Baseball Stat book: You look up one number, and that leads to another and another and what started out as a search for Napoleon Lajoie’s (got it that time, Steve) best year for doubles (51 in 1910) winds up comparing George Brunet’s career WHIP (1.316) with that of Jamey Wright’s (1.545, pretty crappy for a former first rounder) three hours later.
My piece on the Syndicate of Sound led to Gene posting the Music Machine, and when I finished watching that, there was a link to the Seeds on a show called Shebang, which I think I remember, but am not sure.
I can say that I kind of liked the Seeds, but I can also say this is maybe the worst lip sync ever:
But, in typical stat searching style, that led to this video of 50’s pin-up model Bettie Page dancing, I guess suggestively, to another Seeds hit, I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.
The song is ok, and for sure Bettie was hot (dark hair, bangs, and blue eyes are deadly. If I knew she was left-handed, and wore glasses sometimes a la Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep, I would have probably spent my life savings trying to track her down) but for the most part the whole thing is stupid, and not really provocative (was it in 1966? I doubt it.).
Emily Stein has taken pictures of teens on the floor at concerts, using some sort of uberlight and a fast shutter speed, these are the cleanest mosh pit images I’ve ever seen.
Mosh pit pics are a venerable genre, but they usually look like some variation of this:
Delightful.
Thanks Jayne!
It isn’t only the MPAA that sends post facto bills for pirated music.
A Canadian band, Skinny Puppy, has billed the US Department of Defense for using its music to torture prisoners held at Guantanamo.
Read more at the CBC website. There’s a clip there, too.
The requested $666,000 seems a bit devilish, doesn’t it?
This clip has some fine dancing.
