My Perfect Driving Mix

When driving a lime green rental car to Cape May and back, the following CDs hit the spot.

Bloc Party - Silent Alarm. Perfect for getting the hell out of the Avis parking lot and then immediately getting stuck in traffic on the BQE.

Massive Attack - Mezzanine. Perfect for zoning out across vast swathes of the Garden State Parkway.

Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III. Perfect for feeling vaguely bad about blasting out your windows as you roll into bucolic little Cape May - until you realize that you just passed two other cars also blasting it out their windows.

The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing. Perfect for frantically trying to get to one last winery before it closes at 5 p.m. (We made it!)

The Kills - Midnight Boom. Perfect for driving along the beach at night to. Also good for replaying the first song over and over again at any random point along the drive.

The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday. Perfect for the bittersweet sensation of having to leave Cape May. Wahhhh!

Joe Turner Been Here And Gone

I'm reading this Studs Terkel book, "And They All Sang," which has to do with the musicians he interviewed on his Chicago radio show back in the day. And I'm considering that reading this book is a mistake, because I don't need any more stacks of CDs tottering precariously on the edge of my stereo, and I suspect that I'm about to acquire them.

Already, I am intrigued by a man called Big Bill Broonzy, and a song of his called "Joe Turner No. 2", which Terkel sets the stage for thusly:

This is the one. If ever there was a hush in the control room, the edge-of-the-chair anticipation, it is now. Bill is retuning his guitar. This one calls for extra-special tuning. "You guys can go for a drink while I'm doin' this." Now he's ready. We hear a guitar, but it's like no guitar we ever heard before. It's a human voice, not one but a whole ramshackle town...And now that chord - whang - only it isn't that - it's crying, everybody crying - a cry of salvation.

By chance, one happens to be able to hear this song in its entirety online at the moment, thanks to this fabulous replay of this fabulous Americana show that aired July 3. It's the third song in.

PS. Fast forward through the drugged-out DJ's vacant ramblings.

Adam Yauch Is My BFF

According to a recent "My New York" column in the NY Post, Adam Yauch is my doppelganger.

Consider:

*"I actually find Brooklyn much more interesting than Manhattan at this point," he tells the paper. Well, duh. He also loves Prospect Park.

*He likes the fish cake and green papaya salad at Sri Pra Phai. I'm more a fan of the fried salad myself, but I would totally order the papaya salad for kicks.

*He says Regal Battery Park Stadium is his favorite big cineplex in NY for the same reasons I like it: "There will be like 25 people in a stadium that's made to hold 300 people." He also says he and fellow Beastie Boy Mike Diamond battle over whose personal theater is. Sorry guys: it's MY personal theater.

I'm totally going to also check out the Manhattan Special Coffee Soda he talks about: "It's this crazy, weird, nasty soda that they used to have commercials for when I was a kid."

I recently saw Yauch's movie "Gunnin' For That Number One Spot" with him in attendance to answer audience questions. Afterwards, as my friends and I walked to the subway, we were right behind him. He's like the anti-P. Diddy: just this normal guy that you wouldn't know was a rap superstar. Nobody recognized him. Given all the above, I wonder how many times I've walked by him and not even known it.

Just Somethin' About Sittin' On A Stoop

Back in the days when I had a stoop, I used to do a lot of sittin' on it. There just aren't many better ways to spend a lazy summer evening. My Puerto Rican Social Club neighbors undoubtedly thought it was weird that I sat on it with a glass of wine rather than a 40, but damn, what's the point of a stoop if you can't do what you want while you're sittin'?

So when I first heard this frolicking Little Jackie song "The Stoop" no more than five minutes ago, it immediately took up residence on my soul's stoop. It encapsulates the whole experience. So frickin' good. I seriously need me some stoop sittin' time now, so I'm gonna go hunting for somebody else's to sit on. (Go here to get it.)

Sittin on the stoop in Bed Stuy
Always say hi when the brothers walk by
Just for the etiquette sittin on the top step
With a bag of chips sit back relax enjoy the bricks
We got a heavenly philosophy
I don't mess with you you don't mess with me
It is what it is it ain't all hard
Up in the hood sittin on the front stoop
It's all good.

No Longer Eating My Heart Out

I confess to some jealousy of those bloggers who are eternally moaning about all the free review copies of music they get that they don't have time to listen to...but NO LONGER! I have just received my first review copy of a CD.

After I wrote briefly about Robin Danar's Altered States CD here, the nice folks over at Elemental Consulting/Shanachie were nice enough to contact me and I ask me if I'd like a copy. That was an easy enough question to answer. So now I have one!

This is mostly an album of covers, but I think my favorite is an original track by Jessca Hoop, which you can hear over here...

What's With...

Blogs that when you land on them, start playing music at you without you doing anything? Grumble...

Although, I must confess that the last time this happened, I liked what I was hearing well enough to fumble around the Web page until I figured out what it was. And it has tilted me from being in the "I dunno about Santogold" camp into the "Alright, I'm digging Santogold" camp. Twas this, in less invasive format:

You'll Find A Way

Reasons #242 and #243 Why Lil Wayne Rules

#242.

The lyrics!

Man I got summer hatin on me cuz I'm hotter than the sun
I got spring hatin on me cuz I ain't never sprung
Win-ter hating on me cuz I'm colder than yall
And I would never I would never I would never fall
I'm being hated by the seasons
So f--- yall for hatin with no reason

#243.

Wherein Lil Wayne thanks all the fans for buying his history book and gives a shout out to the book drive. Eh?

Not Duke Ellington's A Train

Another stolen photo...

Gosh, I didn't know toting around a boom box was back in style. It is in the outer outer boroughs, at least, where not one, but two boom boxes were going on the shuttle back to the A Train after my trip to Rockaway Beach. Along with a guy drinking a Corona on the train, two barefoot kids (eek!) and several people eating chicken and rice out of styrofoam containers.

Sadly, neither one of our boom box entertainers had put much thought into their playlists: one was playing an abominable, abysmal, asphyxiating slow jam, and the other, more boppable but somewhat irksome gangsta rap.

If I were lugging a boom box on the A train and drinking a Corona at this very moment (and I kind of wish I were!), this would be what I would be playing.

Beastie Boys - An Open Letter to NYC (duh)
Bryan Adams - Summer of '69
Notorious B.I.G. - Anything. Everything
The Ting Tings - Great DJ
Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me
Lil Wayne - Lollipop
Smashing Pumpkins - 1979
Flo-Rida - Low
Ludacris - The Potion
The Replacements - Kiss Me On The Bus. Or maybe Bastards of Young
Foghat - Slow Ride
Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes
Billy Idol - White Wedding
M83 - Highway of Endless Dreams
Jurassic 5 - Quality Control
Dead Prez- Hip-Hop
The Raconteurs - Salute Your Solution
Nas - Made You Look
M.I.A. - Galang
Soul Coughing - True Dreams of Wichita
And of course, The Ramones - Rockaway Beach

Hot In The City Tonight

Two small NY vignettes.

1. I am running in Prospect Park on Sunday. It is 7:45ish p.m. but it is still blazing hot. It is Puerto Rican Day, and the park is CROWD-ed and festive. I look to my left, see a guy lying face down in the grass in a very chalk outline-esque way. All around him, people partying, wandering, sitting, and this dude, face planted in the dirt. I ponder what to do. A half mile or so ahead there's an African drumming group that's always there on Sundays, and there's usually cops there to quell the drummers, should they, I dunno, start throwing drumsticks viciously. So I run along and find me a slightly pudgy cop, stop, and say, "there's a guy lying face down in the grass back there." He looks at me and goes: "drunk." I stare at him. "Maybe," I say. "Or, he could be dead..." Says he: "How far back is he?" I explain. He looks sad, and hot, and makes general noises about how he's going to check it out. I sure hope he did...

2. I am exiting the PATH train at the WTC station. There are two people at the turnstile next to mine, an unruly-looking guy coming in and a fierce-looking woman going out, who have reached an impasse. He has put his money in. She is halfway through the turnstile. Finally, she backs down and out, but he has already lost his money. "I lost my money!" he says, and as she breezes through the turnstile next to him, he slaps her in the back of the head. She hauls off and punches him. A flurry of half-hearted slapping ensues, as I stand frozen in the turnstile next to them, with my jaw on the floor. Two PATH employees are nearby, and they're like, "WTF?" And the guy is like, "I lost my money!" And they're like, "Dude, you just hit a woman because you lost your money???"

In the summer, in the city.

Like Being In Hell With A Cool Soundtrack

(I had to link to this picture. Click here for the original post by its original author.)

Saturday I went to a music festival down near Atlantic City at a place called Appel Farm. It would have been awesome had it not been 250 million degrees in the shade. Oh wait, there was no shade. The last time I completely sweat through every piece of clothing I was wearing was at the Mermaid Parade a couple of years ago, and I had totally forgotten what a disgusting feeling it was.

Anyhow, I think Enter the Haggis was pretty good, but I was so hot I couldn't pay attention. By the time Suzanne Vega came on, I had resigned myself, and managed to enjoy her stage banter quite a bit ("Do I look like Alice Cooper up here? Maybe not the best idea to outline my eyes in black ink before coming out here...and now, we're going to play a song in a major key!")

She ended her set with "Tom's Diner". Now, when I was growing up I absolutely hated that song, mostly because local radio overplayed the crap out of it. But compared to what radio plays today - well, I'll take it. And the live version she did was surprisingly rock 'n' roll...lots of bass, lots of drums.

Then there was They Might Be Giants, who were enjoyable simply because they were clearly having a good time, and because, as they say, they might be the only band on the planet that employs a full-time confetti artist. And maybe because, by that point, the sun had retreated at least five feet away from my head.

My friend advanced a theory that with They Might Be Giants, you can totally date someone by what songs they're a fan of. In my case, it's "Istanbul Not Constantinople" and "Particle Man", but there were some people in the audience grooving to "Fingertips," which I found to be an incomprehensible mess. So what TMBG era do you hail from?

Yay!

New Calexico album

Parental Apocalypse

Spied outside my building in Brooklyn the other night: a small child, perhaps six or seven years old, skipping down the sidewalk singing about lollipops. Bucolic childhood scene? Maybe, if it weren't Lil Wayne's song about lollipops. Disturbing, seeing a child utterly absorbed in singing "She lick me like a l-l-l-l-lollipop."

Stoked/Not Stoked

I am

Stoked: That Radiohead has 167,147 fans on Facebook (which I just joined!), currently 80,848 more fans than Britney Spears. All is as it should be.

Not stoked: That Coldplay has more fans than Radiohead. Which reminds me of a distasteful interaction I once had:

Me: (playing Radiohead CD)
Unnamed blasphemous one: They sound like Coldplay!
Me: (ominous silence)... ... ... Uh, nooooo, Coldplay sounds like Radiohead.

As a side note, Linkin Park, Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown all have more fans than Radiohead, as does Victoria's Secret Pink. (?) And someone called 'The Stig'. (But not, thankfully, Tool.) Curious, this Facebook...

Stoked: To be going to All Points West.

Not stoked: In sign number 5,644 of the pending CD apocalypse, I was stalking the new Ting Tings album this weekend (i.e. too lazy to look up release date so just checking to see if it's out whenever I'm at a record store) and it was available, but only as LP or MP3 download. If want CD, must wait until June 3. Which happens to be today, but see, I wanted it Sunday, see.

Stoked: Waterfalls in New York! Really!

Yahhhhh!

Okayyyyy, I might be a teeny bit obsessed with Soulja Boy Tellem. Or whatever their name is. First I frightened my neighbors by learning, slowly and clankily as a 30+-year-old woman trying to be cool does, how to do the Superman dance. Now, I can't stop laughing about this "Yahhh Trick Yahhh" song. In its lyrical genius, it outdoes "Supersoak that ho" (is that realllllly what they're saying!??!) by, like, a factor of one million. I think I will try the move at about 3:32 of the way in the next time someone messes with me on the subway.

The Million Dollar Quartet

Another "how did I live this long and not know about this?" moment.

If you ever go to Memphis (and you should), your number one stop, even ahead of Graceland, must be Sun Studio. This two-room, 45-minute tour is one of the best I've ever been on. I got to hear great stories (Elvis lied about his mother's birthday to get that legendary first Sun recording), hear great music (sure, you've heard 'Hound Dog,' but have you heard 'Bear Cat'?), and stand in the studio itself, ground zero for rock and roll.

The picture here hangs in Sun Studio (several times). It's a shot of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. They randomly got together (Cash left) for a jam session. Sam Phillips recorded the whole thing, without anybody else knowing. The session sat, dusty and unheard, for some time; according to our tour guide, it was because Elvis was by that time under contract to RCA and no one else could record him. But after his death, the session saw the light of day. And it's great: as historical record, as music, as way of making legends real. It's got gospel. It's got blues. It's got Christmas music. It's got Elvis impersonating the first Elvis impersonator.

Click here for Sun Studio's own opinion of the top ten lyrics ever recorded there.

And, one of the best tracks on the CD:



And, speaking of Memphis, the Hold Steady is streaming a track from their new CD on their MySpace page where they depart their traditional northern U.S. climes and move south. Is that a joke, that fried reference?

Forever's Not So Long

I have two favorite Devotchka songs so far - maybe three now - and they played one - maybe two - Saturday night at the Fillmore in Philly. It was a good show...I don't really feel like my life has been enriched by the odd encore of scantily clad gymnast, but oh the string section, and the intricate piano work, and the sheer temerity of the sousaphone. And the mariachi trumpets. And his voice.

And these lyrics.

How It Ends

My other old original favorite is "Too Tired." And my new maybe but lemme think about it a little while favorite is "Transliterator."

The Opposite of Dank

Quite a tasty little wine, this odd combination of shiraz and viognier. It's a red wine that tastes fizzy without actually being fizzy...that makes your stomach sparkle...a mouthful of it is the opposite of dank. Which we can all use some of in New York this unsparkling, unfizzy, undelightful spring.

Check it out at this store.

The Bones Of You

Every so often, I hear a single song and I know that I have to be able to hear it again whenever I want for the rest of my life, and probably whatever other songs it has been packaged with on a CD as well, and that I must possess this capability immediately.

This happens less and less often as I grow more cautious about all the previous CDs bought on a similar impulse that turn out to be, well, junk. But it remains a happy impulse when I can't rationalize myself out of it, and so it was yesterday morning.

Now that we've got a decent radio station in NY at 91.5FM, my alarm clock tunes in at 7 a.m., just in time for the NPR round-up, after which I usually drag myself out of bed. But yesterday this song comes on after the news and glues me to my mattress until it decides that it has had enough of me, and ends. Partly because of the determined guitar strum that kicks in at beat one and carries all the way through, building at around 2:20 to a great contemplative noise before pausing and then striding forward again. Partly because of the lyrics, which are simply true, and were especially true for me yesterday morning, and start off something like:

So I'm there
Charging around with a juggernaut brow
Over draft speeches and deadlines to make
Cramming commitments like cats in a sack
Telephone burn and a purposeful gait
When out of a doorway the tentacles stretch of a song that I know
And the world moves in slo-mo
Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day

And partly because of the ending - is that "Summertime" being played so faintly in the background? Curious...

"The Bones of You," this song is called (listen here), by Elbow, who I had previously lumped into the "another indie band that I don't have time for" category. No longer.

Addendum

As a postscript to my marching band post, I have just accidentally watched a video called "Talkin' Out Da Side Of Ya Neck" by a group called Dem Franchize Boyz, the Charming Olde Shoppes of the rap world. The video features a marching band and a repetitive brass line that could be played by a lone horn player who regrouped after proving unable to master, say, the C major scale in junior high band.

The song appears, fortunately, not to be about tracheotomies (tracheotomiez?), but instead to be about lying jerks.

Beh, I can't even bear to link to it.

Dirt Off Your Shoulder

I usually don't listen to music when I run. For a lot of reasons: my ears I guess are weirdly shaped because the buds fall out; and they sweat and that's just kind of nasty; but mostly because the beat of the music interferes with my running. I find myself trying to keep time with the music, and I just can't get any kind of groove.

But a couple nights ago, I'm at my local NYSC, curse its raggedy soul, at the tail end of a run on the treadmill, and this Jay-Z song comes on the usually garbage in-house video network, and damned if it didn't exactly match my tempo, and damned if I didn't run for an extra five minutes because it was so perfect.