My friend Adam suggested combining “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie and “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga. Here’s the result.
Let’s Just Dance
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Revival Revival vs Lady Gaga vs David Bowie
mp3 download, ipod format download
Meet guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers, one of my favorite musicians in the world. He founded Chic along with the late bassist Bernard Edwards, and he’s on Twitter.
Nile Rodgers has led an action-packed life. As a teenager, he played with the Sesame Street band, and then with the Apollo Theater house band, where he backed such luminaries as Aretha Franklin and P-Funk. He was an active Black Panther. His Allmusic bio lists various NYC bands he played in before forming Chic, including a new wave rock outfit called Allah & The Knife Wielding Punks. He later went on to write most of the disco songs and eighties pop hits that I like, and helped lay the cornerstone of hip-hop. He deserves a blog post and then some.
This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.
A little late but it took me this long to track down: Steve Dallas channels the King of Pop. Thanks Adam G for scanning this from his extensive Bloom County collection and sending it. Click for full size.
Christmas makes me depressed. I would like it not to make me depressed. I want to have kids, and I want them to at least have the option to enjoy this time of year. In order for that to happen, I need to learn to enjoy it. I remember enjoying it when I was little. I can’t exactly pinpoint when I soured on it, but by late adolescence, it was mostly an occasion for dread, and in my adult life it’s mostly been an occasion for sadness. I’m hoping that some autobiographical writing will help me get a grip on the whole thing.
A big part of my sadness is due to the early death of my dad, who loved Christmas and celebrated it with a total and unironic enthusiasm. Among his fellow investment bankers he presented a Frasier-like highbrow persona, opera-going and cosmopolitan. But he showed his midwestern roots in his lifelong devotion to Garrison Keillor, his love of fireworks and especially his fondness for Christmas kitsch. We stopped going to church after Grandma died. Dad didn’t inherit any of her religious fervor. Or did he? He took Santa Claus and the tree seriously. He loved to play Santa at office Christmas parties and signed half the cards on gifts to us “from Santa” into my college years and the one December past them that he lived. As a little kid I thought it was terrific, but the older I got, the more difficult it got. The holiday ritual I liked the best was the Elvis Christmas Album.
Ohhh What A Feelin’
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Revival Revival vs Lionel Richie vs Michael Jackson
mp3 download, ipod format download
Vocals, guitar and bass by Babsy. Beats, loops and production by me. The beat is from “Billie Jean.”
We love this song. Here’s the original.
Here’s my remix of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” featuring Barbara Singer, Nicole Bishop and Candida Haynes.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
mp3 download, ipod format download
Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again.
Today the Michael Jackson fan art I have on my mind (and on the ipod) is “Please Don’t Stop The Music,” sung by Rihanna and produced by a couple of Norwegian guys. It includes a samples of MJ singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” The sample includes both his quasi-Swahili chant and his unearthly woo-hoo. It runs under almost the entire song after the first minute, with dramatic filter sweeping and what sounds like some vocoder.
MJ never made a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” leaving a vacuum that the fans are only too happy to fill. This video even includes footage of MJ’s video game.
This MJ song has inspired a lot of fan art, maybe because it is itself fan art. The music industry likes to send lawyers after people who make fan art, which is dumb and self-destructive on their part. No fan art, no art.
Hip-hop artists love Prince. Like them, he blends drum machines, live jazz-funk musicians and samples of other songs.
When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how you can jump many times your height, as if you’re a bug.
