Earlier this week Pulp announced a show at Radio City Music Hall, and tickets went on sale at 10am, and when I checked at 9:59 tickets hadn’t gone on sale yet and when I tried to but two tickets at 10am they were sold out already and when I tried to get one ticket at 10:01am that was also sold out and then when I tried again at about 10:04 I got stuck in this endless loop of Ticketmaster wait time.
Argggggggggggh.
Filed under: music, personal | Tags: guilty pleasures, me me me me me, one week one band, personal
Over on One Week One Band this week people are guest-posting about their favorite album closers… The posts on Blur’s “Yuko and Hiro,” Fiona Apple’s “I Know,” and the Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me” are all excellent. I wrote something, too. I was one of the few (the only?) person to choose an album-ending single and it’s one you’ve probably known forever, even if I didn’t know it myself until I was in my mid-twenties.
Actually, with the move I’ve got all my vinyl with me but none of my CDs, which is part of the reason why I didn’t end up writing about “Bar Italia” or “The Dancer” or “O Girlfriend” or “Constant Craving” or “Glory Box” or “Just Call Me Joe.” Also, I considered “Jealousy,” but I’ve already written about the Pet Shop Boys there…
Filed under: music | Tags: kathy kirby, obituaries, the british, the sixties
Amid all the year-end obituary roundups that have recently surfaced on the internet, one name I haven’t seen yet is that of Kathy Kirby, the British singer who died this May and who was, at one point, Britain’s highest-paid television star.
I suppose that shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise. Kirby never had any hits in the US, and her last British chart appearance was forty-five years ago. Still, her booming voice and her bizarre, sad personal life gave her quite a dedicated fanbase.
In 1954, at the age of sixteen, Kirby approached famed bandleader Burt Ambrose and asked him outright whether she could sing with his band that night. Hearing her powerful vocal chords he agreed, and that led to Kirby’s traveling the nightclub circuit with Ambrose for three years before she embarked on a solo career. He eventually became her manager and, later, her husband, despite the fact that he was forty-two years her senior.
[semi-simulblogged on my Tumblr...]
I considered skipping out on a Favorite Songs of the Year list this year, just because of the moving and everything, but I’ve done it every year since I was twelve (at least) and decided not to stop now. I listened to a lot less new music than usual this year, and honestly the state of pop was rather bleak for a while there. (There was a minute this spring when Katy Perry, Avril Levigne and Ke$ha [above] actually had three of the best songs on the radio!)
I did manage to come up with 56 songs that I liked, though, and starting tomorrow morning I’ll be announcing them, eight per day. [Spoiler: Ke$ha didn't make the final cut.] I’m posting the songs on my Tumblr during the day, just because, and each night I’ll do a wrap-up here. This page will be the master list, and will link to individual postings. Probably this makes it all more complicated than it needs to be, but whatever.
1. Linnea Henriksson, “Väldigt kär/Obegripligt ensam”
2. Rihanna, “Man Down”
3. Lady Gaga, “Bloody Mary”
4. The Kills, “The Last Goodbye”
5. Lloyd feat. André 3000 and Lil Wayne, “Dedication To My Ex (Miss That)”
6. PJ Harvey, “The Words That Maketh Murder”
7. Baxter Dury, “Isabel”
8. Britney Spears, “I Wanna Go”
9. Lykke Li, “I Follow Rivers”
10. Selena Gomez and the Scene, “Love You Like A Love Song”
11. Adele, “Rolling In The Deep”
12. La Femme, “Sur La Planche”
13. Lena, “Taken By A Stranger”
14. Cobra Starship feat. Sabi, “You Make Me Feel…”
15. Shirubi Ikazuchi, “St. Cabah”
16. Gruff Rhys, “Sensations In The Dark”
17. Cults, “Abducted”
18. Beyonce, “End of Time”
19. Alexandra Stan, “Mr. Saxobeat”
20. Veronica Maggio, “Jag kommer”
21. Stylo G, “Call Mi A Yardie”
22. Coeur de Pirate, “Adieu”
23. Florence and the Machine, “What The Water Gave Me”
24. Jazmine Sullivan, “Drive By (Always On My Mind)”
25. Bjork, “Crystalline (Omar Souleyman Remix)”
26. Ladytron, “White Elephant”
27. Charlotte Gainsbourg, “Terrible Angels”
28. The Rapture, “How Deep Is Your Love?”
29. Dev, “In The Dark”
30. Lil Wayne, “Six Foot Seven Foot”
31. Dirty Beaches, “Lord Knows Best”
32. Emeli Sandé, “Heaven”
33. Warm Ghost, “Mariana”
34. Little Dragon, “Nightlight”
35. Mastodon, “Curl of the Burl”
36. Foo Fighters, “Rope”
37. My Tiger My Timing, “Endless Summer”
38. Little Boots, “Shake”
39. Enrique Iglesias, “Tonight (I’m Fuckin’ You)”
40. Tove Styrke, “Stalker In Your Speaker”
41. Erykah Badu, “Out My Mind Just In Time”
42. Austra, “Beat and the Pulse”
43. Battles feat. Gary Numan, “My Machines”
44. Jenny Silver, “Something In Your Eyes”
45. Martin Solveig feat. Dragonette, “Hello”
46. Guineafowl, “The Lie Is”
47. Roxette, “She’s Got Nothing On But The Radio”
48. Severina, “Brad Pitt”
49. Azealia Banks, “212″
50. Mondo Marcio, “Come Un Italiano”
51. Kelly Clarkson, “Mr. Know It All”
52. God Bows To Math, “Teenagers Is Lazy Journalism”
53. Keren Ann, “My Name Is Trouble”
54. Wale feat. Big Sean, “Slight Work”
55. Jelena Rozga, “Razmazena”
56. Inoj, “On”
To be honest, I wasn’t a huge Aaliyah fan until her final album came out. Part of that is because her final album is really awesome, and part of it is that her earlier stuff came out when I was going through my high school indie snob period. Sure, “Are You That Somebody” is one of the greatest songs ever, but it was really easy to write off when it came out due to its inclusion on the Dr. Doolittle soundtrack.
That last album, though, is really fabulous. Released just a month before her untimely death, I first got it on a CD-R sent to me by a British man who couldn’t stop raving about it.
The fall of 2001 was a funny time for me: trying to adjust to moving back in with my parents, starting classes at a commuter college that was basically high school pt. 2, doing my best to dodge footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, and writing rather a lot. There are a few albums I associate very specifically with that period: Bjork’s Vespertine, By Starlight by Helicopter Helicopter, Nirvana’s Nevermind (which I bought that September, on the 10th anniversary of its release), and Aaliyah.
11 posts on the Pet Shop Boys since Monday and the big party tomorrow. (Hopefully you are coming!) The plan for Friday is to crash all day and/or catch up on Torchwood, which I’m already three episodes behind on. (Although honestly I spent most of the first couple of episodes just wishing the Mekhi Phifer would go away, possibly to an acting school somewhere.)
In any event, posting will resume soon.
I’m guest blogging over at One Week One Band this week, talking about one of my all-time favorite duos, the Pet Shop Boys. This morning I started with the history behind “West End – Sunglasses,” an early remix of their debut single, and between now and Friday I’ll be winding more or less chronologically through their catalog at the rate of two songs a day. Which is hard, considering how very many great songs they’ve made since 1984.
Filed under: music | Tags: cibo matto, concerts, japanese-americans, victory day
Today is Victory Day (formerly Victory Over Japan Day), a celebration of nuclear annihilation against that is still a holiday in Rhode Island and only in Rhode Island. It’s a pretty ghastly reason for a day off, although I guess a Monday off in August is not the worst thing in the world, but it got me thinking about Japanese culture and about the visibility of Japanese-Americans in popular culture. It’s a subject I studied a lot in college but haven’t really thought about much lately.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I saw Cibo Matto play in Boston. I wrote a little thing about it, then left it to rot in my Drafts folder, but I thought today would be as good a day as any to bring it out again:
A few weeks ago I got to DJ a super-fun dance party with two other people, DJ Manhunt and DJ Gem Powers. As it turns out, over the course of the evening Ms. Powers uploaded her entire (fabulous) playlist to my iTunes, and this mix is picked and chosen from there. As we’ve reached horrid, humid August, I think this mix is particularly appropriate for cooling down in an overly air-conditioned place (something the party we DJed definitely wasn’t.) The normal rules still apply–no tracks over five minutes, and so on–but for the first time my “no songs related to creepy violence and/or murder” rule was broken, unknowingly, since I just learned (while double-checking the double-z in Q Lazzarus) that “Goodbye Horses” apparently figures pretty predominantly in The Silence of the Lambs, a movie I haven’t actually seen since I was about 11. Since that movie’s all about a serial killer who skins women alive you may want to, uh, leave it off your day-to-day playlist. (But maybe not?)
Download/tracklist after the jump:
