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:
Filed under: music | Tags: buffy sainte-marie, canadians, jane child, kd lang, kon kan, leonard cohen, martha and the muffins, men without hats, nelly furtado, sarah mclachlan, the stills
10. Kon Kan, “I Beg Your Pardon” (1989)
I actually had no idea Kon Kan were Canadian until a few weeks ago. I assumed they were British and nearly put them on a playlist for the Euro-pride party I DJed, but decided at the last minute to look up their origins online. This song is great, though, with its sample-as-chorus and moody moose verses boosted by a really perky synth section.
Filed under: music | Tags: alannah myles, canadians, cowboy junkies, joni mitchell, len, meryn cadell, new pornographers, rufus wainwright
17. The New Pornographers, “Letter From An Occupant” (2002)
My old roommate used to get SO mad that I would refer to the New Pornographers’ chirpy first single as “Letter From An Occu-PAHNT,” the way that Neko Case does when she sings the title. Regardless, it’s still their best song, I think… This and “All For Swinging You Around” are two of my favorite Neko Case songs, as well. Not that I’m a huge fan the way that much of the internet is, but, you know, I think she’s nice and all.
Filed under: gay, music | Tags: antonio variacoes, gay, mixtape, music, pride
June is Pride month, and while I could write 10,000 words about how that makes me feel–I’ve got at least two drafts saved already!–I thought I’d take this opportunity to compile together some LGBTQ-and-queer-friendly-straight artists that I’ve liked over the years. That list includes the obvious (Bob Mould! Michael Stipe! David Bowie!) but also folks like British record producer Joe Meek (represented here with Davy Morgan’s “Cocaine”) who was driven to murder and then suicide by a blackmailer in 1967, and Antonio Variacoes, the wildly hunky Portuguese hairdresser (pictured above) who opened the first unisex salon in all of Portugal before launching his music career in the early eighties, only to succumb to AIDS a few years later.
Also some people that are still alive! I made sure to represent the L, G, B and T crowds, and also added in a few straight (or I think straight?) people (Shirley Manson! Twiggy! High heel-wearing Serbian New Wave star Oliver Mandic!) who have their gay followings, even if they’re not the first people you think of when you think of gay musical tastes.
This mix is a little longer than my standard 60 minute compilations, but it’ll still fit on one CD and I couldn’t not include “Cocaine,” “The Sweater” or “The Anal Staircase.”
The video for Los Punsetes’ song “Tus Amigos” has been out for nearly a year-and-a-half now, although I only saw it for the first time about five minutes ago, when someone left the clip on my Facebook wall. (Awwww!) The video is pretty funny, with a lot of taking-it-up-the-butt jokes, actual butts, and even an appearance by some (presumably simulated) sperms, which cleverly show up at exactly the halfway point. (You know, for the Youtube preview.) 120,000 people have already seen the video, though, so maybe you know about it already.
Musically, it’s pretty basic indie number, although it definitely has a charm to it. Maybe it’s just the Spanish, but it made me want to pull out my old Little Darla Has A Treat For You CDs, the ones with superb indie-pop songs from Madrid’s Elefant Records. I haven’t spoken a single word of Spanish since my sophomore year of college, though, so I didn’t quite get the song’s joke (the chorus translates literally to “I hope your friends take it up the ass,” I think.)
I actually started this post Memorial Day weekend while listening to Boston’s oldies station count down the top 500 oldies of all time. Now that the eighties are considered oldies–even “Love Shack,” from September of ’89, made an appearance on the countdown–there’s a lot of sixties stuff that’s getting pushed off the airwaves. Which is a shame! I like a lot of the sixties stuff on oldies radio, whereas Clear Channel representations of the eighties–Billy Joel and Hall and Oates and “You Might Think” by the Cars and not much else–all drive me totally nuts.
It’s with that spirit that I compiled this mix of twenty-four great songs from the sixties. Not that a single one of these was popular on oldies radio (although some, like the Jaynetts’ vague and creepy “Sally Go Round The Roses”, were big hits in their day.) There’s also obscurities from Iceland and New Zealand, a couple of songs you may know by other people, and deeper cuts by Donovan, Ike and Tina, and Nancy and Lee.
Download
[I'm using Dropbox this time and all the tracks are zipped together... let's see how that goes.]
Tracklist after the jump:
I really, really do not like Rihanna’s hair in the video for “Man Down,” which premiered on BET yesterday. But I really, really do like the single, which returns the Barbadian native to the Caribbean sound that she debuted with way back in 2005. Not that this sounds anything like “Pon De Replay,” or that most people even remember “Pon De Replay,” probably, but “Man Down”‘s reggae motif, cliched though it is, just sort of feels right on days that are as barometrically challenging as today is.
While folks in some quarters complained about “S&M”–I for one still like it, roughly 1000000000 radio listens later–I’ve been extremely happy with all of the single choices from her Loud album. I mean, except for “California King Bed”, which is a pretty terrible song. But the concept is hilarious and I’ve yet to hear it once on the radio. So, that’s not so bad.
Filed under: music, not hot | Tags: 1997, countdowns, me me me me me, the indigo girls
By 1997 I was a tenth grader with waaaaay too much time on my hands, thanks to a lack of social skills and a school fuck-up that left me with eight study halls a week. I spent my time practicing French, reading Alice Hoffman novels about girls who locked themselves up for the summer and emerged beautiful and handy at gardening, and watching an insane amount of VH1.
I still like most of the songs on this list, but it’s pretty amazing how uncool they are. Not in the sense that their popularity is collectively embarrassing now (um, hi, Paula Cole) but in the sense that most of these songs weren’t popular in the first place. There’s an abundance of flops by artists whose labels stopped supporting them after their one mega-hit, and songs by folks you may never have heard of at all…
