Compared to today, there were fewer out performers and fewer outlets for performers in the 1970s. Still, some queer acts broke through, and queer songs showed up in unexpected places. This playlist consist of twenty highlights of 1970s LGBT music from a diverse group of genres.
[8tracks width=”300″ height=”250″ playops=”” url=”http://8tracks.com/mixes/7507136″] Click here to like Tunes du Jour on Facebook!(I meant to post this yesterday, but I entered the wrong date on the schedule. Oopsie!)
Before founding Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, who turns 72 years old today, was an in-demand musician. Here are twenty pre-Zeppelin tracks on which he played:
Click here to like Tunes du Jour on Facebook!
Follow me on Twitter: @TunesDuJour
Our weekly dance playlist kicks off with a track that was inspired by a song from the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen. In the movie, Danny Kaye performs the Frank Loesser’s “Inchworm.” While schoolchildren sing “Two and two are four / Four and four are eight” etc., Kaye sings to the titular worm “You and your arithmetic/ You’ll probably go far,” and asking “Could it be you’d stop and see
how beautiful they are?” Singer-songwriter David Bowie told Performing Songwriter magazine “You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song. Not that you’d really recognize it. Something like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for ‘Inchworm.’ There’s a child’s nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult. There’s a connection that can be made between being a somewhat lost five-year old and feeling a little abandoned and having the same feeling when you’re in your twenties. And it was that song that did that for me.”
Today is David Bowie’s 69th birthday. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues with this playlist of club tunes.
Click here to like Tunes du Jour on Facebook!
Follow me on Twitter: @TunesDuJour
Take a DJ from the Ukraine, a style icon from Ohio, a graphic arts student from Tokyo, three legendary funk musicians from James Brown’s band, a homophobic rapper named after a personal hygiene implement, and a reference to a Dr. Seuss book, and you have the single that was named the best of 1990 by the Village Voice and New Music Express and the second best dance record of all-time (after Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”) by Slant magazine.
The song is “Groove is in the Heart,” and it kicks off this week’s Throwback Thursday playlist, in which we’ll hear twenty of the best hits of 1990.
Click here to like Tunes du Jour on Facebook!
Follow me on Twitter: @TunesDuJour
Songs performed by and/or written by and/or produced by and/or about David Bowie. Artists include The Magnetic Fields and Morrissey.
[8tracks width=”300″ height=”250″ playops=”” url=”http://8tracks.com/mixes/7476286″] Click here to like Tunes du Jour on Facebook!