The late great Sinéad O’Connor was born on this date in 1966. Several of her songs are included on today’s playlist.
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Your (Almost) Daily Playlist: 11-18-23
In early 1980 newspaper The Village Voice published the results of its poll of 155 music critics. Voted the best album of 1979 was Graham Parker & The Rumour’s Squeezing Out Sparks. The rest of the top ten was:
Neil Young – Rust Never Sleeps
The Clash – The Clash
Talking Heads – Fear of Music
Elvis Costello – Armed Forces
Van Morrison – Into the Music
The B-52s – The B-52s
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Damn the Torpedoes
Pere Ubu – Dub Housing
Donna Summer – Bad Girls Graham Parker was born on this date in 1950. A handful of his songs are included on today’s playlist.
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Your (Almost) Daily Playlist: 9-30-23
The only consistent member of T. Rex, the late Marc Bolan was born Marc Feld on this date in 1947. He chose his stage name by combining the first and last stage name of his idol, Bob Dylan.
A handful of T. Rex songs are on today’s playlist.
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Your (Almost) Daily Playlist: 7-30-23
As it achieved massive success just last year, many younger people think that Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was written this decade, but the truth is Kate wrote the song back in 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition. Believe me. I know. I was the one who taught her how to play the synthesizer.
Kate Bush turns 558 years old today, or 65 if you wanna go by Wikipedia, the website invented by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1695. Lots of her musical goodness is on today’s playlist.
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Your (Almost) Daily Playlist: 7-28-23
Devo’s “Whip It” was inspired by a magazine article about how to be a better wife. The song’s cowriter and bassist for the band, Gerald Casale, said he’d found that story in a 1962 issue of The Family Handyman and thought it was funny. He decided to write a song that parodied the idea of whipping your problems away. Casale also drew from communist propaganda posters and a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon called Gravity’s Rainbow, which mocks capitalist slogans with satirical limericks.He wrote lyrics that taken out of context sound like motivational clichés: When a good time turns around, you must whip it. Give the past a slip. Whip it into shape. Get straight. Go forward. Move ahead. And my personal favorite: Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.
Jerry Casale turns 75 today. A couple of Devo tracks, including their biggest hit, “Whip It,” are included on today’s playlist.
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Your (Almost) Daily Playlist: 6-5-23
“Pretty In Pink,” The Psychedelic Furs’ 1981 song about a woman named Caroline who sleeps with different men who mock her for being so “loose,” became the title song to a 1986 movie scripted by John Hughes about a teenager named Andie who “must choose between the affections of dating her childhood sweetheart or a rich but sensitive playboy.” I pulled that from IMDB, as I’ve never seen the movie. At the time of this movie’s release I had already seen two other movies based on Hughes scripts, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, both of which he also directed, and didn’t care much for either, the performances of Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall notwithstanding. (Make that three previous Hughes scripts. Looking at IMDB, I notice that he wrote Class Reunion, a movie I saw only because my dad was an investor in it. It wasn’t good.) I’ll give Hughes this – the music used in his films was, for the most part, winning. So while the song “Pretty In Pink” resembles the storyline of the movie Pretty In Pink as much as I resemble Janelle Monae, it is a good one.
The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler turns 67 today. A couple of his bands songs are included on today’s playlist, including the original mix of “Pretty In Pink.”
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