Take it like a mun

For a long time, I thought “top” lists sucked. Who can actually come up with a top five or top ten anything that they are solid about? It’s always open to debate, even between me and my other me. Those scenes in High Fidelity are irritating. I want to climb into the screen and start screaming in Jack Black’s face or tell Cusack that he has no taste in music (and the film song picks are way better than in the novel, though I do like the book).

Then I realized such lists aren’t really meant to be definitive. (Sometimes I’m a bit rigid, but I come around. Usually.) They’re conversation starters, like Jack Black’s Top Five Monday Morning Songs. So this post marks the kick-off of a semi-regular posting at PDB of not just the same old lists. (And that means I’ll probably never post another list here again.)

Top Five Top Five Lists I’d like to see:

1. Top Five Top Five Lists I Hate
2. Top Five Top Five Lists
3. Top Five Internet Timewasters
4. Top Five items for your Mars Exploration Kit
5. Top Five Ways to Self-induce Sleep
Bonus list: Top Five Foods to Eat in the Car that you Shouldn’t But Do Anyway

What do you love or hate about lists? Which ones are you favorites? Which ones would you like to see from other people but not have to participate? Which ones do you hope you never see?

{ 4 comments }

You meet him at the resort in 1981 while your boyfriend mails you joints from eight thousand miles away. He smiles at you on a Nile houseboat and over brunch in the delta, milk charred in clay pots, the rice is sweet, and wet. You pretend you are older and from an older people still. I watch and imagine I am also descended from the jackal. The world is an afternoon by a canal in a wheat field. We do white lines the following summer in the city, but not the same one. You stop writing after you go away to school. I never get closer to the sun than on the back of that donkey.

If you’re not familiar with this 12” from Liquid Liquid on 99 Records (pronounced nine nine), “Cavern” is where Grandmaster Flash got the bass line for “White Lines,” and “This record is what ultimately destroyed 99 Records.” (Scroll down at that link if you don’t want to read about other 99 Records releases.)

Listening to this you can hear the same sensibilities happening in the nascent hip hop scene that influenced Gang of Four, PiL, and A Certain Ratio in the post-punk world, a groove still copped today !!!

The whole 12” is worth listening to. These mp3s are ripped from my so-so copy, decent, but the tracks are not without their pops and tics. Here for your perusal at 320 kbps.

Liquid Liquid
Optimo/Cavern/Scraper/Out 12” 99 Records (1983)

Optimo
Cavern
Scraper
Out

And because it’s Monday:

PiL
Swan Lake

A Certain Ratio
Shack Up

Gang of Four
He’d Send in the Army

!!!
Shit Schiesse Merde, Pt. 1

{ 2 comments }

or more precisely, Les Concerts a Emporter from La Blogotheque. Yeah, it’s en français mes amis Américains but just put down your fritures de liberté for a couple of nanoseconds and get this: You know you love live music, but you’ve got a trick knee, a bum hip, sciatica, glaucoma, gout–you name it–and not to put too blunt a point on it but you’re tired of the scene and the hipsters and the smell of stale beer and vomit now that smoking is a felony–if this resembles you slightly or not at all then imagine

the national at your dinner table
vampire weekend in an empty courtyard
pattern is movement in a van

well over a hundred song-long performances. And you can brush up on your french.

{ 0 comments }

Ex-Blake Babies and one-time Lemonhead John Strohm has released all of his solo material for free download at Musical Family Tree. Well worth a listen and not to be missed for completists. Thanks to eskimo kiss for the heads up.

{ 1 comment }

Welcome to the PDB restart. The original can be found here. Jon and I were going to move that blog, archives and all, here to takeitlikeamun. But MyPHPAdmin is so borked at the old host that a successful exodus proved impossible. Pharaoh’s army caught us at the Red Sea while Moses ate hot pastrami on rye at Katz’s. The original PDB will remain up for a short time, then disappear as we have stopped paying the hosting fee. We’ll bring you our greatest hits from v.1 occasionally. It is our sincere hope that reposting them will make us appear more productive than we are.

As far as the new, improved, PDB (now with 53% more zest!), expect the same great music conversation, downloads, and appreciation, along with a whole lot more nonsense, rumination, expostulation, and holding forth. And now, let the wild rumpus (re)start!

{ 1 comment }