A Meandering Post that Almost Comes Together at the End

I started reading Tim Lawrence's book Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 despite my general apathy towards non-fiction, because The Atlantic included it in their list of "Five Books About Going Out That Are Worth Staying In For."  They said:

Versions of this story have been told before, but what distinguishes Love Saves the Day are the more than 300 interviews Lawrence conducted with promoters, partiers, and legendary DJs such as Frankie Knuckles. It’s full of wisdom from the elders of American club culture: how to stagger straight and gay crowds on a Friday night, how to find the next great floor-filling single, how to build a DJ set like a furnace that can burn all night. Lawrence also folds in a number of select club “discographies” so you can reproduce Jimmy Stuard’s set from 12 West, circa 1976, at home (on nice speakers, perhaps, or an iPhone placed in a cereal bowl). 

so I said "Why not?"  I'm about halfway through and I'm not sure that I'll finish, I'm so bored by non-fiction that I haven't taken a history class since high school.  And my main motivation to finish the book--compiling a playlist of all the mentioned songs--was obviated when I learned that someone already did it.

I am not, however, bored by podcasts about non-fiction and I recently stumbled across the One Song Podcast, a show where DJs Diallo Riddle and Luxxury break down the backstory to a song or album.  This isn't just stories about the first time they heard the song or why it's one of their top ten songs, there's some serious music theory.  Here's Luxxury explaining why the bass line to Nas's N.Y. State of Mind sounds so menacing:

The whole episode is great but many of you aren't into Nas and probably don't care who DJ Premier sampled and how he looped it.  Here's an episode I suspect most of you will enjoy.

But the real reason I'm posting all this drivel is their interview with Fab 5 Freddy.  It's two parts and only the first one is out yet, but they talk about some of the clubs and records from Love Saves the Day, so if you don't want to read 400-plus pages of non-fiction just listen to Fab 5 Freddy talk about the good old days of the NYC disco scene, how DJing was invented, the making of Wildstyle, and lots of other interesting stuff.

Notify, Volume V

Cheers, and welcome back once more to the Notify show, the one where we highlight songs not on Spotify!

After a Neil-based assortment last time, let's go back to the random smorgasbord style that this silly feature was build upon. Here we go!

In the spirit of St. Patty's, here are the Dropkick Murphy's doing my favorite Clash song in their own particular . . . [sigh] [Idiom, sir?] idiom. 

I love the part at the start when the singer asks the crowd, "Do you know what this one is?"

My kids loved this one when it came on The Electric Company 13 or 14 years ago. I did, too, in one of those rare occasions when kids' TV meets super cool adult tastes.

Going international, here's the Pizzicato 5, a Japanese pop band from the 80's and 90's. Culture!

Okay, here's a better way to watch it, and why I originally heard it.

So this song isn't on Spotify in any form, but with Not-ify, you get one of the more fantastic scenes from an old classic, The Blues Brothers.

Here's a song that gets wedged out of most places for obvious reasons, but given that it's not a political or cultural statement but simply an incredibly loose version of Albert Camus' absurdist novella "The Stranger," the shunning is a bit off. In any case, it ain't on Spotify.

 

See you next bat-time on Notify! Who else will appear here?