Five Song Friday: Feel the Burn
This Week: Spontaneous Combustion, Stanky Funk and Meatball Subs
Why are you reading an email in the middle of summer?
But more importantly, why am I writing an email in the middle of summer?
I know it’s technically one of the hottest times on Earth since humans started recording temperatures and keeping track of how many people and things spontaneously combust.
But it’s summer.
You should be outside.
But I am outside, you say. I have a “smartphone” you say. It’s very fancy and allows me to read emails anywhere, even outside, you say.
Stop talking.
If you are on your smartphone outside, you are not really outside. You’re missing the point.
Summer isn’t something you do while doing something else like reading on your phone. Summer is a full contact sport with water slides and beach volleyball montages.
Summer deserves your undivided attention.
I know there are lots of places with heat warnings and local governments urging people to stay indoors. They say it’s dangerous and unhealthy. Stay away, they say. Keep hydrated. Do not leave the shade.
Since when does the government know anything about fun?
Summer isn’t about being scared.
They love to stoke fears and feed public paranoia about heat stroke and skin cancer and melting skin on hot asphalt.
They want you inside watching the news and being afraid and panic buying yoga pants and wicker handbags from the home shopping channels. They want you cool and complacent.
But like my grandma used to say, “Eff that noise.”
We should all be laughing and splashing and sweating. We should be running to the fridge to check if those cheap supermarket ice pops are frozen yet. We should be enjoying burnt hot dogs and slurping watermelon and doing that hot-cha-cha dance on beach sand.
We should be riding jet skis and shooting fireworks and high-fiving dolphins.
We should be choreographing neighborhood sprinkler musicals, beheading fire hydrants and hijacking ice cream trucks.
We should NOT be reading emails.
And we most definitely should NOT be writing them.
But here we are. You reading and me writing.
Not chicken fighting in the pool or catching fireflies on the front lawn. Not lazing on a rock by the river with friends.
Not flash mobbing the local hotel pool dressed in old-timey, one-piece bathing suits with buckets of ice cubes and live crabs.
We’re on a computer at a desk in an office with fluorescent lights and climate controlled air while the joyful laughter of summer fills the air outside our double-paned glass windows.
Can you hear it? Of course not.
You’re too busy reading this email aloud in your head.
Knock it off.
I know it sounds crazy for me to tell you to stop reading email when I’m the one who sent this email to you. It makes no sense. And the fact that I keep writing is only making it harder for you to stop.
But soon, these words will end. You will finish reading and then you will be faced with a choice… do I read ANOTHER email?
Maybe one from work? Or one from your homesick child who is away at summer camp? Perhaps a video link from your Uncle in Florida with a fresh take on the events of January 6th?
Or maybe there’s a new message from the government saying that it’s going to be a million degrees outside and you should pack your family in ice and stay in the basement until October.
See what happens when you read email?
Nothing good.
Unless that email includes five songs that you can listen to outside while enjoying the full (and potentially fatal) glory of the blazing, beautiful sun.
Those emails are okay. And you’ve already finished reading this one anyway.
So get out there and seize the summer while you still can! Next year is only going to get hotter! Seriously, it’s really bad! I sound like I’m kidding, but I’m terrified! It’s like when you get sick and your body runs a temperature to help get rid of the virus, but it’s humans who are the virus! And the Earth is getting rid of us! Oh man, I am really freaking myself out now!
Thanks for reading. Please use sunscreen. Have fun and let’s be careful out there.
Sincerely,
DJ Crankypete
Five Song Friday 023
“Mess Around” - Wargirl
Wargirl is a Long Beach sextet. That means they are six people from Long Beach, California who make music. And in the case of Wargirl, that music is funky, psychedelic pop rock.
“Mess Around” is from their 2019 self-titled debut. I could go on and get all “thesaurusy” about how the music sounds and whatnot, but as I mentioned, it’s summer. And looking stuff up in a thesaurus in the summer is NOT cool.
So I’ll just say that I dig this song and leave it at that. Excuse me now while I change into some cutoff jeans short and go find a dog to throw a frisbee to.
“News at Ten” - The Vapors
You probably know The Vapors as the one-hit-wonder band behind the catchy single “Turning Japanese.” That frenetic pop song that sounds racist (but I don’t think it is) and was rumored to have something to do with self-pleasure (which in hindsight, was what most eighties songs were about anyway).
“News at Ten” has that same breakneck pacing and leaves a similar effervescent eighties aftertaste. But this song is not about self-pleasure or Japan. It’s about what happens when you get old and boring and look forward to watching the news.
Of course, the debut album from The Vapors was released in 1980, long before the 24-hour cable news cycle made it “cool” to watch the news. Back in the old days, news was mostly for nerds and old people. But today we know that nothing is cooler than keeping up with the latest, greatest breaking news.
It’s hip to be hip to what’s happening! Like the fact that most of Europe is like that frozen pizza in the oven that you forgot to set the timer for and only remember once you smell the smoke! Oh no! It’s so burnt!
”Soul Strokes” - Sidney Pinchback and Schiller Street Gang
You might need to wash up after this one.
It sounds like this 1969 record is one that artists like Jack White and the Black Keys kept hidden under their mattress and listened to over and over again until it became part of their musical DNA.
Sidney Pinchback throws so much stank, funk, grit and guitar grunge around in this one that it feels like someone let a pack of retrievers out at low tide and then invited them into the formal sitting room so they could twist and fling their wet, muddy yuck from carpet to ceiling.
Jesus, Sidney, there isn’t a single second of this song that doesn’t sound like what the streets of the French Quarter smell like at 3am.
Straight up nasty… in the best way possible.
“A Milli Vanilli” - Shad
Shadrach Kabango.
I know I talk a lot about names here, but COME ON. That’s the real name of the Canadian rapper known as Shad. I get that you want to shorten things because it saves money on printing costs, but COME ON. I would have killed to have that name growing up.
Of course, as a pale chubby white kid in the suburbs, I would have been tormented and teased to no end. But eventually, the beatings and taunts would have stopped and everyone would have come to realize that a name like Shadrach Kabango is a straight up superpower.
I’m partial to this track because Shad takes a horrendous pop song from my college years (that I haven’t even revisited to listen to ironically) and makes it born-again dope as heck. This gives me hope that something good can still happen for the boys of Color Me Badd.
“Twenty Questions” - Beastie Boys
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since the passing of Adam Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys.
I’ve always loved the Beasties tracks that had his fingerprints all over them. They felt like much cooler, Buddhist versions of the sometimes silly Ringo Starr songs that would pop up on Beatles albums.
He had “Shambala” and “Bodhisattva Vow” on Ill Communication and “I Don’t Know” on Hello Nasty. This track appeared on their 1999 compilation, Anthology: The Sounds of Science and features vocals from Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto.
According to Yauch, he was listening to a lot of bossanova music while recording Hello Nasty and wanted to try making his own version. Which is one of the many ways that Adam Yauch was not like me at all.
I’ve listened to lots of bossanova songs, but not once did I ever think that I’d like to make my own bossanova songs.
Of course, I’ve watched movies where someone is eating a meatball sandwich and thought, I’d like to make myself a meatball sandwich.
But that’s not really the same thing.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube Music
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” - Kurt Vonnegut