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This is Bow Wow Wow’s “See Jungle (Jungle Boy)”, essentially the title track from their 1981 debut LP. Listened to it about 15 times today on the train to and from the YMCA and then on the stair machine. It’s the kind of song that seems perfectly designed to make me feel good no matter what else is going on. It also sounds oddly “now” despite being almost 30 years old, the way it takes 1960s girl-group and bubblegum bits and lays them over a beat and guitar tone borrowed from Africa.

I really love the section about halfway through where Annabella Lwin sings, “In the jungle, I have a rumble/ With my BOY-friend”—the tune in that short section is just so classic, been used in songs a billion times but it will never get old. It makes me think of Best Coast, I guess b/c she writes a lot about her boyfriend, and this beat makes me think of High Places. No wonder it seems current.

The same general template would be used a year later for Bow Wow Wow’s version of “I Want Candy”, which was their one big hit in the U.S. That song is amazing too, but I like how loose and repetitive this track is, just kind of going from one section to the next. It feels like they are jamming a little.

Would kill to have Todd Terje to do an edit of this.

I like the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album a fair amount, and “Suite: Julie Blue Eyes” in particular (easy for me to understand why people despise that band though). The last part of the song, where they do the wordless “doo-doo-do-doot” vocal bit and Stills sings something in Spanish, has always made me happy. I can remember hearing it on the radio in the 70s. It felt like a kid’s song, then and now.

When I started downloading Todd Terje edits a couple of years ago, I hoped that he had re-worked that section of “Judy Blue Eyes”—it just struck me as the sort of thing he could transform in an interesting way. Eventually I discovered that he did re-work it, but a different version of the song, one called “Al Carnival” by early 70s Madrid-by-way-of-Columbia duo Elkin & Nelson (I don’t have the original record and I don’t know the songwriting credits, but I am pretty sure that E&N were covering the CSN song, even though that section was, I think, based on an older folk song of some kind). There it is up above. It’s a pretty good example of the kind of thing Terje is drawn to in his edits: lush sound that’s clear and spacious but still forceful, sections with unique textures that can be shuffled and re-looped. I talk about some of these qualities in the context of a broader discussion about the blurred lines between listening to music and making it, in a new Resonant Frequency that went up at Pitchfork on Friday.

Someone on ILM started a thread about “Suburban Sound” and in it they mentioned Real Estate, which seemed right. And that made me think of Hal Harley’s 90s movies, most of which I believe took place in suburban Long Island. Those movies were very inspiring to me back then because they demonstrated that mundane settings like the one I grew up in could be the setting for something creative and funny and emotional that felt personal and new. That it was a matter of looking closely enough. Seems obvious now but it didn’t then. And the music in Hartley’s films, much of which he made himself under the alias Ned Rifle, captured the spirit of the movies perfectly. Always loved this closing music for Simple Men. And it sounds kind of like Real Estate.