One of the greatest songs of all time, or the greatest song of all time?
Considering launching a Kickstarter to pay Todd Terje to do an edit of this.
One of the greatest songs of all time, or the greatest song of all time?
Considering launching a Kickstarter to pay Todd Terje to do an edit of this.
Incredible that Minnie Ripperton sang this live in a TV studio. It’s like seeing an old theater in which stonemasons made intricate carvings on a ceiling you can just barely see because the idea was to do everything right, no shortcuts. Stevie Wonder produced the studio version; Ripperton says her daughter’s name in the outro, which must be bittersweet for her daughter to hear now. I know people who think this is cheesy but I find it very moving.
This track got some play in high school. Don’t think I’ve ever seen this video.
Been listening to the LP version of this a lot this week on the subway in my new town. “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone/ You can always turn around” is a line that could save a life. I hope it’s true. Guess more people probably know Gil Scott-Heron’s version at this point—they are equally great in my mind.
Packing recently I found an old VHS tape that had dubs from 8mm home movies going back to the late 60s. I had it digitized. So here we have 8mm film->VHS video—>DVD—>m4v—>Vimeo. And 30+ years in dusty closets along the way. Pretty far for these images to travel but here they are. This is Thanksgiving in Chicago; from my sister’s age, I’m going to guess it’s 1977. That’s me in the middle with the red headband. The music is by Philip Jeck. My father had no way of knowing that the film he was shooting would someday become a lo-fi cliche.
Carole King doing the immortal “So Far Away” in 1971. She was 29 and had been writing songs professionally for 12 years.
The Wilson sisters tearing it up in 1976. Have to think Axl Rose studied Ann’s phrasing pretty closely. The “crazy” at 3:00 is intense.
Whenever I hear Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Jeans” I think of “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles. I could see LDR covering this—it’s about the 50s and all.
How great is this song? Production is so simple and spare, it’s almost lo-fi! But then those drums really kick in, oh yeah and the choir too. It sounds kind of like a demo but in a very cool way.
I was thinking back to when I first became aware of Pat Benatar, which, man, I guess I was there right at the beginning, because I definitely remember when “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” was huge on the radio, and that was her second album in 1980, and I remember the big singles from the 1979 debut when they were singles too. In any event, from those years through the earlier days on MTV, during which she was a massive star, I remember having no sense at all of how she was categorized. She seemed kind of hard rock but also new wave, almost “underground” in the way that a lot of British new wave was in the early days of MTV. It was a testament, I suppose, to those early days of music fandom when notions of underground or cool don’t enter into it at all because you don’t really know what those things mean (willing to bet this period of ignorance lasted longer before the internet). But to me, in the early 80s, Pat Benatar seemed underground and kind of “arty” somehow, can’t quite put my finger on it.
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