Meta Nostalgia

For some odd reason, last month I had an urge to listen to some of the songs from Arthur, The Kinks’ concept album about the decline of the British Empire. Truth be told, pretty much all of their albums during this period were about the Empire’s decline, but Arthur was originally made to accompany a TV special that would make the band’s reoccurring theme explicit.

Here are songs from all of these albums, almost none of which are available for (legal) download in the U.S.—these tracks come from my CDs. Although, these tracks are available for download for folks who have access to Amazon in the UK, in which case you can click on the Amazon links below.

Anyway, these guys are great songwriters and this middle period is, for me, when they wrote an amazing number of memorable songs. Many of these songs are nostalgic and the characters in the songs, who are sometimes the songwriters (the Davies brothers), long for the good old days of Empire—school days, mansions in the country and the simple (English) life. It's often hard to tell who is being more sincerely nostalgic—the band or the character portrayed in the song. Though, most of it rings with an uncomfortable truth.

Sometimes these characters are also being satirized, which often makes the songs ironic—and the character singing is viewed as slightly pathetic. Or maybe, it's both the singer and songwriter who are pathetic? Maybe a slew of songs about pathetic and sometimes despicable characters might have ended up hurting these guys’ chances of scoring hits during that era. The fact that the world they describe is so very English might have hurt too. They were blacklisted from the U.S. during this fertile period. Apparently, the ultimate reason for their US ban was due to their refusal to pay dues to the American Federation of Television and Recording Artists before their appearance on a Dick Clark Special. But there were other factors too. They faded from the Woodstock generation's consciousness and only returned as a more boisterous and louder rock band. None of those later songs are included here.

The band is a little sloppy—our standards of what are acceptable for tightness in a pop song has changed—but the songwriting is consistent. I heard that there was drunkenness and the Davies brothers had periodic punch-ups, so life in this band wasn't a day at the beach, even a cold rainy English beach.

—DB
NYC

Eclectic Mix

Wow. I really amassed a lot of tunes since the last miscellaneous playlist! There are some older things snuck in that I wanted to listen to, but also some new things recommended by friends that I never would have known about otherwise.

—DB
Long Beach

World Psychedelic Classics

I realized I hadn't done a psychedelic playlist since 2005. Since then, it has vastly expanded and a lot of usual suspects have been added. This playlist is over 5 hours long! Maybe the longest I've ever done…

There are still some classic tunes from US and UK acts that will be extremely familiar (Kashmir, duh), but now these are joined by lots of contemporary artists mining that vein of free and "out" music that manages to stay within the boundaries of pop. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kasabian, Mt. Eerie and Ben Cooper's Patients project are all here too—as well as stuff that came out in the last few decades—so it's not all 60s stuff by any means. There's a smattering of international psych funk as well. Some years ago when I was at Luaka Bop we did a sampler of West African psych funk called, Love's a Real Thing and we realized that this movement, along with its fuzz boxes and spacey lyrics, found roots all over the world. There are some Turkish psych funk tracks here that are just wonderful—good songs and excellent production (they make some of our home grown stuff sound pretty wimpy by comparison).

—DB
NYC

River of January

It has been exactly one year since I have posted a playlist of Brazilian stuff—so here is an update. This is a long playlist with more than 3 hours worth of music. Some tracks are very new and a few are quite old. Marcelo Jeneci performed in town last week—very nice show—and so did Criolo. I didn’t make it to Criolo’s performance but I heard it was great—he’ll be back and I’ll catch him then. I saw both Tié and Tulipa perform earlier this year—also very good. Thanks to Mauro for passing on their CDs.

—DB
Marfa, TX