A little smaller selection this week, as I’ve had two music projects that have been sucking up my listening time this week.
“London Calling” – The Clash
Joe Strummer was born 72 years ago this week. At first, I accidentally added the entire London Calling album to this playlist. For a second I thought about making that the entire PL for the week. There are worse ways to spend an hour.
“Skydiver” – Briston Maroney
Maroney hasn’t been around very long. I’m not sure he’s put out a bad song yet.
“Old Tape” – Lucius featuring Adam Granduciel
Lucius provided backup vocals for The War on Drugs’ “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” three years ago. Adam Granduciel returns the favor, along with some guitar work, here.
“Sprinter Brain” – Wild Pink
Two-for-two on terrific singles from the next album.
“Taxi” – Onsloow
“No Good” – Christopher Owens
These two songs both made Stereogum’s Best New Songs list last week. Fully deserved, very important honors.
“Torture” – The Jacksons
After a long stretch of classic/very good songs to pick from for our 1984 video, this week was suddenly pretty barren. Plenty of solid songs in the bottom 10, but nothing that really jumped out and screamed “I’M 1984!!!!” to me. This is about as close to a memorable song in that group as I could find. At the time, it was huge. Still, it wasn’t nearly as big of a hit as the first Jacksons’ single of 1984, “State of Shock.” That was basically a Michael Jackson/Mick Jagger duet, so it was bound to be huge. I bet a lot of people who were around in the summer of ’84 have totally forgotten about this track. The video is always hilarious, mostly because Michael and Jermaine refused to appear in it (and all the wild family issues that prompted those decisions) and how their absences were handled. It is extra funny that they decided to make a video that was over six minutes long without the two most popular members of the group being present. I bet the remaining brothers felt like jackasses singing the chorus by themselves. Number 35 this week, on its way to #17.