Platinum Radio Wax Renaissance (August 19th - 23rd)

Hello and welcome to Work Tunes.

It's late Saturday night and I am just sitting down to write. It's been another long day. I got all negative test results today, so that's positive... ha ha. The doctor asked me today if I had any compulsive behaviours; alcohol, food, biting my nails etc. I told him about the only thing I was addicted to was making playlists on my iPod. And here's another one for you.

Because I dug on In The Street for SOTW last week, there's Big Star. I've been meaning to play some Stevie Wonder, so one of his best is here. Kiss add another 70s dose to my list, Bob Dylan reps the 60s and Hank Williams takes us back into the 50s. For relatively new stuff there's the soulful R&B of Valerie June and something else from Joshua Radin. My weekly serve of Hip Hop comes from 50 Cent and Q-Tip. Last of all I have the soundtrack from one of my favourite films, Waking Life, which is a sort of classical requiem for a dream.

Check it out:

• Big Star - Radio City
• Hank Williams - Best Of Hank Williams
• Bob Dylan - Biograph (Disc 3)
• VA - Waking Life OST
• Joshua Radin - Wax WIngs
• Kiss - Double Platinum
• Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
• Q-Tip - The Renaissance
• 50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin'
• Valerie June – Pushin’ Against A Stone

Top Five Artists Last Week

1. Orgone
2. Bob Dylan
3. Prince
4. The Handsome Family
5. Blind Pilot

Song of the Week : Big Star - In The Street

My song this week comes from the soundtrack to a documentary about Big Star. You’ll be familiar with the song if you ever watched an episode of That 70s Show; they use it in a modified version for their theme song. 

In The Street is rock song about bored kids. It has that feel of bored, lost and nihilist teens. That’s an odd thing, given its from 1972 and (in Australia at least) the post-60s hangover was still around. I don’t tend to equate slacking with the 60s kids, who seem over earnest and naïve as opposed to cynical and bored – if the way Hollywood portrays them is to be believed. The attitude on show in In the Street seems like it belongs a good 5 years later in ’77 with the punks. It’s a feeling I knew as a teen in the 80s, a uni student in the 90s and sometimes a cynical old man in the Two-Tens! 

Musically, there is a lovely bit of cow bell in there to go with a few killer guitar licks and a whole lot of noise. Alex Chilton sings in a whine like a brat and it all makes sense. I think it was gold that the used it for That 70s Show, but I noticed they changed the line about the joint to “We’re All Alright!” Much like the show tiptoes around its drug use. 

I chose the documentary mix just so you’d get a different version of it. The difference seems to just be in the polish. I can imagine this mix would sound better in a theatre than the original because the original is a bit more abrasive in the high end. 

Goodnight

It's time for me to watch the latest Futurama and then go to bed with Brett Easton Ellis. Fun times planned tomorrow. A fuse blew in our FM transmitter though, so I may be forced to make a mix CD for the car tomorrow. It's like living in a developing nation in a way. 

Hasala malakim.