Archive for October, 2007

I don’t know about other people, but I sometimes take things for granted. In the case of music, I think I’ve taken Aretha’s singing for granted. I mean, I always knew she was the Queen of Soul and all that, but knowing that doesn’t really speak to the pure quality of her singing. I mean, she’s got hits, which is how most people regard quality, I guess, but for me, the not-as-popular songs are the ones that tell the whole story. Bearing that in mind, let’s check out Good To Me As I Am To You. Natural Woman, Respect, Chain of Fools, et al are wonderful songs, and I’m not frontin on them at all, but Good To Me…she should be famous for this song. Seriously.

With October 31st coming up, I think I should warn people: don’t go around randomly tryin’a scare brothers on the humbug. It can go WAY wrong.

Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 2

A rake???

From Science Daily

February 1, 2006 — Teenagers’ morning drowsiness is often caused by out-of-tune body clocks, in a condition known as “delayed sleep phase syndrome.” Scientists now say that timing exposure to blue light — avoiding it during the first two hours of being wake, then getting a good dose of it — can help restore the sleep cycle, so teens feel sleepy earlier at night and are more awake in the morning.

I’d actually like to try getting some blue LEDs as the article later recommends. Might be a fairly simple solution to the problem of tired teens in the classroom. Of course, that assumes that they’ll actually go to bed on time.

Oh Calcutta – The Meters
One Thing – Amerie
Somebody’s On Your Case – Anne Peebles
Evidence – Candi Stanton
Singing A Song For My Mother – Hamilton Bohannon
Wild Onions – The Beatles
More Than A Woman – Aaliyah
Think Twice – Donald Byrd
Human – David Porter
Stop, Look, Listen – MC Lyte
It’s Probably Me – Sting
Cut The Cake – Average White Band
The Love you Left Behind – Syl Johnson
The Band Gets Swivy On Wheels – Son of Bazerk
Verbal Murder – Pete Rock, f. Big Pun, Noreaga, Common
Where Was You At – War

Fight FIght FIGHT For the cherry and the white!

Temple has won 3 football games in a row. They’re actually mathematically in competition for the lead in their conference. What school is this?

Fly on, baby. Fly on.

As the saying goes, pimpin’ ain’t easy, but how hard is hoein’? Apparently it’s harder than it should be.

A DEFENDANT accused of forcing a prostitute at gunpoint to have sex with him and three other men got lucky, so to speak, last week.

A Philadelphia judge dropped all sex and assault charges at his preliminary hearing.

Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni instead held the defendant on the bizarre charge of armed robbery for – get this – “theft of services.”

Unbelievable.

Deni told me she based her decision on the fact that the prostitute consented to have sex with the defendant.

“She consented and she didn’t get paid . . . I thought it was a robbery.”

Are you serious? It’s one thing for people to use the word ‘ho’ in conversation. It’s something altogether different for the justice system to fail to protect women just because they sell sexual services. Theft of services? That warrants some type of reprimand.

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post is making entirely too much sense on this whole controversy over “performance enhancers.”

All sport is an effort to alter the body and change its chemistry. Nice as it is to believe that it should be a matter of pure hard work, just look at how athletes starve themselves on extreme diets or swallow insane dosages and mixtures of vitamins, manipulating their intake and fuels in “legal” but hardly natural ways. You can’t take a diuretic without getting a ban, but you can be anorexic. What sense does that make? You get a sanction for using EPO, but you can artificially — and legally — raise your red blood cells by 2 or 3 percentage points by sleeping in a $20,000 altitude tent, which is not especially good for you, and that’s if you can afford and find one, which a lot of athletes in Africa or Central America can’t.

Speaking of sports, I love coaching, but I’m not exactly waxing teary-eyed over the upcoming end of the JV football season. Before, I wondered how coaches could spend all day and all night at the gig. Now I know.

Ambivalent is one of my kids’ vocabulary words this week. It’s apropos to my feelings on some of what I’ve been reading.

The item in question: via both The War On Folly and Dr. Spence, I’ve seen this website, Racism Review. Now on the one hand, I generally take a fairly dim view of itemizing instances of racism, because I’m not sure what the point is, except to remind us that racism isn’t dead. But we know that. We been knew that. The occurrence of individual acts of racism doesn’t necessarily signify anything greater than the fact that there are individual racists out there. I certainly don’t think that the fact that there’s a Klan rally somewhere, for instance, signifies that The Master Plan ™ is working. Moreover, I don’t know that it’s productive to focus on something that has real, but limited effects on our progress – or maybe I should say limited effects, relative to the things over which we have complete control. Yeah, racism is real, and it’s really out there, but if we need there to be no racism for us to make progress, we in bad shape.

At the same time, because my general assumption is that people know and acknowledge the reality of racism, I’m always surprised when I see the reaction to racist actions. Take, for instance, this incident in Lancaster County, PA. What’s surprising to me is not what happened, it’s the reaction of the townspeople. They acted like nothing had happened. Even as I recognize that individual racism is not necessarily indicative of a conspiracy, I also know that racism is malicious, and when people who are not racist refuse to acknowledge its existence, racism has found the perfect environment in which to thrive. As it was once said, “The Devil’s best trick is to make people believe he doesn’t exist.” As long as people can sit idly by and chalk up cases of obvious, virulent racism to some type of ‘boys-will-be-boys,’ societal change is impossible.

So then, I have some type of reconciliation, right? It’s important to highlight instances of racism because it draws attention to it and makes people who would otherwise be unaware that it really does exist, right? Well, no. The people who believe racism exists don’t really need more evidence, and the people who need proof tend to not believe it even when they see it — unless it happens somewhere else.

Ummm….with their perpetually weak wide receiver corps, why didn’t the Eagles go after Chris Chambers?

Thanks to the magic of the internet, we’re really able to see things in sharp relief. We know that fashion is cyclical. so what’s cool (or hot) at one time, is corny a few years later, and then back in effect a decade or so after that. Fortunately, some things left and never came back into style. Like…well, Al’s whole outfit right here. Now dig, Al’s my man 50 grand and all, but somebody shoulda told that brother somethin.

If you check my last.fm stats, you can see I’ve been on a big Ohio Players kick lately. Of course I’ve been listening to stuff from the Mercury years, but it’s the Westbound albums that are really gettin it done for me. Pleasure, Pain, and Ecstacy…that’s that sho’ NUFF FONK. Those are the types of albums that I think really get slighted when it comes to those ‘top funky songs’ lists. They got that gooood fonk, but not everybody knows about it.

At any rate, since I have enough to make this list actually somewhat selective, let’s run off my top 20 Ohio Players records.

20. A Thing Called Love – This is that early, early OP’s, before they were what you could really call funky. This makes the cut for the line, “To fire, don’t you know it’s a flame/ to The Flames, don’t you know it’s James”.

19. Black Cat – The Ten Commandments Horns. Period.

18. Sweet Sticky Thing

17. Never Had A Dream – That drum loop. Killin.

16. Cold, Cold World – One of the OP’s straight-up blues joints. Later reworked in an even more vicious version called The Reds.

15. Smoke – the prototypical sound of the Players on Mercury

14. Short Change – The first raw funk instrumental on this list, but neither the best nor the last.

13. I Wanna Hear From You

12. I Want To Be Free

11. Food Stamps Y’all – Raw funk instrumental jam #2.

And now for the money cuts. Starting with…

10. Fopp Yes, the OP’s could put some rock in their funk, and they sho’ did on this jam.

9. Silly Billy This is one of the songs that a lotta people don’t know about, but it’s just about perfect.

8. Good Luck Charm – One of their best ballads. Nice and long, too. Works well on repeat.

7. Climax – Raw funk instrumental. Period. Later reworked into a song a little higher on the list.

6. It’s All Over – The ad-libs at the end. Especially the ‘woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woooouuuu’

5. Pride and Vanity – Seriously.

4. Jive Turkey – Probably one of the more important songs in the development of my idiolect. When I was finally able to pry my eyes away from the album cover long enough to see the track listing, I knew I had to hear whatever was entitled “Jive Turkey.” When I heard it, I was duly impressed. But not as impressed as I was with…

3. Heaven Must Be Like This – This is the song that 97.2% of ballads wish they could be.

2. Skin Tight – The definitive Ohio Players song, and for good reason. There’s just nothing not to like about it, including the fact that they don’t belabor the point with the lyrics. They get the two verses in, then get out of the way and let the instrumentals take over.

Which leaves us to …

1. Funky Worm – I don’t even know where to start with this joint. Is it the sickening horn blast? Is it the guitar? Is it the synth? Is it the Granny character? Is it the rerworking of Climax? (Should Climax actually be tied for #1, as an instrumental?)