Category: Entertainment

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Flashback Friday

My Winter 2009 Playlist

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A Musical Escape

To those of us of a certain age and musical taste, this is manna from Heaven. I received this compilation from a friend (a collection of 12 albums—156 songs—for a total of 13 hours) several years ago when we were living in Denver but for some reason it’s been languishing in iTunes all these years with me scarcely paying it a second glance.

A few weeks ago I was looking for something I could just put on in the background while working from home as I’d grown weary of the offerings of our FM jazz station. Sleaze is a collection of disco and dance tunes from the late 70s to the early 90s that encompasses all the various sub-genres. While a few of the transitions are absolute train wrecks, it’s a stellar collection of the music I used to dance my ass off to. It’s become my go-to commute and working-from-home background soundtrack because I can just put it on and it will run all day without repeating.

I mean, look at this playlist!


(Click to embiggen)

Highly recommended if you can find it. A cursory internet search returned squat.

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Released 27 Years Ago Today

Madonna: Bedtime Stories (1994)

Probably my favorite music video of all time.

The album itself is also available in a very limited edition 2-LP gatefold edition on pink vinyl. It is, of course, priced in the stratosphere and a completely unrealistic purchase on my salary. (And frankly, I’m not as hot to get it as I once was, learning that it’s on hot pink vinyl, not the powder-pink I feel it should’ve been.)

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The Hollywood Amoeba Haul

I didn’t need any of this, but I couldn’t go to Amoeba and not buy something.

I can’t tell you how many times these bags just casually got tossed out when I lived in San Francisco.
Madonna: Bedtime Stories (1994)

Bedtime Stories is a German pressing, and is rapidly becoming my favorite purchase of the bunch. Like all the records I’ve purchased that were manufactured in the Germany, this one is outstanding. There is something about quality control that the factories in the rest of the world should take note of, because I’d be willing to pay a premium to buy all my vinyl from German plants if it were possible.  The record is 180g vinyl with a completely silent background.

Madonna: Super Club Mix (1986)
Sade: The Best of Sade (1994)
Ella Fitzgerald: The Hits (2017)
Jeff Russo/Noah Hawley: Legion It’s Always Blue (Songs from Legion) (2018)

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More From ’79

The fact that disco was the cover story on goddamned fucking Newsweek should’ve been the first clue that its death (or at least transformation) was imminent. When you have pictures of pensioners shuffling along to the beat, you know it’s a goner—at least where the gay nightlife was concerned.  After the mainstream killed it, it went back underground and was reborn under a dozen monikers. Thankfully the beat still lives on today, but you won’t find anyone calling it disco.

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Gawd, I Needed This

ABBA: I Still Have Faith in You (2021)

Abba: Don’t Shut Me Down (2021)

Hearing these new tracks, I’m 25 again. I know that doesn’t make sense, but damn if they didn’t have me grinning ear to ear. The new album is due out November 5th.

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Open Tab

Regular readers know that the 70s Pop Culture fascinates me, from Andy Warhol to the weird clothes to, well, Studio 54. I remember it as a strange and happy time before Saint Ronnie and the Republicans came along and crashed everyone’s party…and we’ve been on a downward spiral ever since.

I just finished reading Vanity Fair’s archive Boogie Nights: An Oral History of Disco. It’s not an article, per se, but a series of one-paragraph remembrances from some of the key players who cumulatively give us the definitive story as they lived it.

Check it out. Those of us of a certain age—who lived through this time period—will certainly enjoy it.

(Stolen and paraphrased from Mock Paper Scissors)

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