Category: Music

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.

Donna Summer: Once Upon a Time… (1977)

Her masterpiece, and as I have written of many times before, an album that holds a very special place in my heart.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Welcome to the Pleasuredome (1984)

Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm (1985)

Culture Club: Waking Up With The House On Fire (1984)

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.)

Quarterflash: Quarterflash (1981)

Madonna: Erotica (1992)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEypHhB0Rc&list=PLrpyDacBCh7Cqp1fPAfIMDfiEaZfirE13

Donna Summer: The Wanderer (1980)

Or as I like to call it, "The beginning of the end of her career."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGuYD-Q__I0

Donna Summer: Four Seasons of Love (1976)

ABBA: Arrival (1976)

This was the first ABBA album I ever bought. It went off to college with me.

Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

I still need to buy a replacement for this one.

Pet Shop Boys: Actually (1987)

Grace Jones: Portfolio (1977)

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.

Donna Summer: MacArthur Park Suite from  Live & More (1978)

I won't tell you about the rabbit hole I went down that brought me to this destination, other than to say it started out with Patti LuPone and Bernadette Peters.

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)

…and it's brought me almost to tears more than once. It's all well-known stuff of course but they're pieces I haven't heard in years. Right now Smetana's The Moldau is playing, and I can't help but envision the translucent yellow vinyl copy that I buried in my collection somewhere. So-called classical is the music that got me into music in High School. (The first rock album I bought was Elton John's Caribou and when my mom heard it playing in my room I thought she was going to have a stroke.)

My folks were big into music. Neither played an instrument, but I remember the house always being filled with music. Classical was their first choice, but this being the 60s and 70s, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Barbra Streisand and even Ferrante & Teicher (?  ) would often make an appearance as well.

I'd really like to know what's happened to that vinyl, however. It hasn't been that long since I last hauled this out (maybe four years tops), and at the time there was no black in that disc whatsoever. It was all translucent yellow, one of the mesmerizing things I remember about this from childhood is how the grooves appeared to swim back and forth while the disk was playing. Except for a few errant pops and clicks, it still sounds good, but this is sad.

Is it a glitch in the matrix?

About a year and a half ago, Ben and I had the pleasure of seeing the Fathom Events screening of Philip Glass' Akhnaten by the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Since that time we've been following Zachary James, one of the performers in the production on Instagram, and he posted that the Met was going to rebroadcast the 2019 performance last night.

I didn't get a chance to watch "live," but it's still available online today, and I've been enjoying it this evening.

After the last eight months, this was exactly what the doctor ordered. From the opening notes of the Prelude, I was immediately grounded and all the accumulated angst I've been carrying around melted away. This is one of those  pieces of music for which I know every note and intonation backward and forward, and hearing it again just resonated..

I don't know how long it will remain up, so if you're even the least bit curious about Glass or this monumental opera, check it out.