Tuesday, February 13, 2007

SHUFFLING THROUGH THE TUNES

Burning discs for the wife and downloading the Indiana/Syracuse national championship game from 1987 off iTunes...thought I'd use the free time to randomly shuffle through the iPod and see what pops up (idea, as always, shamelessly ripped off from my best man).

Do You Love Me Now? (The Breeders) - haven't the faintest idea, I copied one of Meg's CDs for her and I've got my iPod set to default and it uploads everything...it will be deleted soon.

Heart of Glass (Blondie) - In the late 70's, a couple of years before they broke into the big time with this song, Debbie Harry was without question one of the all-time hottest singers ever. Wow. Maybe Stevie Nicks pre-Fleetwood Mac tops her, maybe not. This song was a huge hit, not quite disco, not quite techno, just catchy. Took years before I heard the non-radio edit and hurt that sweet voice utter curse words.

The Bomber (James Gang) - Sounds like a bad early-70's Zeppelin ripoff.

Love Is A Wonderful Thing (Michael Bolton) - Seriously, search the web for a video clip for the brief earlier incarnation of Bolton, with his very minor hit "Fools Game." Good stuff. But not successful enough to keep him from doing cotton candy fluff like this one.

Road Runner (The Gants) - This came from an album with the word "Bubblegum" in the title, and is based entirely on the cartoon character...up to and including his signature "beep beep" sound. It's shocking The Gants didn't establish themselves as bigger stars.

Could You Dig It (Brian Hyland) - My dad was talking to me a few weeks back about Brian Hyland having some success with songs done by Jay & The Americans, or maybe it was vice versa. Either way, I went out and picked up the greatest hits for both acts. Can't say that I recognize this at all.

Just Like Jesse James (Cher) - I mean, seriously, I have so much stuff in my collection that 30% of the time I've never heard the songs. Not a huge Cher fan as it is, and certainly not of anything she's put out the last fifteen years. This isn't particularly noteworthy stuff.

Hungry Like The Wolf (Duran Duran) - It's easy to dismiss them as fluff and all image because they were probably right there with Michael Jackson in the early 80's as exploiting the new medium of music video. But I think music history will give these guys a little more credit than they get. Very catchy stuff, a great drive to most of their music...they're no U2 or even INXS, but this is one of the great bands of the decade, and this is probably their signature song.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind (The Five Keys) - It was only 1956, less than a year into the rock and roll era, and a lot of the music still carried elements of the big band feel. This is one of them.

For Love's Sake (Jody Watley) - Too lazy to check off the stuff I didn't want added, so I downloaded the entire album. At some point I'll delete the nine songs that weren't hits--including this one--and it will never appear in my shuffle again. This is truly bland.

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5 Comments:

Blogger PHSChemGuy said...

Your know, you can delete songs you don't like.

I think at this point I don't have any songs on my computer that earn less that three of five stars, and I think I've got every song rated.

It's an illness...

2:08 PM  
Blogger coachsullivan said...

No, no...the obsession is this: I found a book that lists every song that charted in Billboard's top 100 from 1955 through 1999. I'm collecting every one. I've always worked on that music collection since sophomore year in high school and now I've taken it to one more (final, hopefully) extreme. The New Albany library has been most helpful, but even with 7800+ songs, I'm still probably only at a shade under 30% of all songs. I would suspect the % of songs that cracked the Top 40 is significantly higher...it's finding those things that charted for just a week or two that is going to be the fun part. I'm slowly working backwards and deleting out extraneous downloads.

9:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You are sick, just sick...

It had never crossed my mind to even delete any of the crappy music on my hard drive. I'm sick, too.

Do you think there was something in the water or the sound-proofing of the WNAS studio?

9:56 PM  
Blogger PHSChemGuy said...

So, the goal now is to have only songs that charted between '55 and '99? Not necessarily songs that you like, right, but songs that charted?

That's a great use of harddrive space, and something that I would happily contribute to. Make up a spreadsheet and post it, I'll see what I can do to help clear some of the gaps. I'm thinking that among the various online friends, we should be able to knock this down fairly quickly...

5:30 PM  
Blogger coachsullivan said...

Any song that charted in Billboard's top 100 singles list from 1955 to 1999. If they'd update the book and get a new issue out, I'll add to it. Yeah, not just the stuff I like.

12:01 AM  

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