Pop music is not a crime

Another song about dancing/
I know you’ve heard it all before/
If i wrote a song about more serious things/
Would you want to hear some more?/
It’s just that i really like to dance/
I guess that sounds pretty trite/
Would you dance to a song about dancing?/
Guilty pleasures feel so right

Freezepop, "Pop Music Is Not a Crime"

* * *

I like to think that my musical tastes would make your mental mixtape exhausted and confused, or, worst case, give you a tension headache and causing you to lie down in a dark room for a few hours. That tape might include a tracklist like so:

• Something from an avant-garde composer such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Arvo Pärt
• A little modern and classic jazz from the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Cinematic Orchestra, and Eric Truffax
• Worldbeat sounds like North African rai, Bollywood, Arabic-language pop, and Brazilian samba and jazz
• Contemporary guitar-based Britpop by the likes of Keane, the Kaiser Chiefs, and Peter, Bjorn, & John (even though the latter are actually Swedish, but who's counting?)
• '70s soul and disco, including Barry White (and lots of him), Cerrone, Silver Convention, and both Thelma Houston's and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' versions of "Don't Leave Me This Way"
• '60s Merseybeat and "girl" singers like Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, and Sandie Shaw
• Anything French, particularly Etienne Daho, Air, Mylène Farmer, and especially Serge Gainsbourg
• All those trip-hop groups from the '90s like Portishead, Olive (the first album only), Mono, and "Six Underground" by the Sneaker Pimps
• Guilty, dance-around-your-bedroom-in-your-underwear-singing-into-a-bottle-of-Brut-aftershave (not that I've ever done this . . .) pleasures like the Spice Girls, ABBA, and Kylie Minogue
• Maybe some Joni Mitchell to mellow you out a bit while simultaneously making you moody, or some Carly Simon so you can see how angst-ridden and long-suffering the upper classes in our fair nation truly are
• And, lately, even a little bluegrass and classic, pre-1975 country; consider it an homage to my Dad

I will listen to the occasional opera and have even found myself liking a little hip-hop--most definitely Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot, as well as Common, Talib Kweli, and Kurtis Mantronik. I draw the line, though, at almost all contemporary Top 40 country and pretty much every last bit of gangsta rap. In both cases, I just don't think I'm either suburban enough or white enough for it to speak to my tortured soul. In the latter case, too, I just can't relate to the street-hardened billionaires who make it. You earn all those Benjamins (as one says . . .) and you blow it on an Escalade? We are *definitely* worlds apart. What about a nice Mini Cooper? You can still trick it out, though admittedly it's a bit of a challenge to fit all your entourage in the backseat.

I sometimes/often sound defensive whenever I talk about music--for example, in my previous post on the Spice Girls. Ah, paranoia, man's best friend, at least this one's. It's just that I think I'm always ready to be blasted for my curious and sometimes downright dodgy musical preferences. Consider it coming from a family of four kids who were always very passionate about their tunes and who staked their claim early to some of the best popular music on offer at the time--my sister, Beatles (enough said); my brother, the Honorary Curator of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Memorial Museum, the one-man champion of Southern rock; and my other brother, the Romeo of Duchess Lane, who first brought Bruce Springsteen home (in album form, that is), as well as a slew of '70s senstive singer-songwriters like Emitt Rhodes, all the better (I suspect) to appeal to the feather-haired, blue-eyeshadowed girls that lived in our subdivision.

School for a gay kid, at least in the '70s, was pretty much a never-ending turmoil of hiding all too poorly one's differences, and one great source of tension between the Third Sex and the Rest of Teenage Humanity were lunchroom discussions of our record collections. There were three listening choices for any "normal" American boy in the '70s--Kiss, Aerosmith, and Led Zeppelin, with maybe a pass for Deep Purple or Yes, and, seriously, maybe even for Queen, who could be forgiven all manner of eccentricities because they were British. Interesting that these bands almost always featured long-haired, flamboyant singers, some with make-up and some singing in falsetto and at least one of whom was gay. Nonetheless, they sang about chicks, cars, and partying, so they had to be straight, right? Don't confuse the issue, boy, with your homoerotic subtexts!

Meanwhile, the Lone Homosexual at the table tried to stuff his mouth full of tater tots and whole milk before anyone could ask him about his tunes. They talked about Kiss; I thought about the weekend's shortwave radio listening--namely, the pop music programs from 208 Radio Luxembourg and Radio Nederland, and wondered if Boney M would make it to number 1 on the BBC Top 20. They played air guitar alongside of Led Zep; I dreamed of attending an ABBA concert (who interestingly enough ended up recording "All of My Love"--the only Led Zep song I really like--in ABBA's studios in Stockholm--so, ha, take that pimply bullies of the '70s!) and somehow befriending the band and maybe stealing Benny (the bearded one) away from Frida or at least helping Agnetha pick out her next hairstyle. They rocked out to Aerosmith, and I funked around the living room to Parliament and Bootsy Collins in heavy rotation on my parents' console hi-fi.

To further underline the point, two of my earliest music purchases were 1) a 45 of "Waterloo" by ABBA, fresh from their win at the Eurovision Song Contest, and 2) an 8-track tape of the soundtrack to Shaft by Isaac Hayes. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

Musically and pop culturally, I've just never fit in--I couldn't if I tried, and I recognized that early on and went my own way, but kept it all very sotto voce, at least until adulthood.

And still . . . it's hard to fess up to these squirrelly, non-progressive tastes. The older I get I guess I'm supposed to like more serious stuff, and sometimes I do, but just as often I don't. I mean, ferchrissakes, I am 46 years old and went to a Spice Girls concert. WTF? Just call me Old Spice. I will also accept Mid-Life Crisis Spice as an alternate designation.

I'd like to think absolutely nothing is weird about that, but you try convincing a potential boyfriend otherwise. I speak from experience: I spent three years with a guy who regularly raided my Björk and ABBA collections but just as regularly ridiculed my then-fascination with Kylie Minogue and '70s soul. It was tough going, and in the end, when the going gets tough, the boyfriend is just so much extra baggage to be tossed over the side.

However, I am thinking of making the Spice Girls the Love Barometer for all future relationships. If he doesn't wrinkle his nose when I sing along to "Wannabe" on the car radio, maybe he'll get to second base on the first date (even though I'm not really sure what second base is and for gay men, most likely it's the sharing of a post-coital cigarette). If he can appreciate the '60s pop stylings of Emma Bunton's Free Me album, then there will be a few more dates. And if he toe-taps along with Mel B's hit, "Feels So Good," my favorite Solo Spice effort, then it's you + me = love, I believe.

Sounds fair, doesn't it? And most logical.

* * *

Cod Reggae: The Playlist

There really is no accounting for taste, mine or anyone else's. I get tired of defending mine, mind you, but then I haven't always been generous in my appraisal of other's tastes either. Those screaming divas from the '90s make my ears bleed; the Carpenters, especially during the holidays, make me want to set snowmen on fire and kick elves in the nuts, bless their hearts; and I've never forgiven Shakira for recording all those Latin pastiches for the English-language market, when she did perfectly good rock en español for the rest of the Western Hemisphere. But, hey, that's me.

It should be noted, though, that I am a frustrated DJ at heart. I've always forced . . . uh . . . shared my music with others through homemade mixtapes. Recently through Facebook, I've played with the Mixaloo and Finetune applications as a way, in theory, to create online mixtapes to share with friends, but which, in reality, come up far shorter than my aspirations.
Mixaloo lets you put together a compilation of up to 15 songs. You choose tunes from their library, and you can choose as many from a particular artist as you like--as long as you don't go beyond 15 songs. The choices can be limiting, though. Recently, I tried to make a compilation entitled A Gainsbourg Family Album, which featured tunes by Serge, his former squeeze Jane Birkin, their daughter Charlotte, and others who have recorded or worked with them or have been inspired by them in some way.

But I ended up frustrated--there was very little Jane Birkin to select from in the library, including practically nothing from her excellent Rendez-vous album of duets; there was no Etienne Daho, including the duet of "If" he did with Charlotte Gainsbourg a couple of years ago; there was no Mylène Farmer; and there were only a few remixes of Serge Gainsbourg tunes, although they did include an exceptional Vibrators adaptation of "Je t'aime . . . moi non plus." So at least there was that to appreciate.

Finetune was even more frustrating to play with--you could select up to a very generous 45 tunes for your mix, but only *3* of them could be by the same artist. Three Serge Gainsbourg tunes out of a body of work that spanned at least three-and-a-half decades. Sacre bleu! And there was also the issue, as with Mixaloo, of not a lot of availabilty of non-English-language music, which kind of runs contrary to the point of A Gainsbourg Family Album mix.

So I'm back to basics with my mixtapes, making them at home on a computer, the old school way.

I have started, though, to move beyond the standard one-song-after-the-next mixtape. Last year, I invested in some music software, MixMeister Express, that lets me actually make the mixtape a mixtape, that is to say, let's me mix the tunes together, match beats per minute, and add sound effects if so desired.

The first mix I did was entitled Cod Reggae. I'm not a huge reggae fan, but with what the British call "cod reggae," that's OK, I don't have to be. "Cod" in this case is short for "codswallop" or, in other words, rubbish, junk reggae. Reggae for the non-purist. In short, pop reggae. Just my size.

So, below, I present you with Baby's First and Second Remix Albums, Cod Reggae 1 and 2. In MixMeister you're limited in your mix only if you plan to burn it to a CD; then you have to limit the number of tunes to fit on a standard-sized CD-R. No surprise here, I had more tunes than I had space for (and still could have included several more--what? No Elvis Costello and "Watching the Detectives"? No UB40?). So I broke Cod Reggae into two mixes, and I was fairly pleased with both of them, if I do say so. Let's see what you think:

Cod Reggae 1

Jimmy Sommerville—“To Love Somebody”
Agnetha Fältskog—“The Heat Is On”
Althia and Donna—“Up Town Top Ranking”
Dawn Penn—“You Don’t Love Me”
Third World—“Reggae Ambassador”
Boney M—“Brown Girl in the Ring”
The Brothers—“Sing Me”
Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley—“If I Had Words”
Steely Dan—“Haitian Divorce”
Culture Club—“Everything I Own”
Dollar—“Who Were You with in the Moonlight”
Timmy Thomas—“Why Can’t We Live Together”
Tom Browne—“Funkin’ for Jamaica”
Kongas—“Jungle”
Midi, Maxi, and Efti—“Masenko”
Marta Sánchez—“Desesperada” (extended version)
10cc—“Dreadlock Holiday”
Aswad—“Shine”
Bob Marley and the Wailers—“Could You Be Loved”
Serge Gainsbourg—“Aux armes et caetera”
C. J. Lewis—“Sweets for My Sweet”
Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto—“The Robots”

Cod Reggae Mix 2

ABBA—“One of Us”
Gorillaz—“Clint Eastwood”
Marta Sánchez—“Arena y sol”
Allen Toussaint—“Yes We Can Can”
Maryam Mursal—“Lei Lei”
Blondie—“Die Young, Stay Pretty”
Lily Allen—“Smile”
Ace of Base—“Don’t Turn Around”
The Police—“The Bed’s Too Big without You”
Apache Indian—“Lovin’ (Let Me In) (Bhangra Flava)”
Kirsty MacColl—“Mambo de la luna”
Bob Marley and the Wailers—“Jamming”
Manu Dibango—“Soul Makossa”
Boney M—“Hooray! Hooray! It’s a Holi-Holiday”
Bananarama with Fun Boy Three—“It Ain’t What You Do”
The Specials—“Ghost Town”
Scritti Politti—“The Word Girl”
M.I.A.—“Bucky Done Gone”
Roxy Music—“Love Is the Drug”
War featuring Eric Burdon—“Spill the Wine”
The Chakachas—“Jungle Fever”
Grace Jones—“My Jamaican Guy”
The Clash—“Guns of Brixton”

See what I mean about my pop diet? My cheesiness is showing ("If I Had Words" by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley, "Who Were You with in the Moonlight" by Dollar), as well as my eclecticism (ABBA mixed into Gorillaz! A cha-cha-chá version of Kraftwerk's "The Robots"! Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa," which isn't reggae in the least!).

I wish I could legally put these online so you could hear these, but, alas, I can't interpret international copyright agreements in any way imaginable so that I can do so, and I'm all about being a law-abiding citizen of our fair-to-middlin' republic, as I'm sure we all well know.

But, friends, you never know what might end up included in a future birthday box, stuffed into a Christmas stocking, hidden in your yard by the Easter bunny, or baked into a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

Mmmmm, and what could be more appetizing for the holidays than a little cod mixed with pumpkin . . . .