Random Shuffle Mania

Inspired by John Salmon over at the Mystic Chords blog, I have decided to offer my version of his iPod shuffle, although in my case it's more like the MP3 shuffle, as my player is an iRiver direct encoding sumbitch, but it's only 1 GB, holding about 310-320 total songs, so space is obviously at a premium and therefore a song has to really deliver to make it and, more importantly, must constantly prove itself to keep its spot in the rotation. For your musical edification, here's the first 10 tunes that pop up randomly, giving you just a taste of the tunes that accompany me on my daily rounds. The Onion also does something similar called Random Rules, whereby they get people even more famous than me to reveal which songs come up on their very own iPods when they hit random. The results are often revealing if not fascinating, but they usually only highlight the first 5-6 songs and then riff a little about them. For instance, who knew that Weird Al Yankovic would have The Beatles, The Rutles, Hole, Nirvana, Alanis Morrissette and Frank Zappa, but then again that sounds about right. In my own case, we're not trying to demonstrate how hip, cool or cutting edge my musical tastes are--that's a given that's already been long established here at WardensWorld (or not)--but merely to give you a rare behind the scenes glimpse into what makes me tick musically. Let's roll...

1 Love Struck Baby - Stevie Ray Vaughan
One of SRV's shorter, more poppy tunes, my second favorite song of his after Pride & Joy. The man died in 1990 at age 35, yet except for Jimi Hendrix, no one has or is likely to surpass his sheer mastery of the electric guitar.

2 Ball & Biscuit - White Stripes
This song contains one of the longer solo breaks from the Jack White ouvre. The guy can play the fuck out of the guitar, and it's not his fault that we find ourselves suddenly inundated by demented blues-drenched imitators like the Von Bondies. Which is not such a bad thing anyway, as any pop music movement that takes attention away from hideous hip-hop horrible-ness is OK in my book. There, I said it.

3 Monkey Man - The Specials
Borrowed the first Specials CD from Johnny Starr and just put the whole masterpiece of an album onto my iRiver. Impossible to overstate how great this record still sounds, so I won't even try, except to say that all this record did was kick off a ska revival that featured incredible bands like the Selecter, Madness, English Beat, Bodysnatchers. Plus the band set an example of black-white harmony (dubbing their record label Two-Tone) at a time of strained race relations in England. That's not a bad little legacy. I never caught the Specials live in their prime, I remember getting turned away from a sold-out show at Hurrah's, but did see a reunited incarnation of the band in '94 at Irving Plaza, and I will tell you that every single person in the audience sang every word to every song, and you could see the pleasantly shocked looks on the band member's faces as the sheer joy of the music was reflected back at them. Unforgettable!

4 Teenage Lobotomy - Ramones
I always felt that teenage lobotomies were among the worst kinds of lobotomies.

5 Nantucket Sleighride - Mountain
Mountain specialized in intricate, melodic heavy metal music, and this song is a good example from the band that's still best known for FM radio staple Mississippi Queen.

6 Buffalo Soldier - Bob Marley
Not one of my absolute Marley favorites, but one of about 20 Marley gems to make the cut. The song, from the album Legend, is about the African-Americans who served in the U.S. Army after the Civil War. Borrowed from (and returned to) Bobby Brain. In fact, all of the music on my MP3 is stuff I borrowed from other people or took out of the library, so as not to play out my own CD collection. Yeah, I got this whole "life" thing down to a science.

7 Darts Of Pleasure - Franz Ferdinand
One of the many "nouveau wave" bands like Arctic Monkeys, the Strokes and Interpol that are busy replicating the twitchy, nervous catchiness of original new wave punk bands from the late 1970s, such as the Feelies, Speedies and Joy Division. This album at first sounds derivative but grows on you steadily, and I always turn up the volume just a little more when a FF song pops up. What greater praise can you give?

8 When You're A Jet - West Side Story
Don't usually do show tunes, but almost every song on this cast album from the Broadway play brings a smile to my face, or at least to the relevant parts of my mouth. The record also includes gems like America, Cool and Gee Officer Krupke, although Jet is the only one still on my player.

9 Sway - Rolling Stones
I didn't plan on putting so many Stones tunes on my MP3 (about 25 total I would guess); it just evolved that way. This song is from 1971's Sticky Fingers, and its opening lines are still killer:
"Did you ever wake up to find
A day that broke up your mind
Destroyed your notion of circular time."


10 I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor - Arctic Monkeys
Found this CD at my local Astoria library. They remind me of a punkier, more uptempo Oasis, and this song would be great to dance to if in fact I still hit the dance floor. I don't see that happening any time soon, so covertly bopping my head to this song's herky-jerky rhythms is probably as close as I'll get to showing off the moves that once made me such a legend at long-gone venues like Heat, Hurrah's and the Peppermint Lounge. And that's a shame on so many levels.

That was fun, man. Feel free to contribute your own random shuffles or just favorite portable music. I'm talkin' to you: Johnny Star, JimiTheGreek, Tony Trent, Urb, Gatt, GonzoVin ... you know who you are. Get involved!

See also:

Indie Vids