The 2015/1967 Countdown - 08/10/2016 Update

Today, we turn to hip-hop and two tracks included on our Black Music, Circa 2015 mix -  Holy Ghost and L$D, both of which come to us courtesy of young New York rapper and key A$AP mob member A$AP Rocky, from his critically well-received, chart-topping sophomore studio release At.Long.Last.A$AP.

Album opener Holy Ghost isn't one of the mega-selling album's biggest hits, but it's definitely one of its best tracks, an urgent, gospel-stoked condemnation of profiteering preachers that can also be interpreted as a nod to the premature passing of Rocky's close friend and one of the album's primary producers, A$AP mob founder Steven Rodriguez (aka A$AP Yams), who died before the album's completion of an accidental drug overdose.



And as awesome and impactful as that song is, L$D from the album might be even better.

A trippy, low-key, melodic number that seems stylistically in tune with much of rapper Future's 2015 work (though coming from a much more positive place), it suggests that of all the hallucinogenics out there, nothing delivers a better mind-altering high than sex.

Take a listen.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 08/09/2015 Update

Today, as we continue to work through the singles celebrated in the 1967/2015 mix collections but that will just miss out on making our best of the year countdowns, we turn to early efforts from a couple of monster acts from San Francisco's 1967 Haight-Ashbury scene featured on our 1967's Super "Sensational" Summer Of Love mix, Big Brother & The Holding Company and The Grateful Dead.

But as forever linked to San Francisco and the Summer of Love as these two bands are, or however huge they already were in the region's live scene (answer: very huge), both acts (and really every San Fransisco act other than Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe McDonald & The Fish) were still a year or two away from reaching their full potential as recording acts.

Both acts released their eponymous debuts in 1967. Both releases were highly flawed works.

Big Brother & The Holding Company, even for the era, was a shoddily recorded work, and provides clear evidence that the band hadn't yet fully accepted or figured out how to integrate Janis Joplin into the band (she had been brought to them by San Francisco promoter Chet Helms less than a year earlier). Worse, similar to British practices at the time, their label left the band's two biggest early 45s, Coo Coo and Down On Me, off the record (a flaw corrected years later when Columbia bought the rights to and reissued the album).

The Grateful Dead was a better-recorded effort - and a better listen - but includes just two originals in its entire track listing.

Still, as unremarkable as these early releases were, it just felt wrong not to include either band in our Summer of Love mix, so for Big Brother, we went with one of those two original 45s, Coo Coo (which also highlights the band's initial reluctance to put Joplin front and center, as she's pretty much kept in the background until a latter verse), and for the Dead, we selected the album's opening track, my favorite of the two originals, The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion).

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 08/07/2016 Update

Today, we look to our 2015 singer-songwriter compilation Laurel Canyon Revelry and focus on South Dakota, my favorite track from James McMurtry's fine 2015 album Complicated Game.

The son of famed Lonesome Dove novelist Larry McMurtry, the now Austin-based James shares his famous father's gift for plain-spoken but poetic prose, and throughout his career has proven quite skilled at crafting sharply detailed portrait miniatures that nonetheless illuminate much larger cultural themes.

South Dakota, the quietly devastating, country-tinged tale of an honorably discharged enlisted man's inability to start a new life for himself on his family's ranch, all due to circumstances beyond his control, is one of his all-time best songs, painting a sad portrait of our nation at this time in our history, a nation where for many young men and women born into less fortunate circumstances, there's more opportunity to be found throwing their lives into harms way overseas than through honest hard work applied back here in the states.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 08/06/2016 Update

Today we return to 1967, and take a look at star-crossed, potent garage act The Chocolate Watchband's biggest hit, Let's Talk About Girls.

Few acts from the 60s had as turbulent and mishandled a career as the Watchband, and this song, their biggest hit, illuminates the craziness perfectly.

Though the lead single on the act's debut album No Way Out, their label or management or who knows who somehow thought that the best way to introduce the act to the broader record buying public was to replace their fantastic, Mick Jaggeresque lead singer David Aguilar with session man Don Bennett on this track.  Not that Bennett does a bad job here, but still...the mind boggles.

And just to show what a questionable choice it was to replace Aguilar on Let's Talk About Girls, here's another kick ass number from the band's debut, the free love mocking Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In). Take a listen.  I think we can all agree Aguilar would have done just fine.

For a bit more on these songs and The Chocolate Watchband - check out the updated comments for McQ's Best Of 1967 Volume 4 - 1967's Super Spectacular Singles Superstars.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 08/05/16 Update

Today the Best Of 2015 Volume 2 - Women Who Rock mix page has been update with a few brief thoughts on Chelsea Wolfe's Carrion Flowers from her potent 2015 full-length release The Abyss.

Setting her dark, gothic vocal stylings against the hardest hitting music of her career, a sometimes intoxicating, sometimes horrifying swirl of industrial and black metal influences, Wolfe really  captured some essence of the contemporary horror zeitgeist with the album, and Carrion Flowers itself ended up being one of the most licensed tracks by any musical artist in 2015 - landing in a number of commercials, movie/television trailers (including an add for the Walking Dead spin-off Fear The Walking Dead), and video games.

Here's the official video for the track that caught so many gloom masters fantasy.

The 2015/1967 Countdown Continues - 08/04/2016 Update

Without question, one of the greatest pleasures in putting together the 1967 mix collection was going back and rediscovering (or in several cases discovering for the first time), the endless trove of soul classic that year produced.

So today, the write-up page for our 1967's Super Soulster's Deep Cuts Review mix has been updated with a brief discussion of 60s Southern soulman and bitter James Brown archrival Joe Tex and his two '67 hits - Show Me and Skinny Legs And All.

Both these tracks are a lot of fun...check out these archival videos - one live, the other one of those unbelievabley bad corporate-sponsered lip syncs typical of the era.

Let The 2015/1967 Countdowns Begin

Okay, let's get these promised countdowns started.

Over the next several months we'll be taking a look back at the music years 2015 and 1967, re-ranking many of the best albums and songs from those two years as they sound to Nancy and me today.

In addition, we'll try to comment on all the other 2015 and 1967 songs that will not be included on those lists, but that did make the 2015 and 1967 mix collections.

And that's where we start today, with Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke's Indian Steps, a poignant collaboration with Antony Hegarty from Mohawke's 2015 release Lantern, which we featured on our Best of 2015 Volume 9 - Circuit Teasers mix, profiling the our favorite electro-pop tracks of the year.

In truth, Indian Steps was quite literally the last song I choose to include in the entire 2015 collection,
and there's a good reason for that. It's not a track I'm in love with instrumentally (though I do think Mohawke does a beautiful job layering Antony's swirling overdubs), but lyrically, whoa...this song packs a world of meaning and a hell of an emotional wallop into just a few brief verses.

A look back at a lifelong, committed love from the perspective of the surviving partner just after the other partner has passed, it poetically hits upon the primal desire in all of us to protect those we love most, and also, devastatingly, the ultimate futility of such desires - something the official video for the song also makes clear.