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  • Friday Throwback: All in Love is Fair

    I had no clue what I was going to use when I told GG I would take care of the Friday throwback in his absence. Hell, I was absolutely stunned to actually see this You Tube performance footage.

    I go back and forth between Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Prince’s Sign O’ the Times as my favorite album of all time.

    Innervisions was one of the first albums-maybe even THE first-that I ever owned. I played the grooves off of that record, even though I wasn’t able to appreciate the poetry of the songs-everything from Higher Ground to Golden Lady -until I was much older.

    All in Love is Fair is by far my favorite song on Innervisions, and is one of the best written love songs in history.   I was stunned to see video footage of Stevie singing this that wasn’t taken from a recent concert or television performance. In the thirty-five years since Innervisions’ release, the song has become a standard, rerecorded by everyone from Cher to Streisand. I believe Sinatra may have taken a crack at it too. Still, no one tops the original.

  • Bluegrass Legend: “Vote Obama… What’s an iPod?”

    I admit, it’s been hard for me to write about music the last few weeks because I’ve turned into a total campaign coverage zombie. So my apologies for dipping into the political on a music blog, but I feel compelled to share a moment from an article by Matt Bai from the forthcoming issue of the New York Times Magazine, in which he describes a rally in rural southwestern Virginia in which bluegrass great Ralph Stanley endorses Barack Obama for President. This is sort of surprising in itself. Stanley has always struck me as a sort of populist folk-hero whose music, while certainly having a social and cultural point of view, seemed to exist outside of vulgar politics. (Springsteen modeled himself this way for most of his career – never publicly supporting a presidential candidate until Kerry’s run in 2004. He also publicly supports Obama this year.) But endorsement aside, the best line of the article came after Obama thanked Stanley for his support:

    “When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley’s banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, ‘What’s an iPod?’”

  • Everything is Borrowed: Mike Skinner Gets Zen On Your Ass

    There’s been a huge wave of UK artists crossing over to American success lately. Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Estelle and Adele have all had a degree of success on these shores, although not commensurate with their overwhelming success in their homeland. A British artist that I’ve been enamored with for quite some time is Mike Skinner AKA The Streets. For lack of a better description, Skinner’s a rap artist. However, unlike most British emcees, who seem to be trying their best to sound American, Skinner’s music is decidedly British…and even if he were to try to Americanize his sound, there’s no way in hell he’d be able to cross over with that impenetrable accent. Nevertheless, Skinner’s built up a cult following over the course of four albums-each of which has something worth recommending on it.

    Over time, Skinner has also adjusted his world view. While his first album, Original Pirate Material,was the story of an everyday guy going through everyday paces, his second album, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, was the story of a kid who suddenly made something of himself and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. Third album The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living pointed out some of the vapidity of celebrity (while simultaneously revelling in it), while Skinner’s fourth effort, Everything is Borrowed, presents a mature man, looking at the world in front of him and trying to make sense of it. This maturation from album to album has been extremely rewarding, and Borrowed turns out to be yet another fine effort from Skinner.

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