3156. V.A.: Kings of Rap
3157. V.A.: Basement Flavor
3158. V.A.: M. Walk Productions Featuring the Union
3159. V.A.: Colors
3160. V.A.: Now Rap's What I Call Music! Volume 2
3161. V.A.: Boston Goes Def!
3162. V.A.: The Harder They Come
3163. V.A.: The "King" Kong Compilation
3164. V.A.: Reggae Greats
3165. V.A.: Ska-Au-Go-Go
3166. V.A.: Rockers All-Star Explosion
3167. V.A.: The Island Story
Mixworthy: "Johnny Too Bad," Slickers, #3162; "Israelites," Desmond Dekker & the
Aces, #3163; "All Right Now," Free, and "My Boy Lollipop," Millie, #3167.
As a prelude to the K-Tel and Ronco albums on deck, Quality's Kings of Rap: "10
Fresh Raps," and, as added incentive, "Yo! Learn to rap -- Instructions & lyrics
inside." My copy was bought used and with the instructional booklet having been re-
moved, leading me to believe it once belonged to either Maestro Fresh Wes or Snow...
No date anywhere on Boston Goes Def!, but I think I got it sometime in the late '80s.
Among the participants: Disco P & the Fresh MC, the Fat Girls of Boston, the Body
Rock Crew, Rusty the Toejammer & Larry D, Professor Rock & RCC Roxbury Crush Crew,
and MC Throwdown & DJ Almighty Antski. Schoolly-D, I'm glad there was you...I've
still never seen The Harder They Come, which I'm sure wouldn't be true if I regard-
ed the album as highly as everyone else does. The Slickers and "Pressure Drop"
(listed previously) are great, the rest never made much of an impression on me...
I'm not sure if Free are more properly classified as hip-hop or reggae, but Amer-
ican Beauty's use of "All Right Now" is one of a few excellent moments in a film
that doesn't get enough (or really any) credit for its pop-music savvy.
________________________________________________________________________________
3168. V.A.: 20 Explosive Hits
3169. V.A.: 20 Solid Hits Volume II
3170. V.A.: Believe in Music
3171. V.A.: Music Power
3172. V.A.: Music Power
3173. V.A.: Music Express
3174. V.A.: Block Buster
3175. V.A.: Canada Gold
3176. V.A.: Disco Explosion Vol. 2
3177. V.A.: 20 Original Hits
3178. V.A.: Don Kirshner Presents Rock Power
3179. V.A.: Good Vibrations
3180. V.A.: Boogie Nights
3181. V.A.: Manhattan Explosion
3182. V.A.: Sound Express
3183. V.A.: Super-Sonic
3184. V.A.: Let's Party
3185. V.A.: Star Time
3186. V.A.: Golden Greats
3187. V.A.: More and More Hits
Mixworthy: "In the Summertime," Mungo Jerry; "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes),"
Edison Lighthouse; "Tighter, Tighter," Alive & Kicking; and "Going Up the Country,"
Canned Heat, #3168; "Draggin' the Line," Tommy James, #3169; "Tonite Is a Wonderful
Time to Fall in Love," April Wine, #3173; "What the Hell I Got," Michel Pagliaro,
#3174; "Jungle Fever," Chakachas, #3177; "Paranoid," Black Sabbath, #3178; "Kiss
You All Over," Exile, #3183; "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)," Jacksons, and
"Magnet and Steel," Walter Egan, #3185; "To Sir With Love," Lulu, and "Georgy Girl,"
Seekers, #3186. The two Music Power LPs are completely different, which is odd; it's
not normally like K-Tel to demonstrate a lack of imagination.
I've been looking for a sensible place to link to Scott Woods' recently launched
Blender/Rolling Stone showdown, and, in a way, the strange worlds of K-Tel (#3168 to
#3175) and Ronco (#3178 to #3185) provide one. (As far as I can tell, the sole pur-
pose of this link is in case Scott stumbles home drunk one night and can't find his
way back to his own site. If you haven't seen the Blender and Rolling Stone Top 500s
at issue, both can be viewed online.) As an undertaking like this album inventory
should make clear, I'm a thousand percent in favour of lists; I've been making them
for approximately 30 years, and, to paraphrase Bob in Twin Peaks, I will...list...
again! I also don't have any particular problem with the idea that Blender's list
is intended as an alternative to Rolling Stone's. Everybody knows what's maddening/
frustrating/mildly annoying (you can choose the intensity of your own reaction) about
Rolling Stone's version of pop-music history, and every time they try to manufacture
interest in their latest reshuffling of the same old standbys, they're just asking
to be ridiculed--as I'm sure they're aware by now, ridicule actually seems to be the
most surefire way of guaranteeing that such lists are noticed. What strikes me as
phoney about Blender's own list, though, is the "since you were born" premise, and
the arbitrary cut-off date of 1980 that goes along with it. It reminds me so much of
the old political joke about strictly enforced balanced-budget bills: "Stop me before
I spend again." Blender would say that their 25-year window is meant to reflect their
readership, and there's obviously truth to that, but any list that starts with Mich-
ael Jackson and follows with Outkast, Guns N' Roses (eye-catching on Spin's 1988 Top
100, as doctrinaire as What's Going On in 2005), U2, Nirvana, Madonna, Joy Division,
and Run-D.M.C. is hardly an affront to Rolling Stone; it basically is a Rolling Stone
list, right? (I stopped at #9, the dismal Britney Spears, although judging from all
the plaudits for last year's "Toxic," she too is headed for canonization one day.)
Looking at Blender's Top 10, I swear that "since you were born" is really just some-
body's--one editor or a group of writers, I don't know--way of pleading, "Stop me
before I vote for 'Good Vibrations' again." But do you really need the 1980 rule to
avoid overlap with Rolling Stone? Speaking as someone who's fairly doctrinaire my-
self, even I can tell you that there's no shortage of fantastic pre-1980 pop music
that has no place on Rolling Stone's list. So instead of wasting space on the many
useless songs I see all over Blender's list, all for the sake of filling some arti-
ficially imposed calendar quota, what about Edison Lighthouse and Mungo Jerry and
Alive & Kicking, or "Magnet and Steel" and "Draggin' the Line" and "To Sir With Love,"
or all the lesser known doo-wop and garage and early-70s soul that gets bypassed by
Rolling Stone? There's even some hippie music they've forgotten about--do you really
need to rule great songs by the Charlatans, the Fugs, Hot Tuna, and Quicksilver Mes-
senger Service as ineligible for the sake of "No Diggity" and Duran Duran? (I'm being
disingenuous: the Hot Tuna and Quicksilver Messenger songs I have in mind I've dis-
covered just within the past month.) So I get the basic thrust of the Blender argu-
ment: Rolling Stone's version of what is and isn't worth preserving from the history
of pop music never changes, or at least only changes incrementally and at a glacial
pace, and we've got 500 songs that prove how out of touch they really are. But the
safety net they then set up--and just to make sure we don't mess up, we're going to
knock all the stuff that supposedly bothers us so much right off the ballot before we
even start--is bizarre. Take a cue from K-Tel and Ronco: open the door to everything
and let God sort it all out later. If you're sick of "Whole Lotta Love," that'll take
care of itself, and if you sincerely believe that the Backstreet Boys made a better
record than Al Green ever put his name to, that'll take care of itself too, but you
won't close the door on the Mungo Jerrys and Edison Lighthouses of the world in the
process. I realize that carping about these lists is the only thing more predictable
than the lists themselves, so I'll stop before I seem more passionate about all of
this than I really am--I'm much closer to the mildly annoyed end of the spectrum when
it comes to both the Blender and Rolling Stone Top 500s. It'll be great following
Scott as he tracks each list song-by-song, he's got lots of statistical comparisons
either up and running or in the works for the Bill James crowd ("listometrics," I be-
lieve this newest branch of data analysis is called), and, in much the same way that
Michael Moore's creepy self-aggrandizement in Bowling for Columbine had me feeling
sympathy for Charlton Heston that he didn't deserve, I even have a rooting interest
in which list comes out on top...I think Scott and I pretty much exhausted the phenom-
enon of K-Tel and Ronco in I Wanna Be Sedated, so I won't rehash all of that here;
hopefully I can find a good cover scan somewhere. Four of the albums listed above are
K-Tel knock-offs from other labels: Disco Explosion Vol. 2 is on British Pickwick, 20
Original Hits (subtitled a "disco-disc," even though maybe a quarter of it qualifies
as disco) on Polydor, Golden Greats on British EMI, and More and More Hits is a late-
80s CBS thing. There are probably between a half-dozen to a dozen songs I've already
listed in the alphabetical section, while some (maybe even much) of what fills out
the rest of these LPs is as grievously wrong as legend would have it. I'm not sure I
can explain, but I find it perversely satisfying to have the only Black Sabbath song
I own pop up in this context...I just wrote a special little poem that I'm calling
"Ronco Haiku":
"The guy who did 'Magnet and Steel,' does this character have a name?"
"His name is Walter Egan."
"That's a great name!"
________________________________________________________________________________
3188. O.S.T.: The Big Chill
3189. O.S.T.: Car Wash
3190. O.S.T.: Looking for Mr. Goodbar
3191. O.S.T.: Five Easy Pieces
3192. O.S.T.: Full Metal Jacket
3193. O.S.T.: Pennies from Heaven
3194. O.S.T.: Some Kind of Wonderful
3195. O.S.T.: Disorderlies
3196. O.S.T.: Get Crazy
3197. O.S.T.: More Dirty Dancing
3198. O.S.T.: Beat Street Volume 2
3199. O.S.T.: Shocker
3200. O.S.T.: Endless Love
3201. Festival de la Musique de Films Fantastiques
3202. V.A.: Phil Spector's Christmas Album
3203. V.A.: Soul Christmas
3204. V.A.: A Motown Christmas
3205. V.A.: Christmas Favourites
3206. V.A.: A Christmas Record
3207. V.A.: A Very Special Christmas
3208. V.A.: Jingle Bell Jazz
Mixworthy: "I Wanna Get Next to You," Rose Royce, #3189; "Machine Gun," Commodores,
#3190; "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," Darlene Love, #3202; "Gee Whiz, It's
Christmas," Carla Thomas, #3203; "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," Brenda Lee,
and "Jingle Bell Rock," Bobby Helms, #3205; "Christmas Wrapping," Waitresses,
#3206.
Spent: "Wipeout," Surfaris, #3197.
No reason for grouping soundtracks and Christmas albums together, except that that
will divide the remaining 40 or so pop compilations into two equal groups. There are
also a small number of LPs from each category that I've filed elsewhere...Some people
make collecting soundtracks their life's work; I've got 14 (17 when you add Saturday
Night Fever, American Graffiti, and The Harder They Come), among which are such land-
marks as Disorderlies and Wes Craven's Shocker. I can provide specific explanations
for a few of them: Car Wash I bought for the Rose Royce song listed above (no use at
all for the title track); Five Easy Pieces, just because it's one of my favourite
movies (Open City's $6 price sticker is still affixed); Get Crazy, for a non-LP Ra-
mones song called "Chop Suey" (no memory of how it goes); and Endless Love, because
I claimed whatever records were still in good shape when my younger sister was ready
to junk her collection. (Four explanations for the sake of explaining why I own End-
less Love.) I mentioned the Looking for Mr. Goodbar soundtrack when writing about
"Don't Leave Me This Way" back in the alphabetical section; however heavy-handed
Richard Brooks' film is, it was, after American Graffiti and The Graduate, one of
the first instances where I was very conscious of the way second-hand pop music was
integral to the film's mood. The listing for "Machine Gun" is not because of Looking
for Mr. Goodbar, though, but rather for its inclusion in Boogie Nights. Four sound-
tracks I wouldn't mind owning on vinyl: Rushmore, The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Trans-
lation, and Boogie Nights. Four that I wish existed: Mean Streets, Scorpio Rising,
Goin' Down the Road, and Wild Christmas. One that I should have bought when I used
to see it everywhere for $0.99: Nashville...I could list another three or four songs
from the Spector album--the whole record sounds great in season--but "Christmas (Baby
Please Come Home)" is the only thing I'd ever listen to any other time of the year.
The Judy Garland and Nat King Cole songs I listed earlier rank a little ahead of
what's above. Amazon/CDNOW's opening screen was hawking a Clay Aiken Christmas CD
right through till about March of this year, and if you looked at your monitor long
enough, you could almost see stacks and stacks of them sitting in a warehouse some-
where in Arizona. It reminded me of all the Bruce Willis and Randy Travis and Patti
LaBelle Christmas LPs we used to send back in great quantities when I was working at
Sunrise in the mid-80s. As John McGyver said in Breakfast at Tiffany's, it gives one
a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past, that sort of thing.