The Cars That Go Boom

Somebody actually took the time to make a video for one of my favorite mashups ever. And it's pretty well edited, too! (If you don't like mashups at least hang in there for the vintage Beatles cartoon.)

Thank You 120 Minutes

Last post I mentioned how MTV's 120 Minutes introduced me to a lot of great music back in the days before the Interweb. Out of curiosity, I dug up the playlists from my junior and senior years of high school to see just how much music I would have missed out on had I actually gone to bed at a decent hour on Sundays.

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Here's some of my favorites, with links to videos where I could find them. I can remember making some of my first mix tapes with these songs, patching the audio output from my parents' VCR into my boom box and recording everything onto glorious Maxell 90-minute cassettes. Fresh.

The Sisters of Mercy: I loved goth-rock before I even knew what goth was. "Lucretia My Reflection" aired in July of '88. Almost twenty years later, I still don't know what the lyrics are supposed to mean.

That same episode featured "Peek-a-Boo" by Sioxsie and the Banshees. I think I bought the cassette of Peepshow the next week.

The video for Billy Bragg's excellent "Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" aired in June. This YouTube video is actually for "There is Power in a Union" from Talking With the Taxman About Poetry. It's worth watching for the AFL-CIO organizer in full cheerleader drag. Due to the relative obscurity of Bragg here in the States (or, at least, in Scenic Western Maryland) I didn't get my hands on an album of his until two years later, when I stumbled on copies of Worker's Playtime and Taxman in the discount bin of the Virgin megastore in London.

The Primitives' "Crash" was another July '88 offering - I must have been up late a lot that July. Apparently, it was remixed for the movie Dumb and Dumber; something I only just learned as I've been steadfastly avoiding seeing any part of that movie since it came out.

Finally, "Reptile", by The Church, aired in August of '88. I think I may have actually seen the video for "Under the Milky Way" earlier that year, but I can't prove it. Both songs together got me to pony up for a copy of Starfish in time for the back-to-school moping season. (I lettered in Mope.)

The Audacity Project

I'm slooowly working my way through a box of my old cassette tapes from the 80s and 90s, converting them to MP3 by way of a neat, free program called Audacity. Briefly, it's a program that allows me to record the input from a borrowed cassette player (thanks, Dad! I'll return it someday soon, I promise!) as a .wav file on my hard drive. I record each side of a tape as its own file, then go back through and chop it up into individual tracks. For the most part I've been happy with the results, although albums that feature tracks fading into each other can be tough to split up. Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, for example, was a royal pain.

I just finished converting one of my favorite tapes from my early college days, Only Life by The Feelies. I remember hearing "Away" for the first time on 120 Minutes, back in 1989 or so. That show lead me to a lot of good music back in the days before the Interwub...but that's a different post. Anyway, here's a link to the MP3 of "Away." Illegal, I guess, so check it out before The Man shuts me down.

Next up: Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy. Bring on the gothy goodness!