Hump Day Hitslist: I Fought the Law, and the Law Won

Final exam tomorrow...on the law of complex financial transactions...enough said...

Hump Day Hitslist: 30 years on, R.I.P. John Lennon

JOHN LENNON, R.I.P.

DECEMBER 8, 1980

1. "Watching the Wheels", posthumous release, Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy, 1981 

2. "Working Class Hero", John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970

3. "Jealous Guy", Imagine, 1971

4. "Happy XMas (War is Over)", single release, 1971

5. "Imagine", Imagine, 1971

Hump Day Hitslist: Exams and Xmas

It's that time of year again. When the crunch of exams and paper deadlines turn my diet into a test case for Super Size Me 2: The Fattening, and I can feel my heart gulp helplessly for air through my ribcage as it drowns in a swamp of stress and despair. Fortunately, this is the last time I will be facing this masochistic ritual, and I can start rebuilding my relationship with the months of December and April in the coming years. I must apologize to our readers, however, that the volume of posts has recently slowed, and can only assure you that once I have finished slaving over my independent study that I paid other people thousands of dollars for the right to do, I will return my efforts full force to more important things like writing about the great misconception that The Clash "sold out" on Combat Rock.

In the meantime, finger on the steam presents you with a playlist that has been getting me through first semester exam period for the past few years. It's full of warmth, holiday cheer, and snow globe wonderment--all of the things necessary for justifying your rum and egg nog habit while you plow through your work in the early onset of winter.

1. Feist - "So Sorry"

2. Sam Cooke - "You Were Made For Me"

3. The Drifters - "White Christmas"

4. Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal"

5. Johnny Mercer & Margaret Whiting - "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Juicy mistake

Hey all,

An astute reader has drawn our attention to an error made in one of our early posts about the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy." After doing some more research, we can confirm...we were wrong! My thanks to "tonyc" for giving us the heads up - like a good friend, he's let us know when we've got food in our teeth:

 I just discovered your blog, and it's really good, but it pained me to read this:

"Heck, he even throws in Love Bug and Starsky and Hutch references just to remind you he likes crappy television, too."

Biggie wasn't referring to "Herbie the Love Bug" and "Starsky and Hutch" -- He was referring to fellow MC Lovebug Starski:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovebug_Starski

You nailed the rest of the post, though, and this blog is really an entertaining read. Keep it up!

Instead of correcting the original as if the error had never been made, I rather just commit the mistake to record. This blog was always intended to be a discussion about the stories behind the music, and sometimes, what finger on the steam has held to be true for so long, was always off target. Like your well-intentioned friend who sometimes has too much to drink at parties, there will be those times where finger on the steam starts wildly singing along to the music "Excuse me, while I kiss this guy!", as those around smirk knowingly. We can only hope that later on you'll take us aside on the patio with a cold brew and let us in on our buffoonery, before, of course, adjusting our collar so we can get back in there and go talk to that brunette.

Hump Day Hitslist: Jay-Z's greatest misses?

Jay-Z dropped his first greatest hits compilation this week and finger on the steam has put together a wish list of five songs we'd like to have seen on the disc; think of them as the greatest misses.

Let us know if we're totally off base with our selection, and what other omissions you just can't do without as part of Hov's musical memoir.



1) "Change Clothes" feat. Pharrell, The Black Album, 2003 - Apparently from Jay-Z's final studio album, this initial single would be his greatest hit until the recent "Empire State of Mind". S'pose he came out of "retirement" to make sure he finally got that #1 single, but it's hard to forget a classic like "Change Clothes".

2) "Girls, Girls, Girls", The Blueprint, 2001 - How does he go about explaining these tracks to Beyoncé? A rather promiscuous tale, this one is just too fun to pass over for some of the lesser material Hova included on his Hits collection.

3) "Takeover", The Blueprint, 2001 - A diss track that took on Prodigy from Mobb Deep before Jay-Z focused his magnifying glass on that other king of NYC rap, Nasir Jones. Forcing NaS to respond on his track "Ether" from the Stillmatic album, the beef would be a launching pad for the resurrection of NaS' previously unmatched wizardry in the booth.

4) "Jigga What, Jigga Who" feat. Big Jaz and Amil, Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life, 1999 - Jigga at his visceral best, with speed to match. Maybe not a club banger, but a stone cold lesson in clutchin' the mic.

5) "Can’t Knock the Hustle" feat. Mary J. Blige, Reasonable Doubt, 1996 - Greatly overshadowed at the time by the belter singing his chorus, Jay-Z was fortunate to get Ms. Blige on wax for his debut album.

Hump Day Hitslist: iTunes and the Death and Life of Great Albums

Apple Computer Inc. made a big stink this week by posting a teaser on their homepage suggesting their iTunes service would add something new and exciting on Tuesday morning. Well, it's been a long and winding road, but finally The Beatles' catalogue is now available for digital download on the music service. It took until 2009 for The Beatles' catalogue to be digitally remastered from its original stereo analogue recordings, leaving fans salivating and yearning for nearly two decades longer than they had to wait for the remasters of other contemporaneous rock acts.

While it is inevitable that these canonical tomes of modern popular music eventually become reduced to a floating binary of kilobytical ephemera, there are those that pine the loss of sound quality, aural fidelity, and visceral connection that came with unwrapping a 12 inch disc of weighty vinyl from illustrious spans of cover art and dropping the kinetic needle on the groove. There is something to be said, as well, for the way in which digital downloads have facilitated the hyperactive hashing and repackaging of music to the point where a song in a tiny .mp3 file is completely severed from any notion of the album to which it was once intended to be a part. That said, there is a bit of revisionist history in this view, given the entire music industry of the 1950s was premised on the 45 rpm single. Of course, even The Beatles owe their great fortunes to that rapid wave of early singles, before they dabbled in their more ambitious projects suited only for long playing records.

While I believe that the current paranoia suggesting "The Album" has met its death as an artform is rather premature, there is no denying there was a Golden Age for the self-contained LP, of which this era only retains a flaxen patina. Yes, that Golden Age was borne of the Progressive Rock movement of the late-60s and early-70s that attempted to elevate rock music to the credible and immortal station of classical symphonies and arias. Popularized by the likes of King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Deep Purple, there is no group that has left its mark so indelibly upon this movement as Pink Floyd. It is nigh impossible to breath the words "concept album" without hanging your hat on the Floyd's 1973 opus The Dark Side of the Moon. In wanting to protect the integrity of their music as part of a larger whole, Pink Floyd brought a law suit against its longtime record label EMI in 2010, attempting to block the sale of the group's songs individually on services like iTunes. A High Court in the U.K. agreed with the Floyd that the band could "preserve the artistic integrity" of whole albums by not breaking them up into individual song sales.

With the entire Fab Four catalogue being released this week for your splicing and dicing pleasure, it seems an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the argument made by Pink Floyd's legal victory. It is not to say that what works for a Prog Rock band is what's best for everybody, but there is some value in taking stock of the fact that music is capable of grander statements when its part of a cohesive whole than when it is severed into one-off snacks of pop delight. And with that, this week's finger on the steam Hump Day Hitslist will not present an assortment of 5 tracks from various artists, across multiple albums. Instead, we feature a full five song, 42 minute LP from Pink Floyd entitled Animals, without breaks or track separation.

Pink Floyd - Animals

Side One
1. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 1"
2. "Dogs"

Side Two
3. "Pigs, Three Different Ones"
4. "Sheep"
5. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 2"







Released in 1977, Animals was a concept album loosely based on George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, with lyrical depictions of various social classes as different kinds of animals: the political dogs that wage war, the ruthless pigs who devour in the name of wealth, and the mindless and unquestioning populism that reduced the masses to a herd of sheep. This concept was developed by Pink Floyd's bassist and co-vocalist, Roger Waters, who felt great disdain at the social and political conditions of 1970s Britain. In a sense, this was Waters' response to the U.K. punk movement that had risen in the previous two years, by demonstrating that Progressive Rock bands who filled stadiums and sold millions of records for their labels could be equally as political as anti-establishment punk rock acts.

Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, famously wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words "I hate" scrawled above to demonstrate his contempt for the arena rock giants. Rotten wasn't wrong in pinning the Floyd as a bloated behemoth that far transcended the four members of the group; the Floyd had indeed become large to the point of nation-state status. The live shows for the Animals album were part of the massive In the Flesh tour that saw the Floyd playing to crowds nearing 100,000 strong in vacuous stadiums. David Gilmour would later intimate that by the end of the tour he realized the band had finally achieved all of the success he could have dreamed of and that there was nothing left to do; a feeling that saddened, rather than pleased him. Similarly, Waters would feel increasingly alienated by the large crowds, leading to his famously erupting on stage in Montreal and spitting on a fan that had annoyed him. These depressive and estranged feelings would become Waters' source of inspiration for writing the Floyd's subsequent album The Wall, that was symbolically represented in later theatric concerts by the building of a great white brick wall between the band and its audiences.

Reader submitted hip hop sample: Beastie Boys "Flute Loop"

A finger on the steam reader has submitted this hip hop sample, and it is too sweet to pass up.

Without the usual historiography and anecdotes, let's just present the two tracks:

The Blues Project - "Flute Thing", 1966


Beastie Boys - "Flute Loop", 1994