Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Mixtape #2: Pop is a Weasel

"The Mirage" by Guy Mondo, collage on card
 A lot of the time I have a theme in mind when i record a mixtape. It's like having my own version of my favorite radio stations from my youth like WGTB-FM and WHFS-FM. Sometimes that theme gets sidetracked by my looking through my collection for songs, looking through my piles of clippings for the cover collage, cooking dinner, etc.
That's probably what happened with the first side of this tape. I think I had some kind of "good-bad-ugly" side of romance theme going before i lost track of what i was doing. Maybe I just lost interest in looking for more songs in my collection. Whatever happened I bounced around differing subjects until I was running out of space. I hate to have long stretches of silence at the end of a tape so, if there's not enough time left for a full-sized pop song, I like to fill that little space with odd, short song samples or bits of dialogue from movies and TV, hence, side one ends with "Sun Wukong (The Monkey King) - Scene 1" performed by The Chinese Academy of Peking Opera.
Side two finds me exploring a more left-of-the-dial indie-style playlist with the theme being danceable world pop. 

The Tracks:
A1 Main Source - Looking At the Front Door
A2 Ralph Tresvant - Sensitivity
A3 Howard Hewitt - If I Could Only Have That Day Back
A4 Talk Talk - Pictures of Bernadette
A5 D-Mob - That's the Way of the World
A6 Public Enemy - Burn Hollywood Burn
A7 Malcolm McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra - Deep in Vogue
A8 Janet Jackson - Escapade
A9 Black Box - Everybody
A10 Kane Gang - Don't Look Any Further
A11 The Chinese Academy of Peking Opera - Sun Wukong (The Monkey King)
B1 Black Uhuru - Brutal
B2 Bad Brains - I and I Survive
B3 Dr. John the Nighttripper - Walk on Gilded Splinters
B4 Ray Lema - Kamulang
B5 Desmond Dekker - Israelites
B6 Ofra Haza - Taw Shi
B7 Les Negresses Vertes - Danse des Negresses Vertes
B8 Mandingo Griot Society - I Haven't Seen My Lover
B9 Augustus Pablo - Pablo Meets Mr. Bassie
B10 The Specials - Message to Rudy
B11 Bad Brains - The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth