Year end lists are starting to come out and I couldn’t be more excited to see what I haven’t been cool enough to notice when it came out. If you listen to Spotify and want to see the stats of what you have been listening to over the last year, then check out Spotify’s Year In Music. It will even create a playlist based on your past year’s plays.
Since getting a smart phone and the unreliability of the iPod, this report is fairly accurate when it says that Miranda Lambert was my favorite artist and the top two songs on my most played list were from Hurray for the Riff Raff:
The company that printed The Idiots magnificent self-titled album notified Mike that we made some money via Spotify, Pandora, Google Music and iTunes (some in various countries like India and Germany). Every once in a while (but not in the last couple years), I have attempted to have the album put online or just look for it but to no avail. In an attempt to figure out a reason for the recent buzz, I googled the tracks, and it the only find was Got That Woman getting it’s own post on one of my favorite blogs, Rollo & Grady, back in October.
I’m guessing because of the recent current events, Gil Scott Heron and his music, especially the great song The Revolution Will Not be Televised, has been featured on a few of the blogs I read along with a piece last night on NPR’s The World about protest songs. While I think he is a important artist and his words/music can be powerful right now, I will let better writers comment on that.
What I want this blog post to focus on is his other famous song, Johannesburg (That link is a great one from his appearance on SNL with Richard Pryor). The NPR piece brought up the interesting fact that because the South African apartheid regime banned the song, when Heron first performed the song in Johannesburg, people didn’t know the chorus and somewhat threw the band off when they didn’t yell it back. It also mentioned that part of the genius of the song was that the chorus was a parody of the jingle for Thunderbird wine, that was popular in poor, black communities.
