theswinginsixties:

Nina Simone — I Shall Be Released - 1969

quite possibly my favorite Bob Dylan cover

(Source: 45andsingle, via velificantes)

(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding

I can’t do what ten people tell me to do

(Source: strong-like-an-amazon, via cinemastatic)

natepatrin:

500 Favorites, #004: The Isley Brothers, “Footsteps in the Dark, Pt. 1 & 2)”

(from Go For Your Guns, 1977)

I’m going to start things off with what looks like a tangent: if you were born after this song came out, that means listening to it gives you a more than 50% chance of immediately bringing “It Was a Good Day” to mind instead. Which is fair enough, since it’s one of the most iconic hip-hop hits of the early ’90s, while the source material is a previous generation’s record that hasn’t aged into canonization to the same extent. (Which sucks, because Go for Your Guns is all-killer-no-filler and should damn well be on every “500 Greatest Records” list imaginable, including ones put together by Decibel and Resident Advisor.) But “It Was a Good Day” is notoriously half-understood by a lot of the people who appreciate it as just a feel-good top-of-the-world anthem.

On its own, it’s a celebration of those times where everything just finally goes right, and Cube’s inspiration to make it was fueled by the feeling that after long years of work, he’d arrived to the point where he was having more of those good days than ever before. But it’s also a red herring: in the context of The Predator and its post-L.A. riots frustration, it’s positioned as an unreal, escapist fantasy scenario, one of those stories where everything feels so effortless and victorious that it has to be a lie somehow. On the album, Cube cuts off the last moments where the track would just otherwise ride out and just snaps: “Hey, wait a minute, fool, stop the shit — what the fuck am I thinking about?” And that brings us to the hidden genius that was coded deep in this sample: “Footsteps in the Dark” is the constant undercurrent of doubt that runs through the whole thing, questioning and interrogating that good feeling the entire way.

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(via mendelpalace)

natepatrin:

500 Favorites #003: Eddie Hazel, “California Dreamin’”

(from Game, Dames & Guitar Thangs, 1977)

It’s funny: I’m writing this sentence right now trying to think of the best way to introduce this song, and kind of hitting my head against the wall, because there’s a certain problematic inevitability involved here. Because despite everything I could say about Eddie’s place in the P-Funk mythos, the Coltrane-as-guitarist mastery of his one-take “Maggot Brain” solo, his place in the Next Hendrix conversation alongside Ernie Isley and Robin Trower and Frank Marino, his 1975 Shatner-on-Twilight Zone angel dust airplane freakout and the ensuing prison bid at Lompoc, his diminishing role in P-Funk, his one solo album, his sparse sideman work in the ’80s, and his too-young death a couple days before Christmas 1992 – all I can worry about is how in the world I can possibly describe what he does with his guitar on this song. I wrote down the phrase “tone like getting razor cuts from liquid,” so I suppose that’s a start.

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(via supervillain)