Guest Blog: 100/100 by Djandor

Hello, everyone. My name is Jacqui, and I am a musician and sibling to Randor. My boyfriend calls me ‘Djandor’, so we’ll go with that. Why not.

This may be a little longer than some of the broski’s posts, but it’s cuz I have a serious complaint. In honor of WTF’s 100th music post, I will guest blog about TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Songs of All Time that they put out on October 24th.

I wish you could have heard my sigh.

Originally I was going to go through it and replace all of the songs I thought should be replaced, then replace the musicians with musicians I would have put in instead. I realized before I even started this task that that would be ridiculously impossible because I disagree with a majority of their list.

I don’t know which hipster they asked to write this, but it was NOT someone who actually knew (good) music (okay it looks like it was a staff-contributed thing). To be fair, Rolling Stone’s list already came out, and it is way better (even some of THOSE songs I disagree with), and maybe they just wanted to be different… Here is a link to Rolling Stone’s list

The only song from the 2010s on TIME’s list is a song and artist I’ve never even heard of. Probably because I don’t listen to a lot of popular music these days because a lot of it is sincerely crap. Okay so I just YouTubed it… yeah, awful. I mean not awful, she’s a good dancer and whatever, but… not so much top 100 songs of ALL TIME material. I mean, I would have picked Amy Winehouse over Janelle Monae any day of the week. Songs also on the list that I have complete disagreements with include (but are not limited to): Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Kanye West’s Gold Digger, Richard Thompson’s Black Lightning, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road, I GOT RHYTHM (the most annoying jazz standard of all time)… I mean with names like this I’m surprised we don’t find Justin Bieber and Jimmy Buffet on here.

Just so you know, there are definitely some songs on here I totally agree with. For example, Dolly Parton’s Jolene is a mournful tune about lost love, and heck we all like some good old-style country, amiright? Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is a given, obviously. That whole album is on my desert island top 5. I can’t even believe Funkadelic and Mahalia Jackson made it on here, but yes, they should totally be on here. The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows is easily one of my favorites (topped only by Surfer Girl, my absolute favorite guilty pleasure song of all time). Lena Horne’s Stormy Weather? Delightful. Louis Armstrong’s Stardust is very in the time, for sure, though I probably would have picked a different tune for him… That’s a hard one since he did so much for music (well, another blog for another day). ANYWAY.

Without further ado (and after the break), I pick apart the list vaguely but definitely, by taking artists I agree should be on the list but making suggestions as to which songs I would have chosen instead (TIME, are you listening?!). For the full list, see the very bottom of this blog entry or go to the source itself

Randor's Song of the Week: 10.17.10

"She's My Girl" by The Turtles from the album She's My Girl. 1967.
    No, this isn't that Temptations song that you've no doubt heard, though you've got the right era. And while any casual listener may not recognize this particular reptilian tune, they're bound to recall other hits by the Turtles- notably "Happy Together". Nowadays the Turtles only claim a handful of living fossil tunes surviving into the modern times, even though they once performed as the feature presentation. Sadly, this is not so rare, for they fall into this category along with other acts like the Lovin' Spoonful, the Grass Roots, and the Hollies. Makes me wonder what groups of today will find themselves stuck in this club when the future rolls around...

Soundtrack of a Script: Revived

EDIT: It seems that Youtube really has a lock on the two clips discussed in this post. While the commentary remains true, I'm afraid I cannot show you the actual parts of the movie featured here. Nonetheless we here at WTF recommend renting or purchasing the whole movies, not just for the purposes of this article, but for the enjoyment of the entire story portrayed. As for this post, well... understand what you can and/or check out other entires through the menagerie of tags.
    Long ago, when this blog first stepped into the cesspool of Internet creations, there were many dreams and ideas in terms of content. I guess real life has delayed many recurring articles and editorials, but I've never lost sight of them. Stored away in a little folder, there sits idle a dossier of everything that never was. Poll ideas, lost features like Up Top, ones without a follow-through, such as Music Musings. Then ya got never seen thoughts, including posts detailing Commercial Jingles and Movie Musicals, and finally, the forgotten periodical- the most applicable of which last appeared a tad more than eight months ago: Soundtrack of a Script (SoaS).
    Back then, we were still experimenting with the voice of the blog, but the message has remained stationary. Music, movies, and their intersection. What better crossroads could there be than SoaS, then? For those clueless, this set of articles intended to document those instances in film where the soundtrack exceptionally played into the emotions of the scene. Acrobatic expertise amplifying the impact of both song and screen. I shoot for the unconventional, but nothing says composed scores cannot peek their heads into my writings. In any case, I decided to send up a couple more examples into the mix, and hopefully we can drip some oil onto the gears of this blog for some long needed momentum.

Randor's Song of the Week: 07.25.10

"A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)" by Simon and Garfunkel from the album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. 1966.
    I'll direct this specifically towards the modern audience, for any oldies fanatic knows Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel better than "The Sounds of Silence" or "Mrs. Robinson". While some of the lyrics most certainly will get served flat in this generation (via culture clash of the pre-summer of love environs), the overall theme applies: the woes of an inundating society. Pop culture, politics, expectations, and social norms- BAM! It's all there and it all applies even moreso in today's world. Oh, and if you had to Google the definitions of "desultory" and "philippic", don't worry- I had to double-check for accuracy's sake. In complete layman-of-layman's terms, "desultory" translates to "half-assed" and "philippic" to "rant." Essentially then, there's another connection to a widely spectated phenomenon in the current era: half-assed rants! Much like some of my posts here, and those by others on blogs world-web wide!

Randor's Song of the Week: 06.06.10

"Talkin' World War III Blues" by Bob Dylan from the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. 1963.

Randor's Song of the Week: 01.31.10

"D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" by Jay-Z from the album The Blueprint 3. 2009.