This Is The Goo I've Got

*This is a companion piece to a similarly-themed article on Karen’s site which, all things being equal, should be published at roughly the same time.*

Is anybody actually using these Spotify playlists? Cos if not, I’ll just save myself the effort.

1. **Pata Pata** Miriam Makeba – such a jolly and uplifting song, I can’t help but like it.

2. **Soul Makossa** Manu Dibango – pretty funky, it makes good “walking” music, if you know what I mean. The sax riff is simple, but effective enough. There’s a few little interesting changes thrown in as well, so it narrowly avoids feeling too long.

3. **Lady** Fela Kuti – 14 minutes long, the first 6 of which are basically vamping over the same chords, and then there’s some singing, but it’s all really rather monotonous.

4. **Monie** Kanda Bongo Man – “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG.” I wonder what Warner Music Group think that their job is. Here’s a stab in the dark – maybe you’re supposed to be giving your artists exposure? What have you achieved here? You’ve made yourselves look stupid. Fucking stupid.

5. **Birima** Youssou N’Dour – I can’t deny it, this is a pretty good song. But I can’t bear this dude’s voice. And this song has a really annoying bongo solo, which basically just consists of some eejit hammering away at them at machine-gun rate for too long. I do like the way that the song builds towards the end – I wish more songwriters made the effort to incorporate some kind of dynamics into their songs. Shame that Youssou can’t be bothered to write an ending, and just fades it out.

6. **Lasidan** Ali Farka Toure – six minutes, mostly guitar wank over the same few chords.

7. **Didi** Khaled – just very very annoying, predominantly because after a while you get tired of Khaled saying “Didi, Didi, Didi didididididididiwa didiwa didiwa heyeyeyeyeyey” or something like that. This is one of the most repetitive songs that I’ve heard in recent years.

8. **Tekere** Salif Keita – another moderately bland song with too much guitar widdling, but at least it’s sufficiently inoffensive to be listenable as background material.

9. **Shumba** Thomas Mapfumo – I quite like this song, though it doesn’t do much. It’s got a nice ambience. It’s got multiple guitar melodies, a vocal melody and a relatively complicated bassline all happening simultaneously, and they shouldn’t really fit together but somehow they do. No dynamics whatsoever.

10. **Yeke Yeke** Mory Kante – the song was written in the 1980s but gained notoriety in 1994 when it was remixed by German Techno duo “Hardfloor”. It’s been quite a long time since I went to a nightclub, so any interest that I may have had in dance music has mostly evaporated.

So, in conclusion: mixed feelings, but generally eager to get onto the next playlist, whatever it may be.

The next week’s playlist

We’re going to be off on holiday, so the next playlist will last us a fortnight. Unless it’s a load of toss, in which case we’ll listen to it once and then find something else to listen to.

Random number: 77
Two playlists, mystical forces choose Sam Cooke over Julian Cope. The book says:

> The soul singer’s soul singer, Cooke was the idol of everyone from Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin to Muhammad Ali and Rod Stewart. Selections #3-#10 are all Cooke compositions.

This looks most promising. Here’s Spotifyage.

*This is a companion piece to a similarly-themed article on Karen’s site which, all things being equal, should be published at roughly the same time.*

Two weeks ago, I said “God, I love disco.” God was evidently listening, and suspected that I was full of bullshit, which is why he sent this playlist to test me. Turns out God knows me better than I know myself. Apparently I don’t love disco.

Incomplete Spotify playlist.

After the first or second run through this playlist, I was aware that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as the week 9 playlist. Nothing that I could put my finger on, I just wasn’t getting the same buzz from it. In the interests of giving it a fair crack of the whip, I listened to the playlist again. But the more I listened to it, the worse it got.

There are lots of incredibly funky basslines on this playlist, but that’s not enough to justify listening for half an hour. I’ve always been a little critical of the “Let’s See How Long We Can Stretch This Out For” school of songwriting, and that seems to be what’s going on here. I can look down the playlist and say “ooh, *Good Times* is a good song, as is *Lost In Music* and *I’m Coming Out* by Diana Ross and *Why* by Carly Simon” but when it comes to actually listening to the song all the way through, I find myself reaching for the skip button after a minute, because I know that there’s just going to be more of the same for another four minutes.

This isn’t the first time that I have felt like God’s chewtoy.

The next week’s playlist

Random number: 139
Two playlists on this page, a coin toss selected – Dodgy French. The book says:

> Somehow, putting a few French *mots* in an otherwise *anglais* song pretty much guarantees *sérieux* kitsch. Blondie managed to get away with it; way down at the other end of the scale, there’s Bill Wyman.

\#2 in the playlist is *Le Freak* by Chic, but we’ll ignore that one.

Spotify playlist, once again woefully incomplete, don’t know why I bother