1 October 2016, No. 195, Parliament, ‘Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)’

I’ve mentioned that this list is ordered by tempo, and it turns out that this is only mostly true. I’ve noticed a quirk of the Serato software I used to do the ordering: Songs with a given whole-number tempo (112 bpm, for instance), are alphabetized by artist. The actual tempo values in the ID3 tags include two decimal places, but when I sort for the tempo field, Serato disregards those precise values in favor of alpha by artist. So while I’ve said in the past that the list is ordered by tempo, it’s more accurate to say that the songs are grouped by tempo and ordered alphabetically within each group. All of this is to explain why sometimes there are multiple tunes from the same artist back to back. I think the worst example is four tunes in a row somewhere in the 120-bpm range, but we won’t get there until next year at least. Maybe not even next year.

And but so at No. 195 is the first of three consecutive Parliament jawns. “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)” seems to be about a hydrophobic dude with pitch-shifted vocals. And “psychoalphadiscobetabioaqua” makes sense enough to me, but what’s a “doloop?” Is it like a doo rag? A Froot Loop? Listen and let me know if you figure it out.