I was very excited to hurry up and write about No. 200 on the list so I could then release a triumvirate of these mixes, but I’ve decided against putting out a block of them all at once. Who has a whole hour to listen to a mixtape these days, let alone three hours—or even four hours? Because I’ll tell you, I’ve got four of these things packaged and ready to go.
One thing I noticed putting them together over the last few weeks is that making mixtapes in this way, with no consideration for the order of the tunes except for the order in which they appear on the list, starts to feel quite mechanical and repetitive. Insert song, match beats, set fades, apply EQ and effects, edit to two minutes, rinse, repeat.
On the other hand, I’ve been listening to these mixes a lot, and the finished product is immensely enjoyable, so I’ll keep doing it. The mixtapes may eventually catch up to the current entry in the Record Show, and I don’t know what I’ll do then. Just have to write more, I guess, and actually follow through when I say I’ll do it every day. Ha!
Anyway, here’s the first mixtape in the Warm Glow Record Show series. It makes excellent diegetic background music in the movie of your life, and it stands up pretty well to active listening too.
Warm Glow Record Show 1 – Your Self-Conscious Substitution
With today’s tune I don’t have yesterday’s problem. That is, I see the title “All Day Sucker” at No. 200 and I know exactly which Stevie Wonder tune it is. Probably because the hook follows a rhythm guitar line pretty precisely, though it could be the Clavinet playing that line; I’ve learned recently that the Clavinet plays wound strings in the same manner a guitarist performs a hammer-on, but I’m pretty sure the line I’m talking about bears the plucked character of a string picked with a plectrum. (In the same manner that I may be confusing a guitar for a Clavinet, I often confuse the words plectrum and plenum.) Obviously there was plenty of multitracking on this tune, but I’ll also point out that there are three guitarists credited, one lead and two rhythm, but only Stevie himself was handling keys, making it seem even more likely to me to be a guitar part. And there’s a little pitch bend on the last note, but apparently there’s also a Clavinet modification that adds a whammy bar. I hope it’s Michael Sembello (later of “Maniac” fame) laying down the plinky little guitar groove to which the refrain conforms. (Interestingly enough, Sembello has one of those Castlebar Clavinets in the “Maniac” video I was watching. Huh. Wonder if it’s the same one George Duke is shredding in another video I found.)
I always thought the vocal refrain was “all day sucker [now] for your love” or that now was girl, maybe, or some other single-syllable filler word, or even a rest in the vocal line. In looking up the lyrics, however, most sources have it as “all day sucker cup for your love.” Sucker cup? Like a suction cup? In my mind the metaphor’s vehicle is an enormous pinwheel lollipop. Not that the lollipop version of the metaphor makes much sense, but y’know, poetic license or somesuch.
Turns out the etymology of sucker as someone with an overabundance of credulity is far from clear. My favorite explanation is that it stems from the “pig in a poke” con, in which the mark thinks he is purchasing a suckling pig but in fact buys a cat in a sack. This con may also be the origin of the idiom “let the cat out of the bag.” We’ll have to settle for letting the sucker cup out of the bag. The lucky thing is it sticks around all day.
Sometimes Stevie Wonder’s tunes’ names bring to my mind neither the groove nor the melody. Regarding No. 199 (the first of a Stevie double header due to the same Serato quirk that lumped the last three P-Funk tunes together), the title “I Wish” doesn’t quite do it for me. I have to look at my notes that say “sneakin’ out the back door” and “those things,” and then I’ve got it. I blame the prominence of the lyrics “those things” and the unaccented “I wish” for my imperfect recall. The same features make me associate the song with Lauryn Hill’s “Doo-Wop (That Thing),” Faze’s “The Things You Do,” and a third song that I suspect doesn’t exist and may just be an as-yet unrealized mashup of the Hill and Faze tunes.
What do you get when you mix Dutch house and reggaeton? A new genre! I didn’t get deep into moombahton, but I have friends who produced a fair amount of it, so I’ve got moombahton tracks lying around. The super soulful vocal sample here pushes No. 198, Sazon Booya’s “Mujeres,” over the genre line and onto our list.
I don’t know the guys who composed the group Sazon Booya (and even just recently learned that Sazon Booya was [a] a duo/trio, not an individual, and [b] a play on Sazón Goya, which I’ve never tried, but I gather this bouillon is the secret weapon of Latino cuisines). Skinny Friedman knows them, though, so I sent a message to Joshua Vega to see if he’d reveal the sample source in “Mujeres” because I’m stumped. It’s something I should probably know, but how is one to learn if one doesn’t ask? No response yet, though. If he gets back to me, I’ll update here.
Edit: It's "There's Nothing in This World That Can Stop Me from Loving You" by Tom Brock. I'd have known this had I been listening to Jay-Z along with the backpacker hip-hop I liked in 2001. I heard Jay-Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls" the other day and it all came together.
I think I first saw/heard Parliament in 1994’s P.C.U., in which I identified most with Jon Favreau’s character, and he was the one who ran into and recruited Parliament to play the pivotal party. In an unrelated note, before I saw the song’s title in print, I always thought they were saying “give us the funk” instead of “give up the funk.” I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I mostly don’t pay attention to lyrics.
I generally double-check the song titles when I’m writing these things so as not to introduce errors, and in checking today’s title I realized that the LP version of this tune has the title and subtitle reversed—“Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)”—and is a couple minutes longer. The version I have on file is the seven-inch version, so that’s what we’re reporting here. It’s a real type of thing.
By total coincidence, our three P-Funk tunes are in reverse order both chronologically and as ranked by peak chart position on the Billboard Hot 100. Yesterday’s “Aqua Boogie” was the most recent of the three singles to be released and topped out at No. 89 on the main Billboard list (though it hit No. 1 on the R&B chart).
Today’s cut, “Flash Light” at No. 196 on our list, is the most recognizable Parliament song, and the charts back that up pretty well. Tomorrow’s tune hit No. 15 on the Hot 100, whereas “Flash Light” achieved only No. 16, but “Flash Light” was No. 1 on the R&B chart while tomorrow’s joint climbed to the five spot and no further. When I think of the Parliament song that everyone knows, I think of this one. I’m odd, though, and probably wrong on this count. The Wikipedia page for tomorrow’s tune has a way longer “in popular media” section than does the entry for “Flash Light.”
Bernie Worrell, not Bootsy Collins, covers bass duties here with a bunch of Minimoogs. Worrell died earlier this year, but having achieved Funkentelechy long ago, he’s now sweeping filters and bending pitches in the stars.
Grab your bop gun and we’ll go fight the spread of unFunkiness under Sir Nose’s Placebo Syndrome. Everybody’s got a little light under the sun. Even the Philae lander on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko gets shined on once in a while.
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.
