iJamming.net

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of an All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 radio station. As you may have noticed, up until now I’ve been putting together amazon.com MP3 playlists to accompany each chapter of my new book, the drawback being that we are restricted to just 30 seconds of each song (not to mention that the amazon widget software is glitch-heavy and that putting together the playlists has therefore been laborious). Now, thanks to David Porter of 8tracks.com, who paid attention both to my book and to what I was trying to do here at iJamming!, we can offer you each song in its entirety as part of a radio-style mix. Starting today, we have made available the first two Playlists – Harlem Strut and Mario Gets Dizzy, both from Chapter 1. Next week, we’ll put up the playlist from Chapter 2. And so on. Soon enough, the 8tracks mixes will have caught up with my own lists and we’ll move forward into fresh territory.

There are but a couple of relatively minor inconveniences attached to the 8tracks.com set-up. Given that it is meant to be like radio, where you never quite know what comes next, the tracks are not pre-listed within the widget itself. (You can, however, follow my track-by-track descriptions of each chapter’s playlist: for Chapter 1, visit this page, which I posted last October.) And the second time you listen through toe ach mix, the tracks will crop up in random order; this takes some of the fun out of comparing and contrasting chronologically, and for this reason I’ll keep the amazon MP3 widget in each chapter that’s already been playlisted. Starting with Chapter 7, I will stop putting together the amazon lists; having 8tracks.com at my back will enable me to focus on what I do best, writing about music rather than programming software.

Given the sheer information overload nature of the web, and the almost unbearable weight of spam, there’s a tendency to put up one’s bs detector every time someone drops you an e-mail or a comment with a marketing idea. In the case of David Porter, who left me a note at the foot of a post a few weeks ago, I’m glad to say he seems to be absolutely on the up and up. David cut his teeth at Live365.com, which helped introduce the concept of web radio; with 8tracks.com (named for the minimum number of songs in each mix, not the old-fashioned way of listening to music in the car!), he has taken the concept much further, into the realm of the DJ culture that inspired him when he lived in the UK in the mid 90s. Best yet, royalties are paid through Sound Exchange, and yet it doesn’t cost you or me a thing. Get listening!

My thanks to Joly at Punkcast.com for uploading to YouTube my recent talk at the 92Y Tribeca. You can find it at my You Tube All Hopped Up and Ready To Go page, at Joly’s punkcast page, and you can also see it at the end of this post. The talk was meant to last about an hour; being me, I extended it to an hour and a half. I’m not a big person for sitting in front of a computer to watch pop videos, let alone lectures; primarily, as I was discussing with Joly over lunch after the talk in question, we archive this stuff so it’s there for future generations. That said, my talk – which I broke into sections on the Apollo Theatre, the Palladium Ballroom, Washington Square Park, and CBGBs – went off much better than I anticipated, so it’s entirely possible you may glean something of interest should you have the kind of computer set-up (HD screen, sofa, remote, popcorn, Châteauneuf du Pape) that invites a movie-length viewing…

Personally, if I had 90 minutes to watch an online video today, it would be to view President Obama’s historic dialogue with Congressional Republicans on Friday, at their retreat in Baltimore. I was in Brooklyn at the time and noticed quite the buzz about it, which is what you get for walking busy City streets during the day rather than being holed up in isolation in the woods writing about your teenage years. This President, in whom I have not lost my faith, has gone above and beyond in his willingness to engage the political opposition as part of the solution; it’s up to them whether they wish, instead, to remain part of the problem.

First British review for All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 just came in from the March issue of Q. It’s a good ‘un….

The book is out in the UK in a couple of weeks, I believe. Expect me to bore you endlessly so that you don’t forget!

Many thanks to Doug Granther at WDST here in Woodstock for hosting me on this past Sunday’s Roundtable show. It was magazine radio as magazine radio should be: informal but intelligent discussion about a book that allowed for the playing of music, the airing of reminiscences from other guests, and a few tangential discussions along the way. Considering we were gathered there at 8am on a Sunday, it was a delight to see even the engineer visibly grooving along to such tracks as Tito Puente’s “The Drinking Mambo,” the Ravens’ “Bye Bye Baby Blues” and the Dominoes’ “Have Mercy Baby.” (Then again, how could you not?) Given that the hour passed by and we’d only gotten into the mid-1950s, Doug has booked me to return on February 21st to bring the story of All Hopped Up: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 up to date. I look forward to that opportunity.

Hard to believe that Groove Armada are on their sixth album already. Black Light will be released on the venerable American dance label Om in March. I greatly enjoyed the song “I Won’t Kneel” that came my way courtesy of a Toyota/MySpace promotion just before Christmas, and while the Fletcher jury is still out on their brand-new, decidely low-key collaboration with Bryan Ferry, I’m more than happy to share it and let you make up your own mind. Stream follows below, and you can download the track for yourself by clicking here.

By coincidence, this week also brought forth the first downloadable fruits of David Byrne’s collaboration with Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love, twenty-two songs “about Imelda Marcos and Estrella Cumpas, the woman who raised her.” Each is sung by a different singer (as opposed to Byrne himself) and the first to be made public, “Please Don’t,” features Santigold on vocals. You can download it by clicking the image below. And you can view a QuickTime slide show better explaining the project below that. Happy weekend.