Musical anxieties (White blues)

What an abundance of talent represented here! And some of their best songs form this playlist, or maybe just songs I happen to like. You be the judge. A Nielsen Ratings agent will be contacting you soon. There’s the classics: It’s Over, Crazy, Some Velvet Morning. There’s favorites from Generation X: Furnace Room Lullaby, We No Who U R, Angelene, and The Ballad of Red Buckets. And there’s that den of thick thieves: Velvet Underground, Nico, and John Cale. Throw in a few outliers like 1960’s Greenwich Village boho Fred Neil, perennially cheerful glass gargler Tom Waits, and The Magnetic Fields straddling bluegrass and death marches. Put it all together and it’s what I’m calling White blues – oozing with angst. My German language skills are non-existent so I cannot speak for the lyrical content of Nico’s song and that of Einsturzende Neubauten, but I’ve the sneaking suspicion they’re not heralding the rebirth of the Age of Aquarius.

P.S. I need to hearken back to the days of yore: one circa 1969 night driving with buddies around the cornfield-studded countryside adjacent to home town Racine, Wisconsin, and probably ‘stoned’ by virtue of ditch-weed marijuana, we caught a distant radio signal - the sort AM super stations could project from, typically, the deep South, Texas, etc. Turned out to be a Christian music station and before I had the chance to switch the dial, the DJ announced the next cut, a wonderful song new to them called “Jesus”, by a New York band, the Velvet Underground. Irony is slapping your mama upside her head with a bible. -J.H.

Programa #132 musical anxieties (White blues)
First broadcast 6-13-24

01 Lee Hazelwood - Pray Them Bars Away

02 Johnny Cash – Thirteen

03 Fred Neil - Blues on the Ceiling

04 Roy Orbison - It's Over

05 Patsy Cline – Crazy

06 Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra - Some Velvet Morning

07 The Magnetic Fields - I Die You Die

08 Neko Case - Furnace Room Lullaby

09 Tom Waits - Everything Goes to Hell

10 Cat Power - He War

11 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - We No Who U R

12 PJ Harvey – Angelene

13 Yo La Tengo - The Ballad of Red Buckets

14 Velvet Underground – Jesus

15 Nico – Abschied

16 Einsturzende Neubauten - Stella Maris

17 John Cale - Ides of March

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