Fugazi

Good one today! Well, if you ignore that we have a rap skit.

De La Soul, “Skit 5”

The closer for De La Soul Is Dead, the final skit that imagines some bullies discovering stealing the album and deciding it blows. De La Soul was clearly reflecting on a break they were attempting from the first album, of trying to shed their image as rap’s flower children. While De La Soul Is Dead contains plenty of shimmery, bouncy, light tunes, it also features darker material like “My Brother’s a Basehead” and (especially) “Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa”, a tragic tale we’ll talk about when it comes up.

Great one today!

Run The Jewels, “Early”

Run The Jewels 2 is just perfect. El-P’s beats have never sounded better, Killer Mike’s rhymes have never soudned better, the guests are fantastic. It’s just such a great album, one of the highlights of music this decade.

Hepcat, “The Secret”

It’s a repeat! Still, Hepcat is always welcome around here.

Minutemen, “Martin’s Story”

I always feel like categorizing the Minutemen as a hardcore band is such a bad idea. They get lumped in there because they would occasionally take that tempo, and of course they were labelmates with a bunch of hardcore bands. But they’re so much different, so much more open to experimentation. Just listen to this!

Nice one today.

Fugazi, “Break-In (version)”

Fugazi released First Demo in 2014, putting out a session from just a year or so into their existence. The songs here would appear on several of their proper releases in a different (and more polished) form. But as a Fugazi obsessive, it’s great to hear how these songs first started shaping up.

New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble, “Nelson Mandela”

One of the great questions being debated by Five Songs scholars everywhere is whether I am, in fact, qualified to talk about the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble. It’s well-established in canon that I’m not qualified to talk about jazz, of course. But half jazz? The pro camp: clearly I know some shit about ska, right? The con camp: I’m demonstrably a terminal dipshit.

It’s our birthday! I posted the first Five Songs one year ago! In that time, assuming I’ve gotten my tagging right, I’ve posted 313 of these things, meaning you all have gotten a minimum of 1,565 different songs (plus a few bonuses along the way). NOT BAD. I’m still thinking about what to do for the second year of Five Songs. I might retire this thing, because it is a fair bit of work for something that is usually looked at by a number of people I can count on one hand. But, at the same time, it’s still fun, usually.

A slow start today, but it picks up.

Aceyalone, “The Jabberwocky”

Yes, it’s a reading of the Lewis Carroll poem, complete with pitch shifting.

Shabazz Palaces, “MindGlitch Keytar TM Theme”

Another track from Lese Majesty, although this is kind of a throwaway. Not a great start to today.

Fugazi, “Dear Justice Letter”

Our second visit from my favorite band. Here we find a track from Steady Diet of Nothing, their second full album (13 Songs was originally released as two EPs). On Steady Diet, they took yet another big step away from the hardcore of Minor Threat, and a further step towards the angular art-rock that would define the post-hardcore sound. The songs on Steady Diet are slower and more deliberate than those on Repeater, and the album is just less direct overall. That makes this a little bit of a transitional album, with Fugazi learning some new tools, tools they’d master with In On The Kill Taker. That album would find them synthesizing the fury of Repeater with the more elliptical sound of Steady Diet.

Gettin’ ska-tastic in here today.

Steady Earnest, “Scrumpy”

Dan Vitale’s Steady Earnest, back with more straight ahead ska from Dr. Earnest’s Nerve Steadying Spirits. It seems like it’s been a while since we’ve had some ska around here, which seems unusual.

Meat Beat Manifesto, “10 X Faster Than The Speed Of Love [Radio Mix]”

This song was originally on the excellent 99%, but this version was on an interesting sampler, Tonal Evidence, put out by Mute Records. There was quite a range of stuff on that compilation, ranging from the dance of Meat Beat Manifesto and Renegade Soundwave, to tracks from industrial pioneers like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. It was a nice pickup at the time, and was my first exposure to several of these artists.