Weekly Dance Break: Q.U.E.E.N (Janelle Monae)

Sometimes the only dance break that will do is Janelle Monae (with bonus goddess Erykah Badu!) Get you some time-traveling, sci-fi, electric jams!

Big Sound Saturdays: That’s My Best Friend!

Most of you may know about the Bechdel test. If a movie does not feature two women on screen without a man present in either frame or conversation, we use the Bechdel test to declare it to be on the wrong side of feminism. Of course, this test is overly simplistic and often inaccurate. The famed lesbian feminist cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, after whom the test is named, recently admitted, “You can certainly have a feminist movie where there is only one woman–or no women.”^[1] I agree. I think some episodes of the TV show Entourage are surprisingly feminist in how they bend expectations of masculinity. But I think it also useful to have a metric for measuring gender equality in something as hyper-masculine as the film industry. So it got me wondering: why is there no Bechdel test for music? Specifically, for hip-hop and R&B, two genres famous for being about either a) individual financial success, b) heterosexual prowess, c) defeating one’s enemies with hot rhymes or d) all of the above. One of the most famous movies to pass the Bechdel test is Thelma & Louise because it is all about female friendship. I thought the same might be true for rap songs about friends. So I went on a search for some smooth and/or hard jams about platonic love.

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Big Sound Saturdays: Very Superstitious

My favorite kind of party is so loud and crowded and happening that everyone loses their center about it and bumps into each other and runs between rooms and bars and forgets most of it by the morning. Some holidays are built for it. And some are the worst! I’ll take a pass, for example, on the Fourth of July: I love a good barbeque, but all those American flag outfits bum me out and living, as I do, as a medium-old lady in a college town, I’m actually kind of nervous walking around with all the roving late-teens, their vacant beer-eyes, and their booming firecrackers. Or the much less real holiday that is SantaCon, when the self-same wasted frat-bros-turned-bank-bros that stood on the lower balconies of the buildings around Zucotti Park hassling the Occupy Wall Street protesters rub their Santa-costumed bodies all over every beer glass in Manhattan. Bad carnivals. The best carnival—next week!—is Halloween.

Big Sound Saturdays: Apocalypse Sound!!

The 1940’s and ‘50’s boast such an enormous archive of atomic bomb scare songs—most of them lovingly compiled onto the Atomic Platters (“Cold War music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security”)—that it feels a little tired to loop them all into a mix that would probably end up being kind of hard to listen to. I went for apocalypses of mind and body instead, with tunes ranging from totally explicit (Elvis Costello’s “Waiting for the End of the World”) to personal disaster, the girl group Heartbeats’ self-released, organ-laden heavy-hitter “Cryin’ Inside.”

In the hopes of mixing these songs into something that sounds like an atomic explosion, this mix is a little out of my usual Big Sound Saturdays fare. Apocalypse Sound!! is loaded with garage rock, punk, riot grrl, afrobeat, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and some big tunes from Italy, Indonesia, and Thailand. I Giganti’s “La Bomba Atomica” is a 1960’s patchwork of low register swamp sounds and earnest falsetto, bombs in the night, and the ever-irrepressible Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “Frenzy” is to the tune of frantic disorientation that I’m hoping the mix will bring you, the listener, into. Barring Chance Halladay’s “13 Women”— a heavy, huge, hilarious apocalypse, like the Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough At Last” in Big Man fantasy space—everyone on here is pissed off. I even rounded it off with a song that The Red Elvises wrote for the post-apocalyptic rock ballad-cum-samurai film Six String Samurai, a furious ska boogie that dances itself all over Leonard Nimoy’s cautionary “Visit To A Sad Planet.” No holds barred in any of these songs. Paint them on your body, carve them in your walls!

Weekly Dance Break: Down For You (Kehlani ft. BJ the Chicago Kid)

Whatever you wanna do
‘Cause baby I’m down for it
I’m down for you

Big Sound Saturdays: Sister Soul

Ladies first, there’s no time to rehearse

I’m divine and my mind expands throughout the universe

– Queen Latifah, “Ladies First”

For today’s mix, I collaborated with the inimitable M.H. to serve a broad swath of soulful, genre-spanning women: from R&B and blues to hip-hop, soul, country, reggae, and funk. Donna Summers leads us in with the radio edit of what, when she first released it as a single on Oasis Records in 1975, totalled at about sixteen minutes and fifty seconds of orgasmic moaning, the mega-hit “Love to Love You Baby.” We float on Dolly’s “Early Morning Breeze” through the melty, ecstatic harmonies of Studio One’s the Soulettes and into Mariah Carey’s timeless “Fantasy,” into what Maya reminds us is one of the best tough-girl songs of our early teens: Toni Braxton’s breakup anthem, “He Wasn’t Man Enough For Me,” and through the lyrical gymnastics of young Queen Latifah and Monie Love. No story line to chart in this mix, really: Erykah Badu plays the prophet, Denise La Salle takes no prisoners, Etta James wreaks havoc over what must be the best horn solo in soul history. A room full of strong women, singing together.

It felt so right and good to make a mix where Denise La Salle rubs shoulders with Toni Braxton, Queen Latifah, and Monie Love—where Sugarpie DeSanto can sing her pre-party dress-up hip-shaker nestled between a progenitor and a disciple, where Mariah links arms with fellow high-voiced angel Dolly Parton. In Sister Soul, Aretha Franklin answers TLC and Big Mama Thornton protects her brood, excoriating the man trying to break into this sonic house of women with the righteous, enormous, “I Smell A Rat.” Maya and I have more rooms to fill with female musicians—stay tuned!