Anonymous Communist

Last week, I finally figured out how to make Audio Player work, and since then I’ve been trying to come up with a way to implement it here.

When I walk Basie, I usually have my headphones on. This morning, a particular song shuffled up on my iPod and it gave me an idea: a playlist based on parts of the body. These are all songs in my iTunes library that have some sort of bodily feature in the title: head, eye, arm… you get the idea. Click on the player at the end of each entry to hear the rockin’ tracks. You also can right-click the song title to steal download. Enjoy!

“Dead Head Blues,” Backwards Day – One of my favorite bands from back in Springfield’s late 1980s-early ’90s alt-rock heyday, Backwards Day lament the teenagers who would rather emulate what their parents did as kids than participate in their own culture:

I guess this generation
is starving for sensation
Can’t they come up with their own?
I got the Dead Head Blues

“Hair,” P.J. Harvey – A wispy British musician whose songs rock hard, Polly Jean has a penchant for appearing naked on album and magazine covers. Awesome.

“I Set My Face to the Hillside,” Tortoise – I have a difficult time describing Tortoise when people ask what my favorite bands are. Their music is brilliant but impossible to categorize.

“Eye Know,” De La Soul – It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 20 years since this song came out. I’d still take this over 98 percent of today’s hip-hop.

“Ear Drums Pop,” Dilated Peoples – I took a chance on this album when I saw it at a Delete Sale several years ago and was rewarded for it. Imagine… a modern hip-hop group that doesn’t reference guns, violence or the crack game. Who knew? One of this song’s lyrics particularly meshes with my delicate sensibilities:

I’m buildin’ with the science that De La dropped
That means it might blow up, but it won’t go pop

“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” the Smiths – OK, I sort of cheated on this one. I didn’t have any songs with “nose” in the title, so I substituted “knows.” Like a bulldog that’s so ugly it’s cute, Morrissey’s voice is so irritating but so perfect for Johnny Marr’s jangly, reverby guitars.

“Syringe Mouth,” Mercury Rev – I’m a sucker for sheets of guitar noise, and this song, like the rest of the “Yerself is Steam” album, has it in spades.

“Protect Ya Neck,” Wu-Tang Clan – When you have the GZA dropping metaphors like “[Nuhs] so stingy they got short arms and deep pockets,” you know you have a hip-hop classic.

Stay tuned for more body parts from artists like Ween, the Pixies and Mos Def.