Jam of the day, road trip radio, and the semantics of "classic rock": Bad Company / "Feel Like Makin' Love"

I made a six-hour drive from New Jersey to Pittsburgh last weekend with some college buddies who I hadn't seen in a while. In my friend's rental car, he had a couple of CDs that we played a few times through: Can's Delay 1968, which is great driving music; Devendra Banhart's Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, only half of which we got through after playing the 8-minute, slow-burning jam "Seahorse" three times in a row; and the debut, Gros mammouth album, of Montreal's French-speaking indie pop-rock band Les Trois Accords (The Three Chords, which is an accurate description of their melodies). We chatted, we napped, we snacked, and we played a fizzling round of "more like a rock or a theory of justice", everyone's favorite, wacky binary search game.

Eventually, I suggested turning on the radio as we got closer to Pittsburgh, and we found a classic rock station. Within a few minutes, Bad Company's hit single "Feel Like Makin' Love" came on. We all groaned. We laughed. But I'll be god damned if the chorus didn't come around after a minute and find us all singing at the top of our lungs. Just try it:



This has to be the cheesiest fucking song known to man. (Watching it with the lyrics displayed makes it even more obvious. Who writes this stuff?!) After we caught ourselves singing along with gusto, we chuckled at the thought of some mustachioed dude in a leather jacket putting this song on the jukebox in some dive bar and strutting down the dance floor with his arm outstretched, pointing at some "hottie" at the other end of the room and singing along. What an image. Who else is this song for?

While we're on the topic of classic rock radio, I should mention an interesting debate I had on Twitter yesterday with some Pittsburgh folks. I tweeted a link to a Tumblr blog that compiles great 90s indie rock hits with the description "90s rule". The Post-Gazette's music critic Scott Mervis wrote back that the 90s were "Maybe the 4th best decade for rock". Yowza. I asked where the 50s were in his ranking? What followed was an interesting debate about what decades were best for "rock music", what "classic" actually means, and some good-natured ribbing. Here's my favorite exchange from the whole thing: Hugh says this, I say this. Check out the thread on Twitter and join the conversation, or leave your thoughts here. I'm listening.

Jam of the day: "Halleluwah" (and puzzles!)

Artist: Can
Song: "Halleluwah"
Album: Tago Mago
Released: 1971
Label: United Artists

This post is partly an excuse to mention some non-musical stuff I've been doing today and also to give props to my friend Sean for introducing me to this band. I've been on campus all day solving puzzles as part of Microsoft's College Puzzle Challenge. It's an all day event with 27 puzzles of various difficulties and styles leading up to one metapuzzle. Standings are based on the time required to submit the answer to the metapuzzle, which we did not too long ago, leading to a 33rd place finish out of 420 national teams, and a 3rd place finish out of 45 teams at CMU. Woo hoo!

So yeah, since 1:00 pm we've been in the grad student study room on our laptops with our brains and fingers racing. It was quiet in the room for a while, which I'm kinda not really used to (if I'm walking, I have my iPod; if I'm in the office, I have my laptop playing; if I'm at home, I have my record player) but I let that go for a while to get the puzzling juices flowing. But later on, I felt a post-coffee crash coming on and needed something to pick me up until the appointed dinner time rolled around. "Let's see..." I thought to myself, "I need something upbeat but not too distracting, something driving but not overpowering, something ... Aha! Can!" This song, in particular, was perfect. It's 18+ minutes of awesome percussion and groovy guitar, kinda long and droning but still upbeat and exciting and it never gets boring. Seriously, if you have some task to accomplish and need something in your ears to keep you going, this is your fucking song. My friend Sean tells me he used to play this song on loop when he was "working in the lab", whatever that means. The video below has the whole song, but the last four minutes are some other random thing, so cut it off around the 18:21 mark.



The whole record is fantastic, really. If you know it already, kudos, and if you don't, it's probably been influencing some of your favorite artists without you even knowing. Check out all of their records. I've heard a few of them and look forward to experiencing more. "Vitamin C" from Ege Bamyasi (video below) is another one of my fave songs, partly for the way he says "vitamin" that makes it sound like a new word, vitamency.