So I Suppose I Owe You An Explanation

Don't ask me about my business, Kay.

EDIT: BAD IDEA JEANS.

Kasabian, "Me Plus One" (Jacques Lu Cont remix) - There are plenty of reasons to hate Madonna - she's boring, she's not interesting, her music sucks, and oh yeah she's kinda dull - but most of them come down to issues of taste rather than effect; I might rather sit around for an hour punching myself in the cock than listen to any of her albums, but they did lay the template for female self-expression in the pop forum which eventually culminated in the release of one of the five or six best albums put out this century so far, so I can't hate too much. Her shanghai'ing of Stuart Price (aka Jacques Lu Cont, aka Thin White Duke, aka Man With Guitar...) as her goddamned tour DJ is simply indefensible; even if she hadn't snatched (and that's not a word settled upon accidentally) him up right as he seemed to be entering the peak of his productivity at the end of 2005, a year as sonically defined by his brand of dance music as the DFA's defined 2002, she still would have been keeping him away from the studio for months on end, and that simply will not do. Lu Cont, for the benefit of the three of you who've been living in a cave for the last five years, is to the synthesizer what Nile Rodgers was to the rhythm guitar: he finds unerringly direct ways of presenting you with simple pleasures whose virtues had never even occurred to you before, and at this point has demonstrated those pleasures to be so versatile as to warrant close inspection of anything bearing his name, no matter how by-the-numbers it might be in practice. This remix undoubtedly falls under this last category, partially because if you've heard one Jacques Lu Cont production (with the arguable exception of his contributions to the Two Culture Clash project), then you know how they surge towards pure disco enlightenment, but not-insubstantially because this is a remix of motherfucking Kasabian, and one can only polish a turd so rigorously before wearing a hole through the middle of it and getting your thumb all nasty. Of course, since this is Jacques Motherfucking Lu Cont we're talking about, he's not completely ignorant about what to do; we've all heard him turn a goddamned Starsailor song into a wild-eyed hands-in-the-air anthem, so it's not too surprising to catch yourself grinning like a jackass as the final breakdown really kicks in (unless, of course, you hate life). And given Kasabian's mealy-mouthed allegiance to the dancefloor (seriously, these guys like dancing in the same way Scott Stapp likes Jesus), it's only fair to credit them for coming up with an insatiably propulsive hook, although I've only heard it employed in this mix and have no interest in rounding out my education any more fully. It may only be a seven out of ten at best, but some people's sevens count more than most folks' tens. (Click here to order the "Me Plus One" CDS from Amazon.co.uk)

Loose Joints, "Tell You (Today)" (vocal version) - Here is how stupid I am: I've had this record since about a day after buying my record player, yet failed to realize that I'd recorded it at the wrong speed until sometime last night when I decided to give it a shot at 45 RPM instead of 33 1/3. Can you blame me? Arthur Russell (the driving force behind Loose Joints, for the benefit of the...oh the hell with you if you don't know who Arthur Russell is) may be many things, but "afraid to be an impenetrable weirdo" most certainly isn't one of them; a loping, wheezing funeral alleged disco dirge would seem to be right up Russell's alley - I mean, it didn't even sound bad, just kinda oppressively stately. Of course, in what may be the least necessary sentence ever written on this blog, it sounds exponentially better when played and recorded at the proper speed; there are a few skips in this recording due to my dumb ass accidentally hitting my desk, but you certainly shouldn't have any problems getting to the heart of why "Tell You (Today)" is such a blast to listen to (also hopefully you'll be that much more encouraged to pick up a copy of the vinyl for your own - this ain't a library, kid) with the version provided here. More than possibly anyone with whom I've ever come into contact, Russell has the singular gift of identifying unique trajectories for his songs to take; here, for instance, he rides a loping Latin percussion section and a couple of downright collegiate horns to a furiously joyful singalong conclusion. It's a fantastic song which easily deserves to be discussed in the same conversations as "Is It All Over My Face" and "Go Bang"; the only question about it revolves around why it might have laid in obscurity for so long. Well, that and why I didn't just take a shot at listening to it at 45 RPM. I mean jesus. (Click here to buy the "Tell You (Today)" 12" single from Rough Trade)