The Competition

The Internet is, of course, the greatest time-waster mankind has ever invented. And so this morning I have been wasting my time reading other music blogs. Many are far superior to my own crappy blog, so you might better spend your wasted time at these sites.

I started with the splendidly named "The Number One Songs in Heaven," which is all about classic soul, funk, and dance music. Jumping off from the links list there, I found my way to Get On Down With the Stepfather of Soul!, who posts short bits about obscure and vintage soul, blues, jazz, funk, and gospel recordings (and uses the same Blogger template I do). Both blogs posted audio tributes to Lou Rawls upon his death last week--either one would be a good place for you to start. This post is being finished to the accompaniment of the Stepfather's most recent podcast--which is soul nirvana.

"Heaven" and "Stepfather" (both of which I've added to the blogroll at the right) are MP3 blogs--a growing category in the blogosphere. MP3 blogs post audio files of the tunes they discuss. I've considered doing that here, or perhaps getting into podcasting myself. (Some curious readers have asked me to post airchecks of my radio shows from back in the day. That's also something I'm looking into.) Most blogs of this type keep their files up only temporarily to avoid copyright issues--so if you plow deeply into these blogs, you'll find dead links where the music used to be.

A couple of clicks further on brought me to Captain Video, which hilariously critiques music videos from the 80s. It's hard to believe anybody ever thought the videos featured on the site were cool--but sometimes there's no explaining our past. And even when there is, the explanations may not be pretty: "CAPTAIN VIDEO! feels confident in telling you that literal pounds of cocaine must have been involved in the making of 'Owner of a Lonely Heart.' Also probably more than one art-school freshman. But mostly just cocaine."