Friday Fun, Songs From Before My Birth--Honorable Mentions

New Friday Fun series.  I wanted to do some earlier songs, and for no particular reason I decided that the cut-off will be songs that were released prior to my birth--February 1978.  That's entirely arbitrary, but there you go.

A couple of ground-rules I just made up.  First, one song per artist or group, because otherwise it would be hard to justify not going with seven or eight Beatles songs.  Second, I'm going to come up with ten, but I'm not going to put them in rank order--it will just be ten songs that are from before 2/78.

But, before we get to the real ten, here are some that I thought about and decided not to go with.

 The Crystals, "And Then He Kissed Me" (1963)


If you know this song, it's probably because you heard it from the movie Goodfellas.  My memory of the song, however, comes from a different cinematic masterpiece, Adventures in Babysitting.  That movie is significant for me because it features my first celebrity/movie crush--Elizabeth Shue.  Shue sings along to this song at the beginning of Adventures in Babysitting, and I was completely in love.  Between Babysitting and The Karate Kid, Shue was the ideal woman to the young Mike.  It's a great song, as well.


Ritchie Valens, "Come on, Let's Go" (1958)

As you will see from the forthcoming posts, I really like the early 50s rock and roll sound.  I will probably rant about this in some later post, but people focus so much on Elvis that they forget all of these other, much better acts.  My own HOT TAEK is that Elvis Presley is the most over-rated musical act of the 20th Century.

Ritchie Valens, however, is not at all over-rated.  Most people know "La Bamba," and some folks know the ballad "Donna," but this one is my favorite.  It just has an infectious energy. 


The Temptations, "I Wish It Would Rain" (1967)

The Temptations are awesome.  I saw them live a few years ago at an outdoor concert.  I don't think it was the original lineup, and they don't exactly move like they did in the 60s, but it is was still great.  


Bob Dylan, "The Times, They Are A'Changin'" (1964)


This is a fantastically written song.  Like all Bob Dylan songs, it is a much better song when someone who is not Bob Dylan sings it.  I like Tracy Chapman's version the best, but there are several good ones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church a
Read more

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more