These Songs Be Stolen

I do so love music. In highschool, me and this guy messed around making wonderfully exotic electronic music. I did toy with the idea of linking the ancient website that still somehow has our music posted, but as it involves me rapping that shall never happen. The world is better without it.

My tastes have always been eclectic. Never good, for Chrissakes I started off with Mix Alot and MC Hammer. I actually wore hammer pants in the 90s. No joke. So not good, just eclectic. And I did enjoy the occasional 'phat beat,' so electro was never much a stretch.

But I've only just now been able to re-open my many treasure troves of ill-begot pirate booty. That is to say, my own respective gigabytes. Pining and heartbreak made me allergic. Awe. While I was away from my normal genres, I plugged away at the roots of rock 'n' roll, old soul music, a lot of 80's synthpop, David Bowie, that sort of thing. I made some interesting discoveries. Ok, maybe just interesting to me, because (in no small part thanks to Sex Dwarf) I'm a pretty big fan of Soft Cell.

The first of these 1960's crash and carries was from Diana Ross. Having only heard the Soft Cell version of "Where Did Our Love Go," it was pretty damned neat to see a B&W version broadcast on PBS. The actual youtube is fantastic.



I would later find that wasn't the only black soul singer Soft Cell had covered. Of all things, the very risque 'Tainted Love,' which I felt epitomized the leather-clad icons of novel debauched imagery, was a 1964 original by Gloria Jones.



I have yet to find a 1960's soul singer do an original for 'Sex Dwarf,' though it would be a bit ironic to see it covered by a modern-day black soul singer. I have absolutely, positively, no idea how you'd arrange something like that. And I mean musical arrangement, not emailing Aretha Franklin.

What ultimately spurred a post was realizing that one of my favorite rare Wailers tracks (~1964), which shares a name with my favorite Hawaiian ska band, "Go Jimmy Go," was actually a cover from a 1959 white teen pop star. Having heard the Wailers version...



I'm actually quite partial to the Jimmy Clanton original.

Kids and Gaming Article Live

This morning the Escapist published issue 230, which included a piece I've been working on for them on Kids and Gaming. When I'm not swimming in a sea of deadlines I'd like to say more, and include some notes on my interviews that couldn't make it into the half-dozen drafts I went through to pound that much information into that tight a piece (I've got to thank Jordan Deam at the Escapist for his keen editing).

Particularly, interviews with the ESA's Rich Taylor and my local dungeonmaster both yielded some great quotes, and there were certain issues that wouldn't fit, but the piece seems to do what it should.