Today, I take my guidelines from the tiktaalik, our distant ancestor. They gave up the sea for the land, and in the increasing number of days of the year when our air is equal parts air, water, and foreign matter, I feel evolutionarily challenged with the mechanism my forbears bequeathed me. This mix makes me feel a little more in step with the New World of Lowered Expectations and Increased Tedium in which I find myself. Also, I just picked up (and can't recommend it highly enough) the 2016 compilation of recordings of Moondog. Several tracks are scattered through here. And some, like the first track, from 1953, are so ahead of/out of their time as to stagger my brain. That one could be a Penguin Cafe tune from their best records. More in comments.
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I’m glad I stayed for the duration of the mix. At first, the transition from Moondog to Lauryn Hill to Derry & Moondog... it didn’t taste right. But then after Bowie, I think it was at this point that I imagined you might have a deeper rooted meaning behind the mix. Perhaps it’s an ideal radio station - one that shares a diverse collection of ideas that shouldn’t be bound by a majority vote of what should be considered “popular music”. I appreciate that.
Paul, thanks for taking the time to comment. Yes, sometimes what seems a plausible narrative in my mind can be apprehended as playing 52 card pick-up with my library. But throwing the i-ching with it may be pretty near the mark. In other words, just go with it and find meaning in it after the fact. In high school, when I was getting a ride, and not on the bus, the radio station of choice was WXPN, which back then was free-form radio at its most engeging. Thier morning show, "Crossroads" wandered all over the map, from various time-periods, genres, and so on. And they didn't shy away from the occasional current hit. I always loved that. I used to listen at work to WFMU on headphones, and those shows cost me a huge amount of money in hunting down CDs I'd never heard of. Anyhow, nice to hear from you. Peace.
Nouba Istihilal is a track I found while searching for Moroccan/Andalusian music I heard on the radio in Morocco in 2001. At noon, the radio plays an hour of people chanting the Q'uran, which is very conducive to siesta hours, when everyone lies in the shade to digest lunch. Then often times, they play this kind of stuff afterward for a while. Well, I went around, every time we were in a market or anyplace, and it was hard to make the guys running the music stalls what I was looking for. They were young, and carried almost entirely Moroccan pop/hybrid music, and western pop and so on. And the expression they gave me, of scorn/pity, was not unlike you would get here in a Target asking for, well, Andalusian music, I suppose.
So, about Moondog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moondog The more I learn about him the more I like him. He was so cruelly reduced to a cartoon beatnik in popular culture, thatit throws one off the trail of his remarkable life and accomplishments. I had previously only had some of his live recordings on the corner at 6th Avenue and 56th, like the "Fog On the Hudson" heard here - a duet with the Queen Queen Elizabeth. But delve, and enjoy, and this collection, "The Viking of Sixth Avenue," is a marvel. It was reviewed in the New Yorker in 2016, and I didn't stumble upon it until I was culling the old pile of magazines in the bathroom. Thanks, COVID!