Radio's Next Dimension
Like Tito Puente before him, Ray Barretto is one of the all-time greatest “Soul Drummers” of them all. He gave us the “El Watusi” in 1961, “Senor 007″ in 1969 and this gem in 1967. The music emanated from el barrio, the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem in New York City, via the then-fledgling Latin [...]
“Don’t Call It A Comeback, I been here for years…,” so begins the title cut from the 4th album called Mama Said Knock You Out by James Todd Smith…aka Ladies Love Cool J…aka LL Cool J. And back in the day in my hood, the strains of LL could be heard emanating from booming systems [...]
I worked at Reader’s Digest in their recorded music division for five years compiling music collections for people who were much older than I was at the time. In effect, I was selling nostalgia to folks whose memories I did not share. The job proved research intensive and ultimately rewarding, and by creating these music [...]
“Follow Your Bliss” is perhaps the most unique recording in the entire B-52’s catalog; it is also the perfect closer to their greatest album. By the time of The B-52’s comeback album Cosmic Thing the group was ten years into their career. After becoming media darlings for the new wave, they soon found themselves in [...]
Growing up in public is nothing new. Sammy Davis, Jr. did it. So did Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. Heck, even Justin Bieber’s doing it now. Some have handled it better than others, and while it’s probably not the easiest thing to do, there are some that make it seem effortless. Justin Timberlake is one [...]
This is Uncle Marty, stick around for an hour as we celebrate This Grand Irish Holiday in a different way… This week on The 3D RadioActivity, we are playing songs that have misheard lyrics. How does this tie in to Saint Patrick’s Day? Because they are known as Mondegreens. A mondegreen is the mishearing or [...]
This breezy instrumental comes from the movie Shaft, one of the most popular Blaxploitation films of all time. However, most people probably first discovered today’s Song Of The Day on the B-side to Isaac Hayes’ number one single “Theme From Shaft.” Hayes initially agreed to write the score for the film only if he was [...]
Herbie Mann was already ten years into a career that established him as a purveyor of Afro Cuban Jazz, Latin Jazz and Bossa Nova music by 1971 and the release of his album Push Push. Mann had released albums for Bethlehem, Prestige, Epic, Verve and Savoy, before signing with Atlantic Records in 1962 where he [...]
There was nothing new about punk and new wave. It came about as a reaction to the bloated excesses of progressive rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis and Yes and their seemingly obligatory side-long multi-part suites of music. (Not that there was anything wrong with that…) Groups like Ramones and Blondie brought back [...]
The first thing that grabs you is the rhythm – jittery, squiggly, purely wiggy and totally glitchy rhythm. Rhythms that don’t make you dance, but do make you move. The ghost of Talking Heads’ Remain In Light lives here. Their fingerprints are all over songs that have been built up from rhythm. They inhabit the [...]
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