“I think when people realized that you’re dancing to a record that goes ‘you think you’re a man but you’re only a boy’ or ‘it’s raining men’ you do kinda realize that you’ve been sucked into the gay world … without prejudice.” — Fatboy Slim

• Divine – You Think You’re a Man

There’s parts of the video that look terrible, they look “80’s”. But I wonder if the colors and the aesthetic are actually bad or they’re only bad because of their strong association with the 80’s. The chicken or the egg?

• Culture Club – Miss Me Blind

• Strafe – Set It Off

This shit’ll make you rob somebody …

• M.O.P – Ante Up

Have mercy!

• ZZ Top – Waiting For The Bus

This is traditional Colombian music, Vallenato. The song is from 1938, but Carlos Vives turned into the biggest pop hit across Latin America in the 90’s, took Vallenato to the mainstream.

As Robert Frost put it, poetry is what gets lost in translation; so the lyrics don’t translate well but, for those interested, they’re about two battling accordion players in some cow-town feud way-back:

“He thought he was going to beat me but when he heard me play, he felt a cold drop of sweat … now he’s lying to my mama, just for the sake of offending me. I’ll lie to his mama so he’ll get offended too. He can kill me or I can kill him so we can end this damn thing.”

• Carlos Vives – La Gota Fria

The tart taste is me bringing these hot styles through.
Some of you bum a few cheers from shock value.
Word power can plow through acres of cornfields,
paragraphs cut like warm steel, perform ill …

• Jurassic 5 – What’s golden

“This song is about what happens when you take too much white powder.” — Pete Townshend

• The Who – Eminence Front

• Bill Withers – Lovely Day

• The Pointer Sisters – Happiness

• JAYDEE – Plastic Dreams

I know that, nowadays, this just sounds like average electronic music but think about the context: about late 1998 we were just coming off the Spice Girls—which made sense in their own way—and going into all sorts of horrible pop what would dominate the airwaves until mid 2000s. Something like this was groundbreaking. Actually there wasn’t “something like” this, it was unique.

Back then there was no internet keeping artists communicated with the audience, and music just seemed to disappear from the mainstream. (I’m not sure how many people can fully understand the seriousness of that statement in today’s world where EVERYTHING seems to be in the mainstream and we’re informed of what the most obscure artist/band is up to, ad nauseam … )

Around late 1998, early 1999, the French electronic scene had gone quiet: Dimitri, Daft Punk, Cassius, Air, all seemed like figments of my imagination. And Rap was full into the fake-thug R&B scenario, monotonous material … I don’t quite remember the timeline but I remember that there was nothing representing real Rap except for the Beastie Boys, until Eminem came. (I remember Wu-Tang/Method and Cypress Hill somewhere around there and the Jason Nevins/Run DMC remix but it wasn’t enough to have a scene and, again, it seemed like music just disappeared.)

But one day I heard this. Wait …

• Fatboy Slim – Love Island

• Benjamin Diamond – Playin’ With Myself

• New Order — Restless
• Andrew Weatherall Remix

• Future Sound of London – Papua New Guinea (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

• Hardway Brothers – Mania Theme (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

• 50 Cent – How to Rob

• Earth, Wind & Fire – Let’s Groove

• Deepah Ones – In The Sky

Today you tell me something y mañana otra cosa …

• Mellow Man Ace – Mentirosa