A few weeks ago I sat in a scuzzy motel room in Arkansas, listening to Elvis run through his greatest hits. It was just past midnight, the weather was hot, trucks rattled the windows overlooking Interstate 40, and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ played like a soulcrushing existential meditation:

And although it’s always crowded, you can still find some room,
Where broken-hearted lovers cry away their gloom…

It was strange, digging an Elvis song. I can’t listen to Elvis without hearing Chuck D looping on a boombox somewhere in Brooklyn circa 1989: Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me you see, straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain. Motherfuck him and John Wayne. (And then Radio Raheem slams the box on Sal’s countertop and demands two slices.) Like many of my generation, I was raised on Public Enemy long before I ran into Elvis. And Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing drilled that lyric into my brainpan. Elvis was a racist. He stole his music from black people.

Stole. That’s a strong word. Yet nobody will dispute that Elvis rode to fame on the back of old blues songs. And there’s the story that in 1957 he said, “The only thing black people can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my music.” According to music historian Peter Guralnick, Elvis never said anything like that — and he was devastated by the rumor, choosing to address the matter in Jet Magazine before permanently shunning the press. “Tracing that rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth,” Jet later wrote. “Some said Presley had said it in Boston, which Elvis had never visited. Some said it was on Edward Murrow’s show, where Elvis had never appeared.”

And that Chuck D lyric? “As a musicologist — and I consider myself one — there was always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions. As black people, we all knew that,” said Chuck D. “My whole thing was the one-sidedness — like, Elvis’ icon status in America made it like nobody else counted . . . My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes. As far as Elvis being ‘The King,’ I couldn’t buy that.”

According to Guralnick, Elvis would have been the first to agree:

When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ’n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.” The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

“The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley,” said Sam Phillips, the Sun Records founder who discovered him, “had to be one of the biggest things that ever happened. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music, but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think?”

Elvis desegregated his concerts. He name-checked blues and boogie artists at his shows. But: “Chuck D’s attack was not aimed at Elvis the person, but Elvis the institution,” said Helen Kolawole, in an essay for The Guardian called ‘He Wasn’t My King’. “The Elvis myth to this day clouds the true picture of rock ‘n roll and leaves its many originators without due recognition.”

* * *

And what the hell is this Elvis myth? I drive to Graceland, skirting past shuttered warehouses and banged-up row houses. I expect to see ferris wheels and giraffes because I keep confusing Graceland with Neverland. (Man, America transforms its icons into such strange and loopy creatures.) Elvis Presley Boulevard is a tattered miracle mile. Two for one bacon burgers. Ladies’ night at the car wash. A sign at Days Inn says, “If you aren’t an Elvis fan, there is no possible explanation for you.” I get cut off by a guy in a Yukon XL with a bumper sticker that says Blow Me.

I pull into a non-descript lot and pay a fortune for parking. Admission is $30. Only members of the “Elvis Insiders Club” are eligible to receive a discount on Elvis Entourage VIP packages. A shuttle bus takes our group across the street to a mansion on a hill. Remember that scene in The Jerk, when Steve Martin finally gets his dream house? He writes his mother:

Remember how I used to wish for a living room with a plaster lion in it from Mexico and how I always wanted a large 24-seat dining table in a dining room with original oil paintings by Michelangelo and Rembrandt and remember how I always wanted a rotating bed with pink chiffon and zebra stripes and remember how I used to chit chat with dad about always wanting a bathtub shaped like a clam and an office with orange and white stripes and remember how much I wanted an all red billiard room with a giant stuffed camel and how I wanted a disco room with my own disco dancers and a party room with fancy friends and remember how much I wanted a big backyard with Grecian statues, s-shaped hedges and three swimming pools?

Graceland is kind of like that. Nouveau riche. Ticky tacky. Classic American excess, tinged with sadness because there’s the room he proudly decked out for his mother and over there you’ll see the room where he recorded his last album because he was too drugged up to make it to the studio, and downstairs you’ll find the lounge by the racquetball court where his body was found.

A photographic interlude:

Elvis bought that house when he was twenty-one. A kid who grew up poor and got lucky. Right place, right time. You get the sense that he knew it, too. Throughout his career, Elvis quietly sent money to Memphis charities and poor families. A thousand dollars here, five thousand there. When he received the Jaycee award for being one of the ‘Ten Outstanding Men of the Nation’ for his charity efforts, it was one of the only awards he showed up to collect. He was so proud of this award that he carried it with him on all of travels after giving this famous misty-eyed speech:

When I was a child, I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream that I’ve dreamed has come true a hundred times. I’d like to say that I learned very early in life that without a song the day would never end. Without a song a man ain’t got a friend. Without a song the road would never bend. Without a song, so I keep singing a song…

The shuttle bus dumps us in the gift shop. Elvis pillows, mailboxes, nightlights, tablecloths, oven mitts, spice racks, soap dispensers, soda, board games, and a 3-piece luggage set.

More Americans watched Elvis’s Hawaiian TV special than the walk on the moon.

Big Momma Tornton first performed “Hound Dog” in 1952, four years before Elvis recorded it. Here she is, doing it with Buddy Guy in ’65:

Helen Kolawole offers this thought experiment:

Let’s imagine that instead of Elvis mania, Big Momma Thornton — author of “Hound Dog” — reigns supreme with her ode to no-good men. Big Momma’s cultural conquest gives birth to a radical white teen culture and a complete and lasting overhaul of America’s putrid racial politics. White teens frighten their parents silly with their extreme bids not to become Elvis’s pale imitation of the black performers he witnessed, but the very image of Big Momma. Sounds outlandish? Any more audacious than stubbornly maintaining that this talented — but more importantly white — man deserves to be king of a genre created by black people?

It’s a challenging scenario, although Kolawole gets one key fact wrong: Big Momma Thornton was the first to record “Hound Dog”, yet the song was actually written by two Jewish guys named Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. And if you head over to the Stax Museum, you’ll hear Rufus Thomas and Booker T. talking about tuning into gospel and the Grand Ole Opry and being influenced by Hank Williams, who in turn was influenced by Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers, who played with Louie Armstrong . . . and American pop music is just such a crazy mixed-up thing with so many bright spots and sad corners and catchy hooks and horrible endings.

And it’s so influential. It’s amazing how much Public Enemy impacted my views of a troubling icon.

Here’s Heartbreak Hotel, in case you’re in a scuzzy motel tonight and you feel like listening to it:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel
RCA, 1956

Notes: Peter Guralnick, How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?; see also his excellent biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley; more about Big Mama Thornton; Helen Kolawole’s ‘He Wasn’t My King’; more about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; Elvis & Racism; complete transcript of The Jerk

At a Golden Corral Buffet in Panama City, where the air is golden.

Somewhere in Utah

Sasha Frere Jones nails Spiritualized®: “It is close to impossible to make rock music this epic while maintaining the sense that a single, fragile individual exists at the center of the storm. Somehow, Pierce and his band did, avoiding the pompous while achieving a whole lot of big.”

From the solar fuzz and narcotic blitz of ‘Lay Back in the Sun’ and Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space to the reverb-drenched Delta rock and blues of ‘Lord Can You Hear Me’ and Amazing Grace, Jason Pierce has crafted one of the most emotional discographies on record: these are cinematic songs of escape, compulsion, and redemption.

On Friday, Spiritualized® will take the stage at Radio City Music Hall to perform Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space in its entirety with an orchestra and choir. Man, I would love to go. More info.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Spiritualized® - Feel So Sad (Rhapsodies)
from Feel So Sad. Dedicated, 1991 | buy mp3s
A quiet and sprawling reprise.

And if you haven’t heard one of the best songs ever, here’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

My grandfather and some friends in the days before Friendster

Are we using status updates to keep up with the Joneses? Stan James explains why his Facebook friends often make him feel bad:

On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation to exotic beaches. In person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marriage. On Facebook they have been to gliteratee tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company. It is a strange case of schadenfreude for me to hear this, knowing that I had been jealous of their beach time and glamor. More »

“It cannot be psychologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms,” says James, drawing an parallel between television and Facebook: “Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.”

I took a short leave of absence from Facebook for reasons I can’t quite remember. Something about it being a relentless timesuck. But after transferring across Helsinki, Detroit, New York, and New Orleans within a year, I’m (re)learning that it’s pretty fantastic to be able to easily remain in touch with the people who pass through your life. Even if it’s only via their ambient chatter.

My ‘all or nothing’ reaction to technology fascinates and puzzles me. I’m working on being a ‘sometimes’ kind of guy.

And of course we’re constructing edited identities for the screen. It’s a good thing. When you visit somebody’s home, nobody takes you into the basement right away. Most people don’t want to go down there anyway.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Gary Numan – Are Friends Electric?
Beggars Banquet, 1979 | buy buy mp3s
Released in 1979 as part of Numan’s ‘Tubeway Army’. “The single topped the UK charts and is notable for being the first electronic/synthesizer-based record to become a hit in the post-punk era. Whilst the track’s new and distinctive sound stood out at the time, sales also benefited from the record company’s use of a picture disc…” More

A tip of the hat to the relentlessly great & prolific Daily Dish.

Zapruder film, frame #285. Babushka Lady stands behind a father and son as JFK is shot.

While doing some research tonight, I ran into the Babushka Lady for the first time. She’s the unknown woman who points a camera directly at President Kennedy when he gets shot in the head. Standing behind a father and son, she wears a headscarf and films the scene. After everybody scatters, she keeps rolling tape before heading towards the grassy knoll.

And then she disappeared. Nobody could find her. The tape never surfaced.

Babushka Lady. A spectral American figure. The stuff of national ghost stories.

In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver announced that she was the Babushka Lady. She said the FBI confiscated her assassination film. They told her to keep quiet. A lot of people said she was lying. She was too young. She was an exotic dancer. But Oliver claimed that, in addition to being muscled by the FBI, she also hung out at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, where she was introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald and several tangential mob and CIA figures. These connections fueled the engines of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Don Delillo’s Libra, and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid.

I ran into the Babushka Lady tonight because I’m researching American sheriffs. And here’s a strange quirk in American history: Beverly Oliver’s husband was George McGann, a Dixie Mafia hit man involved in the murder of Sheriff Buford Pusser’s wife. Pusser was a badass sheriff (and former professional wrestler) who was stabbed and shot fifteen times (and survived) while fighting the State Line Mob, a Mafia outfit that ran gambling rings, prostitutes, and guns along the border of Tennessee and Mississippi. One night, two cars pulled alongside Pusser’s patrol car and opened fire, killing his wife and disfiguring Pusser.

Pusser swore revenge. Three years later, Oliver’s husband turned up dead in Texas, along with another accomplice. In 1974, Pusser drove his Corvette into an embankment and died. His life story inspired the 1973 film Walking Tall, as well as a remake starring “The Rock” in 2004. And I’ve driven the Buford Pusser Memorial Highway across Tennessee several times.

Now back to that image. Frame #285. A shattering moment before my time, yet we continue to reel from its effects. Remember Obama’s inauguration, when the media was impressed that he stepped outside of the limo? They said he was brave.

The Babushka Lady is just a purplish smear against a vivid green, a mysterious woman standing before a dying president. It’s a blurry image that plugs into so many strange threads of American history. Endless mythologies, now surfacing as colorful names and obituaries hyperlinked across the internet.

Maybe Beverly Oliver wasn’t the Babushka Lady. But we know a woman stood on the grass that day, filming the murder of a president.

As I write this, news is breaking that WikiLeaks posted 91,000 classified documents about the Afghan War. Strange symmetry between today’s endless crush of accessible information and the frustration of staring into a grainy frame of mysterious film from fifty years back, looking for clues.

Notes: All of the Zapruder frames are available here; here’s a site saying Oliver isn’t the Babushka Lady; here’s a site that says she is. Here’s some general info on Buford Pusser and his movie. And The Rock.

I procrastinate better than you. Here’s proof: I started off researching the origins of K and W call letters for American radio stations while working on a legitimate project, yet I somehow ended up reading a manual about how to pick a good television show to watch. Now I’m blogging about it.

Here’s what I learned: Pick shows that you can relate to, it gets you into it. Don’t pick a short series that often has repeats. You will feel bored. Also: Try not to miss any episodes because when you tune back in you won’t know what is going on. And: You might feel emotional if it is a drama show. Try to remember that it’s only a tv show.

You’re welcome.

A message in a Bywater lot that bears repeating: The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. Martin Luther King said it in 1963, in a volume of sermons called Strength to Love.

Artillery in the town square of Brady, Texas

Tonight the news wires are running this statement from Pyongyang: “North Korea will legitimately counter with their powerful nuclear deterrence the largest-ever nuclear war exercises to be staged by the U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces.” So many terrifying things about that sentence.

Why are we exercising?

In other fractured war news, I recently picked up two vivid pieces of World War II vocabulary:

“Rommel’s Asparagus”: wooden posts capped with mines and placed underwater, intended to break apart boats landing on the beach.

“Hedgehogs”: six-foot steel girders, welded together and topped with mines to defend against landing craft.

Odd to think of a time when war was that concrete, that victory came down to navigating around a wooden post. I’ve been rereading Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex. Most of today’s politicians would probably call him unpatriotic:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

. . . . which collides right into Top Secret America, the chilling Washington Post investigation into “a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it’s fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping its citizens safe.” And this system is huge. You already knew that. But the details are even scarier, as we transition into a mercenary army:

The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government’s dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S. agency is allowed to do.

And if North Korea acts up, will they protect us?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Fela Kuti – Sorrow, Tears and Blood
from Black President. EMI Nigeria, 1981 | buy mp3s
It’s been all Fela all the time lately. And if you haven’t read his bio yet . . . Jesus.

Sources: thanks to Alex Pruteanu for alerting me to the Washington Post link; the quote about contractors appears in National Security, Inc; here’s Eisenhower’s complete speech

Bywater, New Orleans

Unknown relative circa 1950

In response to my hazy ramble about a nationwide anxiety disorder, Alex Pruteanu writes:

Make no mistake, we are part of an empire in quick decline. Evidence: all the nay sayers making static about how great this country is and blaming whichever party is in the White House. Empires have historically always gone down with its citizens boasting how great they are, and harkening back to the good ol’ days of glory (don’t even get me started on the cultural “phenomenon” of Mad Men — an obvious, overt desire to return or regress to the days of America’s muscle flexing, dominating years). »

He’s right. You hear it everyday: Tell us stories about how great we were. Although I don’t think Mad Men necessarily paints a desirable portrait of the 1960s, I love the vibe of the show and Alex’s comment about nostalgia strikes a nerve. I’m increasingly drawn towards the images, songs, and codes of bygone eras. But what am I looking for in the past?

Every generation waxes about the good old days. When our politicians and pundits speak about the greatness of the 1950s, they’re usually talking about how fantastic America was (if you happened to be a straight, white, heterosexual Christian male). Most of us, however, aren’t admiring Don Draper, surf music, or spaceship Cadillacs for reactionary political reasons. My reasons are technological. Aesthetic.

Q: If you could snap your fingers and replace today’s technologies with telegrams, newsprint, and rotary telephones, would you do it? Sometimes I think I would. Especially when that first wave of email hits in the morning. Or when I’m fighting back the urge to check my inbox. The constant need for more data. The impulse to refresh something, anything. I wonder if these technologies are good for me, if they’re making me a better thinker or a more empathetic person.

Technology might explain why many of us find comfort in revisiting the past: products like Mad Men offer a glimpse at a life that seemed simpler, more streamlined. Especially now that we’ve crossed into a world of infinite information and options. This lifestyle is exciting and overwhelming, but sometimes you want to take your ball and go home.

You can probably draw a parallel between the ‘malaise’ of the 1970s and the uptick in 1950s nostalgia via Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days.

My nostalgia isn’t political; it’s for typewriters and big novels and a time when men didn’t wear sneakers to the office.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Muddy Waters – I Feel Like Going Home
Chess Records, 1948 | buy some mp3s

My dad and some other kid in the 1950s, probably sober.

Woke up to a breaking news alert from CNN: Drugging kids for parents’ relief called abusive. Glad we’re drawing the line somewhere.

Why young children were given drugs such as antidepressants, stimulants and antipsychotics were also unclear. The motives, he said, could widely vary, such as overwhelmed parents looking for a break, amusement or punishment.

Also, a story in the Times-Picayune about a woman being charged with abandonment after leaving her 3-year old in a hot car while she gambled at the casino. And a 3-month old girl was recently rescued from a car by mall workers while her mother went shopping. At least 20 kids have overheated and died this summer after being left in cars with the windows cracked.

I’m going back to bed.

Here’s a picture of my street at sundown, as seen when standing on a ladder in the middle of the road.

Also: I came back from breakfast yesterday to discover eleven Christian children from Nebraska cleaning the gutters in front of our house. They wore bright green backpacks that said We Believe and their neon shirts said I Care About Malaria! Turns out they’re everywhere: 25,000 teenagers from Lutheran churches across the nation have gathered in New Orleans this week to clean and sweep:

The Youth Gathering in New Orleans will support community renewal and reconstruction projects in that city and a new nationwide grant program to help Lutheran Church youth groups reach unchurched youth.

On the one hand, great: if a kid from Wisconsin wants to clean my gutter in the name of Jesus, that’s fine by me. I probably won’t get around to it. On the other hand: malaria?

Anyway, I’m home.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Electric Prunes – Kyrie Eleison / Mardi Gras (When the Saints)
from Easy Rider, 1969 | buy mp3s
Part of the introductory rites of the Roman Catholic Mass, Kyrie eleison is Greek for “Lord, have mercy”. It’s also playing when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda get zorched at a brothel.

Somewhere outside of Bakersfield, California

Here are two recent items that capture a creeping unease in our personal and public worlds:

1. Personal. McSweeney’s recently published Oyl Miller’s alarming reworking of Ginsberg’s Howl, appropriately called Tweet: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am…” Every generation is freaked by its technologies, but these days we’re wandering into new terrain: we’re redrawing the line between private and public in real time while our work, entertainment, and relationships become digitized. Dependance kicks in. So does resentment. And as we gravitate towards screens like moths, it’s natural to wonder if all that exposure can be healthy.

2. Public. In The New York Times, Michael Goodman writes about the broader trauma of the oil spill in A Spill into the Psyche, and a Respite: “The deepest damage of the spill may be the loss of confidence in institutions, like the federal government and a multinational oil company that held itself up as a beacon of environmental sensitivity. Combine that with public exhaustion over two wars, economic insecurity and disgust over the return of bonuses on Wall Street.” You could argue that increasing our independence from the government and corporations is a positive development in the long term — but what does rugged individualism look like in today’s interconnected world?

There’s no connection between these two clippings beyond a few thin emotional threads. A dark feeling in the corner of the mind. Something you can’t put your finger on. Generalized anxiety disorder. Everybody keeps asking, “What’s next?” Always the fear, the sense that something wicked is coming down the pike. I first felt this sensation shortly after September 11, during those moments when the subway would stall under the river for a minute or two. In the past, you’d blame it on train traffic or routine maintenance. Now there’s an extra beat as you imagine what the street might look like as you climb the stairs. Now that sensation is commonplace, the sense that anything could happen, that the wheels might come off at any moment.

And maybe life is scarier these days. After all, we’re living in an age of oil spill weather forecasting and live-tweet rioting. Or perhaps these morbid intimations of social collapse are simply part of growing up, of aging as an individual as well as a nation. You feel vulnerable. Things get creaky. Or perhaps the 24/7 chatter keeps twisting the screws, with top-ranking articles like What’s Behind Yet Another Summer of Racial Discontent? Either way, many of us are nervous. And anxiety can get ugly. Just look at the fear radiating from the Tea Party. If somebody rational doesn’t calm our nerves, somebody scary might do it…

Seems like a good time to throw this on the hi-fi:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Curtis Mayfield – If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go
from Curtis. Curtom Records, 1970 | buy mp3s

Notes: Oyl Miller‘s website; brought to my attention by the alert GJAC; Frontline’s Digital Nation; scary article about BP vs. the government; golf clap for the Tea Party expelling a racist; and just how racist does Mark Williams have to be before CNN will refuse to invite him on its network? Good question.

New Orleans recycles. So do its sea monkeys. This is a photo of our recycling bin. Thought you might like to see it. After Katrina, curbside recycling was suspended, but you can hire a service for a few bucks a month to collect your paper and plastics. Here’s the New Orleans recycling guide.

Remember the song ‘Plastic Dreams’? It has nothing to do with New Orleans. That’s Detroit. WJLB. Ladies’ night at Legends. Cars parked on Belle Isle with the doors open, that bass line booming across the river to Canada. ‘Plastic Dreams’ marked the first time I heard an electronic track make the top eight at eight. And it rocked The New Dance Show with RJ Watkins. A guy dressed up like Batman, popping down the catwalk while that organ jumped and those hi-hats sprayed across the stereofield. Imagine being that guy, putting on your cape and pulling your mask into place, saying “I’m going to go techno dancing on local access television.” I should be more like that, throwing caution to the wind because everybody is a star.

The internet provides a clinical synposis of Jaydee’s hit:

The song, an instrumental, features a prominent Hammond organ style synthesizer melody played in a jazzy, improvised manner. With some versions ten minutes long, the number is known for giving dancers a good aerobic workout.

There are 38 versions of this song. Here’s an edit of the original for your Saturday afternoon jazzercise:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jaydee – Plastic Dreams
SPV, 1992 | buy mp3s

In the parking lots of many gas stations in Louisiana, you’ll find trucks and folding tables selling delicious food. For the record: crayfish, crawfish, and crawdads are all the same thing. Louisiana supplies 98% of the crayfish harvested in the United States. In 1987, Louisiana produced 90% of the crawfish in the world. 70% was consumed locally.