Rambling Rhoads: 2016-10-16

As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Thursday, October 20, 2016

#132 Can't Hold Us – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SihoKQ-uLqE

Regardless of all the crap these guys got about beating out Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Kanye, and Jay-Z for Best Rap Album, this song has one of the great anthem-type choruses of the century. (They also deserve credit for “Same Love”, and “Thrift Shop” is kind of fun if you stick to the version edited for radio airplay.) I fully expect it to be played at sporting events as long as, say, “Seven Nation Army”, and hopefully long after the powers that be mercifully retire the woefully-overplayed “Mammy Blue”.

How to address the post-election anger

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-if-trump-loses-big-the-anger-will-remain-heres-how-the-left-can-address-it/2016/10/14/c848c4b0-8f02-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html?utm_term=.d667a962afd9

Great column by the always-thoughtful E.J. Dionne Jr. about how we need “to understand why Trump happened and to face up to how failures on the left and center-left have contributed to the flourishing of a new far right…”