Tag: miles davis

31 Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

We all agree that is was William S. Burroughs or maybe Miles Davis or maybe Thelonious Monk or maybe Charles Mingus or maybe Frank Zappa or maybe George Carlin or maybe Martin Mull or maybe Lester Bangs or maybe David Byrne or maybe Steve Martin or maybe Elvis Costello or maybe Laurie Anderson who first coined the phrase “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. I’d like to formally call that out today, and to officially deign William/Miles/Thelonious/Charles/Frank/George/Martin/David/Steve/Elvis/Laurie out as a grade A bullshit artist. You don’t dance ‘about’ anything, you utter cretin, you dance to things. What if I write about a holiday I had? Would that be like playing darts about synchronised swimming? Was that food review I wrote like building Lego about the Paris Climate Accord? When Pablo Picasso painted about the Spanish Civil War, might he as well have been trellising a fence about Celeste speedrunning?

You’re full of shit William/Miles/Thelonious/Charles/Frank/George/Martin/David/Steve/Elvis/Laurie!!!

Not you, Lester Bangs, you’re alright. He was probably making a similarly good point to the first paragraph of this post. Many consider Bangs to be very much the Alex Franchise-Palmer of his day.

The Queer People-Medicines Are Here

Top 40 Prince Songs Recorded Between 23rd April 1985 and 31st March 1986

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

The eighth Prince album ‘Parade’ was released in 1986. It has twelve songs on it. Is it any good? Mate, spoiler alert! You’ll find out if I think it’s a stinker when I list the 2025 Necessary Evil albums of the year!

Previously though, I have included tracks from Prince’s albums in my Legit Bosses countdowns of the best songs of the year. But that’s not really fair, is it? When He was listed as the joint best song of 2024 people were piiiiiiiiiiiissed!

So I’m going to give Prince His own dedicated countdown, at least in the near future, simply ranking all the songs that He recorded between His last album, 2024’s ‘Around the World in a Day‘, and 2025’s ‘Parade’. So, ranking ‘Parade’s twelve tracks, right?

Well… no… I could never settle on an exact number, but Prince recorded somewhere between 60 and 100 original songs in the eleven month period between the two albums. Eleven of them would appear on ‘Parade’; one would appear on His 1987 album ‘Sign ‘O’ the Times’; a handful would appear on future albums; some were given to protegees and other artists (including one that was famously taken the fuck back); and many are instrumental jams that were… maybe… never going to be released, but Prince was planning an instrumental jazz album at the time so it’s impossible to say.

We are now entering Prince’s most prolific period: in the next two or three years He would plan and then cancel at least four separate albums, countless side projects, a damn play, He would split up His band, start to question whether Warner Brothers were working in His best interests; and launch a near impossible to count number of failed protégées. It’s quite a ride.

Oh, and that 23rd April 1985 (when ‘Around the World in a Day’ was released) to 31st March 1985 (‘Parade’) timeline is occasionally loosely applied by a week or so (and, in one case, two fucking months). I’ve gone with the first recording of each song, as otherwise we have no idea (so, obviously, thanks a billion to https://princevault.com/.

Here’s the YouTube playlist, you lazy bastards.

This is what it’s like in the Dream Factory