If you grew up in the ’80s, you know The Karate Kid, you remember Mr. Miyagi fondly, and you can’t move your hands in a circular motion without thinking, “Wax on, Wax off!”

A recent blog post I came across revealed that Ralph Macchio, who played the Karate Kid, is now 53 years old and thus, I too am old.

That was the bad news— the good news is that it reminded me of this perfect little pop gem. It’s impossible to imagine the high school soccer fight scene in the movie without this track playing in the background.

I like that the song doesn’t purport to have any deeper meaning or subtext: it’s about a summer that sucks. In the words of singer and songwriter, Sara Dallin:

“It looked at the oppressive heat, the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by. We’ve all been there!”

Yes Sarah, we sure have. And it helps to keep the cruelty of summer in mind as the mercury drops and the temperature falls to 8° tonight here in NYC.

Also, this, with some pretty sweet old-school NYC action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ePIZugahFc

There’s a long, rich tradition of soundtracks eclipsing mediocre-to-terrible films. One great example is the rap-meets-rock mash-up that is the soundtrack to 1993’s Judgement Night, a pretty one-dimensional crime-thriller starring Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr, and Denis Leary. The movie was relatively unremarkable but it’s soundtrack, which paired “alternative”-leaning rock + pop bands with rap groups, was pretty innovative and, nearly 22 years later, its songs leave much more of a legacy than the move itself.

Unapologetically standing on the shoulders Aerosmith + Run DMC’s success with their collaboration on “Walk This Way” on Run DMC’s 1986 Raising Hell, the producers of Judgement Night tapped popular rap groups at the time (including Run DMC, for good measure) with hard rock and alternative pop-rock groups, including Sonic Youth (paired with Cypress Hill), Dinosaur Jr (paired with Del tha Funkee Homosapien) and Mudhoney (paired with rap royalty Sir Mix-A-Lot), among others. Most of the musical pairings were done pretty well, producing, if not a great stand-alone track, at least some interesting, innovative musical styles for the time…though the popularity of the soundtrack also largely birthed the almost universally terrible 90’s rap-rock genre to come.

I lost touch with reality now my personality
Is an unwanted commodity (believe it!)

Regardless of the sonic, cultural damage the Judgement Day soundtrack may or may not have done in the long term, it also produced a few excellent tracks; chief among them—”Fallin'”, a catchy, light-hearted song that skillfully pairs New York City’s peace-preaching rap trio De La Soul + Scottish alternative shoegaze-pop band Teenage Fanclub.

The track inexplicably starts off with Teenage Fanclub singing a single line in a weird hillbilly twang. I distinctly recall, in that final year of high school for me—when alternative music began to sneak into mainstream culture and, as a result, us uncool, dye-haired weirdos suddenly started to actually be considered a little bit cool—being asked by a kid who hadn’t said more than a few words to me since middle school if Teenage Fanclub always sang like that. Which was followed by a long discussion of what shoegaze was and him asking “What do you think of the new Pearl Jam?”

Following the strange intro, the song unfolds into a poppy, sparse, laid back soundscape punctuated by a sample from Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'”—the song’s namesake. Over all of that, Posdnuos, Dave, and Maseo from De La Soul deftly spin a tale of the fall of a washed up rapper who can’t get past the thought that everything he does it like fallin’.

Give it a listen below and remember, though it came at a heavy price in the form of bands like Papa Roach, Linkin Park, and (shudder) Kid Rock, it’s still a pretty stellar track.

Fugazi is legend. Fugazi changed my life.

Is that hyperbolic? Nope.

As might be expected, music has always been very important to me — one of my oldest memories is sitting in prayer services with my parents and slowly rocking back and forth in cadence with the shabads.

My early musical discovery followed a typical path: after religious hymns, my first exposure was to the ghazals and Indian film music of my parents, then Top 40 radio of the ’80s, and then I slowly inched to the fringes and discovered increasingly disparate genres and styles… new wave and Depeche Mode, nerdy prog-rock and Rush, jazzy hip-hop and A Tribe Called Quest (all of whom will make an appearance here in due time).

But it was that one cassette that changed everything because it stood in such relentless contrast to all that I’d heard before. I owe it all to Willie Kim, who reluctantly recorded a mix tape for the geeky little 10th grade kid who wouldn’t leave him alone. On one side was Operation Ivy and 411, and the flipside was Fugazi and Minor Threat.

Enough said, right? Through that well worn tape I learned that punk wasn’t full of hateful aggression that I needed to fear, but rather anger and frustration at the very institutions and injustices that I found so intolerable. I discovered that punk rock was my voice, and it was okay that so few in my little suburban town understood.

The legend of Fugazi is now well known to any music fan: they famously capped the cost of most live performances at $5; they started Dischord Records so they could keep record prices low and sell to fans directly; they didn’t sell merchandise; their shows were always all ages; and they rose from the ashes of two wildly influential bands in their own right, Minor Threat and Rites of Spring.

As important and vital as all of that is, none if it would matter if it weren’t for the music. They’d just be four ornery political dudes from Washington, if not for the fact that collectively they were one of the best rock bands that has ever existed.

Over time, their music evolved and borrowed influences from many genres and styles, but it always sounded like Fugazi because it was anchored by the melodic syncopated rhythms of Brendan Canty and Joe Lally, who seemed to share two halves of the same brain. Combined with the vocals and lyrics of Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, and their jagged, groovy guitars, the band created a sound uniquely their own.

Each studio album is a classic, and you could really start anywhere, but for the uninitiated I would recommend picking up 13 Songs and moving along chronologically so you can track their evolution. Were they influential, obviously to punk rock, but also to popular music at large? Was The Clash? Velvet Underground? The Ramones? You will hear snippets and ideas that you swear you’ve heard before… you have, in a song you like that came out 15 years later. There isn’t a post-punk band around that doesn’t reference Fugazi, even if it’s done unwittingly, plus Dischord has released some of the best punk rock of the last three decades.

Simply put, Fugazi changed the sound of music, Fugazi changed the business of music, and Fugazi changed me.

I’ve included “Furniture” here from their last EP because it covers the full trajectory of the band. The song was written in 1987 and performed at their first live show, but not recorded until 2001 during the sessions for their last album, The Argument. Sonically too, the song serves as a good introduction because it shifts directions several times and offers brief glimpses into many facets of their varied palette.

The scene is a multiethnic tropical party. Sexy ladies frolic in grass skirts and torn leopard print. Men in pith helmets brandish guns. Incongruously, a random white dude in a suit is reading the Manhattan Yellow Pages. This is the world of Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

As far as I can recall, it was this tropical party that first drew me in to the twisted and delightful world of Kid Creole, a band that came out of the Bronx in 1980. Inspired by Cab Calloway and an obvious fetish for the tropics, Kid Creole and the Coconuts is the brainchild of the talented August Darnell and his trusty sidekick Coati Mundi. The band made the lower rungs of the charts a few times in the 80s and has featured a rotating cast of players, including “the Coconuts,” a trio of skimpily clad back-up singers.

I first stumbled across Kid Creole during that sweet spot when CDs were king and the only people who collected records were hip-hop fans and old white blues nerds. People were offloading their old LP collections right and left. As long as you weren’t looking for an obscure Josh White recording, LPs were cheap. I often bought based on cover alone, and nobody does covers like Kid Creole. The tropical party in question graces the cover of his 1980 album, Off the Coast of Me, a good entry point into Kid Creole’s sound, which ranges from brassy tropical daydream to exuberant and edgy disco, like the bastard lovechild of Debbie Harry and Jimmy Buffet.

Today I’d like to call your attention to a track from the 1986 Kid Creole album In Praise of Older Women and Other Crimes, which, incidentally, is a low point for Kid Creole covers. The first track is “Caroline Was a Drop-Out,” a truly bizarre song. I’ve always been attracted to dark or scathing songs that sound upbeat. “Caroline Was a Drop-Out” sounds like an 80s dance party in a dark cabaret but translates as pure burn. The song is a “portrait of a wasted mind” and concerns a former friend named Caroline. On this track August Darnell displays his real talent for song writing:

Mangy child, now she dances at the Pussycat
And other topless dives
Somehow the girl capsized
And she’s steady goin’ under
Maybe got something to do with the fact that
Caroline
She was an outcast
A typical smart-ass
Caroline
She was a drop-out
A permanent cop-out
Drop-out, Drop-out, Drop-out…

I probably shouldn’t like this song as much as I do. It’s scathing and judgmental (which is not particularly indicative of other Kid Creole songs) and contains the seemingly right-wing lyric:

She has the tendency
To blame society
I got no sympathy
She had the same opportunities as me

But damn! This song is full of great burns, which pair well with the exuberant yet sweetly menacing sound and the perverse chorus: Drop out…Drop out…Drop out!

When I picked this record up the other day I hadn’t listened to it in years, but I think I may be entering a new era of fandom. If you want me you can find me here, in my imaginary tropical paradise, wearing a pith helmet and drinking a daiquiri. Drop out!

One of my personal all-time favorite bands ever is Sleater-Kinney. I still remember biking to the college record store with my friend, Amy, flipping through the vinyl, coming across Call the Doctor—their sophomore full-length—and biking back with it under my arm.

I bought the album on a whim, never having heard them before, mostly because it looked cool. Getting it home and putting it on the turntable, I remember the distinct impression that I was suddenly discovering something much larger than I could comprehend at the time.

The urgent, independent sound of the songs, the defiance and strength in both the vocals and the guitar-guitar-drums music, the building up from the punk basics into something more complex, melodic, and, in many ways, more meaningful—all of it opened me up to a totally new musical and social movement, one that, as cliché and hyperbolic as it may sound, changed my life from that point on. I had already been pretty involved in the local feminist organization, but this album and the others its discovery led to provided a kind of soundtrack to feminism for many of us in the mid-ninties.

As most of you reading likely already know, after a ten year hiatus, the band just released their eighth album, No Cities to Love, and is touring extensively to promote it. I wrote that album up a couple weeks back on our studio’s journal when they released a full stream of it. We actually also just today posted a really, really great interview Abbi Jacobson + Ilana Glazer of Comedy Central’s Broad City did with the band there too.

Here at Forgotten Favorite, though, since most readers/listeners are likely already pretty familiar with Sleater-Kinney and most of their songs, I thought I’d reach way back to the depths of their musical catalog to bring you a song that is not even close to indicative of the band and their admirable politics—their little-heard cover of Boston‘s “More Than A Feeling”. It was one of three songs the band contributed to a pretty stellar compilation on Villa Villakula titled Move Into The Villa Villakula in 1996.

If you’re interested in hearing more early deep tracks from the band—most of which feature their first drummer, Laura Macfarlane—I stumbled across this 2008 blog post with downloadable MP3s of all three Villakula tracks, the band’s first 7″, and a great track they contributed to the 1998 Free to Fight 7″/educational booklet series from Chainsaw/Candyass.

I was reminded of this album by a friend’s recent Facebook post inquiring about everyone’s favorite soundtracks. I threw out the first three that came to mind: Pump Up the Volume, Donnie Darko and Clueless. All excellent albums to be sure, but obviously this was nowhere near a complete list. Many of the commenters mentioned The Harder They Come and I realized I hadn’t thought of it because I always forget it’s a soundtrack— it feels too much like its own fully realized album. I’d venture to guess that many are like me and have never seen the film. I’ve tried but could never get passed the few minutes mark (and I’m a huge movie geek), perhaps because I was attempting to watch without subtitles and the film’s characters use a rather heavy local patois.

The soundtrack features Jimmy Cliff on half the songs (he is also the star of the film) and also includes Scotty, The Melodians, The Maytals, The Slickers and Desmond Dekker. Not only are there no throwaway tracks on the album, but it isn’t hyperbole to say that each track is a reggae or rocksteady classic. The soundtrack is often credited with introducing reggae to the US, and with one listen you understand why… I sort of think of it like the Rumours of reggae. You might not even remember how you ended up with a copy, but you have one, or at least you most definitely should.

I’ve attached the soulful Many Rivers to Cross here because it’s the least popular of the Jimmy Cliff tracks, but honestly, I could have selected any of them, they’re all just that great.

As some of you may or may not have heard, following a not-so-great music-tech trend, Björk‘s forthcoming studio album, Vulnicura, was leaked in full over the weekend (Madonna’s forthcoming Rebel Heart fell prey to the same cyber-jerkiness late last year).

Obviously, that sucks. Björk’s long been one of my favorite artists, always challenging herself to reinvent musically, constantly pushing herself creatively and technologically (the previous album, Biophilia, was largely composed on a tablet and was released with a separate app for each song), and acting as my first gateway into modern electronic music since my high school Depeche Mode days. For someone to essentially violate the creative process of someone who I respect so much creatively is, in short, a bummer.

But, in the most shallow of senses, as a fan, at least it’s fast-tracked her talking about the album more, announcing some NYC tour dates, and releasing…some honestly weird album artwork. Via her newsletter yesterday, when announcing pre-sale tickets, Björk wrote: “so that you can have what we in iceland call ‘forskot á sæluna’ , which , translated very literally , means ‘a head start on the pleasure’. we like to say it when we do things like having the first glass of wine before dinner, or opening the first present before it’s christmas.” Which is obviously cute.

you’re so curiously pure
only before you I’m humble

One my most coveted deep tracks from her early post-Sugarcanes solo career is “I Go Humble”, the second track to an EP that’s essentially a single for “It’s Oh So Quiet”, arguably the most stand-out track on her sophomore full-length, Post. “I Go Humble” veers back into that beautifully minimalist electronic field that showcases Ms. Guðmundsdóttir’s crystalline voice and unique style.

For the record, little-known fact heard straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, as my partner, Katie, listened to a 90s radio interview with Björk, “It’s pronounced ‘Björk‘, like ‘he’s a big jerk‘”.

Vulnicura is reported to officially be released this March, along with an exhibit on Björk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that runs into June.

Jeru the Damaja first reached a wide audience outside of his native East New York in 1993 with the release of his debut single Come Clean, but it wasn’t until several years later when the track was featured on DJ Andy Smith’s excellent mix-tape The Document that he entered my consciousness (even though he had a verse on Gang Starr’s I’m The Man, a song I liked but never paid enough attention to because there were better songs on Daily Operation).

I remember driving to the record store in San Diego to pick up his debut album The Sun Rises in the East while listening to Come Clean on The Document. The album did not disappoint… an absolute classic of old school Hip-Hop lyrics and production, and essential for anyone who has even a passing interest in the genre.

So many bodies on my microphone, the shit’s haunted.

At the time, I didn’t know that it would be my future home, and I’m pretty sure everything I knew about Brooklyn came from music (starting with the Beastie Boys) but it held a certain calling that continues to this day for so many people. Everyone everywhere wants to make a pilgrimage to Brooklyn, or at least they should (recent developments notwithstanding). And so it was that Brooklyn Took It resonated with me most because it further fueled the mystique of this mythical land somewhere in New York… I mean, just what was so cool about Brooklyn?! I would find out eventually.

This track is perfect from start to finish, with DJ Premiere’s legendary production hand, a KRS-One sample, and one of my favorite rap lyrics (sidebar).

Jeru released another great album, Wrath of the Math, but failed to recapture the same success again and eventually fell out with both Guru and DJ Premiere of Gang Starr. Still, the first two albums are classics.