2/16 in the 216

So we've gone through a bunch of holiday-ish days here.

Valentine's Day was unobserved and spent taking a much-needed map and painting a whole lot.

President's Day was a Cleveland Adventure Day, which involved a Free Monday at the zoo, where the Rainforest was full of Radio Disney tunes blaring through the palm trees and little girls in princess costumes. We got lunch at the West Side Market and sat on the balcony plotting future Rust Belt Novel greatness, and then walked on the ice at Edgewater and almost wandered out a bit too far... This crack is the line where the solid ice ends and the lake begins.



After that, we went to the Rockefeller Greenhouse to get warm and then on a drive back to the west side through the Flats getting inspired by the old buildings, gray skies, bridges, and pigeons.





And this is for Randal. Evidently the Beast lives in the West Side Market.


And now today it's Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday/Paczki Day depending on where you're at or what you feel like celebrating. I know a few of you are going to see Parliament-Funkadelic tonight, but my current plans are Oberlin for Bela Fleck and the Africa Project, and some preliminary hanging out with my lovely Lorain County people.



I always have grand plans to play festive Carnival-esque music on my show these mornings but usually I'm full of winter melancholy and no amount of colorful costumes and steel drums change the fact that it's snowing outside.

I got a caller this morning who kept requesting all these songs I've never heard of in part because I was born halfway through the Reagan administration and was sheltered from much of 1980's pop culture.

I'm usually pretty flexible about playing people's requests but there are certain lines I draw as far as "this might get me kicked off the air" or "you can hear this on the corporate radio station" or "I just plain don't like it," hence the reason why you won't hear Pink Floyd, NWA, or Rammstein on my show.

So this morning, some guy called me, gave me two different names each time he called and wanted to hear all these 12" single club mixes of 80's R&B songs that I'd never heard of because he "was trying to build a karaoke machine." And it's not like I don't veer into R&B territory occasionally, as I'll throw on some vintage soul or the less mainstream stuff coming out now.

But I have little nostalgia for the 80's in the Madonna and legwarmers sense and the production values in vogue at that time that seemed to afflict every genre. It didn't have to sound that bad but yet it did... so much synthesizer and that terrible drum sound and general overproduction.

And I honestly don't want to use up my airtime playing 9 minute versions of some of this stuff preferring to save that time for Fela. That isn't on a karaoke machine anyway, that's in some DJ's crate. Since we don't really have a lot of circa 1985 house music at the station, I told him I couldn't find any and eventually stopped picking up the phone because each phone call got progressively more weird.

Here, however, is what I did play.

jeff buckley - dream brother
the duke spirit - dog roses
amadou & mariam - fete au village
habib koite - wassiye
daby toure - seta
souad massi - biadi
abdel gadir salim - ati
toubab krewe - bamana niya
angelique kidjo - lakusthu llenga
astrud gilberto - canto de ossanha
antonio carlos jobim - aguas de marco
twilight singers - live with me
metric - collect call
scrawl - wait one more day
afghan whigs - crazy
jawbox - u-trau
tiger trap - for sure
throwing muses - ruthie's knocking / shimmer
the dirtbombs - sun is shining
dengue fever - sni bong
fela kuti - lady
alpay - yekte
bela fleck - ajula mbamba
oumou sangare - djigui