Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
A Definitive Absolutely Accurate Ranking of James Bond Theme Songs
The title says it all. Mostly. It doesn’t tell you why I have decided to put together a ranking of every James Bond theme song. I could tell you that there are great reasons for this, but I would be lying. The real reason: I’ve been watching and re-watching James Bond movies on and off for years, both as a kind of weird comfort watching and because the culture critic in me wants to understand them. The other real reason: cause I want to. In preparing for this, I had to consider two factors: first, what criteria to use to judge these songs, because no ranked list would be valid if we didn’t pretend to some kind of objective measure; and second, how to use such a list to incorporate my brother’s feedback, as he was coaxed into participating in this fiasco for our mutual amusement. The second of these, I simply decided that we’d use the ranking average of our two scores for the final score in one of the criteria categories. The more difficult task was coming up with the criteria in the first place. And so with much deliberation with myself, a little with my brother, and a little more with other folks who also have opinions about things, I came up with this list of five:
The Arts are the Glue that Holds Civilization Together
Something I have been thinking about a lot since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its profound impact on American (and global) society is the place of the arts in our everyday lives. So many of us are binge watching Netflix or other services, reading far more than we used to, downloading comics or writing our own stories, perusing fine art or setting up easels of our own, or doing all manner of creative and artsy things, both for amusement and to keep ourselves busy. I’ve been cramming in a metric ton (officially weight) of Star Trek across four decades of the franchise, blogging (as I am here), and cataloguing my books (not so artsy, but still nice). For myself, this has been part of an effort to keep me from the more destructive behaviors I might engage in (ranting on Twitter, for example) and to help me adjust to what will surely be 2 or 3 months (at least) of near total physical isolation for others. And in doing all of this and seeing all of what is happening around me, I’ve started to answer a crucial question out loud to myself: why do the arts matter yesterday, today, and tomorrow? And I think I’ve got a decent answer to that. I’d argue that the arts are the glue that holds civilization together on both the personal, national, and global scale. It’s the thing that allow us to express ourselves, to find joy and relief, to be human and explore what that even means. The arts are everything.
Joy to End Your Evening
I have nothing really to say today. It’s been a long day… So instead of trying to say something interesting about teaching or research or pandemics or nerd stuff, here’s a music video that continues to bring me absolute joy. I hope it brings you joy, too!
Week of Joy (Day Three): “Young and Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey (Myan and Shane52 Remix)
I’ve been jamming to this tune something fierce. It has a really simple melodic background, but there’s something that just feels so good about it. And now I’m sharing it with you!
Music Video: “Yellow” by Sarah Fimm
I’ve been getting a few music requests in the last few months and I’ve been trying to think about how to talk about them on this blog. It’s not common to find music which has a genre slant to it (soundtracks are a different beast, after all) or that contains messages influenced by revolutionary science figures like Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking. “Yellow” is such an influenced work. First, the music video (after the fold): Here’s how her publicist describes her work: Sarah Fimm [is] a dark and ethereal rock-pop composer, artist and singer, whose upcoming studio album, Near Infinite Possibility, will be released in early May. The first single off the album, “Yellow,” is inspired by the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman who journals her descent into psychosis, paranoia, delusion and desperate fear, as the disparity between reality and the events of her mind crumble. Imagine yourself confined to a bedroom, forbidden to work, hiding journal entries from your husband, so that you can “recuperate” from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency,” a diagnosis common to women in the Victorian period. Elements of Gilman’s short story are brought to life in Sarah Fimm’s groundbreaking video. Employing tropes of horror films, eerie color treatments and quick edits, the video invokes feelings of curiosity and wonder, and at the same time, macabre and unease. The goal was to create a constantly shifting palette of reality to obscure the difference between dreams and waking life, between the conscious and unconscious mind. The dramatic cinematography of the video was inspired by silent film, contemporary art, and design; psychologically, it draws upon the writings of Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Jean Paul Sartre, and Hunter S. Thompson. Using this visual landscape as her canvas, Sarah’s sound, colored with smooth, melodic rock fused with thick electronic grooves, paints a vivid portrait. A prolific artist who draws influences as varied as Bach, Chopin, Leonard Cohen, Bjork, Tori Amos and Alice In Chains, she has performed at the prestigious NEMO showcase in Boston and independently released seven albums to date, garnering accolades like “one of the most enchanting discoveries of the year,” from Billboard Magazine and “she sings like an angel – seraphim…get it? –and her dark haunting and very lush music calls to mind Sarah McLachlan and Peter Gabriel” by Rolling Stone Magazine, which dubbed her 2004 release, Nexus, one of the top ten albums that year. The latest album, Near Infinite Possibility, features Josh Freese (A Perfect Circle), Earl Slick (David Bowie), Danny Blume (Jill Sobule), Paul Bushnell (Tracy Chapman), Sara Lee (the B-52’s), Sterling Campbell (Eric Clapton, David Byrne) and more. As a seasoned veteran, Sarah has toured with electronica giants Bauhaus and Delirium, and collaborated with Iggy Pop on a yet to be released cover of a Serge Gainsbourg track. Her songs have received airplay on hundreds of college and commercial radio stations, and been licensed to MTV, Lifetime, and several major motion pictures. It sounds pretty intense, doesn’t it? I’m hopefully going to get the opportunity to hear the full album, which should be a very interesting experience. You can find out more about Sarah Fimm’s work at her website. (Note: the website isn’t currently working for me. I suspect this is just a fluke. If it doesn’t work for you, try again later or search for her on Myspace.)