Rating Still More Records

From Hell and Back

I so love that many of you are offering your own rating challenges, like this new one from Jeffrey Harvey:

It’s no longer Monday, so on this Tuesday, I have two for you that will up your pulse slightly, or majorly, depending on where you are and if, like me, you’re almost ready for that post-noontime nap.

Remember, we’re using the old Bandstand 35–98 score, irrelevant and arbitrary though it is, so play along and offer what you will as you listen and bug out on your private dancer floor.

First up.

Before it was a TV show, or maybe after cause I never watched it, there was a band called Arrested Development and they had a sound that reached me from Atlanta, their home base. So from 1992’s 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life, I give you:

I love dancing to topical story songs, and this one’s story will always be relevant because we are who we are.

Next up, just when you’re feeling safe and above ground, or above…The Fray…comes The Clash from a simple record, Combat Rock, which most in the mainstream knew then for that hit song about a cazbah. More important was this one, that they virtually premiered on SNL back in the halcyon days of 1982, when Reagan was king and Viet Nam, a war we surely knew we hadn’t won, saw its remains follow us via all the children born and lost to us:

Don’t talk to me about paper planes and runaway trains. Just groove on and remember,

“They’re ain’t no asylum here. King Solomon, he never lived round here.”

Plethora of pop is the home for our ratings games, so please thank Pierce McIntyre and Cherie Cook! And I so want to know what Robert Gowty, Steven Hale, Chris Zappa, Deb Groves Harman, Paul Combs, If Ever You’re Listening, Anthony Overs, AB, Alex Markham, Keith R. Higgons, and Paul Walker think!

Here’s the one before: