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penpusherAs much as picking a favorite song is challenging (and, sure enough, if I picked it today, it would have been a different song from the Day 1 selection), picking a "least favorite" song (the original assignment for Day 2) seems not only just as difficult but very much equally pointless. Why would you want to hear a song that I don't like, unless you happen to like it, in which case my music cred just went down a couple of points in your ears. There's nothing but losing in that scenario.
So this is one of those times when we need to remix the meme and do better. After all, we all want to do better this year, don't we?
Rather than it being about "least favorite" I'm turning it into "least played" - a song that, rather than being disliked is really more "overlooked."
I have a lot of oddities in my collection for a lot of odd reasons. But in 1984, America went Olympic crazy. Granted, we had just hosted the Winter Games in Lake Placid, NY four years before, but everyone considers the Summer Olympics the "REAL" ones (after all, Greece never had a "proper" winter, at least not in the history of humanity). And a special disc of music was issued with it.
The most famous track from that album was obviously John Williams' "Olympic Fanfare and Theme" which, though it hasn't replaced the track recorded and still heard during the American Television coverage of every Olympics dating back to 1968 when ABC was the host network ("Bugler's Dream" by Leo Arnaud), is a constant for every games.
But there were some other pop songs, or songs that were intended to be pop songs included performances by musicians as varied as Christopher Cross, Bob James, Bill Conti, Toto, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass and appropriately enough for our international visitors to Los Angeles, Foreigner. The songs presented were intended to be themes for the various venues, from basketball to swimming, gymnastics to boxing. Most of these have retained their well deserved obscurity.
But there was one other track by one other performer who was popular at the time.
Herbie Hancock was a keyboardist extraordinaire and a bandleader since before The Beatles arrived on these shores. He had been having a solid and steady career in both the Jazz and Blues genres and just started to cross over, as they used to say as the "Jazz Fusion" concept started to happen in the late 1970s.
Hancock just came off of his biggest mainstream success, a song, with a remarkable video to go with it, called "Rockit!" (Am I cheating by providing all these extra tracks??) And he penned something of a soundalike song for the "Field Competition" that definitely gets overlooked, likely because of his massive hit.
Still, it deserves to be heard on its own merits and for its own value.
My Selection for Day 2 - Herbie Hancock - "Junku"
So this is one of those times when we need to remix the meme and do better. After all, we all want to do better this year, don't we?
Rather than it being about "least favorite" I'm turning it into "least played" - a song that, rather than being disliked is really more "overlooked."
I have a lot of oddities in my collection for a lot of odd reasons. But in 1984, America went Olympic crazy. Granted, we had just hosted the Winter Games in Lake Placid, NY four years before, but everyone considers the Summer Olympics the "REAL" ones (after all, Greece never had a "proper" winter, at least not in the history of humanity). And a special disc of music was issued with it.
The most famous track from that album was obviously John Williams' "Olympic Fanfare and Theme" which, though it hasn't replaced the track recorded and still heard during the American Television coverage of every Olympics dating back to 1968 when ABC was the host network ("Bugler's Dream" by Leo Arnaud), is a constant for every games.
But there were some other pop songs, or songs that were intended to be pop songs included performances by musicians as varied as Christopher Cross, Bob James, Bill Conti, Toto, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass and appropriately enough for our international visitors to Los Angeles, Foreigner. The songs presented were intended to be themes for the various venues, from basketball to swimming, gymnastics to boxing. Most of these have retained their well deserved obscurity.
But there was one other track by one other performer who was popular at the time.
Herbie Hancock was a keyboardist extraordinaire and a bandleader since before The Beatles arrived on these shores. He had been having a solid and steady career in both the Jazz and Blues genres and just started to cross over, as they used to say as the "Jazz Fusion" concept started to happen in the late 1970s.
Hancock just came off of his biggest mainstream success, a song, with a remarkable video to go with it, called "Rockit!" (Am I cheating by providing all these extra tracks??) And he penned something of a soundalike song for the "Field Competition" that definitely gets overlooked, likely because of his massive hit.
Still, it deserves to be heard on its own merits and for its own value.
My Selection for Day 2 - Herbie Hancock - "Junku"