Pandemic Playlist: I Can't Dap You Up

Hamilton Bohannon

This week’s Spotify playlist reflects the last few weeks—the new music, the passings, and the associations that bring songs to mind.

[Updated] I like playlists that fit into my life. I look back at old mix tapes and no longer remember some of the songs on them, and vibes that seemed crystal clear when I made them now mystify me. Still, I love that they reflect what was going on in my life as well as my tastes at the time. One thing they clearly aren’t are simple collections of favorite songs.

This week’s Pandemic Playlist fits into that mode as many of tent pole moments come from the last week or two. It starts with two recent deaths--pioneering Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen and disco drummer Hamilton Bohannon. Neither death was attributed to the Coronavirus, but both are sad losses. COVID-19 did claim the lives of The Stranglers’ keyboard player Dave Greenfield and techno producer Mike Huckaby, and Huckaby’s “The Upstairs Lounge” gives this mix a coda.

I almost always enjoy K-Pop because it is algorithmically constructed for pleasure, and Big Bang’s “Fantastic Baby” works in that way. I first heard it a year or two after it came out, and I have heard it daily for the last two weeks because my daughter can’t get enough of the video since my wife showed it to her on YouTube. A daily replay out of context is more than I need, but the song’s a machine, and there are far worse things a seven-year-old could be into.

After a track from Big Freedia’s recent EP, Louder, I go into a stretch influenced by the singer Estelle. I’m ambivalent about her own songs, but she has been an awesome curator of world dance music artists for the Essence Festival. Through sets she’s hosted and helped organize, I discovered soca king Machel Montano, Birmingham grime artist Lady Lashurr, and dancehall singer Hoodcelebrityy, all of whom contribute cool tracks to this playlist. The success of D-Nice’s online dance parties sent me back looking for songs from his days as part of Boogie Down Productions, but nothing had the right feel like KRS-One’s “9mm Goes Bang.”

Videogames are central to the #stayhome experience, and this week I was ecstatic to discover “Katamari Damacy” for Ninendo Switch. The 2004 game does so many things I love, foremost among them rolling up everything around me into a giant ball while Japanese lounge pop accompanies my efforts. The actual soundtrack isn’t on Spotify, but this bossa nova cover of “Lonely Rolling Star” scratches the itch. It also brought to mind Señor Coconut’s cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Rydeen.” And all that faux-exotica eventually led me to Lalo Schiffrin’s main theme for the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon because almost all winds eventually blow me in that direction. 

Les Filles de Illighadad made the cut because I’d likely have seen the band from Niger two or three times during Jazz Fest—likely twice at the Fair Grounds, and they were scheduled to play The Music Box as well. Fiona Apple’s “Under the Table” is here because I want “I won’t shut up” to be the battle cry for every little girl and woman in my life. I love how Apple plays with the line, phrasing it as a threat, as a taunt, as a mock, and finally as a celebration of her strength. 

Pink Floyd got in because on Fridays, the band is releasing concert films for a week on its YouTube channel, and a couple of weeks ago they posted 1972’s Live in Pompeii. The film is very much an art film of its time—translation: often hilariously pretentious—but the Meddle era is one of my favorites for the band when its long tracks usually have somewhere to go, then go there with some muscle. 

Updated at 11:25 a.m.

The playlist has been updated to include “The Man Machine” From Kraftwerk, whose founding member Florian Schneider died of cancer this week. Today, it’s hard to imagine how Kraftwerk’s music confronted the mainstream music press and audiences. In the 1970s, the dominant American rock aesthetic embraced conventional notions of musical ability. Virtuosity was valued—I’d argue overvalued—and self-expression was understood as getting loose onstage.

The idea that someone’s version of self-expression was to perform robotically was incomprehensible. Similarly, people making music on synthesizers were suspected. No one could see them play, so audiences couldn’t be sure that they really were playing. And before Kraftwerk, a keyboard player might play a synthesizer, but he would do so as part of a band with a guitarist or two, a bassist and a drummer. Bands of keyboard players were exceedingly rare, which made their music even harder to imagine. The austerity of subsequent artists including Mike Huckaby reveals how song-oriented Kraftwerk really was, but it’s impossible to imagine electronic music today without Kraftwerk’s contributions.