1. MF Doom’s mixtapes are a reliable device for making me listen to jazz longer than I can ordinarily manage.
2. The Adverts, an early punk band who have always figured highly in Greil Marcus’s list of the top five percent of the class of 1977, deserved to. Some of it is rather conventional and murky, but I really love “Bored Teenagers” and “New Church.” The Adverts actually sound more like what you’d imagine a punk band, stripped of accidentals, would sound like than do, say, the Clash (too much musical competence), the Buzzcocks (too tuneful), or the Pistols (too metal, at least on record, where Steve Jones uses multitracking to turn his meager guitar into Voltron). They’re bored, the themes are basic, the songs are done in under three minutes.
3. A person can make it to age 32 without regular immersion in the two-disc Brunswick Records singles collection, but it’s a mistake. It starts with Jackie Wilson exhorting us “Higher and Higher,” and then, unbelievably, does so.
