In 1977 a disco-styled music video of Apache featured The Tommy Seebach Band. Set on a rocky hillside, it featured scantily-clad dancers adoring a grinning keyboard player. This version was recognized for its kitsch value and made the rounds of the Internet in early 2005. Watch the video online.

More to the point, x86_64 Linux has no Flash player. Therefore, no Youtube. (There is one for 32 bit Linux; that's the really annoying thing.)

If there was anything that would make me dual boot regularly, that would be it.

Pretty simple, really - and all I need is the link to the video to paste into the download site.

Basically, my only interest is the video, and I could care less about anything else, especially since I use Mozilla with everything turned off - including referrer.

Soul-Sides has a comprehensive history of it, complete with .mp3 samples (and Soul-Sides, incidentally, is one of the best blogs for music out there).

What's also amazing is that the handlebar mustache guy is from the Netherlands (no surprise there, what with permissive drug culture and everything) and won the Eurovision song contest multiple times. Mind you, this is the same contest where Celine Dion and Abba got their start, and often features heartbreaking Groban-like boys with their guitars singing in Finnish or Greek or what-have-you.

Except this year a monster-metal foam-rubber-wearing band from Finland won, with more pyrotechnics than all the other groups combined. And they beat out a German Country band named Texas Lightning, too. Naturally, since their actual music video features zombie cheerleaders. What more could you ask for?

Seriously. Eurovision has some amazing material sometimes. The real world is so much stranger than fiction.

I'm too young to have experienced most of disco, actually--and this only serves to make me more grateful.

Wow. Just... wow.

Of course, the really striking thing about it is how much it resembles things that are being made now and put on YouTube. These guys weren't uniquely deficient in musical ability and taste, they were just ahead of their time in having access to video equipment to immortalize their deficiencies in musical ability and taste...

I never liked disco and never paid it much attention..or so I thought. Our temple is rehearsing now for it's Purim Spiel and this year it's a disco version. I am frightened by how many of the songs I actually managed to somehow learn despite paying no attention. I will be humiliating myself with a solo during our pastiche of 'Macho Man' (Menchy Man, I kid you not.) And yet, for all the cheeseiness our production will have, I still think it will be head and tails over this bizarre find.

I didn't need to read any more to know which video it had to be.

(Slight correction to A. Nakama's otherwise excellent summary: It's Danish, not Dutch.)

If you have forgotten how to disco dance, here's a Finnish instructional video from the era.

Note: I was born in 1974 and take no responsibility for these atrocities against taste.

Although, I must say that the participants in that video all look like they're having a good time. I wonder if they'll be as cheerful when they're shimmying IN HELL.

Made the rounds in 2005? I think I saw it later than that. I'm guessing it was on "Bedazzled," but it might have been via WFMU's "Beware of the Blog," which provides my jaded palate with many thrills. (Song-poets, anybody? Industrial puff music? Japanese surf-classical? Jesus Christ Superstar covers? Safety PSAs?)

After that buildup I was expecting something truly horribly awful like, say, this tidbit from the little YouTube war salvo atrios fired off just before Christmas. "Apache" is nothing.

Anyone who ever complains about filk is going to be sat down and made to watch that video.

They aren't exactly disco, if only by virtue of being from the early 90s, but if you're looking for cheesy music videos, look no further than Army of Lovers. There's Crucified, which features a bunch of the gayest boob-shots ever. There's the complicated treatment of anti-semitism and Zionism in Israelism, which, come to think of it, also features boobs, but in a much stranger way. There's many, many, many more, if you're interested. I secretly love them.

You bunch of rockists you.

(Dr. Casanova Frankenstein's henchman in Mystery Men)

Soul-Sides has a comprehensive history of it, complete with .mp3 samples (and Soul-Sides, incidentally, is one of the best blogs for music out there).

I'm absolutely fascinated now - and amazed at how many places I recognize the most sampled 6 seconds of drumbeat from. Yow!

Roy. G: My sincerest apologies there. I hope I can show my earnest repentance by showing that equally amazing video to all the other dancers I know. There is one with a special penchant for hip-thrusting in the Hustle. I think he'll find this video especially eye-opening.

Xeger: The Amen break. I think there was a bit on that on Soul Sides, also... But I might just be making that up.

'Cause I can remember when my friends and I would have thought that was the epitome of groovy. And would have spent hours prancing around in front of mirrors trying to learn those moves.

The geriatric iMac cannot digest video links, so y'all are forcing me to move my chair and rejigger the workstation at the G-5 (which will incur later bitchifying from Mr. Space so it'd better be worth it) so I can have a proper wallow in this thread.

Good God. Setting the course of music, Native American history, and facial hair back decades, if not centuries. Still shuddering.

The women.

No, wait, bear with me here.

Not one of those women would make it into a modern pop video as a dancer, particularly not so scantily clad. One of the three might be toned enough. But the blonde actually has a tummy. And none of them has breasts enough to qualify as sexy in these surgically enhanced days.

They look too...hang on, let me think of the word...human. Yes, that's the term.

My favourite weird, WTF video at the moment is ABC's Look of Love, although one gets the feeling they were deliberately invoking all the weird shit in their video: men in lederhosen, flying nuns, a sort of F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of carnival, carnivorous puppets. For non-ironic 80s cheese, try Tarzan Boy. Oh, I heart it so.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/401148/barry_white_v_gollum/

it says it is a blue version, I watched it all and it's just blue-tinted.

Thanks to seantaclaus.

Over on Crooked Timber they're talking about the bebop classic "Cherokee", and the lyrics to that song (by a British composer who wrote lots of Injun-themed songs) were incredibly, incredibly cheesy. Good thing Charlie Parker didn't have a vocalist.

"Apache" sounds equally good fast or slow.

This is a bit painful to watch, especially if you first learned to play the song from The Ventures album way back when...

Thanks, Linux #6; that's a darned useful tool!

All three women are flat-chested by modern standards, but they're sufficiently self-confident to appear in the video wearing next to nothing; so even if you weren't around at the time, you'd know they couldn't have considered themselves defective. The fact that they look a bit startling to us now tells you how ubiquitous breast enhancement has become for women working in entertainment.

I'm don't know how much the penalty for not meeting the current standards has changed; there's more pressure for me to meet them through surgery, but less need for me to meet them at all without risking life in a bedsit, since the job market is rather more open.

This puts us right in synch with society as a whole.

Yippee.

(Sorry...winter is not my optimistic season.)

On the other hand, sometimes disco can inspire socially relevant commentary.

I think Keira Knightley is very beautiful. Hmm... I said 'beautiful', which I guess IS different from 'sexy'.

i liked keira knightley a lot in bend it like beckam where she just looked athletic & naturally thin.

but she's lost even more weight since then, & i think, has admitted to having an eating disorder. although i try not to follow these things.

Another thing about changing standards of beauty... Take a look at Frazetta's paintings.

Colour me jaded and cynical, but the thought passing through my mind was more along the lines of "Is it heroin, ecstacy or speed that's got them that shape...".

http://img-fan.theonering.net/rolozo/images/frazzetta/nazgul.jpg

http://img-fan.theonering.net/rolozo/images/frazzetta/pelennor.jpg

LOTR fans, please not to be drinking anything before clicky the linkie.

---L.

"After providing tank support for Kelly's "bank job" and returning to America with enough Nazi gold to be able to retire, Oddball remained out of the public eye until he decided to become a keyboard player for a Disco band in the 1950's, many years before Disco caught on in America."

All these negative waves, man.

(Actually, Thomas would just look at the dude, and either sigh that sigh of his, or his laugh his "What the hell?" laugh... but I digress).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbvP7dT3Dx0

No, I'm not tracking down the first one. One was too much.

My cat was in my lap when I watched the Apache video. In your expert opinion, who should receive the bill for our mutual therapy sessions, which will be necessary to restore us to a semblance of mental health?

And I'd missed the "Vindaloo" thread. I haven't laughed like that in a while, just watching the Final Fantasy video. You're right, T, it's much more the song than the visuals: and the two, together, are more than the sum of their particles.

Barbara - now that you mention it...yes! Good eye.

I stopped watching "Apache" about 1 minute in, because my brain threatened to walk out on me. The FFAC version of "Vindaloo" becomes a lot better now I've watched the film itself, because I now know which bits of the story the sequences have been nicked from, and can giggle myself silly. As for "Tarzan Boy", I've always thought the chorus is the best "yell along to while ratted" tune yet, because it has no discernable consonants, and that's always the trickiest part for the drunks to manage.

However, the "Apache" video has at least answered the question of "What did Graeme Garden (of "The Goodies" fame) do with himself on his evenings off?" I hadn't been aware he could play drums.

Jenny Islander @63 - wasn't the poor girl cold? I mean, I only have my memory to go on (the omnibus edition of LOTR is still somewhere in boxes) but I seem to recall the Battle of the Pelennor Fields took place in what would have translated to mid-January, in a Northern Hemisphere climate, which means they were fighting and travelling in the middle of ruddy *winter*. In that kind of weather, I wouldn't be wearing a scale mail thong (which is what Eowyn appears to be wearing in those images) and nothing on my legs. I'd have layer on layer, and I would certainly be wearing some sort of trousery arrangement around the nethers.

Re: Apache. Cheesy, yes, but so much more real than the garbage today's kids listen to. And they won't get out of my yard! Also, if I grew out my porn stache and my white man's fro, I'd resemble the grinning fool. So I judge not.

No more, alas.

Actually it's in The Return of the King. She was supposed to stay behind and watch over the civilians while the Riders went to war, but for assorted reasons, she wouldn't. She rode with her uncle's army for days and nobody suspected that she was a woman. She ended up facing the Witch-King of Angmar purely by chance, which in Tolkienese means anything but. See, there was this prophecy that no man could kill the Witch-King. He was gloating about that, so just before she killed him, she took off her pants . . .

At least, that's the edition Frazetta read.

Which Frazetta then passed on to Ralph Bakshi before he started work on Wizards?

Touching the thread topic, I have to say this:

Ayeeeiii! IT BURNS

Ahem. Sorry. What I meant to say was: I never thought I'd see a video that I thought was even worse than "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins".

One does wonder how she was passing as male in Theoden's host, dressed like that. Even if she did have her pants on before fighting the Witch King... or were breastplate falsies part of the standard Rohan warrior's armor?

I also like the fact that the Witch King is wearing a belt with a skull on it, just in case you haven't figure out he's Eeeevil.

(Tolkien nitpick: Eowen ended up facing the Witch King because he'd just struck down Theoden; she stepped in to prevent the WK from finishing Theoden off.)

(Aside from all that, I rather like the drawing from a technical standpoint -- lovely linework and shading...)

Consider Halle Berry in Catwoman: I reckon she looked better in the "improvised" outfit she wears during the jewel robbery scene than in the purpose made costume she uses in the rest of the film.

And, yes, I know the second looks like a wardrobe accident waiting to happen, but neither hides her shape or the way she moves.

That film was a waste of talent.

Slightly off topic, but I need to say something to Pablo @70:

No he's not. Please believe me. I'm so tired of being asked "Is it true that the Hoff is big in Germany?" as soon as someone finds out I'm German. So I will say it here, for posterity to read and remember:

He's NOT. He was as big (or not) as anywhere else when he did Knight Rider, he did get to No. 1 with "I've been looking for freedome" (BLERK. BLECH. *washes out mouth*) because and ONLY because he released it at the same time the the wall came down and we liked having an anthem*, and then we got embarrassed about having made him some sort of pop star and have been trying to forget him ever since, only to be reminded by the world in general at every corner that it's our fault he ever had a singing career, and incidentally, "The Hoff - he's huge in Germany, right?"

No he ain't. Please please spread the word. Thankies :)

* Not me. I swear, not me. I was only 14 when the wall came down and I didn't know that 'freedom' had just been redefined. So nobody come looking for his music in my house, please.

I'm thinking of such classics as:

- "I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper"

- "Automatic Lover"

I've been trying to find one-hit wonder Zazu's "Captain Starlight", but no luck... ;-P

Mind you, if you want buttock clenching feebleness, go find the stuff Ricky Gervais is trying to hide (a cross between Marc Almond, Ultravox and other influences too dreary to mention.)

As for Apache, I suppose there is only one thing to say. All together now... 'Young man!'

1. The video
2. On attempting to dissipate the woe inspired by (1) by sharing the misery with my partner, she pointed to the keyboard player and said, "That looks like you."
3. On attempting to garner sympathy with regard to (2) by sharing (1) with my work colleagues, one turned round and said, "You're right to be upset. You clearly look more like the bongo player."

Apparently I need a haircut.

The dancing, while never actually graceful nor skillful, is intricately choreographed in a very long video that appears to have been shot in one long take! The jiggling, the assinine shimmying, the steps, all of them are anything but impromptu. There is no randomness in their movements! They are all dancing, in time, for the entire song, in tandem. It's the synchronized swimming of the disco video world!

PS. For those who knew me as Sean Bosker, I am now Sean Sakamoto having taken my wife's name after 8 short years of marriage. I find out today if the judge signed the order.

(boggles)

As to female body type, it's odd how many standards can co-exist: "enhanced" with "anorexic model", and a more buff but still diverse group in sports. In the Aussie Open women's final [you knew I'd take this back to tennis somehow, didn't you?], Large Butt and Bosom (slightly out of shape) demolished Taller, Stick-Thin yet Glamorous, then had to ruefully acknowledge her natural endowments in the post-game interview.

Tending toward Short and Stocky myself, I'm more likely to identify with Ugly Betty.

A moment's thrill, then disappointment.

Sean 101: Congratulations! I must say that 'Sean Sakamoto' is a marvelously multicultural-sounding name.

My friends and I used to have a game of making up the most multicultural-sounding names we could. I think my personal favorite was "Mariko bint Ian".

For one thing, there are a lot of multicultural marriages. But there was also a naming fad among Asian families here a generation or so back for what a friend called "Ivanhoe names" for men's first names - Earl, Baron, Ivan, Dugan, etc. - and this led to a lot of unusual combinations. One of my good friends is Baron Fujimoto.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/world/europe/23britaincnd.html?ex=1327122000&en=9b20d222452e53bb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss (via BoingBoing)

Well, the same applies for California (especially the urban parts), though perhaps not quite as densely...

For one thing, there are a lot of multicultural marriages. But there was also a naming fad among Asian families here a generation or so back for what a friend called "Ivanhoe names" for men's first names - Earl, Baron, Ivan, Dugan, etc. - and this led to a lot of unusual combinations. One of my good friends is Baron Fujimoto.

There was a time (between the Meiji Restoration and World War 2) when there was a class of Japanese nobility with European titles. So "Baron Fujimoto" is actually plausible as a late-19th/early-20th Century Japanese name... though I've no idea of there was any such historical person.

It's funny because I know what they mean, even though I have no Asian features at all. It really elucidates this whole concept of race as a social construct.

It's still head-and-shoulders better than questions like "What are you?" ("Human?") "No, I mean really - what are you?"

Recently I've been helping a friend clean out her storage space onto eBay. Among the items is a disco single which... um.... Let's just say that it's unspeakably fey, anile, and rugose. From the back cover--

SPACE INVADER
(Abba-Stample-Reynald)
Ed. Sonata

Move to the left Shift to the right
Press your funky buttons and get down
Move to the left Shift to the Right
Take it easy baby and get down. [etc.]

I suppose the mention of discos and cheese on the other thread would be in bad taste, and I certainly can't see how to incorporate phrases like "The natural state of a helicopter is "falling out of the sky" into this one.

If it's all one thread, you can't weave.

I have to say though, if that's the worse a "permissive drug culture" can do, let them get high.

There's something strangely endearing about that video, something a bit sad at the same time (but then I can find anything sad, so...). I saw it was compared to "Plan 9 from Outer Space" in youtube's comments, and there's something along those lines; the video is bad, but it seems like it was made in earnest, and enjoyed by most of the partipants. It has the kind of charm a real amateur competition of any kind can have for the game loving audience that'll hardly ever be found watching professionals.

Still awful, though.

Peter Erwin@512:
There was a time (between the Meiji Restoration and World War 2) when there was a class of Japanese nobility with European titles. So "Baron Fujimoto" is actually plausible as a late-19th/early-20th Century Japanese name... though I've no idea of there was any such historical person.

I've personally known a charming old francophile japanese gentleman who insisted that since only sense mattered with ideograms, they could be pronounced any way you wanted as long as the sense was right.
He always insisted on being called "Dubois" instead of Hayashi (can't remember if he had actually made any administrative change, though).

I'm know envisioning a historically perfectly fitting Japanese lord called "Baron Fujimont". Would make a nice character.

113-115:
What I hate most, though, even more than the "what are you" or the rare moments of awkward silence, are the people who just keep on insisting you're pulling their leg.

...a marvelously multicultural-sounding name

Maria de Fatima Israel. I'm not kidding you. My jaw dropped when I saw this one.

Kip @ #20: Damn you, stealing my line out of my head and then posting before me...

Serge, #106, last week.

His uncle was an astronomer, I think.

Forgive me if someone has already said this, I just got here. But "Macho Man" isn't disco. "Saturday Night Fever" is disco -- and remarkably non-dorky for the genre. "Fly Robin Fly" is disco, and kinda medium dorky. "Apache" is only very slightly dorkier than most, and minus the video is pretty average -- gods help me.

Dunno what you call "Macho Man", but it is disco only insofar as disco is part of its whole campy, over-the-top gay guy thing. The Village People were the 80s. Disco was the music of, like, my high school years. Man, that is like, so unfair.

One of my truly special memories is watching an entire dance floor of Fundamentalist Christians dancing to YMCA at my sister's wedding. My companion and I totally cracked up, and my aunt asked why we were laughing. As if that weren't enough to put me on the floor, Neil Rest then went on to explain to my relatively guiltless Aunt Barbara what the song was about and exactly why the spectacle was so damn funny.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=u9dhO0iCLww

cheesy at its best.

Although, Apache helicopters doing synchronised flying to disco would be brilliant.

Oh, and for amysue @15: "Saturday Night Fever" came out in 1977, and "Macho Man" came out in 1978. They're both disco. (I was there... I lived it, to my horror.)

By modern standards they'd definitely be considered a trifle plump.

A year or two later, along cam Alien, which replaced many of the sci-fi cliches. Sigourney Weaver, incidentally, showed off rather more skin in the movie Half Moon Street, and her breasts didn't seem all that large. Galaxy Quest does show what skilled costume design can do.

Anyway, the next time I saw the skimpy silver sci-fi look was a trailer on late-night TV for a subscription porn channel, and some serial where the clothes probably didn't get worn for long enough to wear out. That would be 2003, when my leg was in plaster. From the trailer, it didn't seem worth the money, and my imagination does better visual effects anyway.

Anyway, now HD-TV is spreading, and the porn industry is fining there is too much detail on the screen.

TV networks really like to screw up with the schedule of shows I like. Cold Case used to be at 7pm, then, last autumn, it was moved to 8pm. Which is why they showed the first new episode in weeks at... 7pm. Yeah, I missed it.

Would the Rt. Rev Michael Nazir-Ali do?

That's very funny about the funnydamentalists. Did you know that the Navy at one point considered using "In the Navy" as a recruiting song (with a slight lyric change to "Join the Navy")? Someone took the admiral (or whatever he was) who proposed this aside, and told him who the VP were, and what the song was actually about, and the idea was hastily dropped.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjAXJaFydwM

For those who haven't seen this before: this was apparently a real ad produced by the JMSDF, and for a time it was hosted on their web site (they've since come to their senses, so it's not there any more).

One of them has done "In The Navy", in the style of a recruiting advert. Alas, you need to be a site member to download from that page.

Second: The business about the "Amen Break" drum sample makes me think of the Apollo 17 photograph of the full Earth, which is almost invariably seen whenever anyone in the culture wants to show a picture of the Earth.

I see it in four of the first six images that appear when I Google for "Earth." Africa and Saudi Arabia are near the top, Madagascar is near the center, and Antarctica is surrounded by white clouds at the bottom.

There are other photos of the Earth. Please use them instead.

and #135, yes, he's back, and Betty is back at Mode. You might want to find one of the fan sites and catch up.

I've always thought that there was too much self-parody in The Village People to really count as disco. I mean, disco sounded gay, but it was considered a sure chick-magnet in its day. (Saturday Night Fever starring the emphatically not gay-looking Johnny Travolta!)

When I think of disco, I think of things like Apache, or the song Fly Robin Fly, vacuous songs with with repetitive music and reptetive, minimal lyrics. (Are there more lyrics than "We are family, I got all my sisters with me"?) (You know the biggest problem with Google is that it makes it very hard to ask a rhetorical question. In fact, there are more lyrics. See for yourself. We Are Family

The Village People are described as disco in Wikipedia, but I think they come to the game too late to really be disco. I mean, disco has been around long enough to be parodied. YMCA is 1978, which is too late for disco.

Wikipedia says:

Music historians generally refer to July 12, 1979, as the day disco died. On that date, DJs Steve Dahl and Garry Meier along with Michael Veeck (son of the Chicago White Sox owner at the time Bill Veeck) staged a promotional event with an anti-disco theme, Disco Demolition Night, between games at a White Sox doubleheader. The event involved exploding disco records, and ended in a near-riot. The second game of the doubleheader had to be forfeited.

I really don't know quite what to make of that. You know, at the point where I start arguing about when disco did or didn't die, and by whose hand, I have to admit that I'm a truly pitiful human.

Which, amysue, you might have noticed earlier. Also, pretentious.

P.S. None of which makes Macho Man disco.

P.P.S. Yes, Xopher, I'd heard the story. The Navy bureacracy is such that I can even believe it, though I've never seen it reliably sourced.
Do you know by any chance if it's just an urban legend or if it really is true? On the other hand, I could introduce you to Neil Rest or my Aunt Barbara -- your choice. I suggest you choose carefully.

Aaaaand, not to pick on you, but I must respond!

When I think of disco, I think of things like Apache, or the song Fly Robin Fly, vacuous songs with with repetitive music and reptetive, minimal lyrics.

What you're talking about is what I like to call honky disco. Disco grew pretty directly out of soul; one way to track its early growth is to pick up, at random, any one Motown record per year from, say, 1967 to 1974. Early, Black disco was no more vacuous than the Black soul that had preceded it.

Even when people started picking up on and exaggerating the robotic aspects of disco, there was still a lot of room for genuinely good music. I defy anyone to listen to Giorgio Moroder's best productions (Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby and A Love Trilogy, say) and tell me they're worthless.

And trying to put an end date on disco, especially one in 1979, is pretty silly. Blondie's "Call Me" (which was actually pretty much just Giorgio Moroder with Debbie Harry on vocals) was 1980, as was Lipps, Inc.'s "Funky Town." These were nothing if not disco. Queen didn't go disco until 1981 or 82. Madonna's first album wasn't a new sound, it was a direct growth from the disco of the time.

Sorry to rant; I just feel like disco gets a bad rap. The really awful, honky disco (like the "Apache" video that started this whole discussion) stands in for all of disco in most people's minds. It was a style prone to excess, and for a time it was certainly much too big for its britches, but at core it was just as valid as any other musical style.

PS Despite all this impassioned defense of disco, if I had to pick a single favorite type of music, it would probably be disco's mortal enemy, punk rock.

PPS I'm choosing to blame any poor construction, lapses in ability to make sense, poor spelling, bad grammar, and anything else of that nature that might have happened in this post (not to mention its greaet length) on the fact that it is now 1 AM and I haven't had any coffee today.

er, that said, i like a lot more punk than i do disco, & i imagine i would have liked the scene better. but now i have liberal guilt in putting down disco.

....that said, the pet shop boys are one of my favourite bands ever. & it is thanks to a gay man.

gays? squirrely little jewish boys? women?

little gay squirrely jewish women???

screw guilt. i am all over that sht.

that wasn't hard.....

T/F - The Beatles are better than the Stones

I circled true, but then wrote a paragraph explaining that I could only say true because the Beatles had broken up before they had a chance to "go disco", like the Stones did with Emotional Rescue.

Emotional Rescue came out in 1980, so the disco influence was still around.

Another bit of news: I was amazed to see the NY Times run a front-page item about what's a local item for me: the 29-year-old sex offender posing as a 12-year-old boy. He was finally caught in Chino Valley, just down the road from Prescott (close enough that we have our no-room-in-the-house stuff in storage there). The headline made it sound like it dealt with a wider web of sex predators, but nope: just the info that's already been all over the Phoenix and local news.

I love squirrely little Jewish gay boys.

Re: Stones going disco, again, it makes sense for them to do it, especially on the awesome song "Miss You," which, yes, is disco. They were imitating the same people they were imitating all through their career.

Also, they're better than the Beatles. Take THAT!

You're telling me that one of my two or three all-time favorite songs by the Stones is disco? Are you nuts?

[switches to iTunes and plays song]

Hmm... I think you have a point. Oh, well.

But I AM looking forward to meeting you someday.

Xopher #162: Eh, I'm boring in person.

I liked disco in it's time, but overall, I like folk best. Right now, I can't get enough of Roseanne Cash's "Black Cadillac" which is mostly rock.

Patrick,#169, I was surprised to have three of the top ten albums from the WashPost list: Black Cadillac, Johnny Cash's A Hundred Highways, and T-Bone Burnett's The True False Identity. I rarely recognize the performers from the top ten list.

Given the subject of the exam, I would have assumed that the question-setter was inviting a statement about the superiority of the Stones.

The hard part for me was/is that I am a bigger fan of the Stones than the Beatles. I think I worried over that answer more than any other part of the exam.

This afternoon I was in a cafe buying a muffin and Apache came on--different version, of course, but I had to stifle the insta-giggles. Had a smile on my face all the way home.

*That* is the power of this video.