Phil Fox Rose

Click through to see … Continue reading Playlist: Phil’s mix 2000-5 (for the second end of the millenium)

Trip hop is one of my favorite forms of music. At its best, a beautiful, maybe even ethereal, female voice floats over gritty electronic music, making one of the most perfect tensions in music.

While trip hop has pretty much faded away, in its heyday I was doing the music programming for the downtempo electronic station at digital radio company Clickradio, a station I had created. The mix was probably 50 percent trip hop, along with some ambient, acid jazz, exotica and doses of alt-folk, singer/songwriter and alternative hip hop. But this playlist is pure trip hop (well, by my standards.) It’s a mix of 40 tracks that represent a cross-section of the best the trip hop genre had to offer — drawing from the dub, DJ and soul styles.

Several of the tracks admittedly lack the feature that is supposed to define the genre: a slowed-down sample of a hip hop beat. I’ve included them because the genre became so much more than that, and they fit the feel and the culture of the genre otherwise. Lamb’s work, for example, is technically jungle, and the beats are speeded up, not slowed down, but they also feature jazzy female vocals and were popular with trip hop lovers.

The order is for the mix, the tracks have been sequenced to work well together. It’s not a ranking of the songs. I’ve put links on the album names to their Amazon pages, for your convenience, and perhaps a few pennies in my direction to help pay for this site. Motel Girl’s Ghost Sonata was from a self-published EP that is not available — if you email me I might be able to find it and I could let you know where to go; it’s definitely worth it. Motel Girl was the best band … Continue reading The Ultimate Trip Hop Mix

This is obviously my opinion, but it’s from a whole lot of experience. I have a bias towards female singers and female sentiments, but there are a few men mixed in here. Take a look. I’m also not strict about the definition of singer/songwriter. I remember when I was in radio the music nerds would debate over whether Elton John was a singer/songwriter since he wrote the music but not the lyrics. I don’t care. Here, Alison Krauss, who does write songs, is singing a cover, two singers who don’t write are covering Sting, who is a singer/songwriter but I like these versions better. There was also a debate over whether a performer who used a group name rather than an individual name for their work could be called a singer/songwriter, since the name is a singer’s name. Again, I could care less and include several bands who write amazing songs. So, you can buy the disks and duplicate the sequence, or you can learn about a few tracks you don’t already know, or if you already have them all, you can try my sequence if you want, or you can just read my comments and learn a thing or two about the songs and artists. (The numbering is the track sequence of my mix, not a ranking of the songs. They’re all awesome.)

Not a Pretty Girl — Ani DiFranco — Not A Pretty Girl — 1995   One of the strongest songs ever written. Ani is always articulate and powerful, and this song is an earthquake. I could quote some of the lyrics to show you how amazing they are, but which ones? I’d end up quoting the whole song to you. And though they stand well on their own, much of … Continue reading Essential songs #1 (v4) — singer/songwriters

I’ve always refused to play this game because, after all, I typically have a few dozen different artists in rotation in my playlist at any one time and love stuff in virtually every genre. Top 100 maybe, but Top 10? Impossible. But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that much of my resistance is a form of phony elitism, as in “My tastes are too complex to reduce them to such a list.” I also know that I listen to some stuff because it’s “interesting” without actually enjoying it that much. So to defy those tendencies in myself, I set about constructing my Favorite Albums Ever list,1 based on what I love and what I think is awesome, issues of intellectual merit and genre balance be damned. (Notice I didn’t say “best” albums; I said “favorite”. I will acknowledge at least that much post-modern insistence on the relativeness of taste.) In order to impose a little Sound Scan-style discipline on myself,2 I looked at my play counts in iTunes to see what I actually listen to the most. Note these are not in order; that would definitely be going too far. So, here then, are my fifteen favorite records ever (as I see it right now, which will probably have changed by the time you read this):

Sticky Fingers — the Stones — In their own ways, I like Exile on Main Street and (the relatively unpopular) Goat’s Head Soup as much, and every Stones album has a couple of indispensable tracks, but for me Sticky Fingers is the cornerstone. It was the Stones album played at every party when I was a teenager, it had that naughty naughty zipper cover (which crotch I recently learned belongs to Warhol … Continue reading My Fifteen Favorite Albums Ever