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Thursday, January 31, 2008
THE SUPER BOWL SHUFFLE
Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew
Red Label Records : 1985
[Buy It]
SUPER COOL
Black Heat
No Time To Burn
Atlantic : 1974
[Buy It]
SUPERGROOVALISTICPROSIFUNKSTICATION
Parliament
Mothership Connection
Universal : 1976
[Buy It]
SUPERFUNKYCALIFRAGISEXY
Prince
The Black Album
Warner Bros. : 1987
[Buy It]
THAT'S REALLY SUPER, SUPERGIRL
XTC
Skylarking
Geffen : 1986
[Buy It]
SUPER TUESDAY
The Shazam
Godspeed The Shazam
Rainbow Quartz : 1999
[Buy It]
The Super Bowl is Sunday. Super Tuesday is close behind. I am supercharged for both events. Between them comes a day of both rest (from football) and preparation (for politics); some people are calling it "Super Monday." I find this designation both superacute and superabsurd, but I will superexert myself to honor it nonetheless. I will watch old Superman cartoons. I will check to see if the Seattle Supersonics are still superawful. I will scour the Internet looking for a full-song version of R.E.M.'s latest single, "Superserious Superstitious," which has thus far been guarded supersecurely and is as a result available only as a supershort snippet taken from a ringtone. I may even reread Superbad, a book I wrote that is not related to the movie of the same name, but which I once pretended might be. (I'm supersorry to even bring it up. Ego made me do it. Superego is making me apologize.)
It's supereasy to find songs for these superdays, from Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" to the Carpenters' "Superstar" to Lee "Scratch" Perry's "Supersonic Man," but I think it's superimportant to be superselective, and that's why I have supervised this playlist. It starts with the "Super Bowl Shuffle" itself which is immortal in the sense that it will never die, no matter how many times you try to kill it:We are the Bears Shufflin' Crew
Shufflin' on down, doin' it for you.
We're so bad we know we're good.
Blowin' your mind like we knew we would.
You know we're just struttin' for fun
Struttin' our stuff for everyone.
We're not here to start no trouble.
We're just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle. From there, we tour the seventies and eighties with three stellar funk songs as guides: one from 1974 (the Dolphins beat the Vikings in that year's Super Bowl, 24-7), one from 1976 (Steelers over Cowboys, 21-17), and one from 1987.
The 1987 Super Bowl marked the end of Mike Ditka's not-quite-dynastic Bears. They had won Super Bowl XX, of course, blowin' your mind like they knew they would and burying the New England Patriots by a score of 46-10. With the Shufflin' Crew largely intact, the '86 Bears were picked by many to repeat as Super Bowl champions, and, despite aging superstars and a few key injuries, ended the regular season 14-2, only a game behind their 1986 pace. But in the team's first playoff game, at home against the Washington Redskins, the Bears' defense faltered, and the Redskins escaped with a 27-13 upset. The next week, the Redskins were shut out by the Giants, 17-0, who went on to pound the Denver Broncos 39-20 in Super Bowl XXI.
The Giants' victory came at the beginning of the year; at the end of the year, Prince recorded and then shelved the Black Album, which quickly became one of the most famous and common bootlegs of its era. I clearly remember taking the train from college in New Haven to New York City in December to try to buy it. An older kid had told me that a certain store was carrying it, but made me promise not to say where I had heard. I brought along music for the trip, including XTC's Skylarking, which had been released the year before. I liked "Grass" and loved "Earn Enough For Us" and didn't miss "Dear God," which wasn't on my cassette version. I was starting to date a woman who was starting to seem like she might want to have sex, and in that context, "That's Really Super, Supergirl" struck me as filthy, in a good way:That's really super, Supergirl
How you're changing all the world's weather
But you couldn't put us back together
Now I feel like I'm tethered deep
Inside your fortress of solitude
Don't mean to be rude
But I don't feel super, Supergirl I failed to find the Black Album on that trip, though I did see a movie (Wall Street, maybe?), and so I had to return the following semester. It was March 1988 by then. The Reagan presidency was waning. Candidates on both sides of the aisle were lining up to succeed him. Among Democrats, Gary Hart was a clear favorite until his marital infidelities took him down in the summer of 1987, and in his wake a handful of others then popped up: Dukakis, Gore, Jackson. There were many front-runners in the early going, which is to say that there was no front-runner. Then, a few days after I went to New York to look for the Black Album for the second time, Southern Democrats scheduled a coordinated mega-primary (nine states in all) to try to influence the selection process. That was the birth of Super Tuesday, at least in the modern sense. The 1988 Super Tuesday was not as conclusive as Democrats wanted: Dukakis took six primaries, Gore won five, and Jackson five. By then I had the Black Album, and I was listening to it every chance I could get. I'm sure I played it while I watched returns. Gore tried vainly to position himself as a moderate to Dukakis's liberal, but Dukakis surged, and Gore dropped out after the New York primary in April.
Gore was from Tennessee, of course, as was the power-pop group The Shazam, led by Hans Rotenberry, which kicked off its 1999 album "Godspeed the Shazam" with the superb "Super Tuesday," which starts soft and then explodes, much like the election season. When it came out, I was dating the woman I would soon marry, though we were going through a rare bad patch at that time, and the song struck me as true, in a sad way:Somebody needs to set you down
And tell you how things is
Living on the dark side of what is
You're always talking talking ready for a fall
You've got your reasons but you don't believe them at all
You act like you're waiting for the sympathy vote
Tomorrow's Super Tuesday
And the people in the news say
You're sagging in the polls
That's how it goes For bonus points, try to guess which election is represented by the electoral map above.Labels: ben, funk, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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