Radio LBB: Backwards Inspiration

I thought about putting together a CoronaVirus-centric playlist. Maybe with some punny songs (‘Touch Me I’m Sick’? ‘In The Air Tonight’? ‘Night Fever’?). Or possibly some songs I’ve pulled and used for Corona (the beer) commercials. Instead, I’m going with something as a distraction to all this.

You never know where you’re going to find some inspiration. Sometimes you need to look backwards a little. Sometimes you just need to clear your head and not think about the project you’ve just spent the last week focusing on day and night. And if you happen to pull some ideas out of that head-clearing, all the better.

That’s the genesis of this playlist. To distract myself from an intense project, I went down a YouTube wormhole watching some early/mid 90s skate videos. I started with the ones ingrained in my memory, the early Blind and Girl videos directed by Spike Jonze, and fell in deeper from there.

The thing that struck me the most was how varied the music tracks on them were. It wasn’t all one genre or a focus-group-tested algorithm of what was ‘cool’. They were generally all over the place and that just helped set the overall vibe. From Count Basie to The Jesus Lizard to childhood songs about math. 

Sure there were the obligatory-for-the-time Beastie Boys and 90s hip hop tracks, but I loved how they’d be next to Raymond Scott or Ravel; The Jackson 5 to Black Flag was my favourite segue. Not to mention the deep dive through the fog of memory into the long-forgotten (Ned’s Atomic Dustbin!). 

Anyway, hopefully something here will provide a little nugget of inspiration or help you do some exploring down your own rabbit hole. Or possibly just give you a distraction to the infinite amount of things on your plate (and going on in the world).

Enjoy!