She’d gotten a snare and a hihat and a cymbal and I couldn’t believe how loud it was. Her parents said she’d quit by year’s end. She did. She gave me a tape with weird indie music I’d never heard before–The Magnetic Fields, Pavement, Papas Fritas, the Legendary Jim Ruiz Group.

I had dreams of running up mountains and doing a thousand pushups a day and setting up old tires to run through in the backyard. Instead, I lounged around the living room flipping through the Minty Fresh Records catalog and listening to the Mets on the radio.

Legendary Jim Ruiz Group - Urban Gentleman
Legendary Jim Ruiz Group - Every Other Sunday
Legendary Jim Ruiz Group - Glad They’re Gone
Papas Fritas - Passion Play

Whether rock is black enough is a question that ought to be raised and can clearly be answered by an aging white male who wears derby hats. I’ve got it: let’s reduce all music to that perfect Fort Greenesque multiethnic baby, parented by supermodels (and underpaid immigrant nannies), gliding along in shock-absorbent strollers, brunching at the new vegan East African spot on Dekalb. And let this baby sound like the Rolling Stones. And let this baby never misappropriate.

Here are two little ditties from last wintertime listening season (or beyond) that don’t exactly swing like the Brian Setzer Orchestra, but it’s ok, we grant you permission to listen to more than one genre of music.

MGMT - Kids

Renderers - Dream of the Sea

It’s always nice when people sing pretty songs about, like, politics. While all too often a political ballad will roll hamfisted into the gates of tacky hell, sometimes a small charming ditty — helped if delivered by a pretty girl — will lull you to happiness before understanding that what underlies your happiness is actually a Western gaze that insists on compulsively commodifying all it touches. Then you have your tea and feel better.

Mayra Andrade - Dimokransa
Mayra Andrade - Comme S’il En Pleuvait

Without the aplomb and will of a sweater wandering into a suit, it takes a rare band or person to successfully remix drunk singing favorite I Will Survive (curiously unsung at the last karaoke gathering) without falling into full out camp. But before ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ became a rallying cry for rubber-obsessed internet fans, Erasure in 1991 managed to pull off a great version that could appease both lovers of intense synth and Gloria Gaynor impersonators. The track remains as ripe today.

Erasure - I Love to Hate You

Don Omar - Con el Cucu en la Boca — LINK FIXED!

Sabor Kolombia - Bota y Tambor