Feminists don’t worry, the above image is meant ironically… And besides, who doesn’t like eating a lot on days of dreaded wintry mixes, snow pouring into rain pouring into cold? Who doesn’t like a little whiskey and gospel on such days? WHO!?

Dorothy Coates - Strange Man

Fine, so we won’t bother you with more hilarious posts from the TSA’s blog (but for the diehard: today a post intended to laud the blogosphere for their hard work turns into a total asskicking. brilliant) but instead turn your precious attention, inspired by some random Spivak wandering, to the postcolonial realities encapsulated by this song. Wrought from the soundtrack to King of Scotland, a movie whose pretensions to antiracism actually amount to painting its idealist white lead as savior (with long hair no less), this song nevertheless shows us how music is able to travel much more than any kind of bullshit philosophizing.

Angela Kalule - Me and Bobby McGee

Goodbye, Brooklyn, how you doing?

Some of us, increasingly more of us, are off to [un]faraway vacations for a few weeks, and at the risk of emitting too much like a military experiment gone awry we wanted to direct a big fucking thanks to all the transumers, brand butlers, New York police, judeo-christian moralists, dive-bar-killers, Fort Greene expatriate grups and piece-of-shit ex-girlfriends that made this year such a precious one. Here’s some nostalgia for ya.

Jay Z & Lil Wayne - Hello Brooklyn (The Knocks Remix)
Carlos Moura - Sou

Ok, now you got me angry - and at least I don’t need to artificially, New-York-cop-style pump myself up on public insurance funds to demonstrate just how much. But fast on the heels of my last post, reader Miss Momo asked me for some good recent-ish songs. So let’s get on with it, eh?

The first song stands as perhaps the perfect end of the year song for living in New York. Hinging on hipster opera vocals, the irony of would-be-gentrifiers lamenting the purchase of the city by fuckheads would stand at the forefront were the song not so damned great. It’s fantastic to see a song explicitly about urban politics that is handed down by white newcomers; its a sign that America is a) waking up to realize our total and complete lack of livable urban infrastructure and, simultaneously that b) we have no plans to reshape it - are, in fact, blocking it all attempts at salvation.

Was it any different, though, way back? Tanya Stephens sings about the music biz in this 2004 classic, but it would be remiss to not see the same kinds of trends happening in the political and other worlds. Emphasis on superficial additions to our city - ooh, bikes on Governor’s Island!! - over sustained commitment to the myriad of other deeper endemic problems that revolve around people’s engagement with the civic sphere plague the real business going on in this country, a thesis a priority-lover would love.

Indeed, it is the dark end of the street. But what will the new year bring?

LCD Soundsystem - New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
Tanya Stephens - Way Back
James Carr - The Dark End Of The Street

With apologies to the racial politics of the soul genre, TMYLM wanted to offer a corollary to the millions of wonderful blogs writing about soul. Maybe the appropriation makes the man, maybe the falling bridges make me weep and laugh. The sexual politics would make many a feminist blush, too, but who can resist being saved by someone, somewhere? What would you rather read about on a Thursday, the latest gossip about Gawker’s firings?

Jon Rae and the River - Just One More
Devendra Banhart - Saved

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