Scott Crawford

Some updates:

Everyone I’ve mentioned in these pieces who has or had COVID-19 is still with us as I type this, as far as I’m aware (and I have been keeping up; the person who had the worst case out of all the people I know is still fighting like hell, but they’re starting to make some progress now). I do know people, including some of you who read this, who’ve had losses, and I’m very sorry for those losses.

In much lighter news, I’m 40% through the pile of comic books now, so there’s been some progress there. I’ve watched The Illumination of Jim Woodring, Strange Brew, One Million Years B.C., Barbarella and the long-lost Music Of The Spheres (which I hadn’t seen in over 30 years, and which I thought was lost to the ages) since I wrote last, so I’ve finally got some attention span back for movies. I’ve been keeping up with Better Call Saul and Westworld, too. The former had a great season, while the latter’s had an uneven one. We’ll see how the finale plays out on Sunday.

On the video game front, my household’s played the hell out of Untitled Goose Game, and I just have to get through the timed missions to 100% it. It’s been a tonic through some pretty bleak times.

Here’s a running total of what I’ve enjoyed so far this year, album-wise.

I’ll try to write a bit more frequently this month, as it’s probably kinda scary when people have long gaps in between their diatribes nowadays. I hope that you are all as well as you can be at the moment. Y’all should stay in touch too, eh?

I am alive.

It’s been a little over a month since I did that thing I did.

I hear from far fewer people on a given day than I was hearing from before I did it, and I don’t know a lot of what’s going on in your lives. Plenty of you are keeping the faith, though, and I appreciate it. Shoot me a line, leave a comment here, or whatever. “I’m always home. I’m uncool!”

I’ve done my best, given my general state of being, to reach out, too. There’s room for improvement, but I’m very human and my sleep was a mess for weeks. I’ll continue working on it.

I’m also torn between my desire to nuke multiple accounts on really terrible websites, and my concerns about further isolating myself at a time when people need each other.

Back here on the other side of the screen, it’s tough for a middle-aged man with my interests to make local friends without either volunteering somewhere or being an alcoholic. Where volunteer work is concerned, the spirit is willing, but I’m tired and physically unreliable. I’m retired from the other thing. Alternate suggestions are welcome.

I’ve started the next round of doctors for the various things that are wrong with me. My goal (barring new catastrophes) is to figure out what can be fixed, what’s likely to get worse, and what’s going to stay about the same relatively soon. Wish me luck on all that.

I figured out, during this process, that Monday appointments are a really bad idea for me. It’s a combination of the stress of not knowing if I’ll be awake for said appointment, and wanting to get started on my week when other people do, especially since my productivity is often limited during business hours.

Little by little, I’m trying to clear the cobwebs from a year’s worth of post-concussion syndrome. At least, I hope it’s post-concussion syndrome, and some more of it will wear off, and not permanent brain damage, where life’s just gonna be like this or worse from here on out. There are good days and bad days.

I’m still experiencing some writer’s block, which has been ongoing since I pulled the plug on the motherfucker. It’s impacting this website and my other one, but I’m trying to push through it. How obvious is it that I’m straining to write this?

I’ve been a little behind on current music (I’ve got a backlog of at least Kesha, Marc Almond, and Ozzy; best wishes to Ozzy, by the way…), but Richard Marx, that beautiful bastard, put out an album that I’d describe as a best-case scenario for a Richard Marx album released in 2020. I’m going to guess that if you’re not already a fan, this isn’t for you, but who knows?

There are also new songs from Sparks (full album out May 15th)…

…and Choir Boy (full album out May 7th).

I haven’t gotten out a lot lately. Definitely feeling the urge, but there’s a time and place for it.

With that said, I highly recommend going to see Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn while it’s still in theatres, or at home when it isn’t. I think it’s the best live-action DC super-hero movie I’ve seen since Keaton was Batman (though I haven’t seen Aquaman or Green Lantern yet).

I’m pretty sure that the world’s still on fire, figuratively and literally, and getting worse by the second. There’s some good stuff too, though.

Does anyone have any questions?

Yeah, for the hell of it, I did the ’60s, too.

I enjoyed making this one more than I thought I would, given how overplayed to hell and back most of this stuff is. I still think my ’70s playlist is the best one, and will remain that way, but this felt similar to my process for the ’70s one. Around 1966, stuff got weird in a hurry, but it did so in a way that made sense, similar to how disco impacted the ’70s.

For those who might be wondering, doing the 1950s is a really distant possibility (I’m looking at it right now). I don’t know if I’m going to do the 1990s, though. I looked at the lists the other day, and found that my interest in what was on the pop charts started to really tank around 1993, then wore down to a trickle by the end of the decade. I’m also still really sick of the worst of the 1990s music, as it wasn’t that long ago that it was popular, and as I got severely overexposed at the end of the decade by working in a mall that was home to a “best of the ’80s and ’90s” radio station.

2000s to present, hell naw. I looked already, and the number of 2000s pop hits I’d want anything to do with is a third of the ’90s list (which is shorter than the ’70s list, and about the same size as the ’60s list). The 2010s list would be half of the 2000s list. I really liked 2012 in mainstream pop for some reason, but not a lot else. Despite the fact that I do keep up as best I can, there have only been 3 songs in the past 4 years that made Billboard’s year-end lists that have really resonated with me.

Anyway, enjoy, let me know what you think, and with all of these playlists, feel free to tell people about them.

02/15/20 Update:

Yes, for better or worse, I went through the entire history of the year-end charts. Individual decades are available as public playlists on my Spotify profile.

They weren’t like this, because the Hot 100 is a very different filter than MTV was, and a much, much different one than the music I got exposed to through the people I met, and on the various margins I became privy to from the moment I got cable television, but this was an interesting experiment that I, of course, couldn’t help pissing away 2 days on, and I think it produced some fun results.

This list is twice as long as the ’70s one, which sorta makes sense, because I was alive for the entirety of the decade instead of 5 1/2 years of it, and paying more attention, as a slightly more fully formed person.

I’ve given y’all 51 hours and 28 minutes’ worth of playlists this week. I’d love some feedback on how I did, if you’re feeling up to it.

No one asks me this.

Being a rabid oversharer, though, I do volunteer a lot of what I remember, which isn’t a ton, and was almost all wildly inappropriate for someone in early childhood, just by virtue of life being fucking complicated. For some reason, though, I have a pretty strong sort of sense memory of what the music was like in the last age before widespread music video. I’ve wanted to do something like this for quite some time, but the combination of insomnia, caffeine, time I should’ve used on something else and obsessive behavior hadn’t aligned until last night.

(Note: share embeds from Spotify only list the first 100 songs, roughly 48.7% of the playlist, so you’ll need to go to Spotify for the entirety of the big list.)

This is an evolving document, but to the best of my recollection, give or take some things I never wish to hear again, either because they were terrible or because the people who made them were a bit shit, this is what the 1970s sounded like to me, as they were happening. My extra brain for this was Wikipedia’s series of annual “Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles”  from 1970-1979 (start here). Almost everything on this playlist can be found on those lists. A few non-chart songs snuck on. A notable exception was Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase” from the “Midnight Express” soundtrack, because, while it did not chart on those year-end deals, the song was absolutely everywhere in that time period. So many local television stations used it in the background of sports video packages, public affairs calendar stuff…you couldn’t get away from it. Which, of course, took a somewhat uncomfortable turn when I got cable television at a young age and wanted to see the movie that cool song was from, but that’s another story.

I will also mention that at least one song on here (David Naughton’s “Makin’ It”) is definitely a re-recorded version, and normally I wouldn’t go with those, but that song was such an important part of my 1979 (some of my earliest phone calls were to a local radio station to request it over…and over…and over again…) that it’d leave a gaping hole if it wasn’t in there, and it’s actually not a bad re-record.

You may notice that there’s really not much in the way of hard rock, heavy metal, punk or new wave on this playlist. I don’t really remember hearing it until 1980 or so. “1980, you say?”

Bonus: yes, because I’m a horrible cheater who is firmly in the “decades are 0-9” camp until I have to actually define eras of my musical life, I made a 1980-specific playlist. In my head canon, 1980 was still part of this period, but you can see that the selections I went with from memory were already very different than the ’70-’79 stuff. I would call both of these playlists part of the same era, but also sorta not.

Why stop here, though, if I’ve crossed the decade line already?

Two things happened around the end of 1980 that really created before/after markers, at least in my head. First, as I alluded to above, music videos started to be broadcast on a pretty widespread basis. My first exposure was probably Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 10 in 1980, and from there, we got cable in June of 1981, so I saw a lot of things on HBO Video Jukebox, and, eventually, MTV.

The other thing, which is pretty unpleasant, is that John Lennon was shot and killed. Hearing of a popular musician being shot and killed when I was 6 years old…well, it left a big fucking dent that I’m still grappling with almost 4 decades later. Yeah, that got dark, but it’s absolutely relevant to a conversation about my personal musical history, and really my life.

Before that happened, though, I had a good almost 6 1/2 years of musical discovery. Here’s what it sounded like. You’ve got about 17 hours to listen to. Some of it will be really familiar, some might not. I consciously put songs in vaguely chronological order, but also in “this would sound good here” order, but I’ve been testing both playlists on shuffle, and they work that way, too, oddly enough. Enjoy, and let me know what you think in the comments or otherwise.