Until I saw the album art tonight I had assumed that 50 Cent was white. How much this had to do with his being associated with Eminem (after all, I never thought Obie Trice was white) and how much this had to do with my thinking "Wanksta" was awful (and despite liking "In Da Club" better, I still like it in the weird way where I'm not so sure I think he's not a terrible MC) - unclear to me.

Oh, well, er, that went away.

Trojan singles box, disc three: what if Motown's house band were from Jamaica?

I deliberately avoid knowing the titles of the more interstitial, "non-song" songs on Another Green World. Oh why, why oh why Brian Eno, why did you have to choose lamely programmatic titles (fishes, reptiles, whatever) for them? I do not want even the temptation to imagine "movies for my head" to accompany these tracks. The music does not need this.

I suspect that my easily associating Robert Fripp's guitar solos with Robert Fripp upsets something of the effect I might have been intended to get from the record. I suppose that, given Eno's audience (and the fact that No Pussyfooting, the Fripp and Eno record, came out two years earlier), it wouldn't be unusual for them to be able to put faces with the sounds. But to me they're all, to some extent, goofy and unusual, heavy on the alterity. This is true of Fripp's solos, too, I think, but knowing that they're his taints things. The solos seem to me more obviously unusual-guitar solos rather than unusual-sounds, which I'm more inclined to group many of the other things as even when they are obviously ordinarily "musical" in some way (so we're not talking about Neptunes screen door slam beats or Neubauten jet turbines or anything like that).

Or is it? It's repeated on the inside but then spelled correctly in a record title in the credits.

"Metro Area" is misspelled on the back of Digital Disco.

The buying itself, I meant, as I barely listened to them.

I have a cold, yet today was probably the consistently best day I've had in months. The records I bought surely had something to do with this:

Louis Armstrong - Complete Hot Fives and Sevens (on JSP)
Orchestra Baobab - Specialist in All Styles
V/A - Digital Disco (on Force Tracks)
Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...
Prince - Sign 'o' the Times
Matthew Herbert - Let's All Make Mistakes
Trojan Singles Box Set

Georg Lichtenberg cutting close to home in C47:

A principal rule for writers, and especially those who want to describe their own sensations, is not to believe that their doing so indicates they possess a special disposition of nature in this respect. Others can perhaps do it just as well as you can. Only they do not make a business of it, because it seems to them silly to publicize such things.

Jeff and Matt, tonight, commenting on this blog: "it's like pornography".