Hail Hail Rock 'n' Roll: 100 obscure, neglected or forgotten songs of quality (guaranteed 30 second rap interlude free)

I may as well get the semi-rant part out of the way right at the start.

I like a mixture of music, as long as it’s done well with a degree of passion, and I look forward to new releases as much as the next man. I admit I am getting a bit long in the tooth and I can probably count my age in musical formats like the growth rings of a tree. I think there’s been the 33 & 45 rpm Record, the Tape Cassette, 8-Track, DAT, Minidisc, CD and now MP3 Digital Download. I even owned and played a few 78s as a very young kid (Doris Day’s ‘The Deadwood Stage springs straight to mind and I still know all the words) but that wasn’t a live medium in my lifetime so I suppose it doesn’t count as a growth ring in my musical evolution.

However, I have reached a point where I must vent my ageing spleen against the manufactured Pop/Dance/R&B manufactured CRAP that is currently littering the ‘popular’ music TV and radio, repeatedly working to a formula which inserts a cosmetic meaningless thirty second rap interlude between a verse and a chorus, which has usually been borrowed from a recognisable 70s or 80s hit, all set to a formulaic ‘Dance/R&B’ beat.

Eleven out of forty three tracks on the latest ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ compilation include artists with a ‘ft.’, as in ‘featuring’ not ‘feet’, in their names. We never had this ‘featuring’ malarkey in my day! (Maybe once or twice, ‘The Beatles featuring Tony Sheridan’ or ‘featuring Billy Preston’ do spring to mind. The exceptions that prove the rule as they say). This artist is usually the ‘talented’ guest rapper, usually with names like Teenie Tampon or MC To$$a, brought in to supply this essential thirty seconds of rapping genius (time them if you think I’m making this up!).

Anyway, as an antidote to this throwaway current formulaic pop/pap (and I hasten to add that not all current music is pap) I thought I would gather together a bunch of not so well known songs of substance and quality from my mental ‘Shit that’s good bank’ that I believe deserve their Warholian fifteen minutes of fame (or for some of them a reminder that they once had fifteen minutes and are due a repeat prescription).