We’re getting all of our Swedish bands out of the way! This time instead of two couples it’s three siblings and a former Nazi (seriously).
In 1994 I lived and breathed this song for months. I still have my 7th grade journal and each week I tracked how this song was doing on the charts and every week it was number one I used a ton of exclamation points. The week it fell off number one I wrote a lot of frowny faces. It was the first CD I ever bought. I still do love this song. The octave Linn Berggren goes up in the final chorus gives me chills.
I find most of their songs to be overproduced and I don’t really care for most outside of “All That She Wants” and “Don’t Turn Around.”
ABBA (sorry I can’t figure out the backwards “B”) was on constant rotation on the record player when I was a kid. I completely dug the ultra poppy “Rock Me,” “Take A Chance On Me,” and “Money, Money, Money.” As I grew older, “One Of Us” became my favorite. An incredibly sad song given that Bjorn and Benny wrote this during their divorce proceedings with Agnetha and Anni-Frid. The music video, while a bit weak on the cinematography, does a good job presenting the sorrow within the group.
This was their last #1 hit in Europe before they disbanded. Cool to see they got back together after 40 years to release an album a couple months ago. I listened to “Don’t Shut Me Down,” and I don’t know why it just feels like a GlaDOS song.
Beyond just the music I will occasionally write about the artists themselves and how I reconcile any conflicts with their personal lives and or racist/sexist lyrics (especially when we get to country!). I don’t think I had ever read the Wiki pages for either 50 Cent or Nate Dogg. By all accounts it seems like Nate Dogg was not the best person, with a domestic assault conviction and several more accusations and charges before he died following two strokes at 41. 50 Cent has never had any similar accusations, though his relationship with his first son is sad, with regular public feuding, saying he didn’t love him and didn’t care if he died. Way to take the high road there. He came out as very pro-gay pretty early on which is pretty cool.
As for the song itself, it’s a sweet love song reflective of the experience of black men in thug life (Tupac Shakur’s concept of that). Mostly I love the instrumentation. The guitar work is repetitive, but I love the sound of the high E at the end of every line. This won’t be the last time Nate Dogg is featured this year; he had no part in writing this one, but the King of Hooks does a slick job with the chorus and the outro.
For 2022 I will be posting a song with an accompanying music video for every day of the year. Each day will be a different artist as to avoid monotony. The only times an artist will appear more than once is if he or she is a featured artist for someone else, or if the person had a band and a solo career. This only will happen a few times as I wanted to make sure the sounds were also distinct. So for example, I decided not to have a song from both Ben Folds Five and Ben Folds as you can’t easily tell the difference between the two.
I don’t like ranking songs, as that would change constantly depending on the mood I’m in. So this list will be in alphabetical order by artist.
I hope you enjoy this list. There are songs from the 1950s all the way through 2021 and every major genre is represented. Please don’t hesitate to give me recommendations for new music!
Inspired by a friend. And woah, a lot of white men here. The only female directors are the Wachowski sisters, and there’s only a handful of POC. I anticipate this will get better as I age.
Will keep this updated.
Year
Movie
Director
1938
The Lady Vanishes
Alfred Hitchcock
1939
The Wizard of Oz
Victor Fleming
1941
Citizen Kane
Orson Welles
1946
It’s A Wonderful Life
Frank Capra
1948
Rope
Alfred Hitchcock
1949
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Robert Hamer
1950
Rashomon
Akira Kurosawa
1952
Singin’ in the Rain
Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
1954
The Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa
1957
12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet
1961
Judgment at Nuremburg
Stanley Kramer
1962
To Kill A Mockingbird
Robert Mulligan
1963
The Birds
Alfred Hitchcock
1964
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Winning several game of the year awards, Gemini Rue is an incredible first effort by UCLA student Joshua Neurnberger, a sci-fi thriller combing classic point and click adventure with some light arcade.
Publisher: Sierra Developer: Sierra Year: 1992 Platform: DOS, Mac
Rating: 5
Mostly a beat-by-beat remake of the original game Hero’s Quest (changed due to copyright infringement), Quest For Glory I updated the graphics and sound to match Sierra’s SCI engine at the time. While it’s easier to play, it also lost some of the charm in the conversion.
Publisher: Sierra Developer: Sierra Year: 1990 Platform: Windows, DOS, Amiga, Atari ST
Rating: 3
A well-researched labor of love by Christy Marx, Conquests of Camelot takes a fantasy world a lot more seriously than does King’s Quest. While in many ways a nice break from the usual Sierra adventure fare, it unfortunately bit off more than it could chew and is a mess on many levels.
Publisher: Freeware Developer: DrSlash Year: 2021 Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac
Rating: 8
Fan-made remakes of games tend to focus on aesthetic improvements such as updated graphics and sound. DrSlash decided that King’s Quest IV was gorgeous just the way it was (and they would be correct) and left all that alone. Instead this version tries to modernize the game play to appeal to younger gamers. The experiment is mostly successful.
Death By Troggles 
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