Umm Kulthum: Enta Omri (1964)
Painstakingly rehearsed and kept to a compact 33 minutes, the studio version is a fine place to start with her if, like me, you know next to nothing about Egyptian music. If you then decide to check out hours of live recordings to find the best one, tell me about it!
#TheTenX5 Honorable Mention 5
Don Omar & Lucenzo: "Danza Kuduro"
Puerto Rico/Portugal/France 2010
Reggaeton and kuduro! Two international dance crazes in one! Who would ever think of such a thing! (Actually the French did a lot, but this one actually worked.)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zp1...
it's bad!
22.06.2025 00:19 — 👍 3 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)
This should be Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but I can't listen to its soundtrack without crying, so I've put off watching Rochefort indefinitely. I can't follow the lyrics, but I gather there are young girls and a guy who sounds like Gene Kelly but speaks French?
Manga page from Aliens, Baseball, and Civilization by Teito Heji & Sai Yamagishi. Human: It's interesting how baseball-like the chromosomes of life on this planet are! Yaluru: You often say that, Nana. Human: But the genomes, which are the blueprints for life forms… are surprisingly similar between humans and Yaluru. If we use the gene editing technology I developed… we could make a hybrid between a human and Yaluru. Yaluru: Nana. Sometimes you say such the most ridiculous things. Human: Artona! I want you to be my husband! Let's make a baby! Yaluru: <spurts drink>
RIP Aliens, Baseball, and Civilization, which had one of the great pre-cancellation "that escalated quickly"s—in ~2 chapters it went from a cozy story of teaching aliens baseball to king nerd shit about gene editing, a brain in a jar, and sneaking past the laws of physics like you're stealing home.
28.02.2026 05:52 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
#TheTenX5 Honorable Mention 4
Riton & Kah-Lo: "Fake I.D."
UK/Nigeria 2017
I like Riton but remain amazed that *he* was the one who got some kind of stardom out of this collab
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp__...
#TheTenX5 Honorable Mention 3
2NE1: "I Am the Best"
South Korea 2011
Looks like the hopes for not-in-English songs rest on Route 1 Bangers (well, and "Despacito"). Since I love Route 1 Bangers (the Black Eyed Peas are gonna clean up on my '00s), that's fine with me!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_l...
![Komeda Quintet - Kattorna [Official Audio]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:bcv5b34j4qwov63p4urmcfuy/bafkreie5pozoh4ym7i5zfxg3abcii36dbajiz2nvieyrwx4lrjfk746lum@jpeg)
Krzysztof Komeda Quintet: Astigmatic (1966)
Polish-mostly guys do better at taking Kind of Blue's ideas further out than anyone besides Miles and Trane, and you could argue about Miles. Central to the creation of a distinct Eurojazz (the exciting kind, not the "feel the portent of every note" kind)
On #HeebieJeebiesDay, I'm declaring Louis dropping his lyrics to be the moment that African/European/American strands combined in him to give birth to A-Pop As We Know It (and it's not even my fave 26 Louis.) Plus North Africa (via J Bogart) brings us the most sexually explicit song of the Twenties!
26.02.2026 20:38 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
#TheTenX5 Hon. Mention 2
Mondo Grosso ft. Hikari Mitsushima: "Labyrinth"
Japan 2017
q: is it the best video of the '10s? a: probably
q: does it retrospectively justify La La Land? a: maybe
q: do it and the Oscars debacle together justify La La Land? a: definitely
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2qu...
#TheTenX5 Honorable Mention 1
Beatrice Eli: "Girls"
Sweden 2014
A botch on my part—this should've been in my 50. My apologies to the LGBT community.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orff...
Live: Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Pop Festival (1967)
I'm totally unequipped to judge how this compares to his hundred other albums, but this is the one that mattered, and once it gets going it's transporting. Like all philistines, I like it best when Alla Rakha goes ham on tablas.
Fourcade & Healy, The Ordinal Society, p. 154 John Deere has outfitted new generations of tractors, harvesters, and other agricultural machines with sensors, cellular transmitters, and software that is on by default and cannot be easily turned off or tampered with. In January 2022 it unveiled a tractor that it claimed “can plow fields, avoid obstacles, and plant crops with minimal human intervention.” Again, the core impulse is familiar. Agricultural corporations have long sought to secure the dependence of farmers through the genetic manipulation of seeds, planned obsolescence of machinery, or simply through access to parts for maintenance. Many farmers have pushed back against the computerization of their means of production not by rejecting software as such but by turning the “right to repair” farm equipment into a potent political issue. Others, meanwhile, try their luck in the over-heated market for older, computer-free machinery; or they turn to do-it-yourself videos and websites to learn how to hack their own equipment using third-party code that technically violates the terms of their software license with John Deere. Most people do not resist the datafication of their machines and devices in this way. Regulatory protections against companies’ control of repairability are (so far) rare and hard to enforce. Instead people tend to be more fatalistic in the face of technological upgrades…
The progress of right-to-repair under Biden (and the fact it hasn't been destroyed yet) makes me more optimistic labor can resist tech rent-seeking,. "Sit and code all day" workers, who know they'll be the first to get squeezed, should think about what they can learn. (Wait, I sit and code all day…)
26.02.2026 04:23 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0unlocks for non-subscribers in an hour, so be patient, freeloaders
25.02.2026 20:14 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0New stuff, 99 year 364 day old stuff, it's all the same
25.02.2026 20:09 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
#TheTenX5
26. Red Velvet: "Ice Cream Cake"
South Korea 2015
Complete list of girl groups that I'm sure have a better body of work than Red Velvet:
the Shirelles
the Supremes I guess
www.youtube.com/watch?v=glXg...
*The databases say 1969, but the biographies say the second Shleu Shleu only formed in 1970 when most of the first Shleu Shleu decided to stay in New York (starting a tradition the second and third Shleu Shleus would continue)
25.02.2026 05:32 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Les Shleu Shleu [Tête Chauve] (1969*)
One of the most delightful pre-synth Haitian albums (and covers) by I think the second Shleu Shelu, ft. the sax of Georges Loubert Chancy, who'd only been playing for a year, and guitars that sound very Afropop when they're not explicitly Latin (and even then.)
#TheTenX5
27. Metric: "Now or Never Now"
Canada 2018
A mini-epic about how middle age makes even listening to the alt-rock throwback radio station hard; it stands with [insert whichever Fantasies single I end up picking for the '00s].
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC8M...
I dunno the context here at all but it just rules to me that an 89 year old is still out there covering BABYMETAL
24.02.2026 11:54 — 👍 23 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0
Fourcade & Healy, The Ordinal Society, p. 148 To be sure, the new data-driven hiring and management strategies, and even the “platformization” of workers, might produce opportunities for people who might have been otherwise shut out of the labor market. But they can also cut down dramatically on workers’ autonomy, distribute work schedules to maximize profit, anticipate who has a higher likelihood of quitting their jobs, calculate pay on the basis of smaller and smaller fractions of time worked, or even remunerate workers based on an automatically generated estimate of what they might be willing to accept given their rating and the specific conditions the data suggests they might face. Ever finer wage discrimination and dynamic wage setting relies on the same economic framework as price discrimination and dynamic pricing. Almost all firms, in fact, have become “ruled by data” in some manner, even if this only extends in practice to rule by the idea of acquiring data.
The data power battle between big tech and consumers is rapidly being won by big tech. The data power battle between big capital and workers, well, you'd hope workers recognize what's at stake. (Hmmm unions, it'd be nice to have counter-managerial AI workers can use to make it kind of a fair fight.)
24.02.2026 06:33 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Toots & the Maytals: Sweet and Dandy (1969)
The first great reggae album—its case is mostly "read the tracklist", but bassist Jackie Jackson and Leslie Kong's house band show they've mastered the new groove, and Toots leaves you in no doubt he has the right and reason to sing "We Shall Overcome".
I asked my wife and she didn't know either, guess it's a "rest of the Western world" thing
24.02.2026 03:47 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Enjoying the Americanized reprints of Asterix by Papercutz. Most noticeable change is Panoramix keeps his French name instead of Getafix, for "how did they ever get away with that" reasons
(the depictions of Africans are touched up but still aren't *great*, so look before buying your kids the set)
also: the NuGrape Twins, wtf
23.02.2026 21:04 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Preparing for #HeebieJeebiesDay by listening to the short edit of @centuriesofsound.bsky.social's 1926, and it strikes me this is the last year where you can make a 35 min megamix that gives the impression of containing the whole world of recorded music. (By '27 you start playing "but you missed…")
23.02.2026 21:03 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
#TheTenX5
28. Chief Keef ft. Lil Reese: "I Don't Like"
USA 2012
I watched Top Gun for the first time in decades last night, and you know what? They're the same movie
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WcR...
that's all I've got for Latin America, to finish we'll take a leisurely, haphazard, and woefully incomplete journey across the (non-UK) Old World
23.02.2026 05:54 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Violeta Parra: Las últimas composiciones (1966)
One of the few lyricists who gets better the more poetic she waxes. Resist the temptation to flatten her (better Kacey Musgraves covers her than Joan Baez): her songs can be the most vivacious in the Spanish language one day and the bleakest the next.
Celia Cruz: Son Con Guaguancó (1966)
On Cruz's first record backed by Nuyoricans, she gives them legitimacy, while Tito et al. give her huge horn charts that'd eventually make all of them but mostly Johnny Pacheco's lawyer tons of money. Not sure they ever improved on the formula of "Bemba Colorá".
