Kevin Cole

"America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you've lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn't belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don't care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve." ~ Tom Morello, guitarist Donate to the KEXP Spring drive: ww.kexp.org/donate

Frank Guan analyzes the lyrics of “This Is America,” which draw heavily on trap music, a gritty rap subgenre with its origins in Atlanta. “The incongruousness of Glover, raised middle-class and a NYU graduate, bragging about his Mexican drug supplier and threatening to have you gunned down, is intentional,” he writes. “It’s a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal.”: www.vulture.com This is a must watch video! youtu.be Donate to the Spring Drive at Kexp.org!

Public Enemy sampled this song themselves in several other songs on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, including the lines "Now they got me in a cell" and "Death Row/What a brother knows" in "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and the lines "Bass!" and "How low can you go?" in "Night of the Living Baseheads". "Yeah, well, music is, without all getting all cryptic, but it's that vibration that moves us, just like, I mean, every heart got a beat that's for the living beings." - Read more of our interview with Chuck D in 2018 here: www.kexp.org

It's one of the music industry's great ironies that today, outside of reggae circles, Jimmy Cliff is perhaps better known for his film appearances than his music. Even after a string of hits, the singer never quite managed to break into the mainstream, although he seemed poised for international stardom during the late '60s/early '70s www.allmusic.com Donate to The Spring Drive Here: Kexp.org

IDLES frontman Joe Talbot shared with NPR: "I promised Danny [Nedelko, member of Bristol band Heavy Lungs and a Ukrainian immigrant] I’d write a song for him and him me; the tone comes from Danny, and the lyrics came as I thought of his exuberance and how important people like Danny are. I think of this one more as a humane portrait than a political song, but I wanted the two notions to be inseparable." Donate to Kexp Here: kexp.org

Ian Fraser Kilmister, the jagged-voiced heavy-metal singer and bassist known as Lemmy, who led the loud and fast British rock band Motörhead for decades, died December 28th, 2015 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 70.: www.nytimes.com Donate to Kexp here: Kexp.org/donate

"Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" is the fifth single from LCD Soundsystem, released on February 21, 2005. The accompanying music video paid tongue-in-cheek homage to Spike Jonze's and Michel Gondry's music videos for Daft Punk's "Da Funk" and "Around the World." James Murphy previously name-checked Daft Punk on LCD's debut single, "Losing My Edge." He explained his lyrical stalking of the French duo to ireallylovemusic.co.uk: "I do love Daft Punk, but really I think they're a great signifier because they manage to be genreless, rather than something really specific, you know, like 'Junior Sanchez is Playing In My House.' They are like a band and they are DJs; they do song style songs and techno songs; they do dark stuff and pop crossovers. It is like referring to David Bowie who has been everything from folk to glam rock." Donate to The Spring Drive! kexp.org

The singer on this track is New Jersey-born house producer Anthony Moore (aka Romanthony), whose vocals were heavily Auto-Tuned and compressed. Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesizer... What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before." bit.ly

This is the ONLY song produced by French house band Stardust, a joint effort combining the talents of Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter with Alan Braxe, and vocalist Benjamin Diamond.

"“Woke up feelin’ like I just might run for President” is definitely a vibe these days. Lizzo isn’t the first or the only person to throw out a sentiment like this in the last week or two, but she has been the first to follow it up with a smashing song worthy of streaming through the roof. As the second track off of Lizzo’s new album, Cuz I Love You, “Like a Girl” brings up the energy of the album about 10 notches, which is saying something, because it already starts off at around an 11. Following up on the explosive orchestra of the album’s title track, “Like a Girl” propels the album from the realm of the romantic (“I’m cryin’/ ’Cause I love you”) into the world of individuality and power." consequenceofsound.net

“Prince actually was working on the album with me before he passed on to another frequency, and helped me come up with sounds. And I really miss him, you know, it's hard for me to talk about him. But I do miss him, and his spirit will never leave me. pitchfork.com

24 years after the release of this one, the Beastie Boys admitted in their new book that it's about a sound engineer: “We were totally indecisive about what, when, why and how to complete songs. Mario [Caldato Jr.] was getting frustrated. That’s a really calm way of saying that he would blow a fuse and get pissed off at us and scream that we just needed to finish something, anything, a song." You can make a one-time donation to KEXP or become an Amplifier today! If you are already one of our fabulous Amplifiers, you can increase that current monthly amount. Thank you for being a part of this amazing community! Thank you so much for your donations today! Plus lots of thank you gifts available!! www.kexp.org

They recorded the songs in the same order they played them live. The Ramones famously borrowed their moniker from Paul McCartney’s early stage name, but that wasn’t the only cue they took from the Fab Four. Much like the Beatles’ 1963 debut, which was recorded in a single marathon session, the Ramones wanted their first LP to have the excitement and spontaneity of their legendary live sets. To this end, the band performed their stage-tested set in the studio over the course of seven days — three for backing tracks, four for vocals. “We recorded the songs in the same order that we played them in our live set at the time,” said Johnny. It was a pattern they would continue for their next two albums, Leave Home and Rocket to Russia. Producer Craig Leon even considered making the record a single track with no breaks between songs, a technique he employed to a smaller extent between “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.”

The inspiration for the song occurred during a tour of Japan mid-1979, when Billy Idol and bassist Tony James were struck by the sight of the young crowd in a Tokyo disco club dancing with their own reflections in walled mirrors rather than with one another. bit.ly --- www.kexp.org

A pop star on her own terms, Robyn only became more acclaimed as she became more independent. After some early success in the '90s as a more traditional pop artist -- her 1995 debut album, Robyn Is Here, featured work by famed producer Max Martin www.allmusic.com

Billy Idol was one of the first young pop/rock artists to achieve massive success in the early '80s due to the advent of MTV. Mixing his bad-boy good looks with an appealing blend of pop hooks, punk attitude, and dance beats, Idol quickly rocketed to stardom before hard living briefly derailed his career and almost proved fatal. www.allmusic.com

Le Tigre was an American electronic rock band formed by Kathleen Hanna.

Olympia, Washington punk rock feminist heroes! In an NPR interview On the writing of “Rebel Girl” “We were all talking about not being binary, not having a single narrator, all that kind of postmodernist stuff. And so of course, I was really influenced by the idea that identity is fluid. [But] it's also that childhood, sexy feeling of having a crush on someone, where you don't really understand what's happening. ... I always liked the older, kind of bitchy girls in my neighborhood, who used to leave me out of things. I wanted to be them, or be like them, or make out with them — I didn't really know. [With "Rebel Girl"] I was kind of like, "All of the above." n.pr

"Hey ladies...." You must procure this delightful song for yourself. It's available as a free KEXP Song of the Day: www.kexp.org

Junior Senior were a Danish pop duo, active from 1998 to 2008. The duo consisted of Jesper Mortensen alias Junior (11) (vocals, guitar, bass guitar, keyboards) and Jeppe Laursen alias Senior (2) (vocals, keyboards, programming). www.discogs.com