A track-by-track rundown of the current "New Cue Revue" playlist on AFOS

(Photo source: Darkmatters)

Every Wednesday and Friday at noon (with a bonus Wednesday airing at 4pm), AFOS streams the most recent additions to the station's playlists--"AFOS Prime," "Beat Box," "The Whitest Block Ever," "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" and "Hall H"--for an hour-long block entitled "New Cue Revue." Here's the current "New Cue Revue" playlist.

(Photo source: The Geek Twins)

1. Brian Tyler, "Can You Dig It (Iron Man 3 Main Titles)"
"Can you count, suckas?"

2. Mychael Danna, "Set Your House in Order" (from Life of Pi)
"Tiger style."

3. Howard Shore, "Roast Mutton (Extended Version)" (from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)
"I wish I was a little bit taller."

(Photo source: TRON LIVES: Uprising Art)

4. Joseph Trapanese, "Compressed Space" (from Tron: Uprising, "The Stranger")
"Yeah, bitch! Magnets!"

5. Asha Bhosle, "Dum Maro Dum" (from Hare Rama Hare Krishna)
"Won't you pack the pipe and keep it moving down the line?"

10 Best Original Song Oscar contenders on Spotify that don't suck (so that means neither of them will probably get nominated)

On December 11, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its list of 75 original songs that are eligible for the Oscars' Best Original Song category. Only 32 percent of these potential nominees are on Spotify. Adele's "Skyfall," a song I've been streaming on AFOS and a Bond theme I've grown to better appreciate after realizing how well its lyrics tie into two of the film's key scenes involving Judi Dench's M, and the original songs from Django Unchained and Will Ferrell's all-Español Casa de Mi Padre are among the 68 percent that are inexplicably absent from Spotify.

Of the 32 percent, the following 10 tracks are the only potential nominees on Spotify that I like, which means neither of them will turn up in tomorrow morning's Oscar nod announcements because "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile aside, the Academy never nominates any original tunes I like. I must be the only film geek who doesn't care for the Oscars and is more interested in IFC's Spirit Awards, a far less up-its-own-ass and tedious movie award show. I really hope the NBA All-Star Game takes place during Oscar Weekend again this year. The All-Star Game festivities made for great Oscar counter-programming.

1. The Black Keys and RZA, "The Baddest Man Alive," The Man with the Iron Fists
2. Julie Fowlis, "Touch the Sky," Brave
3. Sunny Levine featuring Young Dad, "No Other Plans," Celeste & Jesse Forever
4. The Arcade Fire, "Abraham's Daughter," The Hunger Games
5. Beck, "Looking for a Sign," Jeff, Who Lives at Home
6. The Bootleggers featuring Emmylou Harris, "Cosmonaut," Lawless
7. Mychael Danna featuring Bombay Jayashri, "Pi's Lullaby," Life of Pi
8. The Crystal Method featuring Martha Reeves and The Funk Brothers, “I’m Not Leaving,” Re:Generation
9. Florence + the Machine, "Breath of Life," Snow White & the Huntsman
10. Jordin Sparks, "One Wing," Sparkle

Except for Life of Pi, I've seen neither of the films these songs hail from. That biopic starring Jessica Chastain as Lucy Lawless looks interesting.

March Madness March of the Day: "Baraat" from Monsoon Wedding by Mychael Danna

Today's "March Madness March of the Day" post is just going to be a bunch of quotes pasted together because I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on Indian music and Punjabi culture, although when I saw Monsoon Wedding at a press screening in 2002, I found its Mychael Danna-penned opening title march's New Orleans brass band-style sound to be a tremendous way to kick off the film.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Southern White DJ Whose Radio Show Used to Follow A Fistful of Soundtracks Back When AFOS Was a College Radio Show Ages Ago and Whose Name I've Since Forgotten. Your dumb and cruel ridicule of the Indian actresses who sang the Monsoon Wedding track "Mehndi/Madhorama Pencha" while I played it at the station was one of several things that made me realize it was time to leave terrestrial radio and turn AFOS into an Internet radio station, you racist piece of shit. Thanks, Hank or Toby or Enos or whatever the hell your name was.

Danna, whose name I haven't forgotten, described the roots of "Baraat" in a summary of the theme that I found on the blog of a musician who arranged a cover of "Baraat" for his wind band and even received Danna's blessing:

Baraat is the hindi word for the wedding procession of the bridegroom to the bride's village, with the groom on horseback, surrounded by his family and friends and musicians, singing and dancing with the joy of the occasion. Traditionally, the music that would accompany this noisy journey would be the exciting rhythm of the dhol drums. But since the time of the British military brass bands, the more affluent weddings use this strange yet typically Indian absorption of marching band instruments into Indian popular songs... musical proof that outside influences will come and go, but there will always be an India. This piece was written by me in that style for Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding.

An example of a baraat.

In a 2002 article for The Music Magazine, reviewer Surajit Bose outlined how "Baraat" forms the backbone of Danna's original score:

The liner notes [to the CD of Monsoon Wedding] reveal that Danna and his wife Aparna underwent a traditional North Indian marriage ceremony even as he was working on the music for Monsoon Wedding. Apparently this was mere serendipity, and not (alas) a symptom of Danna's fanatic devotion to researching his art. Nonetheless, Danna's first-hand familiarity with the traditional trombone-laden wedding orchestras is evident in the joyous and appropriately raucous Baraat, which serves as both the title music and the music of the baraat at the movie's eponymous close.

The melodic line established by Baraat is worked and reworked in various arrangements and at varying tempi throughout the movie, almost in the manner of a raga interpreted and reinterpreted over and over again to bring out its varied facets. Danna's creativity reveals itself in the dazzling array of orchestral arrangements, emotional effects, and musical affinities that emerge from the reworkings of a single melody...

The repetition begins to function not only as a background to the action, but also a comment on it...

The reimagining of the same melody over and over again has another, more tactical effect. Danna not only manages to relate the various characters and situations to each other, he also relates his own composition to the borrowings that pepper Monsoon Wedding. His recontextualizations of his own brand-new melody parallel the recontextualization of an old classic like "Mujhse pehlisi muhabbat". First off, Danna's own melody is credible as part of the story. The presence of a typical marriage brass band concoction like Baraat is natural enough given that the movie is, after all, about a wedding. But when that concoction recurs under various guises throughout the movie, it takes on a resonance beyond that of mere theme music. Just as with "Mujhse pehlisi muhabbat", something that could be taken for granted turns out on closer investigation to be meaningful in unexpected ways. So symbiotic is the relationship of music and action, that the music becomes the movie, as it were; the music is not a decorative add-on, but an integral part of the movie's shape, its texture and flow. It is, as Nair says, an "essential inclusion" into the life of the movie.