"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Run-DMC, "Rock Box"

Song: "Rock Box" by Run-DMC
Released: 1984
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: The tune that gave the AFOS non-score music block its new name--and remains one of the most effective examples of rap experimenting with hard-rock guitar licks--clearly left an impact on young Chris Rock. (It also happens to include his last name in the title. I wonder why he digs it so much.) The comedian and Prince Paul sampled "Rock Box" in their 1997 Diddy parody "Champagne"--which was where I was first exposed to "Rock Box"--and then Rock and Everybody Hates Chris showrunner Ali LeRoi later got both Rock's younger self (Tyler James Williams) and special guest star Jason Alexander to lip-synch and quasi-air-guitar to the Run-DMC classic in a highlight of the 2007 "Everybody Hates Snow Day" episode of Chris. Most gamers may know "Rock Box" best from its appearance during Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Hear why Calvin Klein's no friend of Run's.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Crystal Method, "Starting Over"

This is the first in a series of weekday posts about each of the existing songs that are streamed during AFOS' "F Zone" block, which is starting over today with a new name, "Rock Box" (4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays). Each post will provide info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and point out the movie or TV series moment where the track is so effectively used. The series of posts will end when I run out of "Rock Box" songs to write about.

Song: "Starting Over" by The Crystal Method
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's in the original CSI's 2004 "Dead Ringer" episode. The rousing track also turns up in Alias and Blade: Trinity.
Which moment in "Dead Ringer" does it appear?: It's in the pre-credits teaser at a nighttime relay race for cops where the CSIs are participating as runners, beautifully shot in the desert at night by cinematographer Nathan Hope.

The opening shot of runners and police escort vehicles emerging from the horizon, accompanied by the perfectly chosen opening electric piano riff of "Starting Over," is the ultimate example of Alan Sepinwall's description of CSI as "a snazzy-looking series, particularly in the way it picked up the baton from The X-Files in showing how much can be done with scenes set at night." A fan review of the episode at TV.com noted how the opening shot is "as stunning a bit of visual imagery as anything I've seen on network series TV. While you can always count on Jerry Bruckheimer's works to include plenty of nicely done location shots -- usually from the vantage point of a helicopter -- this night shot of the marathon runners was just amazing."

This is literally my "Rock Box"

I like to use shoeboxes to store the complete runs of three of my favorite comic book series--Y: The Last Man, Gotham Central and the Vertigo version of Human Target (Y ran for 60 issues, Gotham Central lasted for 40 and Human Target had 21, so the complete run of each title can easily fit in a shoebox). I also sometimes use shoeboxes as portable filing cabinets for CDs that have to be utilized for AFOS. One of these boxes contains the CDs that carry all the non-score music tracks (a.k.a. existing songs) I have to presently re-edit and re-upload to my Live365.com music library without the old AFOS "F Zone" sweepers they used to open with--all in time for the "F Zone" programming block's name change to "Rock Box" on January 3.

The time slots for "Rock Box" on AFOS are 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

"Always funky fresh, could never be stale"--Run, "Rock Box"

New Year's Day means changes to AFOS programming

I'm renaming one of the AFOS programming blocks. Starting January 3, "The F Zone," which focuses on "needle drops" (non-original songs during films like High Fidelity and the Harold & Kumar series and shows like Breaking Bad and Community), becomes "Rock Box." The time slots for "Rock Box" are 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

In November, I created a block called "New Cue Revue," which streams selections from new releases (or albums that aren't exactly new but are new to the "Assorted Fistful" playlist). It moves to Wednesdays at 10-11am and 4-5pm and Fridays at 11am-noon.

A new block called "The Street" will focus on my favorite kind of film or TV score album: the funky-sounding kind, the kind that gets frequently sampled by beatmakers. Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, David Holmes and newcomer Adrian Younge will get tons of airplay here. "The Street" airs on Mondays at 6-9am and noon-3pm, Tuesdays through Thursdays at 6-9am and 1-4pm and Fridays at 7-9am and 1-3pm.

The listeners who evaluate my playlists' tracks on Live365.com tend to give low star ratings to the funkier or more soulful-sounding ones. Live365 has listeners rate tracks because the site thinks this helps its station programmers decide which tracks to keep and which ones to get rid of. Well, it doesn't help this station programmer because I don't care about those listeners' ratings anyway. Every time someone on Live365 gives a track one and a half stars, it makes me want to find ways to stream it more often.

Whenever I upload a new track to one of my playlists, I always have to block my eyes from the ratings to keep myself from getting pissed off at a negative one. What the hell are those listeners doing hanging around AFOS anyway? I bet they want another StreamingSoundtracks or another Permanent Waves. AFOS is a little different from them. It streams certain subgenres of film or TV score music that those stations tend to ignore.

"The Street" is my three-hour middle finger to those people who give one and a half stars to classic tracks like "Pusherman." On Fridays, the block is two hours because my middle finger will get tired by the end of the week.

I don't listen to just film score albums, you know

I don't even listen to any of them on most days of the week, although the Tron: Legacy score was on repeat a lot last week.

For the print compilation of my webcomic, I've been trying to write an article about one of my favorite movies, Chan Is Missing, and I've been fighting off a bad case of writer's block with the help of some music. There was an episode of Quantum Leap that mentioned that Sam and Al put on the Man of La Mancha Broadway cast album while building Project Quantum Leap. DJ Phatrick's Asian American Hip-Hop for Dummies, a 2008 compilation of his mixes from the KPFA-FM program Apex Express, has been my Man of La Mancha album.

Despite the censored curse words (stay out of my mixtape, profanity censor guy from Ping Pong Playa!), Asian American Hip-Hop for Dummies is a fantastic sampler of APA hip-hop. Hey, look, it's a pre-electro-hop-era Far East Movement joint.

DJ Phatrick's mixtape is an effective cure for writer's block. My piece on Chan Is Missing consisted of only 68 words last week. Then I started bumping the mixtape on my laptop to get myself to add some more words. The article is now up to 2,168 words.