May U live 2 see the disc: Prince's out-of-print Sign o' the Times movie deserves an American Blu-ray because it shows why the late musician was a consummate live performer

I never got to see Prince perform live. But every time the eccentric musical genius and consummate guitarist performed live on TV (instead of lip-syncing on TV, aside from earlier appearances on The Midnight Special and American Bandstand), it was a can't-miss event, even whenever I had to sit through a bunch of unfunny SNL sketches just to watch that SNL episode's purple-loving musical guest, who died yesterday at the too-young age of 57.

Sure, it would have been dope to attend a Prince concert or better yet, rock out to one of his even more legendary surprise sets inside smaller and more intimate venues. But I didn't have to check out Prince live to know that he was tremendously skilled when it came to both putting on a show and making a song (whether it was one of his own songs or another artist's) sound even more alive and vibrant than the original recording of it, especially when he shredded on his electric guitar like there's no tomorrow. On stage, nothing compares to Prince.



Inside both my MacBook and my phone, I have a good-quality mp3 of a terrific Prince cover of Radiohead's "Creep" from Coachella 2008 that I've never removed. Prince, who hated encountering footage of his music he had no control over, assigned one of his techie goons to wipe out all traces of his live "Creep" cover. That goon clearly sucked at attempting to wipe them all out.

I love Prince's epic take on "Creep" more than Radiohead's original version. Even Thom Yorke himself agrees that Prince improved upon "Creep."

13 black artists' covers of white artists' music that surpass the originals (to close out Black History Month)

Quincy Jones and Sarah Vaughan (Photo source: Jazzinphoto)

The following list was inspired by both Harry Allen the Media Assassin's irritated response to the latest of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake's "History of Rap" medleys during the first week of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon...

... and Andrew Ti's similar response to the "History of Rap" medleys.

1. Sarah Vaughan, "Peter Gunn" (both Vaughan's 1965 version and the dope Max Sedgley remix)
"According to the liner notes, we can thank Quincy Jones for the recording. Hank Mancini says he never thought the song would work with lyrics, but Jones kept pestering him to try it. So, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans wrote some lyrics and Bill Holman arranged the song. Vaughan provided the fireworks. Vaughan infuses the song with the same kind of slinkiness found on Peggy Lee's 'Fever,' but Vaughan manages to sound sultry at a much faster tempo."--Cahl's Juke Joint, 2008

2. The Skatalites, "Guns of Navarone"
"The song itself is an adaptation of the theme song to the 1961 film of the same name, and there are in fact two different versions of The Skatalites interpretation. With one clocking in at more than six minutes, it is the shorter, two and a half minute version that exemplifies everything that makes ska so fantastic."--The Daily Guru, 2010

3. Earth, Wind & Fire, "Got to Get You Into My Life"
"In 1978, Earth Wind & Fire appeared in another motion picture, the Beatles movie tribute Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the film, the band played themselves, performing 'Got To Get You Into My Life' at a concert hall. The film itself was a commercial bomb... Yet despite musical performances on the soundtrack from Aerosmith, Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees and Alice Cooper, Earth Wind & Fire's remake of the Beatles classic was the highest charting pop single from the soundtrack. 'Once more, we had a movie that flopped on us,' said Maurice White, 'but we had a #1 hit out of it... We actually recorded our parts on the set.'"--Goldmine magazine's profile of Earth, Wind & Fire, 1997

"Robert Stigwood called us and asked if we wanted to be in a movie... We said okay, it could be interesting. At that particular time, you didn't see a lot of musical blacks in movies--there was The Wiz, but that was a horrible movie. We had three songs to choose from--'Got To Get You Into My Life' and two ballads. We just did the song Chicago-style. Some people thought George Martin produced the song, but Maurice produced it."--Verdine White, Goldmine, 1997

4. Stevie Wonder, "We Can Work It Out"
"... it's worth mentioning that Stevie's soulful reworking of the original--no doubt powerful in its own glory--makes it sound more searing; indeed, converting it into a freedom song/black power amalgamation. In short, Stevie Wonder's version of 'We Can Work It Out' is nothing short of a magnificent transformation. And to a certain degree, you could say that Stevie Wonder 'flipped' the Beatles original. Does that mean that Stevie Wonder's version of 'We Can Work It' is better than the original? I'm not sure if that's a question worth entertaining."--Amir Said, 2010

Uh, it's a question I'm willing to tackle: hell yes, Wonder's version trounces the original.

This is the end

Because today is the last day ever, I ain't going out like no sucka. Go ahead and cry in the shower. Meanwhile, I'm posting 30 of my favorite original score cues or songs on Spotify that accompany the end credits of feature films. None of them are re-recordings (I love me some Spotify, but it's befouled by the stench of terrible re-recordings of film and TV music). All of them are the originals.

The last playlist ever kicks off with the summer of 2012's best end title theme (Alan Silvestri's "The Avengers," from an art-house film called Anna Karenina), followed by perhaps my all-time favorite original end title theme (Willie Hutch's "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," from a Dean Jones family film called The Mack). Tron: Legacy and Superman: The Movie both had end credits that ran so long they had two or three end title themes instead of one. Most of the end title themes below can be heard on AFOS, but some of them aren't in rotation because I simply don't have them in my library (Silvestri's Who Framed Roger Rabbit score is an album I always wanted to have, but I was never able to nab the score because it went out of print again before I could do so). The playlist concludes with Earl Rose's end title theme from a fascinating doc that aired on PBS in 2012: Johnny Carson: King of Late Night.

Too bad Adele's theme for Skyfall isn't featured in the film's end credits (it's also not on Spotify). I wanted to include "Skyfall" in the playlist because its Jim Morrison-esque opening lyric happens to be "This is the end," which is also the name of this playlist. In another interesting tidbit, "Skyfall" is simultaneously one of the most emotional songs to open a Bond film (the song is written from the point of view of M and is one big spoiler, and no wonder Daniel Craig cried when he first heard it--without giving too much away, it must have brought him back emotionally to the scene the song is basically about) and one of the most wry (an apocalyptic song about mortality is ironically the theme for a film that's all about revitalizing the 50-year-old Bond film franchise and keeping it going, and Adele and her producing partner Paul Epworth seemed to have written "Skyfall" so that it could also be interpreted as a tune about the 2012 apocalypse).

Goodbye, cruel world!

"This Is the End" tracklist
1. Alan Silvestri, "The Avengers," Marvel's The Avengers
2. Willie Hutch, "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," The Mack
3. Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly," Superfly
4. k.d. lang, "Surrender," Tomorrow Never Dies
5. Daft Punk, "TRON Legacy (End Titles)," Tron: Legacy
6. Daft Punk, "Solar Sailer," Tron: Legacy
7. Radiohead, "Exit Music (For a Film)," Romeo + Juliet
8. Dominic Cooper, "Jail-bait Jody," Tamara Drewe
9. Alan Silvestri, "End Title," Who Framed Roger Rabbit
10. John Williams, "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," The Empire Strikes Back
11. Alan Silvestri, "Captain America March," Captain America: The First Avenger
12. Prince, "Scandalous," Batman
13. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Face to Face," Batman Returns
14. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "A Watchful Guardian," The Dark Knight
15. John Williams, "Finale and End Title March," Superman: The Movie
16. John Williams, "Love Theme from Superman," Superman: The Movie
17. Michael Giacchino, "The Incredits," The Incredibles
18. Michael Giacchino, "Up with End Credits," Up
19. Jerry Goldsmith, "End Credits," Star Trek: First Contact
20. Danny Elfman, "End Credits," Sleepy Hollow
21. Bruce Broughton, "End Credits," The Rescuers Down Under
22. Gladys Knight & the Pips, "Make Yours a Happy Home," Claudine
23. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)," The Wedding Banquet
24. Michael Giacchino, "End Creditouilles," Ratatouille
25. John Carpenter, "The Fog End Credits," The Fog
26. David Shire, "Finale and End Credits," The Conversation
27. John Williams, "Finale & End Credits," Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
28. Earl Rose, "End Credits," Johnny Carson: King of Late Night
2014 additions
29. Alexandre Desplat, "The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe, Part 7: After the Storm," Moonrise Kingdom
30. Alexandre Desplat, "Traditional Arrangement: 'Moonshine,'" The Grand Budapest Hotel
31. Michael Giacchino, "To Boldly Go," Star Trek
32. Michael Giacchino, "End Credits," Star Trek
33. M83 featuring Susanne Sundfør, "Oblivion," Oblivion
34. Ramin Djawadi featuring Tom Morello, "Pacific Rim," Pacific Rim
35. Blake Perlman featuring RZA, "Drift," Pacific Rim
36. Brian Tyler, "Can You Dig It (Iron Man 3 Main Titles)," Iron Man Three
37. Brian Tyler, "Legacy," Thor: The Dark World

BONUS TRACK: "Summer in America," DJ Blue & Chubb Rock's rousing original song from the end credits of the hilarious cult classic Wet Hot American Summer.

"If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck": The best existing songs that are theme music for shows you've probably never heard of

1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)

During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:

Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."

In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.



2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."

Jim Gaffigan, the whitest cat u'know

Throughout this year, I'm posting older material--like non-Blogspot stuff from a few years ago, unpublished writing I've kept buried in my computer and transcripts of interviews from A Fistful of Soundtracks' terrestrial radio years.

Here's another one from my archives, an alternate version of a 2006 plug for Jim Gaffigan, who's gotten me hooked on bacon again, and whose latest Comedy Central special, King Baby, premieres this Sunday night.

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The moment you hear the words "airline" and "peanuts," you know you're trapped in a room with a bad observational stand-up (or an ancient Evening at the Improv rerun full of 10 of them). On the other hand, a really good observational stand-up is someone like Indiana-born Jim Gaffigan.

Like other observational comics, Gaffigan fixates on food, but not on exhausted food-related topics like peanuts, Taco Bell or that other '80s classic, Grape Nuts ("What is the deal? It's neither a grape nor a nut!"). His favorite punching bag is Hot Pockets, which are like calzones if they were made by a crackhead and come complete with a jingle that makes "By Mennen!" sound like Kid A ("Hoooot Pocket!").

Gaffigan frequently beats up on his own appearance, like another self-deprecating paleface, Conan O'Brien. He's turned his whiteness into the key gag for a series of cheapo and very funny superhero cartoon spoofs created for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In Pale Force, a buffed-up Gaffigan and his cowardly sidekick Conan (both voiced by Gaffigan) strike fear into the hearts of evildoers with their pale skin and laser-firing nipples. The next episode of Pale Force ought to be a celebrity deathmatch between the melanin-challenged men of steel and those albino twins from The Matrix, with Powder as the referee.

In an avclub.com interview, Gaffigan said he doesn't curse anymore onstage. "Clean stand-up comedy" are three words that often scare people away, though not as badly as "Kevin Federline rapping." What's unique about Gaffigan is that he got funnier as he did away with the profanity, which is like Richard Pryor in reverse. At about the same time as the F-words vanished, he developed a falsetto "inner voice" character--an unamused, prissy female audience member commenting on Gaffigan's jokes. It's become an audience favorite. With his clever riffs on junk food, religion and Tom from MySpace-style yellow fever ("I only dated one Asian girl, but she was very Asian. She was a panda"), Gaffigan proves that curse-free observational humor doesn't have to suck like, well, a Hot Pocket.

I just want to hear Girl Talk

The moment in which Girl Talk mashes up Ahmad's "Back in the Day" with Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" during "Shut the Club Down"? Too damn genius.

Likewise with Thom Yorke being edited to look like he's singing Blackstreet's "No Diggity" (during the second video, which is based on "Still Here," track 3 from Girl Talk's Feed the Animals album). I don't know who edited these music video clips together to GT's Feed the Animals tracks, but somebody get this guy an editing award.

Music: "Still Here" by Girl Talk: