Artist	Song
Naked City & Barack Obama	Crosstalk
James Brown	Mind Power
T. Rex	Main Man
Bad Brains	athemovies
Patti Smith	a.i.Strange
Phil Cohran	Malcolm X (live)
Lou Reed	City Lights
Qwel	Silence
Mauricio Kagel	Nordwesten
Leonard Cohen	Please Don't Pass Me By (live)
Leos Janßcek	Songs of Hradcany: The Golden Alley
Elton John	Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Rip Rig & Panic	Subversive Wisdom
Fresch*ard	Brooklyn Moon
Claude Debussy	Nuages
4Walls	Night in Siberia
Art of Noise	A Nation Rejects
Nico	On the Desert Shore (Demo)

Comment:

Inspired by the Rip Rig & Panic piece, here's my attempt at a subversive career in song.


Obama was the ideal voice for the prologue since he has experienced (and later profited from) a genuine deal of subversive circumstances, yet is about to become the world's most powerful man with a lot of contras directed towards him. Samples were taken and slightly al*tered from his Grammy'd "Dreams from my Father" audiobook.
The journey then sets off for grassroots power, pseudo-bohemian hierarchy, a fierce protest against commercial media, subcultural transcen*dence, ethnic pain and drive, golden age irony and finger-pointing boiled in rage (tracks 2-8 respectively).


"Nordwesten" simply means "North West", which is the part of Germany the recipient of the mix and I spent most of our lives in, transformed into an abstract sketch of police state vs underworld by Mauricio Kagel. "Please Don't Pass Me By" is sincere street platitudes reaching a mass audience and blurring privacy with brotherhood in a manner only Cohen can.
Track 11 concerns the Golden Lane in Prague, where a King once installed his alchemists to conjure up wisdom and gold - instead the houses were left in poverty and here a choir mourns about dreaming for more prosperous places, which are revealed to be devoid and overgrown in their own sense.


At this point the mix shifts more toward our subversive narrator, who decides to quit his bigot ("golden") scene and pauses for reflection (tracks 12 + 13). He brushes off his individualized lover (14) and has his most satisfying experience of freedom when he gives in to the movements and surroundings of nature herself (15).
There's a curious climax: repelled into exile by the forces he despised (16), he eventually stands on the sidelines when a national momentum shifts for better or worse (17). We finally see him matured but clung to the desert shore, his ecotone, the personal verge he cannot leave (18), scantly speaking his knowledge in a way that makes him unlikely to be heard.


Track 4 is "At the Movies", #5 "Ain't it Strange" and #14's artist reads without the asterisk, modified for technical reasons.


92 minutes of this may be listened to under the download link. The front artwork (not on display) was found at http://fluxlisteurope.blogspot.com

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