I bet I’m not supposed to like this. But a world in which this represents the height of complacency and slickness — which I gather is why certain friends slightly older than me freaked out at my casual mention of kinda liking Fleetwood Mac — strikes me as totally acceptable. I wouldn’t give up Violent Femmes or Hex Enduction Hour for this, but with soft-rock’s cultural moment past, no such choice appears to be mandatory.

- Incredibly long: 70 minutes plus a version of the first song that adds Ol’ Dirty Bastard for the bridge.

- I have to take back what I said about Basement Jaxx not messing with their guests’ voices enough on Kish Kash; the Jaxxized Chasez sounds much better and more distinctive than the real thing, even on the (competent) track they produced for Schizophrenic.

- You know how some movies have a flow where the jokes get more and more shocking, except that the point is that you get used to it as it goes on so that the most shocking gags live or die on their actual funniness? Chasez is like that with unintentionally lame lyrics. He opens with the asymmetrical “Some Girls (Dance With Women)” and only gets more awkward from there, until, by the time he sings about a girl “blowin’ me up with her love” over female moans, one gets the impression that he doesn’t know “blowing” is a euphemism for oral sex but is revelling in the idea that somehow — and he hasn’t totally figured it out yet — sex might be related to explosions.

- 70 minutes only gets longer when you suck half the time. I have a new appreciation for some glib mainstream-press articles I read recently about the aesthetics of “the iPod age”.

I’ve tried to make a note of which artists I liked whenever I listened to a compilation full of near-identical electroclash songs, but I must have missed one, because I would have bought this disc for “Needy Girl” without hearing a note of any other tracks had I known it was there.

Chromeo has some of the same note-perfect retro thinness as DMX Krew, which I mention because from the back cover photo of Dave One and Pee Thug I expected them to suffer from DMX Krew’s humorless smirkiness too. But no! If this is a joke it’s too subtle for me to tell; I even think the VERY goofy pictures of Pee Thug and Dave One on the back might be real. The single’s probably the best thing on the record, but the rest holds up as well or better than the average full-length by a smoove new wave band from back in the real 80s.

I seem to have been confused about what Russell songs were where when I wrote about this compilation yesterday. I still feel like the disc is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Loved a Saint Etienne song on a mix CD, bought the album, couldn’t get into it. Loved the 30-second samples of this album, downloaded it, can’t really get into it (though the frilly Eurodance of “Desert Baby” ought to be good for a few more listens). Maybe that’s why St. E were the favored avatars of smoothness for indiepop kids even in the low-fi mid-90s; it’s not that they were part of our tribe, just that they sounded so much better on mix tapes…

After my realization about the Indigo Girls (bad past experiences with them all involved Emily Saliers songs; good ones, Amy Ray), I waffled on whether to buy this. Finally figured that even if I’m trying to blunt my musical risk-taking somewhat for financial reasons, a songwriter I like can squeeze $12 for 5 songs out of me pretty easily, and the rest is just distraction.

I even went through and listened to Amy’s 5 tracks by themselves. Aside from a fast ska tune (should I have been surprised?) they bogged down more than I expected. On listening to the whole album I found instead that I mostly looked up during Emily’s songs, particularly the closer “Rise Up”.

Not that it (or the ska song, “Heartache For Everyone”) changed my life, but it’s always nice to be wrong. I must know someone who’ll lend me the earlier albums, right? I mean, normally I’m on my own, but someone must have Indigo Girls records.

In its best moments, certainly goes back more to what was great about Pavement than SM’s Jicks do. Those moments, though, come rarely and would be barely remarkable were the rest of the record not so half-assed. (And, let me be clear, I mean “moments”, not “songs”.) Largely gives the impression of having fallen from an alternate universe where R.E.M.’s Out Of Time inspired legions of talentless imitators.

Odd to realize, by the way, that for the most part it didn’t. In fact, I’m going to listen to some R.E.M. and see how that goes instead.

It’s a mark of Russell’s talent — but also of his current cachet — that this confused and confusing compilation still has drawn so many unqualified raves. I mean, it’s good, but…

If you take out the tracks mixed by Larry Levan (who’s famous and all but puts an unpleasantly worldly sheen on Russell’s spirit) and the tracks available on Disco Not Disco 1 and 2 (which not everyone has, but I assume most Russell fans ended up with it) you’re left with a few of the best voice-and-cello tracks from Another Thought, and some fine rare Russell disco. With a promised Arthur Russell reissue campaign looming, though, why not stick to the disco and release a comprehensive collection of his 12″s, or failing that, a cohesive one? And if on the other hand this is meant as only a sample, a best-of, where is the incredible “Tell You Today” that introduced Russell to me and so many others three years ago?

Could be that I’m spoiled by having found mp3s of “Let’s Go Swimming” and scored the Another Thought CD and heard Dinosaur L’s LP once, and so on and so on. This world needs more of Arthur Russell’s, so more power to Soul Jazz. But… it’s not like this is headed for the Billboard charts anyway. The target audience is people who are basically like me, except maybe a little newer to Russell’s music. The results could have been better.

Six remixers, six songs, ten tracks… it’s hard to argue with “free” but that’s a fair amount of repetition.

Too many of the mixes manage to be dull in the same way as the originals (all taken from Reveal) were without sounding the same: maybe a sign I should excuse myself from the REM processional anyway, but still no credit to the folks involved. One interesting take: Matthew Herbert’s martial / nightclub / plunderphonic mix of “I’ve Been High”. It’s the wildest track in this project, but still sounds like a redemption of the original, not a subversion.

Heard about it, of course, but never heard it, until last night at a club. Suspecting that had been a dance mix, I listened to the real thing afterward.

In the club it seemed gleefully nihilistic, with (if my ears can be trusted) the third line of the chorus looped in place of the second, so it just went “Damn right, it’s better than yours” twice. In comparison the original felt tepid and, whatever novelty it might have, not worth the attention it’s gotten. Kelis is hardly seductive when in the song’s canonical form she tries to lay down a vocal track that actually displays her supposed appeal instead of just declaring it.

The appeal of a dance mix where the song is stripped, thematically and literally, down to little more than “damn right it’s better than yours” goes beyond queen-of-the-damned Kelis leading her minions in taunting an absent and possibly imaginary adversary about their superiority in sex-bomb technology (though maybe not far beyond); it wipes out the failed nuances which make up the song’s idea of euphemism. Not only does the chorus not need to be justified, it’s a bad idea to even try.