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Sorry.  Maybe next week.  All six of you who pay attention to this will survive for the next seven days, I’m sure.  (And, if not, then I’m truly sorry for having contributed to your early demise.)

1. Sam & Dave, “Soul Man.” Some days, the world is on serendipitous shuffle play.  This tune popped up on the radio Saturday while I was enjoying a pleasant afternoon out and about with some friends, where we traded trivia tidbits about Stax’s perpetually squabbling duo while singing along.  And here it is again, popping up right away for Monday’s blog shuffle.  If this is what randomness sounds like, I’m all for it.
2. Madonna, “Keep It Together.” Madonna’s no longer the controversy magnet she was back in the ’80s and ’90s . . . but I was always struck by the ways that, even then, there was this ridiculously obvious instant public amnesia about her music.  Despite numerous tracks like this one — e.g., big hits that weren’t even remotely scandalous — the dominant discourse around Her Materialness always suggested that everything she did was dripping with deliberately button-pushing smut and sacrilege.  Like this infectiously danceable groove about the virtues of holding on to one’s family “forever and ever.”
3. Louis Armstrong, “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” A sweet little burst of tenderness and love . . . and some mighty fine horn-blowing from Satch, too.
4. Bonnie Raitt, “Love Letter.” Second verse, same as the first?  Arguably, this is the same basic theme as the previous track — an ode to those first thrilling yet scary (or is that the other way around?) feelings of a newly born love — though the groove here is more bottleneck blues than Dixieland jazz.  On a not-quite-related note, I can never hear the chorus of this song without thinking of Marilyn Monroe.  Asked about what she had on when she posed for Playboy, Monroe allegedly quipped “the radio.”
5. Nat Kendricks & the Swans, “Mashed Potatoes.” An early ’60s R&B dance groove from Atlantic.  A little goofy.  A little silly.  But that’s not a bad thing at all, is it?
6. Skyliners, “Since I Don’t Have You.” A classic old tearjerker.  And a great roadtrip sing-along tune, at least for the closing thirty seconds or so of over-the-top wailing, screaming, keening, repetition of “you, you, you.”  Highly cathartic, even when you’re not going through heartbreak.
7. Mojo Nixon & Jello Biafra, “Plastic Jesus.” Mojo and Jello: two great tastes that taste great together.  This probably isn’t the sort of track you want booming out of your system when you show up for Sunday services . . . but, then again, if you’re the type to take Sunday services seriously, you’re not likely to have this one in your musical library anyway.
8. Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns, “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.” If there had never been an Elvis Presley . . . well, Huey “Piano” Smith probably wouldn’t have taken his place.  But rock’n'roll could very easily have come to be a piano-centric music (think Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis).  And tracks like this one would hold a much higher place in the canon.
9. Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Sorry.  I’ve got nothing to say here right now.  I’m too busy thinkin’ ’bout the simple beauties of this song.  (And how painfully Diana Ross’ talking-not-singing version destroys those beauties.  Okay, maybe that’s something to say after all.)
10. Bonnie Raitt, “You Got to Know How.” It must be a Bonnie morning ’round here.  And I can certainly live with that.

1. Asylum Street Spankers, “Think About Your Troubles.” A cover of an old Harry Nilsson song.  And a testament to the Spankers’ versatility.  It’s not too many bands who can do sweet and sincere children’s tunes (like this one) and bawdy bits of musical sauciness . . . and do them both well.  Even better, they can manage to do them all in the same song at once (cf. their “You Only Love Me for My Lunchbox”).
2. Brenda Lee, “Dynamite.” Of course, sometimes saucy youngsters make their own music.
3. Rolling Stones, “Let It Bleed.” And then, sometimes, the baddest of bad boys can serve up odes to tender emotional support and friendship.  (Okay, okay.  They still manage to get in a few lines about coke and cream and knifings and junkies.  But what’s a little stoned bloodletting between friends?)
4. Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Eventually, of course, the randomness of the iPod shuffle algorithm serves up a tune that can’t be shoehorned into some serendipitous theme except by the most gratuitous forms of textual violence.  So let’s just enjoy these five minutes or so of classic ’80s synth-pop coolness, eh?
5. Neneh Cherry, “Outre Risque Locomotive.” Whatever happened to her?  A brilliant debut album.  A decent, but (IMHO) not wildly exciting, second effort.  A gorgeous one-shot contribution (a stunning rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”) to the Red, Hot, and Blue AIDS benefit album.  And then . . . what?  Was there a third album?  If so, is it worth chasing down?  If not, why the hell not?
6. Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There.” There’s a meme floating around on Facebook among some of my friends right now — “25 (or 20, for some people) Songs I Can’t Live Without” — that I’ve resisted playing along with . . . but I’ve toyed with some rough lists.  It’s a major “favorite child” question for someone like me.  Limiting myself to 25 artists would be tough.  25 albums seems like cruel and unusual punishment.  25 songs?!?  That’s just not right.  Still.  This is a groove that would definitely need to be on my “long short list” for consideration.
7. U2, “Desire.” I’d estimate that roughly one out of every three U2 songs has the Bo Diddley beat in it somewhere.  This is only the most obvious example.
8. Temptations, “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” Some classic Motown . . . with a mini-version of the Bo Diddley beat snuck into the middle eight.
9. Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “My Baby’s 3-D.” From the same group who gave us “Sixty Minute Man,” this is a simple yet sassy homage to the lead singer’s multi-faceted gal, who evidently has “got it upstairs (Lena Horne), she’s got it downstairs (Betty Grable), and she’s got it on her balcony (Janey Russell).”
10. Queen, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” A little throwback rockabilly action from from those champions of glam-rock.

1. Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters, “Money Honey.” A glorious, old-school, doo-wop dissertation on the cruelties of capitalism and its detrimental effects on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  No, really, it is.
2. Ray Charles, “Hey Good Lookin’.” Brother Ray makes Hank Williams swing and jive.  And a party where the strongest refreshment is “soda pop” never sounded more fun than it does here.
3. Joe Diffie, “Good Brown Gravy.” I have no idea who Joe Diffie is.  None.  I originally found this track online when I was trying to round out a mix CD devoted to the intertwinement of food and love/lust.  I suspect I dropped “gravy” into a search engine (inspired by a track I already knew: Tampa Red’s extraordinarily smutty “What’s That Taste Like Gravy?”) and this was one of the winners that turned up.  Maybe the only winner on that search.  But a beaut.  “You can sop it with a biscuit, you can eat it from a pan, you can lick it off your fingers when it’s runnin’ down your hand.”  Who knew that the Waffle House menu could be so sexy?
4. Dominoes, “Sixty Minute Man.” A classic bit of ’50s R&B raunch.  Less well known is the Dominoes’ followup record, “Can’t Do Sixty No More”: the sad saga of what happens to Lovin’ Dan when he’s finally “blown his fuse” for good.
5. Cat Stevens, “If You Want to Sing Out.” Sweet and simple, and one of the many lovely things to come out of that quirky little gem of a cult movie, Harold and Maude.  (And whatever happened to Bud Cort anyway?)
6. Jackson Five, “ABC.” Decades later, it would become the core hook sampled for Naughty by Nature’s “OPP.”  But this remains one of those tunes that always pulls me back to childhood memories of Saturday mornings in front of the TV — where I always sided with the Jackson brothers over the Osmond brothers, both in terms of music and in the land of animated cartoons.  The prepubescent Michael’s exhortations to his “girl” to get up and “show me what you can do” didn’t mean anything to me then — and they’re actually a little creepy in retrospect — but it’s still a damned fine pop-funk groove.
7. Tom Waits, “Nirvana.” A largely spoken-word track from Waits’ Orphans three-disc set.  Here, there are no drunken peg-legged dwarves playing canasta.  No baying hounds nipping at the heels of the circus clown.  No tattooed barmaids pouring bourbon into cracked tin cups.  And yet it’s still very much Tom Waits.
8. Jon Rauhouse, “5 After 5.” I think I said something about Rauhouse before.  And I don’t think I’ve got anything much to add to that . . . unless it’s to note my keen excitement about the upcoming release of Neko’s newest.
9. MFSB & the Three Degrees, “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia).” I spent five years living in Philly as an undergrad (and immediately thereafter).  It never sounded like this.  That’s not a knock on Philly, mind you.  I loved the city when I was there.  But the streets were not filled with righteous riffs, glorious grooves, and soulful strings.
10. Asylum Street Spankers, “Pakalolo Baby.” Ah, the Spankers!  If you ever get the chance to see them live, do.  Just do.  You’ll thank me later.  And you may be getting a very rare treat at this point, since I gather the costs of touring have led them to scale way, way, way back on their previously robust itineraries.  Now you may have to travel to Texas to see them spank it up.