Eddie Murphy "Boogie In Your Butt"

Another story popping up multiple times on my Facebook feed is this one about the old Columbia Record And Tapes Club.  It's worth a read.

I had forgotten about the thing, completely.  But those ads used to be ubiquitous.

Perhaps the only worse deal that someone actually joining the Columbia Record Club, was the one I somehow roped my cousin into.

The deal was something like, "You can get 11 records for a penny."

But in the fine print you found out: you had to buy a certain number of albums at an overprice, AND they would send you a new album every month and make you pay for it unless you sent them a refusal saying you DIDN'T want it.

Because the number of albums you initially got was an odd number, I proposed to my cousin Christine that I'd give her the penny, and only take 5 of the albums and she could have 6.  But in the fine print: she had to be the one to sign up for the account, leaving her on the hook for the payments and the refusals.

These 30 years later, she still speaks to me.  But it was a pretty shitty deal to foist upon a family member.  Sorry cousin!


Lousy deals aside, it may surprise you to know that the Columbia Record And Tape club was not so much a musical influence on me, as it was a comedic influence.  I got my first comedy albums this way, including "The Best Of Bill Cosby" and Eddie Murphy's debut "Eddie Murphy."

As recently as today, I was appropriating material from the Eddie Murphy album.

(He does this brilliant thing where he asks an audience member who'd been hit by a car, "Where did you get hit?" and when the person responds with the street, Murphy gets a big laugh from the audience by saying that he meant where "on your body" did you get hit.  It's brilliant because it works in reverse---if the person had answered with a body part, he could have said "I meant where in town did you get hit?")

And the albums weren't without their occasional musical moment, like this timeless classic, Boogie In Your Butt."


Hear the song on Youtube.

Ray Charles "Night Time Is The Right Time"

I was reading this article in the AV Club about sitcoms in the 80s, which posits that The Cosby Show was one of the most important sitcoms of its era, if not of all time.

And it got me thinking: The Cosby Show was a strange paradox.

On the one hand, the sitcom couldn't have been more mild-mannered and tame. Plots revolved around peer pressure and homework and never approached a tone harsher than good-natured geniality. It was no more profound or adventurous than scores of shows that came before it, or after it.

And yet on the other hand, The Cosby Show has this enormous cultural legacy. It brought a version of the African-American experience (perfectly normal, largely apolitical and upper middle class) to a viewing audience that hadn't seen a minority family on television without overt and often stereotypical allusions to race. (Not everyone thinks this is a good thing, including two of my favorite UMass Professors)

For me, not surprisingly, the cultural impact was more musical than social.

For me, and for my teenage friends, The Cosby Show was our first experience with more than a couple of significant African-American and Latino musicians.

I know this is hard for folks who are, say, over 55 to believe, but my first exposure to people like Tito Puente and Dizzy Gillespie was through Cosby. (I remember Lena Horne being on there too, but I already knew who she was, from Sesame Street)

I'm sure I knew "Hit The Road Jack" by that age, but I can't say that I knew much about Ray Charles. And I'm fairly certain I'd not heard "Night Time Is The Right Time" at that point in my life.

But when the memorable scene in the video below aired, it motivated me to head to the stereo cabinet, and find Dad's banged up LP copy of "Ray Charles Greatest Hits." It didn't have "Night Time Is The Right Time," on it, but that only encouraged me to explore more.

So thanks, Cosby Show, for both a better understand of race, perhaps also a worse understanding of race and certainly a better understanding of Ray.