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William Gibson's June 2008 Playlist:

Tracks. Ten. Off the top of my head, in no particular order. I have always regarded music with lyrics as a species of fiction.

1) Country Blues, Dock Boggs. On finally learning to hear this music, you literally become some different, more primal manner of flesh. There is simply nothing else like it. It is an Ur-thing, sere and terrible, yet capable of profound and paradoxical rescue in the very darkest hour. Dock Boggs lived in Wise County, Virginia, not far from where I grew up. I am haunted by the possibility that someone could have listened to this recording in Paris, in 1927, the year it was released.

2) Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor, Lucinda Williams. A ravishingly young woman (1978) channels all the sexuality, injustice and spirituality of the American Gone World. For Smithsonian Folkways, no less.

3) Decoration Day, Drive-By Truckers. Like early Cormac McCarthy, but with three lead guitars. Hyper-literate narrative song-writing in the service of an act of stingingly efficient shamanistic cultural recall.

4) Down in the Bottom, Walter Becker. The entrails of someone's Very Bad 70s, spread and read years later on gorgeously-veined marble, the slab of immaculately classical proportions. Sky by Turner, Dantean overtones, that sublime perversity of swing.

5) Highway 29, Bruce Springsteen. Extraordinarily lean and cinematic. Achingly effective minimalist narration. Like John Ford filming Jim Thompson.

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Drive-By Truckers. Like early Cormac McCarthy, but with three lead guitars. Hyper-literate narrative song-writing in the service of an act of stingingly efficient shamanistic cultural recall.

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Originally posted by Black Jacque:
Pass the Mind Bleach(tm). Rarely has a playlist convinced me of 'oldness'.