Another pair of related posts coming up to finish off September. Do, or don’t?
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/Subject /Do
/Playlists 
/Deezer / 
/YouTube
/Related /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Assistance /Suggestions/99 /Used Prior/21 /Unique Songs/89 /People Suggesting/42
/Details /Tracks this week/10 /Tracks on Deezer Playlist/10 /Duration/39:00
This week, it is most emphatically “do”. Calls to get stuff done, and much more. Thanks to everyone who suggested songs.
A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.
Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).
/Ice Cube
/You Can Do It (feat. Mack 10, Ms. Toi)
/War & Peace, Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc)
The lead single from the Ice Cube vehicle Next Friday is a track that has aged way better than the film, I suspect. A world away from NWA in subject matter: this is a song about personal improvement (and the word “do” appears at least forty-seven times), as Ice Cube and his cohorts encourage themselves and their listeners to put some goddamned effort into whatever they are doing to succeed. And if Ice Cube is telling you what to do, you’re gonna listen, right?
Ice Cube has had a surprisingly successful acting career alongside being a rap titan, starting out in the still flat-out brilliant Boyz n the Hood in 1991 and still making films to this day.
/Rob Zombie
/Dragula
/Hellbilly Deluxe: 13 Tales of Cadaverous Cavorting Inside the Spookshow International
Somehow, Rob Zombie’s eternal signature song has never properly made it into this series (the only time it did was in remix form, back on /Tuesday Ten /003!). A song that celebrates the DRAG-U-LA from The Munsters in wild, madcap style: it’s an industrial rock banger that twenty-eight years on from release, still fills the dancefloor every damned time. All it takes is to hear that spoopy droning and the “superstition, fear, and jealousy” samples in the intro, drinks are down, time to stomp to the dancefloor.
As for the “do”? That’ll be the bridge, where “Do It Baby” is repeated quite a bit…
/Cabaret Voltaire
/Do Right
/Micro-Phonies
The closing track of the phenomenal live return of the Cabs over the past year or so has been the opener to Micro-Phonies, the near-seven-minute groove that introduces the album and rams home the band’s mastery of their now-industrial-funk-dub hybrid that even forty-plus years on, still sounds fresh and new. A barrage of sampled, manipulated voices (one of them repeating the title ad infinitum) jostle for space with Stephen Mallinder’s own measured vocals, that come together to set the scene for the album – a murky, dystopian tension that permeates through every note. The “Do Right” here is perhaps not for noble causes.
Interestingly, the Cabs were also suggested for the opposite subject (“Don’t”), which follows next week – obviously for the mighty Don’t Argue…
/Betty Boo
/Doin’ The Do
/Boomania
Just six years on from the Cabs came Betty Boo: a one-time rapper who found a pop career (and one that was derailed relatively quickly after equipment malfunction at a gig revealed she was lip-syncing – hardly something unique to Boo in the pop scene at the time!). Listening back, her rap origins are clear, as the song is frankly a bubblegum variant of the female-fronted hip-hop that was already beginning to make a splash at this point. It remains a catchy tune, that’s for sure (you’re already humming the “Doin’ the do” chorus, right?), even if it’s total nonsense….
/ABBA
/I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
/ABBA
Not perhaps one of the best ABBA songs – it certainly didn’t make it onto ABBA Gold, the definitive best-of and probably one of the tightest Greatest Hits collections there ever was (and one of the biggest-selling, too), although it did make it onto the cash-in More ABBA Gold – this 1975 single owes a lot to schmaltzy European pop of the time (particularly German Schlager) as the band bring in saxophones to assist the usual dual-vocals of Agnetha and Anni-Frid as they proclaim their love for someone, within in the embers of another dying relationship, in emphatic terms (hence the oft-repeated title)…
/Eddie & The Hot Rods
/Do Anything You Wanna Do
/Life on the Line
A classic from the Pub Rock era comes from the big hit by the south Essex band Eddie & The Hot Rods. Pub Rock was no-frills rock by mostly working-class men from unfashionable parts of the UK, from men who were uninterested in the flashier Glam Rock scene, and their songs reflected this, and Do Anything You Wanna Do is one of the best examples. It is a song that was something of a clarion call to their working-class listeners: do something more, go do that thing you always wanted to try rather than getting caught up in dead-end jobs and boredom. Even in the present day, it would probably be better life advice to troubled young men than the influencers and far-right idiots online…
/The Temptations
/The Way You Do The Things You Do
/Meet the Temptations
Motown group The Temptations were probably one of the most, if not the most, influential soul group of all. Their vast number of hits have been covered by anyone and everyone, they took soul into new dimensions, and their songs are instantly recognisable, even with most of them coming from the Motown hit factory.
I’d not heard The Way You Do The Things You Do in a long time, as it turns out. Unlike their darker, grittier later singles – which I must confess I prefer – this is a song of admiration for a paramour, where they get to list all of the things they love about them: which amounts to basically everything they do.
/Gerry and The Pacemakers
/How Do You Do It?
Something of a sub-theme this week is of songs by artists better known these days for other songs (For Gerry & The Pacemakers, of course, that will be Ferry ‘Cross the Mersey and, of course, their take on You’ll Never Walk Alone). Amazingly, too, this song was very nearly the first Beatles single instead of Love Me Do, but various decisions meant that this song ended up in the lap of fellow-Brian Epstein-managed singer Gerry Marsden, and he and his band took full advantage with a tight, jaunty song that covers similar ground to the song above.
/Rollins Band
/Do It
/Do It EP
“Don’t think about it / DO IT”
And thus begins Henry Rollins’ lesson. In this early Rollins Band track, Hank takes up a subject that he’s long been an advocate for: getting things done. He’s got no time for excuses, the time is now for doing whatever it was you wanted to do. He has been the living embodiment of this for most of his adult life: from being a Black Flag superfan one minute to fronting the band he saw as his heroes, to seeing the world on tour, to acting and presenting on radio and TV, to writing, to his spoken word work, not to mention his longtime advocacy of LGBTQIA+, poverty, civil rights and anti-war causes, even in his mid-sixties he never seems to stop: but remains an inspiration for many as someone who did and does.
/Bryan Adams
/(Everything I Do) I Do It for You
/Waking Up the Neighbours
The first of the nineties megahits that just wouldn’t fuck off – number one in the UK for sixteen weeks, and even thirty-five summers since that long year, I still fucking hate this song. The lead song for one of the blockbuster films that summer, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it is an eternally long, power ballad that certainly helped resurrect Bryan Adams’ career (which was looking in danger of being extinguished already after the relative failure of his previous album), but for those of us wanting to listen to anything else at the time, it was the shadow cast over anything else released.