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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome an APA artist to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

So Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1992, been on HBO’s “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam,” and included in the 2006 Best American Poetry Anthology edited by Billy Collins.

He is currently acting in Juliana Hu Pegues’s new play, Q & A, produced by Theater Mu at Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis, which opens today.

Whatever.

What you may not know about Bao and music:

a) For an apartment he was moving into, in an effort to store his gigantic CD collection, he decided to build a floor to ceiling CD shelf out of a bunch of lumber planks. It was so big that his friends thought it was a king-sized bed frame. This may also be due to the fact that his mattress did not have a bed frame.

It still was not large enough to hold his CDs.

b) He used to DJ dance parties, to varying degrees of success. The highlight of his on-again, off-again DJ career was seeing middle-aged immigrant Korean women dancing to Biggie when he played Big Poppa at an event in the late 90’s.

c) He recently finished an 8-disc mix CD compilation, “Soundtrack to Zombie Apocalypse.” He figures people can put the set in a glass case with a sign that says “In Case of Zombie Outbreak, Smash Glass and Bump This Shit.”

d) He owns an old white blocky I-Pod that he pathetically bought wallowing in self-pity after a particularly difficult break-up, even though he couldn’t really afford it. He never learned to use it, so for this Shuffled! he put some of his favorite mix-CDs into his 5 disc changer in his home stereo and hit the ‘random’ button.

“Kugatsu No Omoi”
Bird
I love this song so much that I was going to cheat and make a mix-CD that was just this song over and over again so that it would come up during the shuffle. I remember my friend and roommate Lym-Sung first played Utada Hikaru’s Never Let Go in a car for me, after she had sold like 9 million copies of her album in Japan, and it blew me away, and sparked my interest in contemporary Far East Asian pop. But when I heard this album at a dinner party that my buddy Mirei threw, I had an epiphany. This whole album, Mindtravel, is stellar – not a single weak song on it. But this particular song – breathtaking. I’ve listened to it over and over again through the years, and it has never gotten old. Her voice is beautiful, and she knows how to use it - if you listen carefully, every single syllable she sings is precise, but she makes it sound effortless. This song is the epitome of music to me. This is by far my favorite song in the history of all things.

“Bring It On Home to Me” (Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963)
Sam Cooke
If you listen in the beginning during Sam’s spoken lead-in to the song, there’s a part where he says, “I hear somebody say, hello.” And you can hear in the background, some random dude in the audience shouts “HELL-LO!” in response unexpectedly, and it throws Sam off for like a second… hilarious. But this song? Damn. Someone asked me, if I could sing like anyone in the history of music, who would it be? Probably Sam Cooke. I think, if I was in the audience when he sang this, I would have just passed out from the force of his voice. How can you not be moved, how can you not be joyful about life during the call and response of him singing, “let me hear you say yeah…” This song and Sarah McLachlan’s version of “Angel” from Mirrorball are my favorite live recordings.

“Let’s Go Crazy”
Prince
To give you an impression of how dope Prince is, this is not even my favorite Prince song. And yet, it is still so fantastic, so vital… it feels fresh and classic at the same time. Is there anything as iconic as hearing that organ and hearing him start to chant “Dearly Beloved…” And I wonder how many millions of times his last guitar riffing has been air-guitar’ed since this song came out. Prince is a divisive issue for me. If you don’t like Prince, then there is nothing you can say or do that could possibly interest me, because if you don’t like Prince, you’re obviously a worthless idiot.

True story – I once saw Prince at the Cheapo in Uptown, browsing through vinyl with his entourage. I was so shocked and star-struck that I froze mid-step. Then one of his bodyguards looked me up and down like I was short, so I just left.

“I’m Coming Out”
Diana Ross
Okay, some people say this song is played out – it’s been used by: Puffy; for a hip hugger jeans commercial; and, as a dear friend of mine pointed out, it’s the anchoring song for countless GLBT mix-CDs of a certain generation. But it’s still dope. I love, love the beginning of this song – the almost hesitant drum licks, the horns slowly fading in. And the bridge? Not even Puffy can kill how funky that bridge is. The way the drum rolls, the funky guitar, the horns, it’s like magic. I could listen to that all day.

“Jimmy Mathis”
Bubba Sparxxx
Oh, wow! So out of all the hip hop I listen to, this is what comes up? My CD changer is RACIST! Well, this song is actually pretty good – the lyrics are clever, and the beat is sick. This is one of my favorite Timbaland beats, actually, and it’s interesting because I’m guessing not many people have heard it. I was kinda hoping Lupe Fiasco/Matthew Santos’ American Terrorist (my favorite major-label hip hop song in recent memory) or some Blue Scholars, Magnetic North, Power Struggle, Kiwi, Lyrics Born, would come up on the random play so I would look cool. Hey, I just noticed that I wrote about multiple songs for some of these Shuffled! entries. Damn, I’m a cheater. Ah well, rock that bluegrass thump!

“Back in Black!”
AC/DC
Aw, come on! Okay, look, it’s not like I’m embarrassed by this song – it’s one of my favorites, and it fucking rocks. It rocks so hard that I added an exclamation point in the title, just because if I didn’t, the demigods of Rock would ride into my office on a mercurial cloud of Rock and shove a guitar made out of a lightning bolt down my throat for not Rocking up to their standards. I was just hoping the last track would be, like, you know, my favorite version of Beethoven’s 9th, or a track from I Was Born With Two Tongues’ Broken Speak (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that album should be like Thriller for Asian Americans, each home should have two copies) – or from my old hip hop collection, or some Operation Ivy or the Cure. You know, desperately trying to show off how diverse my musical taste is. Well, it looks like the Gods of Rock have won again. “Forget the hearse cuz I never die/I got/nine LIIIIIIIIVES/cat’s eyes…” This song better be in Guitar Hero 4, dammit.

Last 5 posts by shuffled

• Shuffled! Delia - August 14th, 2008
• Shuffled! Giles Li - August 7th, 2008
• Shuffled! Alexander Chee - July 31st, 2008
• Shuffled! Terry Park - July 24th, 2008
• Shuffled! Theresa Vu of Magnetic North - July 17th, 2008

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