Friday night playlist 3

...All the usual recent stuff, plus:
The Neville Brothers -- *Hey Pocky Way, *Bird on a Wire, *A Change is Gonna Come, Fire on the Bayou, Brother John/Iko Iko, Yellow Moon, Voodoo (live), Ain't No Sunshine, Let My People Go/Get Up Stand Up (live) (all from BEST OF/THE MILLENNIUM COLLECTION).

Would never have heard the Neville Brothers if it weren't for KPLU's "All Blues" show every weekend. On this cheap best-of they do an absolutely gorgeous version of Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire," and a beautiful cover of Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come." There's also a very nice up-tempo version of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" -- the original's one of my all-time faves, so I wasn't expecting much.
Some of the others will definitely keep you moving -- like "Voodoo" and "Yellow Moon," "Fire on the Bayou" and "Get Up Stand Up."
Best of all for me are the GREAT horn parts that light up "Hey Pocky Way." I've been playing that one over and over.
Most of this is good party music. I admit I'm hesitant about some of their "issue-oriented" songs, but I'm still listening. And I've heard Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" WAY too many times to put up with another version by someone else....

Finished William Gibson's IDORU (1996) finally. It's a nice entertainment. It's certainly not as "visionary" as his NEUROMANCER was, or the short stories in his BURNING CHROME collection were, but it reads smoothly, and there's some nice cyberspace/computer-oriented stuff in it, some nice "visuals."
In the future, a world-famous rock musician decides to "marry" a famous Japanese singer, who is actually a computerized simulation. His management panics, and hires a data-visualizing expert to see if he can figure out WHY. The musician's fan club also freaks out, and sends a representative from the club's Seattle chapter to Tokyo to get The Real Story.
The story then moves into vivid character sketches and accidental smuggling of illegal computer hardware, and turns into a chase-intrigue thing. There are brutal security men, tough and clumsy Russian agents, homicidal former bosses with a grudge. And it's funny.
I bogged down about 100 pages in the first time through, in what I thought was Gibson's rather distant, thin style -- plus the fact that the data-visualizer's job-interview seemed to be taking up the whole book. But it read quicker and more smoothly this time around.
Only complaint is I would like to have seen the musician's brutal head-of-security "talk to" a villainess in the plot on-stage. In the book, we're only given hints of what that conversation will be like, and I was looking forward to it. She'd certainly earned a talking-to.
It only took me about five years to get through this novel. I wonder what ELSE I've got lying around here....