I Need A Dollar

Funny I saw a live electronic band doing a rework of the aloe blacc dollar song on friday and all 700 kids knew it like second nature

Don Strasburg

Huh?

Actually, it’s Aloe Blacc, but I wouldn’t know anyway.  But Google is my friend, so I fired it up, wondering if the search engine could make sense of Strasburg’s BlackBerry scribblings.

Lo and behold, the track came right up:

Wait a second.  This is GOOD!  INSTANTLY!

So I go to Wikipedia to find out more.

Aloe Blacc started out fifteen years ago as an MC in Emanon.  I know that act, but none of their material.  And he had a solo album in 2006, but it’s 2011.  But "I Need A Dollar" is new.  Whew!  I’m not that out of it.  But I’m pretty out of it.

We’re all out of it.  That’s why there’s need for a filter.  That’s where all the money is.  But right now, we rely on friends, like Strasburg.  Strasburg testified to me in Colorado all about the success he’s having with electronic groups, he’s my go-to guy when it comes to breaking live acts.  But how did he know about "I Need A Dollar"?  Was it because it was the theme song for HBO’s "How To Make It In America"?

I get HBO.  But I’ve never watched that show.  So I click through and find out it’s about the fashion scene, which I care not a whit about, I’m not gonna watch a show about that, I’ve been wearing the same clothes since college, ha!

But then Wikipedia tells me "I Need A Dollar" was an iTunes Single Of The Week.  But I don’t need a free song when everything’s free on YouTube.  But maybe Single Of The Week is not free, who knows, I never buy anything from iTunes and it seems almost nobody else does either:

But the real reason I’m writing this is this song is infectious.  It’s not Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy", but it’s better than anything that Cee-Lo has done since, better than "F___ You", just because you use an expletive in the title, that doesn’t make a track great.

And Aloe Blacc sounds a bit like that dude who sang "Chocolate Rain", but the more I listened to the song, before I researched, I realized this was positively professional.  The horns.  The backup vocals straight off a Fine Young Cannibals record.

And we all need a dollar.  At least I know I do.  I just balanced the checkbook, weird to see the money deplete.  Still, it’s Aloe’s vocal more than what he’s singing.

This sounds nothing like Bieber or Drake, the members of the Canadian Club, it’s not purely reliant on beats, it’s like a bunch of cats listened to the songs played in the basement in "Quadrophenia" and decided to update the sound.  This is like what Duffy was doing, before she went off the rails.

So consider this a turn-on.  I wouldn’t say this is normally my kind of music, but great tracks transcend genres, wasn’t that Strasburg’s point?

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