Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle
10.31.05

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

Monkey Dot
Money Mark, Push the Button

There was a time, maybe in the late 90s, when I thought Money Mark was just short of being a living god. Why? Well, he was good with keyboards and wrote nice little songs. More than that, though, he hung out with the Beastie Boys.

Things've changed since then (and I've erased all of the 4-track tapes that record my attempts to learn to rap), and I don't really think that one degree of separation from the Beasties is enough to confer divinity. Money Mark is still good with a keyboard, though.

There's not much to "Monkey Dot;" just a minute and a half of a few intertwining keyboard parts playing over a drum machine. My favorite of the keyboard parts has kind of a fat oom-pah tone; the other sort of tootle around. It's nothing incredibly exciting or intricate, but it's fun enough for what it is.

It's tough to say much more about the song, because it's so bare-bones. To be honest, it probably wouldn't have been released if it hadn't been recorded by a Beastie crony. But it was, and there isn't really anything wrong with being simple. My mood got a little better just listening to it to write this.

So there you go.

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):

1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2.  "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
4. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
5. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
6. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
7. "The Calming Sea," Beechwood Sparks
8. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
9. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
10. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
11. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
12. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
13. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
14. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
15. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
16. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma