Just listened to my 95,000th unique iTunes track, the sexy reggae — or is it mento? — 1972 single, “Night Food Reggae”, by the mysterious Nora Dean, found on the Trojan Records collection Tighten Up Volume 7. The alleged singer later moved from Jamaica to New York, became born again, and turned from reggae to singing gospel. We say ‘alleged’ because Ms. Dean denied in 2005 that she ever sang this track, which is a slightly sticky tale of oral sex and frustration.
This represents 618.61 GB of data, constituting 258 days, 22 hours, 32 minutes, and 28 seconds of playing time. Which leaves 78,749 items (I’ve been ripping quite a few CDs since last we met) remaining unheard, totaling 491.53 GB of data lasting 222 days, 16 hours, 11 minutes, and 20 seconds.
The 94,999th track, in case you care, was the lovely song “Проходит Всё” sung by Екатерина Юровская (Ekaterina Yurovskaya) from the album Золотые Россыпи Романса (something like “Golden Hits of Romance”). The song title means “It Takes All” — according to my rudimentary Google Translate skills — though it appears to be a different number than the same title with music by Rachmaninoff (again, according to my untutored ear). Reversing the two words gives ‘Всё Проходит’, changing the meaning to ‘everything passes’ — thus this last Russian phrase is also the translated title of George Harrison’s classic solo album All Things Must Pass.
Completing the somber bookends to that ninety-fifth thousandth tune from the dancehall, the 95,001st* song from my iTunes was the beautiful and melancholy “Dark Eyes” by Bob Dylan, from Empire Burlesque. At the time of its release (1985), it seemed only a lugubrious coda to yet another breakout album by my favorite artist. But one can now hear in its slow sad strains the gloomy tenor which pervades his albums since 1997’s Time Out Of Mind.
*Technically this was not the 95,001st song, as I’ve already listened to “Dark Eyes” three or four times before. No, technically, the 95,001st song was B.B. King’s “Beautician Blues” from The Jungle, a much more upbeat melody. Unfortunately, this particular version is one I ripped from my own LP, which has suffered over the years (I think it never had a record sleeve until I turned it into mp3s), and one can hear the damage of time.