Episode 124: Tropical Top 100 Part 3

I am in the middle of a series that I am playing through the end of this year and into early next year: the official Tropicology list of the one hundred greatest songs from Africa, Brazil, and Latin America. Today we are going to be hearing the third episode counting down my top songs. My first 2 weeks of Top 100 programming counted us down to number 47 on the list, leaving 46 songs remaining. Today’s show will take us from number 46 down to number 29; next week’s show will move from number 28 to number 16, and the final show of the series will reveal my top 15 tropical songs of all time. Top tropical songs is my holiday gift this year… this will be episode 3 of the Tropical Top One Hundred.

I’m not trying to arrange songs by rank until the final week… up until that time, the methodology is to group songs by sound, making a nice playlist each week. Week one covered country and rootsy sounds from the Top 100 pool, and last week I played a more urban jazzy sound. This week the theme is the dance floor; the songs on today’s show were written to make audiences get down and boogie. Of course that can be said on some level for most of the songs in my Top 100 list; but the songs today are different in the sense that they are all part of the modern era in which audiences might actually dance to the record itself… not the band in a live performance, but a DJ playing the record through a soundsystem. In the 1960s and earlier, spinning a record in public meant a jukebox or a hi-fi; speaker and amplifier technology took a big step forward in the 70s, and sound recordings followed by pumping up the bass and extending song lengths to create dance floor material. Today we hear clubby dance tracks from my top 100 list.