As long as the RIAA's got lawyers, MP3 mixtape site Muxtape can't last. But while it does, go to strangeritsahit.muxtape.com to hear the songs covered in this space every week. (All that fit, that isāthe site has a 10MB limit.) My own Mux: matoswk75.muxtape.com.
"Thought It Out"
by Al Green
(MP3)
Al Green has made as many "comebacks" as any pop performer alive, the most recent being a pair of reunions with Willie Mitchell, who produced most of his '70s stuff. They stuck, tooā2005's Everything's OK (at long last, Al covers Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful"?) more than 2003's polite I Can't Stop, even if the latter got more ink. But the Roots' ?uestlove is behind this song, a leak from their forthcoming album together, and it's a more convincing evocation of Green's classic period: Green's Hi albums were as memorable for their airy, ruminative vamps as for their tight songwriting, and for these seven fathomless minutes you'll swear you're hearing a great old outtake. Not to mention that Green can still convince you that he has the most beautiful voice on earth.
"Big Ideas"
by LCD Soundsystem
(Columbia)
Right, an outtake given to a soundtrackāfor 21, a movie that recasts most of the book's Asian characters as, what do you know, white movie stars (way to go again, Hollywood). But "Big Ideas" evokes Sound of Silver in miniatureālive plus programmed instruments, pile-driving bass, ecstatic yelled chorus, the works. Not up to most of the albumāan outtake is still an outtakeābut in the same ballpark, meaning good enough.
The Raveonettes
"You Want the Candy"
(Vice)
Or, why transcend your influences (in this case the Jesus and Mary Chain at their bubbliest, or maybe least tedious) when you can wallow in them? Especially when you can bring the very goodies this song's title promisesāyum.
"Sexual Seduction Freestyle"
by Capone-N-Noreaga
(MP3)
"You don't think CNN would be on some shit like this, would you?" Actually, no, not in a hundred years would I have guessed that one of rap's hardest duos would fuck around with Snoop's backing track and a vocoder ("I know I can't sii-ii-iii-i-iiiing") and come up with primo slapstick: "Smoke a cigarette to this oneāwhat kind of cigarette? I think you need a Marlboro Light [cackles]!" Maybe oddest of all is this line: "How we fuck don't make no sense." After hearing this, nothing else does, either. 
