Being creatures of free will, human beings don’t need a reason to celebrate, but boy, do we sure love an excuse to party. Think back a few weeks ago to St. Patrick’s Day: this is a holiday that commemorates a figure of a specific cultural heritage that makes up just a slice of the world’s population. Yet Irish or not, everyone loves to swill green beer, sing Irish shanties, and be surrounded by their friends and loved ones.  We persistently come up with arbitrary holidays, either with legitimate cultural origins or simply for the sake of themselves, just to have an excuse to bring people together to laugh, love, and to enjoy. To further illustrate, we here at the Institute of Idle Time are gearing up to celebrate 15 years of obsessive list making and other asinine, pop-related pursuits with a beach bonfire that required months of preparation and planning. Why?  

Because why not?

So happy April Fool’s day, perhaps the most pointless of all celebrations! In the tradition of the Roman hilaria, the medieval Feast of Fools, and the Hindu celebration of Holi, The Playlist By Committee has decided to celebrate this most frivolous springtime tradition with a special mixtape. These are not funny songs, or songs about being fools. In fact, these aren’t really songs. PBC’s “All Fools” is a compilation of our favorite skits and interludes on albums. These are the tracks that you never hear on Pandora, and that you more likely than not skip through when listening to full-albums on your iPod or CD player. They’re neglected because they rarely ever reach pop-song length, and in some cases are derided by critics, but we here at PBC think nothing is too unimportant to spend hours of our lives debating and organizing. The result of our labors is a series of intermissions that add up to about the length of an episode of Seinfeld, the best metric for time, and hopefully you’ll find it equally entertaining.

You may think this is a pointless endeavor. That thought crossed our minds too. But maybe we just wanted a reason to get together and make another list before our next official playlist. We built this for the same reason you’ll hopefully give it a listen.

Because why not?

PBC: All Fools

1. Wiz Khalifa – Slim Skit

It’s been ten years since Wiz Khalifa debuted, and finally people seem to care as little about him as I do. I won’t say I’m immune to his hits; “Say Yeah” and “Black and Yellow” are undeniably infectious, but “Slim Skit”  off his Kush and Orange Juice mixtape is my favorite thing he’s ever produced. The bongos and whining guitar imitate a Curtis Mayfield track, then Slim’s monologue sounds straight out of a 1970’s exploitation movie. His lamentations are funny, semi-sympathetic, and littered with pieces of casual wisdom (re: “you gotta stay cool”). – RF Continue reading PBC: All Fools →