Thursday, October 15, 2009

Contest Time: Win Two Free Betty Davis CDs!

Much like a very young Ronald McDonald or a very old whore, the LET crew is delighted to announce that we've recently served our 20,000th satisfied customer! While it took us more than a year to reach 10,000 sets of unique eyeballs, we've kind of been rolling here lately, so the second 10,000 came much quicker. (I could make another very old whore joke here, but I won't. I respect us both too much for that softball.)

Obviously, the masses yearn for multiple takes on various old tunes just as much as they want to know the outcome of the Roxanne Shante vs. The Real Roxanne battle. You also seem to really like Ella Fitzgerald and zombies, in the for-whatever-its-worth category. Fortunately, these are just my lines of bullshit, so I see ours as a symbiotic relationship. I haven't decided who is the tick to the other's exposed skin in the woods, but I fear I'm running the risk of just rambling now.

To celebrate and/or bribe you fine folks to keep coming back for more, we've decided to have Contest Time! Our good, good friends over at Light in the Attic Records have kindly provided us with the two new re-releases from Betty Davis (Is It Love Or Desire and Nasty Gal) to give to you. For those of you somehow not in the know, we're not talking about the one with the eyes, we mean none other than Miles Davis' second wife. The former Miss Mabry is credited with funking up Miles' sound and thinking, acting as inspiration for both Filles de Kilimanjaro (that's her picture on the cover) and Bitches Brew (allegedly, Miles originally wanted to call it Witches Brew and she changed his mind). Legend even has it that it was Betty that introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix. Suffice to say, the woman is so funky you're going to have to scrape the goo off your speakers every time you're done playing her grooves. Consider yourself forewarned.

While I was more than willing to accept pictures of our readers in various compromising positions and pick a favorite, it was brought to my attention that such a contest might actually cost us readers, as well as whatever legal fees arose from various lawyerly action take against us for giggling and posting the pix on your ex's FB page. Megan felt we should do a contest wherein participants described how funky they were and why they deserved these two excellent albums, but I couldn't figure out exactly how to set the parameters, so they went by the wayside. I got all meta for a moment myself, and was going to have two contests--one where the readers came up with a contest and a second where the previously mentioned winning contest actually was enacted. Then I realized just thinking about that made me dizzy, so that was dropped, too.

And so it happened
That I opted for haiku
To pick a winner



Your job is to write
A haiku describing why
You should win these discs

U.S. residents
Are the only ones who can
Participate now

Because contests hate
All you foreign-type people
Or so I am told

Drugs not required
To play along, but it sure
Doesn't hurt, either

Now have at it, kids. Deadline of whenever we arbitrarily feel we've received enough submissions and, more importantly, have enough good ones. And just so you know what you're getting for your troubles, some titular tracks for y'all:

mp3: Is It Love or Desire (Betty Davis from Is It Love or Desire)
mp3: Nasty Gal (Betty Davis from Nasty Gal)

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