ON REPEAT: Cleaners From Venus, Mac Krol, Smino & Doechii, Sanullim, Dua Saleh, Dorothy

It's a corridor of dreams that gave me everything I own

Here’s another roundup of new songs I like, and one true “gold standard” song that ties into a podcast I did a few years ago…

If you want to keep track of my weekly picks you can jump on my very long ON REPEAT playlist on Spotify. And be sure to see the new Guest List posts by Tallie Medel and Mike Krol!

Smino, Doechii & Fat Man Scoop “Pro Freak”

Whoa. On my first listen I thought Smino’s part was pleasant and I’m always happy to see Fat Man Scoop (creator of one of my favorite fucked up nightmare music videos) as always. But halfway through the song, Doechii blew my mind. In her verse, she does a full-Busta (see the Chris Brown-less clip below to compare and contrast):

She’s one of the many great female MC’s right now, and one I’ve unfortunately been sleeping on, possibly due to an aversion to TikTok. She gets a lot of Nicki Minaj comparisons (I guess that makes sense) and gave me the same feeling I had when I first heard Nicki’s legendary “Monster” verse (monsterverse, lol) where she just annihilates the big names around her. We’re living in a golden age of genuinely weird mainstream female rappers, and I couldn’t be happier.

Mac Krol “For Some Other Reason”

Just last week I featured some song picks from Mike Krol, who then announced a new collaboration with Mac McCaughan of Superchunk fame. Mike had recorded a bunch of songs at San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone (which you should donate to here) but they didn’t work with his voice, and wound up on a hard drive for years until Mike emailed them to Mac, and Mac Krol was born. And thank god, I’ve been waiting for some new Krol, and Mac works just fine here.

Dua Saleh “Sugar Mama”

I was previously really into “Cat Scratch” by Dua Saleh, and then forgot to do the deep dive and now I’m playing catch-up. Better late than never because they are super talented and now my playlist is full of a bunch of their songs that kinda don’t have a genre.

Sanullim “Don’t Go”

Sanullim (loosely translates to “mountain echo”) is one of South Korea’s preeminent rock bands. Kim Chang-wan, Kim Chang-hoon, and Kim Chang-ik are all brothers, like the Bee Gees or Hanson or Death or Jonas Brothers or Kings of Leon or Neville Brothers or Isley Brothers or DeBarge or Los Lonely Boys or SHeDAISY if they were boys. I don’t have much to say besides I found it on a Khruangbin LateNightTales mix and it’s neat.

Dorothy “Softness”

“softnessssss”

THE GOLD STANDARD

The Cleaners From Venus “Corridor of Dreams”

I used to do a show called The Podcast For Laundry, sparked by the weekly boredom of going to a laundromat in Bushwick that was just far enough from my house that it wouldn’t be worth it to go back home. What if there was a show for specifically this? Thankfully, the fine folks at Forever Dog took a chance on this dumb idea, and it turned into a very fun project.

I had an a small goal with this project to also tie in a beloved band, The Cleaners From Venus. Lol Elliott and Martin Newell formed the band in the early 1980’s and were intensely prolific and underappreciated in their time. They didn’t seem concerned with musical trends and just seemed like they wanted to put these out to the world. Newell would continue to release music this way through an entire solo career. Captured Tracks put out a big box set (the first of three) of their collected tape releases decades later and I loved it so much, particularly this track, which has this dreamlike quality to it.

I knew the CLEANERS had to be part of this laundry project, and knew how it would end regardless of the path the show took me. I even tried to license this song as an official theme song, but never heard back. From the first episode with guest Tom Scharpling on, my character (essentially a Brett Davis variant whose laundry podcast sends him on a new, life-ruining timeline) refers to the laundromat as a corridor of dreams.

Throughout the podcast’s run, “Brett” begins to deteriorate and loses sense of reality, as the “Brett” of the show moved further away from the Brett that started it. “Brett” became homeless, and went to prison, leading to his escape after a knife fight. He joined the mob, changed identities, and discarded friends, morals, and a sense of self. Every guest begins with a friend and ends with a burnt bridge, all in the name of a niche podcast and a love of all things detergent.

Somehow a growing obsession with laundry (a necessity to keep the podcast going) began to work out for Brett when he gets mixed up with dangerous people. The show was set to end with a messiah complex and a worldwide crusade.

The pandemic hit and I had to rethink the ending. Messiah complex intact, “Brett” began peddling snake oil Coronavirus cures “blessed by God” to a congregation of lockdown-hating worshippers at a Florida megachurch, before being mauled to near-death by Doc Antle’s tiger, Ramses. It was a lot.

One final episode was back to basics. “Brett,” humbled, lay on his deathbed to use his final breaths to simply talk laundry with his first (and now last) guest, Tom Scharpling. “Brett” quietly passes away during a plug for Tom’s new show Double Threat. Tom tearfully declares “Brett Davis is dead.”

But it doesn’t end there. You begin to hear the distant, cacophonous echo of Cleaners From Venus’ “Corridor of Dreams” intro, as Brett moves to a new world. As the song becomes more clear, you hear the voices of Brett’s past guests finally telling him exactly what he wants to hear as he ascends to the laundromat in the sky.

It's a corridor of dreams that gave me everything I own, and I traveled 'round the world and I never really had a home,

Well there's friends that come in and there's friends that go out of my life, and things which occur when you balance on the edge of the knife,

It's a messed up, mucked up, crying kind of a place,
Sayin' goodbye is something I could never face,

So take some time, it won't be misspent on me, if you stay another day I swear I'll make you see, it's not where you are, it's where you feel you should be, and it's where... your heart is...

Look, the podcast isn’t poetry. But the song is, and it’s one of my favorite songs ever. I never exactly told anybody about this connection with the song and how it shaped the show.

Later, I found out that Martin Newell himself had, in fact, heard about the podcast. Instead of licensing the song, he mentioned writing a new theme song for it, but this never wound up happening…I think. Maybe a demo of it will appear on a box set in 20 years…