Unfunkked Eleven is melting.

Testing, testing, is this thing on? I didn't die over vacation, if you were wondering. But I feel like I'm pretty well blogged out, and I've enjoyed not having to clean spam comments off the site, so I'm leaving them off until I figure out what, if anything, I'm going to do with this site. I suppose I'll still toss things up here from time to time, like these here 80 minutes of funk and soul, in case you're into that sort of thing. And you should be, you philistines. It even comes with a theme! Sort of vaguely, anyhow.

August in North Carolina is hot and wet, and not in the good buttsex way. Mosquitoes prosper, the air gets relentlessly heavy, people start staying indoors, and even flies can't be bothered to move quickly. If you have free time and available funds, you instinctively head toward the water. I put this together thinking of high school and college weekend trips to the coast. It was the mid-1980s and I drove a seldom-washed diesel VW Rabbit just big enough to seat three people with duffel bags and a cooler full of beer. The odometer was nearing 200,000 miles but it just kept chugging smokily along the same routes I'd been driven down as a kid, before the big highways got finished and took at least an hour and a half off the trip. Old US routes and state roads running through the center of little town after little town. The speed limit would drop from 55 to 30, then a series of stoplights, a turn or two for good measure (follow the signs!), and back up to speed coming out the other side. In between was mostly miles of corn, tobacco, cows, pigs, and swamp. At most of the gas stations, you could also get an impressive variety of live bait in styrofoam containers. The cycle of speeds felt as natural as the mild sunburn everybody got on just their one window arm. Shirts sweat-stuck to our chests because the AC hadn't worked since the previous summer, and the windows were down anyhow because everybody smoked.

We were all young, scruffy, and buzzed, totally gullible easy marks, usually heading for several days of bourbon-and-cheap-weed-hazy debauchery in some low-rent condo blocks from the nearest wave. And it was going to be a blast because nothing much mattered yet. This isn't actually what I would have had in the cassette player back then, but it sure would have made a swell soundtrack flipping from side A to side B and back again. It's a little more laid back than usual, and made for driving with the windows down.

Unfunkked Eleven: Dawg Daze
78:48, 140 MB .zip file.

01 United Soul Association - Sticky Boom Boom
02 Ohio Players - Pain
03 Bobby McNutt - Country Loving Country Style
04 Flo - Common Law Wife
05 Ron and Candy - Plastic Situation
06 Lee Charles - Sittin' on a Timebomb
07 Lamont Dozier - Out Here on My Own
08 Mitch Mitchell - Can't Get a Nuff
09 Alice Clark - Never Did I Stop Loving You
10 Little Sonny - Memphis B-K
11 Jessie Hill - Naturally
12 Lee Dorsey - Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?
13 Phil Moore Jr. - Funky Canyon
14 The Four Mints - In a Rut
15 Harvey Mason - Fair Thee Well
16 Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson - It's Your World
17 Gizelle Smith and the Mocambo Allstars - Free Vibes (Part 2)
18 Mighty Joe Hicks - Train of Thought
19 Theron & Darrell - It's Your Love
20 Reggie Milner - Soul Machine
21 Hott Snow - Let Nature Take Its Course
22 Ebony Rhythm Funk Campaign - 69 Cents
23 Glover, Crockett, and Glover - The Prophet

If you're burning to a CD, set the gaps between tracks to zero seconds and turn on volume normalization.

And, of course, the archives:

Unfunkked (tracks)	Unfunkked 2: id est, UNH! (tracks)
Unfunkked 3: The Booty Loosens (tracks)	Unfunkked 4: Rubber Unfunkked 4: Grits (tracks)
Unfunkked 5: The Unfunkkening (tracks)	Unfunkked 6: Suckers Can't Buck the Mustard Truck (tracks)
Unfunkked 7: Just Add Water, Makes Its Own Sauce (tracks)	Unfunkked 8: That Ain't Gravy, Lady (tracks)
Unfunkked 9: Inaugural Balls (tracks)	Unfunkked X: Stretch (Disc One) Unfunkked X: Stretch (Disc Two) (tracks)
Apomerica (tracks)	Don't Bogart that Groove Disc 1 Don't Bogart that Groove Disc 2 (tracks)