The PopCulteer
July 25, 2025

We have great new themed episodes of our Friday Music Specialty programs on The AIR Friday Afternoon, but after that we have some of those obituaries we can’t avoid mentioning, like we told you about a few weeks ago.

The AIR FRIDAY!

Friday afternoon both of our Friday music specialty shows devote themselves to special themes. Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL and Sydney Fileen’s Sydney’s Big Electric Cat return with new episodes.  The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, we have a new episode of MIRRORBALL where Mel Larch uncovers a batch of Disco classics that are cover tunes…originally performed by other artists. Some of them weren’t even originally Disco…even danceable…songs. Making it even sweeter, the show oepns and closes with Gloria Gaynor working her Disco magic on two Motown classics from the 1960s.

Don’t believe us? Check out the playlist. It’s covered with Disco…

MIRRORBALL 118

Gloria Gaynor “Walk On By”
Michael Zager Band “Shake Your Groove Thing”
Thelma Houston “Don’t Leave Me This Way”
Amii Stewart “Knock On Wood”
Edwin Starr “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”
Walter Murphy “A Fifth of Beethoven”
The Spinners “Working My Way Back To You”
Tavares “More Than A Woman”
Donna Summer “MacArthur Park Suite”
Gloria Gaynor “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with a terrific new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat that finally delivers a topic that she’s been talking about doing since the first year of this program. This week, instead of delivering two hours of New Wave’s greatest hits, Sydney serves up two hours of New Wave’s GREATEST MISSES!  You will hear songs that aren’t familiar by musical artists that you’ve never heard of before.

Sydney dug deep into her slush pile of song submissions from aspiring hitmakers from the classic New Wave era, and what she comes up with is a fascinating alternate history of New Wave classics that never were.

it’s sort of like finding a “Best of New Wave” CD from an alternate dimension.

It turns out that Earth Two had some pretty cool sounds. Just for good measure, Sydney opens the show with FEX, the group who did “the most mysterious song on the internet,” which was finally discovered earlier this year after a long search by thousands of internet sleuths.

Check out the playlist of people you never heard of before…

BEC 130

FEX “Subways of Your Mind”
Tattoo Host “Civilised Make Up”
The Elektrics “Pretty Plastic”
Bunnydrums “TV Eye”
DeFilm “Bitter Surprise”
Elements “All My Best Friends”
European Toys “So Look At Me Now”
Idle Eyes “I’ll Wait”
Jon St. James “The Girl Who Seduced The World”
Trek W Quintronic “Zolan Space”
Glaxo Babies “Stay Awake”
Tirez Tirez “Vowels”
Paparazzi “Stop”
Big Dish “Swimmer”
Minimal Compact “Shouts and Kisses”
MC2 “Goin’ Crazy”
T.X.T. “What About You”
Red 7 “Big boys (Talk Tuff)”
Little Heroes “Seventh Heaven”
The Elevators “On The Wire”
The Victims “Tokyo Waits”
Threshold “2000 Light Years”
Alternative Radio “Strangers In Love”
RPM “Man Overboard”
Velvet Monkey “Future”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon,  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning at 10 AM.

Could You People Quit Dying For A Minute So I Can Finish This? 

Looks like The Grim Reaper decided to party like it’s 2016, as we had a raft of notable pop culture deaths this week. I was whining about this just a few weeks ago, so apologies if I somehow invoked the spirit of death to suddenly get busy.

First and foremost, we have Ozzy Osbourne. I’ve not mentioned this before, but the second rock album I ever owned had Black Sabbath on it.

It was a Warner Brothers Records sampler called “Heavy Metal” (back before that term meant what it does now) and it was a birthday gift from my brother, just a few week’s shy of fifty years ago I suspect there was no small element of Homer’s bowling ball at play here, since many of his favorite bands were on it, and I only had one rock album that I’d bought because it was funny (that would be Frank Zappa’s “Apostrophe”).  Still, this is a pretty wild collection, and Sabbath’s “Iron Man” caught my attention because I was a comic book nerd.

Among the other artists on this “Heavy Metal” compilation were YES, Led Zepplin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and for reasons beyond my understanding, Dr. John, Van Morrison, The Eagles and Faces.

That record put Ozzy on my radar, and while I was not a rabid fan, and was pretty repulsed by the reality show (I am pretty repulsed by EVERY reality show), I did respect his importance in music history, his influence and his charitable contributions. He also wrote or co-wrote a ton of great songs. “War Pigs” would probably be in my top twenty if he didn’t rhyme “masses” with “masses” in the first verse.

Fifteen years ago I made a short film starring my buddy, Lee Harrah, and his band, HARRAH, doing a rather fun and credible impression of Ozzy. I think this was an attempt to get Lee on a TV show or movie or something. Anyway, it’s purely a loving tribute, and here it is again…

Malcolm Jamal Warner died in a swimming accident this week, and like almost everybody else who was alive at the time, I enjoyed his work on The Cosby Show…at least before that show’s star made it hard to watch again. MJW was the rare child star who avoided the pitfalls of fame and went on to have a successful adult career in front of and behind the camera and was a creative force in poetry and music. It’s a true tragedy because he clearly had much more to offer the world.

We also lost Chuck Mangione.  Mangione was a virtuoso musician who learned at the feet of Dizzy Gillespie, and managed to find mainstream success at a time when instrumental soft Jazz was not even a musical catagory. His success with Easy Listening music obscures his substantial jazz cred, with stints playing with Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Art Blakey and Keith Jarrett. His music made millions of people feel good, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hulk Hogan was, of course, an iconic professional wrestler. I offer my condolences to his family, friends and fans. Not being a fan of him as a wrestler or a human being, I will refrain from further comment.

That is this week’s PopCulteer.  As your humble blogger looks forward to his first weekend without travel or illness in a couple of months. Still, we has the fresh content every dang day. Check back for our regular features every day too.