"I love this Internet radio station... The DJ's commentary between songs is a riot too." —"ISPY2" on the RyanAdams.org message boards

"A great mix of new releases, old favorites and some tracks you may not have ever heard before." —DVD Verdict

Now available: Shirts, mugs and even thongs. Click on Brigitte Bardot's body to buy some merch.

"Know the score."

The station's flagship program, A Fistful of Soundtracks features original movie and TV score music from such artists as Ennio Morricone, Danny Elfman, Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, Yoko Kanno, David Holmes and Isaac Hayes. Fistful first aired in 1997 on KZSC-FM in Santa Cruz, California and remained on the KZSC schedule for five and a half years. It has been streamed to Live365 and iTunes listeners since 2002.

The program is hosted and produced by Jimmy Aquino, who wrote film reviews for the San Jose Mercury News, capsule reviews of films and CDs for the Metro and arts articles for Silicon Valley Community Newspapers. Each hour-long ep of Fistful carries a title and a specific theme (007 main title theme songs, selections from anime soundtracks, score cues from obscure spaghetti westerns, et cetera).

Fistful: The Series airs Tuesdays and Thursdays at midnight-1am, 4-5am, 10am-11am, 3-4pm, 7-8pm and 11pm-midnight, with bonus airings at 7-8am, 9-10am, 11am-12pm, 1-2pm, 3-4pm and 5-6pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

Most recent Fistful episode:
"The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum."
Selections from scores to films that were released by United Artists, which has begun celebrating its 90th anniversary with the 2007 release of a mammoth DVD box set and a traveling festival of the studio's most popular movies, even though the anniversary doesn't take place until 2009. (blog post about the ep) (playlist)

Next new Fistful episode:
To be announced.

The Fistful eps that are currently in rotation are:
"We Want Sleazy." (WEB86) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)
"The Wonderful World of Covers." (WEB91) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)
"Funk in the Trunk." (WEB92) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)
"All This Has Happened Before." (WEB93) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)
"Galloping Around the Cosmos." (WEB94) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)
"Bottomless Party." (WEB95) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)
NEW. "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum." (WEB96) (blog post about the ep) (playlist)

High-Carp Diet

Sick of unfunny morning zoo crew humor? As an alternative, the Fistful of Soundtracks channel presents Morning Becomes Dyspeptic, an uncensored 15-to-20-minute series featuring the sharpest and angriest stand-up comedy to ever hit the stage. Hear clips from comedy albums by performers like Patton Oswalt, Chris Rock, Lewis Black, George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

Morning Becomes Dyspeptic also airs Sunday through Thursday at 1am (9am for British listeners).

If morning shows were like breakfast meals, The Today Show would be Corn Flakes, CNN's American Morning would be an Egg McMuffin and The Howard Stern Show would be a big honkin', gas-causin' breakfast burrito. As for Morning Becomes Dyspeptic... it's like that bottle of brandy you dump into your bowl of cereal.

Come Along and Have a Real Good Time

Morning Becomes Dyspeptic's opening theme music is "Stompin' at Le Savoi" by Kid Koala.

What's New on Morning Becomes Dyspeptic

Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops (Sub Pop Records)

Jen Kirkman, Self Help (aspecialthing Records)

Maria Bamford, How to WIN! (Stand Up! Records)

Greg Giraldo, Good Day to Cross a River (Comedy Central Records)

Patton Oswalt, Patton Oswalt and the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company Along with Other Accidental Hilarity (Chunklet.com)

Morning Becomes Dyspeptic Episode List

Episode MBDA01: Patton Oswalt, Russell Peters, Brian Posehn and Richard Pryor

Episode MBDA02: Bill Hicks, Jim Gaffigan, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and the Sklar Bros.

Episode MBDA03: Louis C.K., George Carlin, Maria Bamford and Patton Oswalt

Episode MBDA04: The Sklar Bros., Patton Oswalt and Eddie Murphy

Episode MBDA05: Russell Peters, Steve Byrne and Jim Gaffigan

Episode MBDA06: Dave Attell, Rex Navarrete, Dana Gould and Mr. Paul Mooney

Episode MBDA07: Jim Gaffigan and Lewis Black

Episode MBDA08: Wanda Sykes, Norm MacDonald and Eddie Murphy

Episode MBDA09: Brian Posehn, Dana Gould and D.L. Hughley

Episode MBDA10: Gilbert Gottfried, Lewis Black and Brian Posehn

Episode MBDA11: Gilbert Gottfried, D.L. Hughley, Jim Gaffigan and Steve Byrne

Episode MBDA12: Richard Pryor, Mr. Paul Mooney, the Sklar Bros. and Jim Gaffigan

Episode MBDA13: Rex Navarrete, Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Gilbert Gottfried and Dana Gould

Episode MBDA14: Mitch Hedberg, Chris Rock, Louis C.K. and Eddie Murphy

Episode MBDA15: Gilbert Gottfried, Jon Stewart and Russell Peters

Episode MBDA16: Chris Rock, Stephen Colbert, Rodney Dangerfield and Patton Oswalt

Episode MBDA17: Brian Posehn, George Carlin and Redd Foxx

Episode MBDA18: Louis C.K., the Sklar Bros. and Rex Navarrete

Episode MBDA19: Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Jim Gaffigan

Episode MBDA20: Steven Wright, Robert Klein and Patton Oswalt

Episode MBDA21: Eddie Murphy, Mr. Paul Mooney, Ali LeRoi, Louis C.K., the Sklar Bros., Dave Attell and Mitch Hedberg

Episode MBDA22: Lewis Black, Rex Navarrete and Russell Peters

Episode MBDA23: Greg Giraldo, Lewis Black and Dan Gabriel

Episode MBDA24: Greg Giraldo, Patton Oswalt, Steve Byrne and Rex Navarrete

Episode MBDA25: Dana Gould, Maria Bamford, Patton Oswalt, Greg Giraldo and Julia Sweeney

Episode MBDA26: Mr. Paul Mooney, Jim Gaffigan and Greg Giraldo

Episode MBDA27: Jeff Garlin, Maria Bamford and George Carlin

Episode MBDA28: Todd Barry, Lewis Black and Steve Hofstetter

Episode MBDA29: Maria Bamford, Mike McDonald and Greg Giraldo

Episode MBDA30: Patton Oswalt, Mitch Fatel, Russell Peters and Mr. Paul Mooney

Episode MBDA31: Marc Maron, Jim Gaffigan and Eddie Murphy

Episode MBDA32: Patton Oswalt, Aziz Ansari and Todd Barry

Episode MBDA33: Jessi Klein, Jamie Kennedy & Stu Stone (featuring Bob Saget) and Katt Williams

Episode MBDA34: Lewis Black and Andy Blitz

Episode MBDA35: The Sklar Bros., Steve Hofstetter, Wanda Sykes and Jamie Kennedy & Stu Stone

Episode MBDA36: Marc Maron and Mike Birbiglia

Episode MBDA37: Bill Hicks and Jon Benjamin & David Cross

Episode MBDA38: Todd Barry and Patton Oswalt, Eugene Mirman, Maria Bamford & Brian Posehn

Episode MBDA39: Lewis Black, the Sklar Bros. and Katt Williams

Episode MBDA40: Patton Oswalt, Eugene Mirman, Maria Bamford & Brian Posehn and the Sklar Bros.

Episode MBDA41: Steve Hofstetter, Maria Bamford and Patton Oswalt

Episode MBDA42: Robert Klein, Todd Barry, Steve Hofstetter and Mr. Paul Mooney

Episode MBDA43: Todd Barry and Lewis Black

Episode MBDA44: Jim Gaffigan, Lewis Black and Greg Giraldo

Episode MBDA45: Mitch Fatel, Wanda Sykes and David Wain

Episode MBDA46: Mitch Fatel, Greg Giraldo and Chris Rock

Episode MBDA47: Jen Kirkman, Jim Gaffigan, Gilbert Gottfried and Maria Bamford

Episode MBDA48: Chris Rock, Maria Bamford, Jen Kirkman and Patton Oswalt

Episode MBDA49: Louis C.K., Richard Pryor, Jon Stewart, Maria Bamford and Bobcat Goldthwait

NEW. Episode MBDA50: Patton Oswalt, Richard Pryor and Louis C.K.

The Def Zone

Enjoy your favorite existing songs from movies and shows like Mean Streets, The Wire and Veronica Mars during "The F Zone." It's a daytime shuffle-mode block in the style of "Soda and Pie" and "Chai Noon," and it airs Mondays 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm and Fridays 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm. There's also a bonus airing at noon on Wednesdays. Click to the Fistful of Soundtracks MySpace blog to find out more about "The F Zone." Track information can be found on the Fistful channel playlists page.

Adventures in the F Zone

While A Fistful of Soundtracks and the "Assorted Fistful" portion of the station schedule focus on original film scores and music recorded specially for the movie, the "F Zone" block focuses on existing songs from movies and shows like GoodFellas and The Boondocks.

The Wire, The Sopranos and The Shield are distinctive for eschewing original score music and instead using existing songs as occasional underscore. Sure, every single TV show these days features pop songs ("Featured on tonight's episode of the CW's Pretty White People with Problems were songs by Coldplay..."), but the song choices made by the music supervisors on The Wire and The Sopranos are the cleverest and least hackneyed. For instance, it was cool how The Sopranos' fifth-season finale—a turning point in the feud between Tony Soprano's Jersey crew and Johnny Sack's New York crew—wryly used Van Morrison's "Glad Tidings" ("And we'll send you glad tidings from New York/Open up your eyes so you may see...").

Film score purists might not agree, but what music supervisors David Chase and Martin Bruestle and music editor Kathryn Dayak have done with the songs on The Sopranos is as much of an art as what Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein did with their original scores during film music's Silver Age.

F Is for Feature Articles

The following articles or blog posts are worth checking out. The writers discussed the "F Zone"-related topic of the use of pop music in movies and TV.

The A.V. Club lists "15 Pop Songs Owned By Movie Scenes." In the comments section, tons of readers posted their favorite pop-scored movie moments that weren't on the list. The songs in Donnie Darko and Shaun of the Dead are mentioned quite frequently in the comments.

A Northern Exposure fan site posted a 1991 GQ article about the show's eclectic and obscure existing songs, which were selected by future Sopranos music supervisor Martin Bruestle. At the time of the article, Bruestle was Northern Exposure's associate producer.

In 1999, Village Voice writer Phil Dellio sang the praises of Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson (no relation) for the ways they "melded pop music to image" in Boogie Nights and Rushmore. But Dellio felt Spike Lee overdid it with the Who songs during Summer of Sam, which makes one wonder what Dellio must have thought about the CSI franchise's Who fetish five years later.

Minneapolis Star Tribune TV critic Neal Justin wrote about prime-time showrunners' tastes in music (J.J. Abrams loves Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood" so much he used it for both Felicity and Alias). This hard-to-find 2002 article was archived by a Michael Vartan fan site, of all places.

Uncle Grambo and his readers—including some joker pretending to be Manute Bol—described "the soundtracks to their lives" during a 2003 post from Grambo's blog, whatevs. Many of the posters' favorite moments of music are existing-song-related (the instrumental half of "Layla" during GoodFellas, Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You" during Starship Troopers—oddest place to find Mazzy Star ever).

In a 2005 post that sang the praises of Wes Anderson and his frequent music supervisor Randall Poster, the blogger known as "the cinetrix" said, "The job that music editors and supervisors do is in many ways just as challenging as that of a traditional soundtrack composer."

Chicago Tribune TV columnist Maureen Ryan did a lengthy June 2006 feature on pop song licensing and rock artists who have turned to prime-time dramas instead of broadcast radio as a way to get airplay. The piece ends with a strange quote speculating over which TV shows Kurt Cobain might enjoy if he were alive today. (There's no way Cobain would have been a Grey's Anatomy fan like the interviewee said. Cobain would have been more of a Trauma: Life in the E.R. fan.)

Entertainment Weekly TV critic Gillian Flynn answered a reader's July 2006 question about her favorite uses of pop music in prime-time and said Veronica Mars excels at choosing existing songs, while Rescue Me's indie-pop montages have grown tiresome.

Assorted Details

During the "Assorted Fistful" block, which occupies most of the day's programming, the station streams random movie and TV tunes. At noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 4am on early Wednesdays and early Fridays, "Assorted Fistful" becomes "Chai Noon" and focuses on Bollywood tracks from the assorted library. At noon on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, "Assorted Fistful" becomes "Soda and Pie" and focuses on '80s tracks from the library.

If you want complete information about a certain track during "Assorted Fistful," "Chai Noon" or "Soda and Pie," click on the track title while it's being scrolled on the "Now Playing" window on the the default page, the playlists page or the FAQ. A window will pop up, displaying track info, the cover of the CD featuring the track and links to the CD's order pages on Amazon and iTunes (or MSN Music). (Note: The pop-up windows won't appear for Firefox users.)

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Bollywood Shuffle

Every Tuesday and Thursday at noon, the Fistful of Soundtracks channel brings you "Chai Noon," an hour-long block of assorted tracks from various Hindi movies, from the Amitabh Bachchan classic Don to the more recent Dhoom films. None of the other original film music radio stations on the Web are doing something like this, which is pretty damn absurd. How can they not recognize the moviemaking capital of the world?

Bollywood tracks have recently popped up in the oddest places. The Black Eyed Peas sampled Asha Bhosle's "Aye Naujawan Hai Sab Kuchh Yahan" for their 2005 hit "Don't Phunk With My Heart." "Chaiya Chaiya," the already-classic musical number on a train from the 1998 movie Dil Se, spiced up the opening and closing credits of the Spike Lee joint Inside Man. And when Homer's nuclear plant got outsourced in the Simpsons episode "Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore" (best Simpsons episode title ever), the Simpsons and their new Indian friends cavorted to the sounds of "Pal Bhar Ke Liye" from Johny Mera Naam. During "Chai Noon," you'll get to hear these songs in their original form.

If you want to identify the tracks during "Chai Noon," click to the Now Playing window on either the default page, the playlists page or the FAQ. Like during the Fistful channel's other lunchtime shuffle-mode block, "Soda and Pie," the tracks won't be identified on the air. There won't be any clips of trailers to clue you in as to which movies the tracks come from, and there won't be any backannouncing because the Hindi titles of these songs don't deserve to be mangled. So you need to keep your browser open to the Now Playing window.

"Chai Noon" also airs Wednesday and Friday mornings at 4am, so that the U.K. listeners can enjoy the block during their afternoon (we're asleep while they break for crumpets and tea).

Stay fly, Mumbai!

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Power Lunch

Do you like parties? Then tune in on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at noon for the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's "Soda and Pie" block, which focuses on the sounds of the '80s, from movie themes to clips of vintage trailers. Flash back to the days when the words "Philip Michael Thomas" didn't mean "unemployment line."

Yeah, the '80s had a lot to answer for: mullets, jhericurls, Full House and crappy Scott Baio sitcoms. But the decade also gave us Akira, Public Enemy, The Young Ones and Phoebe Cates in a red bikini. Remember the things about the '80s that don't make you cringe as "Soda and Pie" streams great '80s movie and TV score cues from the "Assorted Fistful" library.

Click here to the "Soda and Pie" page for more '80s-related stuff, like "The Super Bowl Shuffle" translated into Portuguese and then back into English.

 

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© 2008 Jimmy Aquino

Like other observational comics, Gaffigan fixates on food, but not on exhausted food-related topics like peanuts, Taco Bell or that other '80s classic, Grape Nuts ("What is the deal? It's neither a grape nor a nut!"). His favorite punching bag is Hot Pockets, which are like calzones if they were made by a crackhead and come complete with a jingle that makes "By Mennen!" sound like Kid A ("Hoooot Pocket!").

Gaffigan frequently beats up on his own appearance, like another self-deprecating paleface, Conan O'Brien. He's turned his whiteness into the key gag for a series of cheapo and very funny superhero cartoon spoofs created for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In Pale Force, a buffed-up Gaffigan and his cowardly sidekick Conan (both voiced by Gaffigan) strike fear into the hearts of evildoers with their pale skin and laser-firing nipples. The next episode of Pale Force ought to be a celebrity deathmatch between the melanin-challenged men of steel and those albino twins from The Matrix, with Powder as the referee.

In an avclub.com interview, Gaffigan said he doesn't curse anymore onstage. "Clean stand-up comedy" are three words that often scare people away, though not as badly as "Kevin Federline rapping." What's unique about Gaffigan is that he got funnier as he did away with the profanity, which is like Richard Pryor in reverse. At about the same time as the F-words vanished, he developed a falsetto "inner voice" character—an unamused, prissy female audience member commenting on Gaffigan's jokes. It's become an audience favorite. With his clever riffs on junk food, religion and Tom from MySpace-style yellow fever ("I only dated one Asian girl, but she was very Asian. She was a panda"), Gaffigan proves that curse-free observational humor doesn't have to suck like, well, a Hot Pocket.