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7. The Main Ingredient: “Everybody Plays the Fool”
The main ingredients to this 1972 single were a catchy piano-and-flute lick and a lead vocal by Cuba Gooding Sr. “Everybody Plays the Fool” shot up the pop charts and earned the Main Ingredient a Grammy nomination for best R&B song, although it lost out to the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”
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8. Candi Staton: “I’d Rather Be an Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than a Young Man’s Fool)”
“You may think I’m silly to love a man twice my age,” the Southern soul singer Candi Staton sings on her first hit, from 1969. Let’s hear her out: An old man will just sit and talk, “but a young man is somewhere busy doing the camel walk.” (Dancing like James Brown sounds like a plus in a relationship, but to each her own.)
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9. Isis: “April Fool”
It’s unfortunate to name your band after an Egyptian goddess only to later have the word come to be associated with … other things. I’m not going to let it stop me from highlighting this funky, horn-heavy track from the all-female rock group’s self-titled 1974 album. That drum break deserves to be sampled somewhere other than on an obscure De La Soul rarity.
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10. Bow Wow Wow: “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread)”
I intended to put Ricky Nelson here, but then ran across this fun cover by Bow Wow Wow, the new-wave band formed by Malcolm McLaren and best known for “I Want Candy.” (That one almost made my Halloween Amplifier playlist.)
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11. The Stone Roses: “Fools Gold”
As essentially a rock kid who was dance-music-curious, when I heard “Fools Gold” and tracks by the Stone Roses’ contemporaries like the Happy Mondays and Primal Scream, I at least caught a glimpse of what the 24-hour party people were up to. This 1989 single stretches to almost 10 minutes, and I could groove on it for twice as long. No fooling.
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