This week’s inspirational #MusicMonday song is “The Skills To Pay The Bills” by The Beastie Boys.

Sometimes it’s too easy to forget how good you are while you’re out of work, as there aren’t as many people on a daily basis telling you how much you rock. Which you do. I don’t think The Beastie Boys have ever had this problem.

As one of the most influential hip-hop groups ever, they’ll be the first to tell you how dope their rhymes are. Which they certainly do, in “The Skills To Pay The Bills”.

Issued in 1992, the song was originally the name of a “Pass the Mic” Japanese bonus track remix, but The Beastie Boys liked the name so much they decided to make a separate B-side song out of it, with the help of a sampled beat from a former Jimi Hendrix drummer (Buddy Miles Express “Train”).

It’s important to understand and remember your best skills, not just on paper. When the interviewer asks you to tell them about yourself, you need to be able to tell them you bring more to the table than just “the Futterman’s rule”. I know it’s tough sometimes to silence the voice in your head saying ”just get a job, just get a job, just get a job” (Believe me, I know!), but I’ve found that my best foot forward was to know myself forward and backwards - what I was about and what I was good at, ultimately not wasting your time or the interviewer’s time. 

Make yourself the obvious choice to put your resume in the follow-up pile. Know yourself. Know your skills. Time to rock the mic.

By Jeff Fryer, 405 Club Member with mad skills to pay his bills.

Read more of Jeff’s weekly Inspirational Music Monday posts here.

This week’s inspirational Music Monday song is “Got to Get Me A Job” by Ann Alford. 

The funk is in full effect this morning. 

Soul sister Ann Alford made only 1 single, which came out on the Shreveport, Louisiana Hy-Sign label in 1972. Side A of the 7” vinyl record was “Got to Get Me a Job” and side B was “If It Ain’t One Thing (It’s Another)”.  The song is some hardcore street funk over which Ann shrieks. 

As the story goes, Ann Alford (a vocalist who’d also cut for some RCA Records music in the late ’50s) was apparently just passing through Shreveport with her man Don when they decided to cut the song with the musicians at Sound City, an important southern soul studio at the time. Critics often dismissed the song as just a slower derivative of Sly Stone’s guitar-bass-horn beat that Sly laid down on “Thank You” in 1971. As a result, the song didn’t do much at the time but would later be preserved in regional soul-funk compilation albums. 

Not all inspirational songs have to be in the supportive “you can do it” theme. Sometimes people just need a street-level reality check. Lyrics like “Cost of living is going up, and my money keeps going down” tell it like it is. And it was certainly true then - 1972-1975 is still the 3rd longest period of economic stagnation (unemployment + inflation) in the U.S., next to the current recession  &  the early ’80s. 

OK, enough of the history lesson. Look, life can be a hustle, and it’s up to you to keep the eyes on the prize, pull yourself up, and do what you have to do. No one else can do it for you. Meet people. Get out there. Learn from it. Listen to this song and walk in to your next interview with a strong swagger, confident in who you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. Whatever it takes for you to know that you have what it takes to get to that next step, and get that job or client. It’s time to get out of this jobless funk for you!

 By Jeff Fryer, 405 Club Member, Music Connoisseur, Contributing Writer, & funky job seeker

Read more of Jeff’s weekly Inspirational Music Monday posts here.

This week’s inspirational Music Monday Song is “Do It!” by House Rulez feat. Lee Yoon Jung. 

The reason I picked the song this week isn’t because of the lyrics (in fact, they’re mostly in Korean, which I don’t speak), but because of the music’s happy-go-lucky style. It just makes me smile & feel peppy when I hear it. Even in this dark & rainy weather today. 

Sometimes it simply helps as a jobseeker to hear a musical pep-talk of “Day by day. Don’t stop dreaming anymore. Don’t stop, boy”. (Or girl, for that matter). We all need that sometimes, to keep the fire burning. 

House Rulez make catchy Korean funk/house pop music and sound like a mashup of Jamiroquai + Pizzicato Five. The group is led by Suh-ro, who as soprano sax player is often dubbed as the Korean Kenny G. (Wait, wait, where are you going?…)  

OK, if you don’t care for that, the other 2 guys Paco and Young-hyo don’t even sing. They just kind of dance and are hype men. Yup, that’s right. They’re in a group. The Korean Kenny G and 2 guys that don’t sing. Did I mention they also won Best Dance + Electronic Album at the 2008 Korean Music Awards?  

Watch the music video for ”Do It!” below and you might see why. Maybe it was mind control from the video. Or maybe they gave the award to stop seizures from it. It’s what I imagine an acid trip while staring at a kaleidoscope looks like.

And if anyone reading this does speak Korean, please feel free to comment on the lyric content of the song. Apparently, Google Translate can’t change it to English. Enjoy your #musicmonday K-pop, everyone.   

 By Jeff Fryer, 405 Club Member, Music Connoisseur, Contributing Writer, & very active job seeker

Read more of Jeff’s weekly Inspirational Music Monday posts here.

This week’s inspirational Music Monday song is “Keep on Pushing” by The Impressions

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, everyone!

On such a holiday as today, I think it may be wiser for me not to try and directly compare the struggle for employment in the 21st century with Dr. King’s struggle in the 1960s for economic and social justice (although economic hardships in the current recession continue to disproportionately affect minorities today). Instead, I tried to find a song that I felt the lyrics could apply to both situations.

“Keep on Pushing” was released in the Freedom Summer of 1964, in the midst of the civil rights movement, and urged perseverance, no matter the odds. In fact, it was originally a church gospel song that was slightly altered to better fit the message of the Chicago soul group - the original stanza “God gave me strength” was changed to “I’ve got my strength.” The Civil Rights Act was signed several weeks after its release.

In the liner notes to the People Get Ready! The Curtis Mayfield Story cd box set, producer David Nathan wrote of “Keep On Pushing”, “In the context of popular music, it was arguably the first such tune to urge African-Americans to move ahead, strive for social justice and equality, and refuse to accept the status quo.” Even though the Top Ten hit was the only ‘message’ song on their sophomore album of the same name, the musical contributions that original members Fred Cash, Sam Gooden, and Curtis Mayfield added to the social and political landscape led to the group later being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Curtis Mayfield had strange ties to MLK. Not only is he the writer of this R&B anthem, but in 1990, he was paralyzed from the neck down in a freak accident from a lighting scaffold toppled by a “mini-tornado” gust of wind at an outdoor MLK tribute concert at Wingate Field in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. His life came to later personify such ‘triumph over adversity’ songs like his song “Keep on Pushing” because although he was unable to play guitar, barely able to sing, and diabetes took one of his legs, Curtis Mayfield took 6 years to release one last album, New World Order. He sang it one line at a time, lying flat on his back. It was the only way the great soul singer could get enough air into his lungs. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1999 for his solo work, but was unable to attend the ceremony and died 6 mos. later.

Before he died, Curtis once explained that his songs had evolved from the specific hopes of the civil rights movement to “the way we as all people deal with our lives.” For his last album, the struggle was constant, but he never stopped facing it. “Whenever life pulls you down,” he sang, “you just get back up and hold your ground.”

By Jeff Fryer, 405 Club Member, Music Connoisseur, Contributing Writer, & active job seeker

Read more of Jeff’s weekly Inspirational Music Monday posts here.

This week’s inspirational “Music Monday” song is ”Keep On” by D. Train.

The song was only a blip on the top 20 R&B charts in 1982, but a lot of D. Train’s songs were later covered and sampled by others more well-known than their original, including Miles Davis’ version of “Something On Your Mind” and Notorious B.I.G. “Sky’s The Limit”.

The Prelude Records duo was an interesting pair. D. Train earned their nickname from vocalist James Williams’ hard-hitting defense on his city championship football team in Brooklyn. So what stud did he choose? In this case, a geeky keyboard nerd named Hubert Eaves III from the local high school glee club. Kind of sounds like Gnarls Barkley (Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse) getting together, come to think of it.

Although D. Train broke up a few years, “Keep On” survives to this day thanks to fleeting dance radio airplay. The lyrics remind ourselves to keep reaching for our goals until we touch the sky, and planting our feet on solid ground (wait, did this rip off Casey Kaseem’s signoff of “keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars”?).

The last chorus implores you even more: listen, i can’t let nobody keep me from reachin’ the top
don’t you give up for nothing keep on ‘til you get by
reach, reach, reach you’re almost there
if you have a goal, set it in your mind
reach for it, say to yourself, this will be mine!
keep, pressin’ on spells keep on, keep on pressin’ my friend!
ain’t no half steppin’ you’ve got to keep on pressin’!

And then concludes with a self-commandment: THIS WILL BE MINE!Keep on pressin’ on …

I read somewhere once that this song is like a prayer of self assurance, self awareness, self awareness, and self determination, of ones self. I think that’s appropriate.

When you feel down, put on this song, get off the couch, stretch those back muscles & dance a little. Psych yourself up like a boxer. Keep positive. Keep the faith. And keep on pressing on!

By Jeff Fryer, 405 Club Member, Music Connoisseur, Contributing Writer, & active job seeker

Read more of Jeff’s weekly Inspirational Music Monday posts here.