Using my last.fm page’s static weekly charts as a guide, I’m going to self-analyze my listening habits and try to put a paragraph to them. Because goodness knows, I’m the only one who can explain why Mission of Burma comes up on my iPod one moment and John Coltrane comes up the next. (I’m sure the guy who has been running Gallery of Sound in West Hazleton since it first opened in 1987 sometimes tells the guys who work under him about the one time in 1992 when I walked up to the counter with a New Kids on the Block remix CD in one hand and the Bitches With Problems CD in )the other…

Just as a general foundation, here’s what my overall last.fm Top10 chart looks like:

1) Morning Musume
2) The Stooges
3) Nine Inch Nails
4) Minutemen
5) Black Flag
6) W
7) Puffy AmiYumi
8) Sayuri Ishikawa
9) Frank Sinatra
10) Hank Williams III

Now, here’s what my listening habits looked like, from #10 on down, as they looked for the week ending Sunday, August 30, with my somewhat pithy/pitiful explanations following each one: (Last.fm usually finalizes these charts at Midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Sundays)

10) Whiteberry. I wrote about their brilliant (and tragically out of print) Chameleon album at length at MotokoAoyama.com v1.0, and I wish that my former web host during that site’s existence wasn’t run by an inept hair metal drummer. Otherwise, I’d be linking to that blog entry. Anyway, the article in question pretty much cemented why Chameleon rates so high amongst my favorite albums. Last week was one of those times when I decided to start my workday with Yuki Maeda and company rockin’ out from start to finish.

9) KISS. This is as close to a guilty pleasure as there probably is on my iPod right now. I do admit that Ace Frehley is, along with Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, one of the reasons why I picked up a guitar in the first place – although I have to qualify that it was because of the likes of Johnny Ramone, Mick Jones, Steve Jones, Greg Ginn, Richie Stotts, and Philo Cramer that I kept that guitar in my hands. (And then I heard Jah Wobble, Horace Panter and Mike Watt and picked up the bass as well.) So I spun some Kiss favorites last week, although at least half of those spins were Ace’s “Rocket Ride”. They’re putting out a new album soon, as is Ace himself, and I’ll ruminate on both in the immediate future.

8) Motley Crue. Another what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking selection. I felt like listening to Shout at the Devil for the first time in years and that was that. Still a pretty decent album. I’m not bothering with Cruefest though, even though it’ll be in town on Friday – I refuse to sit through the talentless Godsmack just to hear Nikki, Tommy and company play Dr. Feelgood from beginning to end. And fortunately, many of Nikki Sixx’s lyrics aren’t as embarrassing to my matured ears as Gene Simmons’.

7) AKB48. Since they’re hardly an album act compared to, say, Morning Musume, its was their singles – specifically, all of their King Records singles – that were getting enough airplay on my iPod to crack my Top 10. They seem to be pretty quick with the single releases lately, too: it only seems like six weeks ago that “Namida Surprise” came out (in time for my birthday,too), and already there’s a new single (which I’ll get to this week, review wise).

6) Justin Duerr and The Etheric Phoenix of L.O.V.E. Justin is the lead singer of the fine Philadelphia trio Northern Liberties and a good friend of mine. This past Friday was his birthday, so while thinking of my friend I played his first side-project CD, a collection of four-track recordings he did between 2004 and 2006. I played some Northern Liberties, too, but not enough to crack my Last.fmTop 10.

5) Black Flag. Sometime last week seemed like a good Black Flag day, so The First Four Years and Loose Nut came to the rescue. Loose Nut in particular is one of my all-time favorite Black Flag albums.

4) Morning Musume. Yikes! How did my favorite band get kicked so low on the chart last week? Nothing they did wrong, nor did I have any kind of crisis of faith about them. I blame the top three:

3) Mike Hale. Mike does some great, introspective acoustic solo music when he isn’t fronting the trio In The Red, and I got a bit hooked on the highly recommended Lives Like Mine album (Suburban Home Records) as late-night listening last week.

2) Hiromi Iwasaki. Hiromi is one of the first Japanese kayokyoku albums I got ahold of last year when I was looking for some nourishment for my turntable. A few times last week when I got in bed, I put my iPod in my JBL speaker/charger pod and put on her Album album, a very pretty and calming record, at a soft volume and let it help me drift off to dreamland. Speaking of Iwasaki-san, you’ve probably heard one of her songs already, but not her version: Morning Musume covered her song “ROMANCE” last year.

1) Shonen Knife. How’d they get here? Simple. I blame how good their newly released album Super Group is. Review in a couple of days.

(And if you see Aerosmith in the lower reaches of the top ten next week, it’s because I was playing Rocks while I was writing this…)