Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Songs From the 80s #117: "Driver 8" by R.E.M. (1985)



R.E.M. only landed one song, "Radio Free Europe," on Pitchfork's "Best Songs Of the 80s" list. There was a time when I would have considered that a shocking and unjust result. R.E.M. after all was one of the most critically praised bands of the 80s, and I loved them at the time, awaiting each new album and what mysteries it would reveal with baited breath.

But today, as I go back through their catalog, I don't actually see a lot of great songs. Maybe I soured on them by because of the long string of bad albums they released after the 80s. Maybe they just stuck around too long. Maybe they made really good albums filled with good, but not great, songs. Maybe I'm just a cranky pants. I don't know, but R.E.M. looks a lot less impressive in retrospect than they seemed at the time. Sometimes objects in the rear view mirror are smaller than they appear.

R.E.M.'s third album, 'Fables Of the Reconstruction' (or 'Reconstruction of the Fables' if you prefer) stands out as a kind of oddball album in their discography. Produced by the legendary Joe Boyd in London, the album is steeped in Americana, but about as bright as an overcast London morning. As with most of their songs from this period, I don't really know precisely what "Driver 8" is about, it's oblique enough to be open to all kinds of interpretations. But I've always dug its dark Southern Gothic feel and Byrdsian jangly guitars. I still do.

Whatever I think of R.E.M. now (and honestly, I'm not sure what I think), I am forever grateful to them for the music being a fan of theirs introduced me to. Throughout the 80s and beyond the band consistently used their fame to promote other artists they loved, whether it was through guest appearances, production, or just generally talking other bands up in the press. A partial list of artists I discovered at least in part because of some connection to R.E.M. includes: The Replacements, The Feelies, Game Theory, Robyn Hitchcock...(actually I think I'll just stop there as those are four of my favorite artists from the decade).

Songs From the 80s #116: "Furniture" by Fugazi (1988)



When Fugazi first came together in 1988 Ian MacKaye, Joe Lally, Brendan Canty, and latecomer Guy Picciotto were willing to throw out every rule of rock and roll music making. The idea was to tear everything down and start from scratch. Keep what works and discard what doesn't. Despite the fact that MacKaye was co-owner of Dischord Records, they considered the possibility of not releasing proper albums but instead distributing a limited amount of free cassettes that others would dub for distribution. The idea was thrown around that rather than being a traditional guitarist/vocalist Picciotto would serve as a "foil" a kind of Flavor Flav to MacKaye's Chuck D. Live shows were augmented by go-go dancing accountant in drag Charlie, audience participation was encouraged. In the recording studio they would embrace techniques employed in dub and hip-hop.

Some of these ideas were eventually discarded, but the ambition and willingness to break rules that inspired them were part of what made Fugazi one of the greatest bands ever.

"Furniture" was an early live favorite of the band, and appeared on the 1988 demo cassette that was distributed by fans. But the song didn't get a "proper" release until it appeared on an EP released around the same time as their final album 'The Argument' in 2001. The originally recorded version appeared in 2014 on the band's 'first demo' album (an official release of the demo cassette).

Comparing the two versions is instructive. The 2001 version was recorded in a very "plain jane" no fuss style. It features a very dry studio sound with no added affects that was consistent with the recording style Fugazi employed on their albums. The demo is another matter altogether, it utilizes all kinds of spacey dub effects, and is perhaps the best recorded evidence of Picciotto serving as MacKaye's foil. Both versions are great, but the early one crackles with the energy of a band who was willing to totally re-write the rule book, while the later version is the tight work of band that had honed its skills diamond hard through years of touring.

Songs From the 80s #115: "The Puppet" by Echo & the Bunnymen (1980)



Another great performance from 'Urgh! A Music War,' Echo and the Bunnymen became one of the most commercially successful post-punk acts, but their urgent live performance of "The Puppet" fits in just fine among selections from Au Pairs, Dead Kennedys, and The Cramps.

I loved these guys when I was in Junior High, and caught a lot of crap from classic rocker types for listening to them (I think it was the name). Which is ironic because more than any other post-punk / new wave act I can think of Echo & the Bunnymen drew on a deep well of classic rock influences: The Doors (Ian McCulloch's voice resembles Jim Morrison's more than a little), The Byrds, David Bowie, along with some more obscure 60s rock acts like Love, The 13th Floor Elevators, and The Velvet Underground. Yes, one can hear the influence of PiL and Joy Division as well, but at heart Echo & the Bunnymen's approach is classicist. From the very beginning they wanted to craft great songs with big hooks, not deconstruct rock music.

I had kind of moved on to other artists by the time I got to college, and I didn't listen to these guys at all for years. I pulled out their records again several years ago, and I have to say I had great taste in music in Junior High (that is if I choose to only selectively remember bands like Echo & the Bunnymen and ignore some of the dreadful garbage that caught my fancy back then as well).

Songs From the 80s #114: "Dare To Be Stupid" by "Weird Al" Yankovic (1985)



Weird Al had bigger hits during the 80s, but I think "Dare To Be Stupid" is his finest moment. "Dare To Be Stupid" is a Devo parody, but it doesn't sound like any particular Devo song. Instead it's a brilliant pastiche that sounds like every Devo song all at once. This is less an indictment of Devo's lack of musical diversity as it is praise for Yankovic's astonishing skill at synthesis.

This wasn't a hit when released in 1985, probably in part because by mid-decade Devo was not viewed as particularly relevant anymore. But listening to it today and watching the video it's clear that its a work of genius. As he did with the Queen parody "Another One Rides The Bus" Yankovic gently mocks Devo's pretentiousness. He takes Devo's calls for nonconformity and tweaks them just slightly. Every suggestion on how to "dare to be stupid" is about rejecting the conventional wisdom. But it's the largely the kind of conventional wisdom that even the most hardcore non-conformist would not suggest you reject (e.g. letting the bed bugs bite), or completely trivial (squeezing the Charmin).

But as is always the case with Weird Al's humor there is nothing mean spirited about the song. A lot of comedians (brilliant, genuinely funny ones) come across as misanthropes at their core. Not Weird Al. No one could possibly walk away from this song and video without recognizing he absolutely loves Devo. And I don't know why, but I find it absolutely hilarious when he and his band put ice cream cones on their foreheads.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Songs From the 80s #113: "Gotta Serve Somebody" by Dove, the Band of Love (1980)



One of the weirdest things to happen during the 80s was the "satanic panic," or the widespread belief (mostly among Fundamentalist Christians) that there was a vast network of Satan worshipers who controlled secular society, and were using popular culture (especially rock music) to recruit converts to Satanism.

I heard all kinds of conspiratorial stories from other kids: The biggest was that rock music contained "backmasked" satanic messages encoded in it. How the heck someone was going to get converted to Satanism by hearing messages played backwards was never clear to me. I do remember someone earnestly telling me that Satan wanted people to sing his praises backwards, and so when kids sang along with rock music they were engaging in Satan worship.

These beliefs might have been fringe, but they were widespread during the 80s, as was the belief that teenagers across the country were engaging in abusive ritual satanic practices, despite there being little to no affirmative evidence of such activities. It was quite common to hear rock and roll referred to as "the devil's music." This hysteria ran concurrent with the rise of "Christian Rock," rock music intended to present a wholesome alternative to the devil's music, and to promote Evangelical Christianity.

A widely distributed 1984 Chick Tract, 'Spellbound,' claimed the music industry was controlled by witches who cast spells over master tapes causing demonic possession among teenagers. Much of the "evidence" for these claims came from a guy named John Todd, an Evangelical Christian who claimed to have been born into a family of witches who had been grooming him for the Illuminati. Todd even claimed that Christian Rock was part of a satanic conspiracy to bring the devil's music into churches. (In 1987 Todd was arrested and convicted of child molestation, which, depending on your point of view, either proves he was a fraud or confirms the expansive reach of the Illuminati.)

Needless to say, all of this was ripe for parody, and the guys from Devo were on it like white on rice. They created Dove, the Band of Love as an alter-ego that would open for Devo. As Dove they claimed to have sworn off the devil's music, and been born again as Christian rockers. Here for your listening pleasure is their savagely sarcastic cover of Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody." By changing a few lyrics, "You might like to drink yoo-hoo / You might like to drink bread," Devo (or Dove if you prefer) drive home the fact that Dylan's born again lyrics are already faintly ridiculous.

While much of this hysteria has faded into the background of history, it still retains a powerful grip within certain segments of the Evangelical Christian community. To this day Bob Jones University bans "any music which, in whole or in part, derives from the following broadly-defined genres or their sub-genres: Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/Techno, Rap/Hip Hop, or the fusion of any of these genres." This includes Christian Rock, so presumably Dove, the Band of Love, would not be welcome at Bob Jones University.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Songs From the 80s #112: "Freedom Of Choice" by Devo (1980)


Whip It" from Devo's 1980 album 'Freedom Of Choice' was one of the more unexpected hits of the decade, and started the 80s off with a sense that there would be a lot of great, forward-thinking popular coming our way over the next ten years. That promise was never fully fulfilled, and by the end of the decade the pop charts were dominated by painfully uninteresting music from the likes of Bon Jovi, Milli Vanilli, Poison, Warrent, New Kids On The Block, etc. Even formerly promising new wave acts like The Bangles, The B-52s, and R.E.M. were turning out dreck. (Just my opinion, but go ahead and look at the top 100 hits of 1989 and tell me it wasn't a pretty sad period on the pop charts).

Devo didn't live up to their promise either, releasing increasingly unfocused and bland material over the course of the decade. But at the start of the 80s the band was a force to be reckoned with, and their sharp sense of irony was genuinely subversive in the non-conformist world view it promoted. Devo gave us every reason to expect the 80s would in fact be awesome.

"Whip It" might be the obvious choice (although not to Pitchfork, that didn't make their list either), but I chose "Freedom Of Choice" because of how prescient it seems in today's Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon/Netflix dominated media landscape. We've nearly totally abandoned any pretense of free choice, instead letting these corporations collect huge amounts of information about us and deliver exactly what they think we want to the screens we live in front of. And no wonder we've embraced it. Choice is hard. We arguably have too much of it in our current digital mediascape. We're more than happy to give it up for the sake of convenience. "Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want." These guys called it exactly right back in 1980. Our devolution is complete.

Video can be seen on youtube here (embedding has been disabled by request).

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Songs From The 80s Playlist

I put together a playlist on youtube of all the songs I've featured in my "Songs From the 80s" series.



I also created a playlist on Spotify, although a few things I've blogged aren't available there. I made a few substitutions where possible. I'll try to keep both playlists up to date as I go.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Songs From the 80s #111: "Just Got Lucky" by JoBoxers (1983)



"One hit wonder" is often used in a pejorative manner.* Why do we hold it against a band or artist when they only have one great song in them? The vast majority of recording artists don't have that much to offer, and some of them go on to have long and successful careers dribbling out bland mediocrities. Thank god for little miracles like this one. "Just Got Lucky" is an absolutely perfect blast of 80s British neo-Northern Soul.

Unfortunately the original video is blocked in the U.S., so enjoy this lip-synced performance from Top Of The Pops.

*Technically, JoBoxers had four hits in the U.K., and "Just Got Lucky" wasn't even the biggest. However this was the band's lone hit in the U.S. peaking at #36 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Songs From the 80s #110: "Come Again" by Au Pairs (1980)



'Urgh! A Music War' is an absolutely crucial document of the explosion of creativity in the punk/new-wave/post-punk/whatever music world of the 1980s. In addition to relatively well-known acts like The Police, The Go-Go's, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Devo, the film features performances from lesser known groups like Au Pairs, who were perhaps the most radical band featured in the film.

Au Pairs featured an angular, spiky attack similar to other post-punk acts like Gang Of Four, Delta 5, and Romeo Void. I had mentioned before that the frank sexuality of Romeo Void's "Never Say Never" made me blush when I heard it as young teen. If I had any clue what this song was about during my many youthful viewings of 'Urgh! A Music War,' "Come Again" would have caused me to blush twice as hard. Never before (and perhaps never since) had female desire and sexual pleasure been addressed so frankly in popular music.

"Come Again" is a mini sexual drama, with Lesley Woods telling her lover exactly what she needs to reach orgasm, as Paul Foads haplessly asks "Am I doing it right? Doing it right?" I can't think of another song like this one. It's certainly not a love song. It's a sex song, but there's nothing sexy about it. The encounter sounds entirely mechanical and unsatisfying ("Is your finger aching? I can feel you hesitating"). By the end Woods simply seems to give up, ("Yes, thank you I got one / Yes, it was nice / Yes, we should go to sleep now / Yes, yes, it was fine"). She clearly didn't get what she needed, but there's no sense of bitterness, just frustration followed by resignation. It's an absolutely brutal deconstruction of gender relations and the act of sex, rendering it absolutely passionless. At the end of the song Foads' clueless character, his male ego incapable of processing his failure, believes he succeeded and tells her, "We must, we must do it again, do it again, sometime." Fat chance.

"Come Again" addresses an aspect of human sexual relations that had never been addressed before in popular music, and has rarely been addressed since. It's a completely radical break with traditional songwriting, and it's one of many things that made the early 80s such an exciting time for those following musical trends that travelled just below the radar. Brilliant!


Thursday, January 21, 2016

Songs From the 80s #109: "Plateau" by Meat Puppets (1984)



"There's nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated
book about birds." Exactly!

Okay, I'm not sure what Curt Kirkwood is going on about here, and I assume it was inspired by a healthy intake of hallucinogenics in the hot desert sun. This is some freaky stuff, from the lyrics to the song's crazy stylistic diversity that incorporates everything from hardcore to psychedelic rock to bluegrass. But Kirkwood's trippy lyrics suck you in and force you to accept them on their own terms (or maybe not, the Meat Puppets aren't going to be everybody's cup of peyote tea).

Personally, I love the way Kirkwood juxtaposes the spiritual and the absurd in the song. The plateau seems to hold some deep spiritual significance. Plateaus usually do. Many struggle to scale it only to find "nothing at the top but a bucket and mop and an illustrated book about birds." The quest for spiritual knowledge is rewarded with nothing but a few seemingly random objects. Life is absurd. But it doesn't matter, just use the mop to clean the plateau, then move on looking for the next one. "Some said it was in Greenland and some say Mexico. Others decided it was nowhere except for where they stood. But those were all just guesses, wouldn't help you if they could."

I didn't catch up with the Meat Puppets until a couple years after 'Meat Puppets II' was released, but I wish I had bought it when it came out so I could have been shocked by just how original and unique it is. It holds up perfectly today, not sounding like the 80s at all, but rather outside of time itself.