Showing posts with label 80s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 80s. Show all posts
"Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners
There are a few songs released in 1982 that take me away to an unknown place whenever I hear them. It must be something about a child's development: I guess at age seven, a child learns to love music in a certain way that leaves an indelible stamp upon him.
Alternately it could just be that there were some kick-ass good songs released that year.
Kevin Rowland doesn't matter very much to the world. A bit self-important, really, he thought more of himself than the public-at-large did, with the result that he spent about three years at the top of his game and generations a laughing-stock.
This is, however, the top of his game. It's rare, really, that someone's best song is also their most commercially successful (in fact, in the USA, this song is pretty closely associated with the state of being a 'one-hit wonder'). Rowland's dream of integrating soul with Irish music might have been revolutionary if Van Morrison hadn't already been spending decades at it by this point, but here he gets the balance pretty good. Being 1982, somehow this song manages to sound synthesised despite being performed entirely on acoustic instruments, yet it pulls the listener along from start to finish through an amazing ride of increases and decreases in tension as well as tempo. A wonderful vocal melody shares the spotlight with those fiddles and accordion and whatever else, with a result that must have struck a 7-year-old Canadian as in many ways other-worldly while still seeming so perfectly right.
I didn't have the first clue what they lyrics were when I was seven - I just heard it as another part of the music that would occasionally call out the title before lapsing back into mere sound. Had I never read them online, I might not have known that they reference Johnnie Ray and seem to be largely about getting a girl out of her 'pretty red dress'. And frankly at 7, neither of those things would have meant much to me. It is interesting, though, that like so many touchstones from my youth that make me nostalgic to hear now, it is a nostalgia piece itself - going back to 1950s radio with 'our mothers' crying in it. Ultimately, the music is all 'retro' too. Yet that doesn't stop it from being a truly awesome piece of work - with much less 'soul' than most other Dexy's Midnight Runners songs, but somehow with all the more soul as a result.
And ultimate proof that it really doesn't matter who or what you are, how good or how pompous a musician you are: it's still possible to find that elusive thing and pin it down for three minutes or so, thus entering you a place in eternity's record books.
"Jolie Louise" by Daniel Lanois
Daniel Lanois is an interesting figure. Better known as a producer than as a musician, he’s the kind of producer who seems to add precious little of his own personality to his projects. No two Daniel Lanois productions sound alike, so there’s no sense that he’s made much of a contribution beyond getting it down on tape. Mind you, that’s not a criticism.
Doesn’t matter, anyway. The point here is that he also has a little sideline as a musician and singer – I doubt he’s ever earned much money from it. I don’t know much of what he’s done, but I do know this song, which is something that I rarely find in a song that I like, namely ‘charming’.
But it is. It’s a totally guileless, intentionally small song, evocative of several different francophone North American genres, a mid-tempo shuffle with a melody that could be five hundred years old as much as it could have been created last week.
Not being a traditionally ‘good’ singer helps Lanois here, as his rudimentary vocal chops carry a song about an ‘everyman’, a working class loser with a failed marriage and a drinking problem. Sung in a franglais so well-written that you barely notice he’s slipping between languages, Lanois’s vocal performance carries the song, making the Jean-Guy of the lyrics an entirely believable character.
This song manages in some way to touch on a very male kind of feeling, I think. The lyrics are sparse, so it’s difficult to figure them out for sure. Either he’s hard-working guy who is driven to drink by being laid off, or his drinking leads to him being fired. Either way, he enters into a downward spiral, drinking to hide his ‘shame’ from his wife and kids. He ends up hitting his wife, so he’s clearly no hero, but as she runs away with the kids, he’s left to mourn what was lost. You can’t exactly love the guy, but at least on some level you can see the guy as a flawed character trying to get through the meaninglessness that we call life.
Did I really call this song about alcoholism and spousal abuse ‘charming’? Well, on some level it is. You walk away from the song strangely uplifted, and perhaps that’s where that unmemorable folk-shuffle deceives. Just like the ancient folk ditties that tell of horrors yet are sung genially in bars, this song somehow manages to couch its rather distressing lyrics in a musical setting that encourages more than the lyrics discourage.
Hell, perhaps that paradox is the point: the out-of-left-field sucker-punch that is this song, movingly sung by a non-singer, genially performed by a non-performer, and undeniably great even though none of its constituent parts are all that special.
"In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins
We’ve got a bit of a double-feature this week, looking at the same artist at his very best and at his very worst.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: Phil Collins isn’t one of the greats. In many ways he’s exactly what’s wrong with the music industry, in fact. Genesis in the 70’s, meh. And it wasn’t his band, anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s been Phil Collins’s dream to muck up R&B into chicken-dance music for retired old ladies ever since trying our for the Monkees, but spending the 70s in a band that had certain powers to ‘evoke’ led him in the 80s to intermittently feel obliged to continue putting out mood music, amongst the cheese. Both under the name “Genesis” and under the name “Phil Collins”. Let’s be frank: in the 80s it didn’t make a bit of difference which name was on the label, did it? The contents were interchangeable.
Apparently, Phil was getting a divorce. He was depressed. He was experimenting with his new studio. He was making demos. He improvised the lyrics and most definitely did not see a man drowning another man and most definitely did not train a spotlight upon said killer during a concert. Actually I can report to you a lot about what Phil Collins has said concerning this song. The reason, of course, why Phil’s spoken at such great length about this song is that it’s the only song reporters have ever wanted to discuss with him.
What, they were going to ask about that great horn line in “Sussudio”?
Have you ever heard of the phrase “suspension of disbelief”? This is, I believe, the correct way to listen to this song. Convince yourself that this is not the guy who slaughtered “You Can’t Hurry Love” or did that “I Can’t Dance” song. This is not a dodgy balding Conservative with on freak moment of glory. This is an absolute frickin’ genius. Lie to yourself. It’ll make it all better.
Concentrate on that amazing mood he constructs. The sparseness – the chainsaw guitars somewhere in the background, the drum machine casually trotting along like a person aimlessly tapping his pencil on a desk, the array of weird sounds over top. Concentrate on, get this, the majesty of Phil the vocalist: the thespian way he moves from quiet rage to white-hot rage. The way subtle effects like echo and vocoder come in and out of Phil’s vocal line to spice things up.
It continues that way for several minutes: tension, followed by more tension, followed by more tension still. Then, of course, like a famous story often told or movie often watched, we know what’s going to happen yet it still knocks us off our feet.
Phil, bathed in vocoder, grunts out the line, “it’s no stranger to you and me”, and then suddenly it happens. At exactly 3:39, the world temporarily comes to a stop for the single most glorious drum break in the history of recorded sond. It starts at 3:29 and is over by 3:42. Phil Collins earned his place in music history with precisely three seconds of music. But there’s no way to overstate it. No human can resist air-drumming at this point, as Phil Collins invents the best advertisement ever for drumming as a professional career.
But like I give a damn about technically impressive instrumentation. You won’t find any Yngwie Malmsteen on this list, and for good reason. The thing is that the drum break, and the eternal drum fill that follows, makes perfect sense in terms of the emotional weight of the song: it’s the explosive summit of a three-minute crescendo, a gradual increase of tension until it shatters stupendously into relief. Shakespeare could not have scripted it better.
Forgetting boring discussion involving Ahmet Ertegun and overdubs, Phil was dead brave to release this as a single. Radio was brave to play it. The public was brave to love it. It was an amazing moment when Phil suddenly looked like the Genesis member to beat, artistically.
And in history’s most lunk-headed move, he proceeded to follow it up with the faux-cheery “I Missed Again”, the first in a long string of grandma-rock ‘classics’.
But if you close your eyes and just wait for that drum break, you can picture Phil Collins as the coolest man in history.
"Temptation" by New Order
At this point in this project, I’m planning on not duplicating artists. Sooner or later I’ll have to get over that – I mean, when it comes to sacred cows like Bob Dylan or the Beatles, you can’t just throw in one song as representative of them and be done with it. Certainly each of them have quite a few songs worthy of being considered among the ‘best ever’.
I mention those two ‘golden-age’ performers, but I haven’t gotten around to either of them yet. As strange as it may seem, at this point the artist I’ve had the hardest time narrowing down to a single song has been New Order.
Their modish design ethic on a chic boutique indie back in the 80s may have obscured the point, but New Order were shockingly consistent. Listening to their singles collection “Substance” reveals not a single song that couldn’t by rights appear here on this list. Their approach was so assured that they were pretty much guaranteed of quality each time out.
They’re an interesting bad, New Order. The path they took from generic punk on “
Through it all, the main constant in Joy Division and New Order has always been Peter Hook. It is his bass playing that makes a New Order song, and whatever else it sounds like, if he is on bass, it’s genuine. “Temptation” has great lead bass lines, but what it also has is both melodic guitars and punchy drums. In other words, it’s an intermediate step in their journey, and being the single coming immediately before the iconic “Blue Monday” is the last time that they were truly stumbling in the dark, holding onto Joy Division’s residual audience without truly finding a new one of their own. They were soon to be heroes, but weren’t yet.
"Troy" by Sinéad O'Connor
I remember it. Toronto in a... well, I don't remember the weather. I do remember being a kid and playing hooky from school. I remember watching MuchMusic and seeing the VJ introduce some woman with a funny name and a funny accent. She was bald, which, to my twelve-year-old mind, was absolutely hysterical. I was only half-watching as whatever banal questions were met with whatever banal answers. So far, so irrelevant.
Until they played the video.
I don't recall when else I have been so utterly captivated. There's not much to the video except her naked and in gold paint. Yet somehow the video perfectly complemented the song. Which was...
It was...
Twenty years later I still can't explain why this song effects me the way it does. Something about it just pierces through my (admittedly thick) armour and slays me. Every time.
Maybe it's the way she effortlessly goes from whisper to scream, all the time in perfect control, with a searing heat, both of passion and of anger. Maybe it's the way those strings create a perfect vessel on which to navigate the stormy seas - tiny and plain but never capsizing.
Maybe it's just how completely and utterly new this strange creation was; how it was able to take my prematurely-wizened "been there, done that" twelve-year-old mind and slap it out of complacency, saying "There is much more out there that you still have no idea of".
It was just as mythical as the phoenix she sings about.
It seemed to show that there were entirely new modes of expression I was unaware of. Entirely new definitions of beauty and of power. I was completely floored. Transfixed, silent, mouth agape for the six-plus minutes of the song.
Turns out after the video, when they cut back to the studio, the entire working staff of MuchMusic was as shocked and transfixed as I was. There was the kind of reverent silence you probably get when a statue of the Virgin Mary starts crying. Then there was just this applause all round. It was so intriguing to me to see people spontaneously react that way on TV (remember that in the 80s, spontaneity on TV was a bad thing). Especially seeing people spontaneously react the same way I just had. It was truly wonderful.
Then, of course, Sinéad O'Connor became superhuge with a Prince cover, tried to continue pushing the envelope while under the spotlight of fame, messed up tragically, became a punchline, then, after all that... recorded a reggae album.
Strange...
Still, before becoming a parody, she was the future of music. Hell, perhaps she was the future of Western Civilisation.
And after this accomplishment, a million punchlines are irrelevant.
"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" by Public Enemy
Being the age that I am, I missed several key 'Year Zeroes'. I wasn't born when Elvis, or Chuck Berry, or Ike Turner, or whoever it was who somehow magically 'birthed' rock and roll came out with whichever magnum opus was 'the first rock and roll song'. I wasn't alive for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" or "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag". I was alive for "I Feel Love", "God Save the Queen" and "Rapper's Delight", but just barely - and more interested in Ernie singing "Rubber Duckie" than any of the above.
One of the few true "Everything you knew is wrong" moments in music history that I can actually say I've witnessed is the release in 1988 of Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back".
I think one of the main reasons I was slow to warm to rap music was that the early era of rap music was, let's face it, decidedly light on meaningful lyrical content. The music was great, the verbal dexterity was impressive, sure. But lyrically most of the rap that was on the radio in the mid-eighties was pretty vapid lyrically.
Or, more to the point, if there was any depth I wasn't hearing it. Rap was okay, but it wasn't compelling. Chick D, on the other hand, had both a voice that pulled you in and the lyrics to make you shut up and listen. Hanging out with my friends and a boombox, I can only remember once being absolutely stunned into silence with a rap song. It was this particular one, though it could have been almost any on this album.
It wasn't just that piano riff (sampled apparently from Isaac Hayes). Like so much of the Bomb Squad's work, it seemed annoyingly compelling, or else compellingly annoying at the time, but years later I see it as a great exercise in tension and release. More specifically, each of those repeated clashing chords steps up the tension, until the bar-ending piano line lets it out. And then over and over again.
And over again.
Six and a half minutes is crazy long for a mid-tempo rap song. The only real reason this song can go on so long is that Chuck D is telling a great story. Hell, it was revolutionary enough that he was telling a story at all, but this noir tale of a draft dodger breaking out of prison is just a good story. The black power rhetoric (here is a land that never gave a damn...) stunned me but in a way that somehow felt refreshing, exciting. It set up a tale that, while bloody and subversive, was profoundly righteous. Going through idealisms at a teenage rate as I was, that was highly impressive.
Lastly, sorry to say, "Black Steel" is brilliant because Flavor Flav's role is minimal. One of the more frustrating people in hip hop, Flavor Flav took solo pieces like "911 is a Joke" and made them compelling. He was a good rapper. Yet so much of his "Yeah boy-eee" shtick was tired that it actually regularly served to bring down everything Chuck D had built up. So here, absent except for verse-delineating 'phone calls', Flavor Flav is exactly as present as he ought to be.
"Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S
When I first heard this song, I was going through some kind of irrational ‘no hip-hop’ phase. I don’t really know why – it was probably hip-hop’s best ever era, and here I was more or less refusing to listen to it (though oddly I seem to know all of the era’s greatest hip-hop tracks – somehow.
What I was listening to was all kinds of arty English music – you know, playing the part of suburban Canadian sophisticate. My wardrobe wasn’t entirely black, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the songs I was listening to.
Anyway, suddenly there was ‘Pump Up the Volume’. To somebody with the musical rigidity of a North American radio station, ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was uncategorisable and thus did not compute. It was on 4AD, home to the artiest of the arty and the Britishest of the British, and had a cover that looked like it. It was by a band that technically didn’t exist (M/A/R/R/S were a one-off collaboration between two bands I’d never heard of and would never hear from again), it had about a million different remixes (okay, probably 5 tops, but that was revolutionary back then), and best of all, it wasn’t really a song at all.
It may not seem like such a big deal now, but that fact that ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was actually bits of a bunch of different songs cobbled on top of each other completely amazed me. I mean, I’d heard plenty of songs with samples and/or with scratches (and I’d heard ‘Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ and tried – and failed – to me impressed by it), but this was somehow more compelling. I immediately gave myself over to silly rhetoric about how all songs would sound like this in the future (for a brief moment, they did, first and foremost the Coldcut remix of ‘Paid in Full’, which might as well be the same track). What they call the ‘magpie’ aesthetic appealed to me conceptually, while still sounding good. It's a rare beast that, as they say, appeals to the mind as well as to the body.
Now, of course, songs like this are illegal (for the most part)… It’s easy to get overly swept up in the politics of sampling – it is an interesting discussion where things really aren’t clearly black-and-white – but what I miss about song constructions like this is how they manage to be both arty (thus appealing to my teenage self) and undeniably visceral as well. It seemed like people really were pushing the boundaries of what music was, all the while creating product that was genuinely enjoyable and danceable (not that I would have been caught dead dancing back then…). It isn’t often that you hear songs that are genuinely ‘prophetic’ – giving you a sense of what the future will be like – but listening to Ofra Haza trilling exotically over a flood of breakbeats, chants, soundbite phrases, scratches, guitars (how déclassé!) and kitchen sinks back in the day really did give you a sense that music was somehow changing.
Even if it turned out to be a false prophecy in the end…
Incidentally, if you ever doubt the arty credentials of this song, consider this: I have never seen it since or even found reference to it online, but I am absolutely sure that I can remember, when the song was popular, seeing its ‘sheet music’ for sale in a music shop. Picture, if you will, ‘sheet music’ for this song. Has there been a better conceptual-joke objet d’art since the glory days of dada?
"They Don't Know" by Tracey Ullman
Music tends to be, in my experience, a struggle between irony and sincerity. With the advantage of added-on hipness, usually irony-mongers dominate the FM dial and critical opinion. Sincerity-mongers, on the other hand, often dominate the AM dial and are sneered at.
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