The Wipers - When It’s Over
Loving this Wipers song. It’s all I want to hear for the next couple hours. Total guitar epic, high drama from a bunch of punks who weren’t afraid to fucking rock out. This has Rock Band written all over it. NO WAIT I’VE GOT IT: when they do the eventual Guitar Hero: Nirvana, they had better include all those bands that are known for being Kurt’s favorites: Vaselines, Wipers, Young Marble Giants, Meat Puppets, Beat Happening, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, etc. Actually, that sounds kind of awesome.
Young Marble Giants - This Way
I didn’t want to get up after watching tonight’s Curb Your Enthusiasm premiere, so I sat through the debut of Bored To Death, a show about Jason Schwartzman getting dumped for drinking too much white wine and consequently rebounding by becoming a private detective on Craigslist. Instead of real score, they just used four Young Marble Giants song, which makes sense in a hip, tense and quirky way, but I’m annoyed to hear YMG as Brooklyn muzak. But then again, it short-circuits the indie soundtrack breadcrumb trail left by Mark Mothersbaugh by going straight for the postpunk obscuro. It is what it’s become.
The Chills - Pink Frost
The Chills’ 1984 chart breakthrough, “Pink Frost,” gives me bad anxiety. Blankets of it. Blankets that pile on and muffle the minor-key leering that follows the chirpy opening bars. The aural suffocation feeds directly into heart-turning lyrical concerns about a girl’s sudden, shocking death (gun to my head, I think it’s an overdose) and the panicked guy who finds her that way. Shattering as it is, I have an apparently bottomless need to hear it, no matter how close to full-fledged breakdown it takes me. Of a piece, I’d argue, with the end of SLC Punk, which is true and devastating and rewatchable in kindred ways.
Classic. I love the indie pop guitar tease at the beginning—it’s just pleasant enough for the band to yank the carpet out from beneath you. Regarding the death in the song, I’ve always read the unreliable narrator as a possible culprit. (Also, the above post = instafollow for thenotes!)
The Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s
#07: Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime
In his paper “‘Living Turned Inside Out’: The Musical Expression of Psychotic and Schizoid Experience in Talking Heads’ Remain in Light”* Michael A. Brog claims that the cover of Remain in Light, with the blotched over and obscured images of the band, “suggests both splitting and obliteration of identity”, providing listeners with a first warning of the experience that follows. I’ve always found the cover striking, of course, but like the Polaroid mosaic of More Songs about Buildings and Food, it always struck me as a joke: “Seen and Unseen” is about willing yourself into physically changing your appearance to meet an ideal and waking up one day unable to recognize the person you’ve become. The cover is an airbrushed glamor shot Talking Heads-style: a gross parody that exposes the latent self-mutilation of image politics.
As I’ve mentioned several times in passing here, Remain In Light is the greatest album of all time. Like any statement about the “greatest” something, this is a contentious opinion, but it’s not a controversial pick either because Remain In Light is such a singular statement of presence, intent and vision that it’s an unambiguous classic. Remain is not perfect; it has fillery tracks, yes, but the above-mentioned “Seen and Unseen” for example has enough thematic value and musical quirk to contribute to the album’s distinctive gestalt. The problem for me is that this album is ineffably great and significant; how do I talk about the album in a mere blog post? Liveblog it. Gameplan: Write everything I can during one listen of the album.
But isn’t this post about the song “Once In A Lifetime”? Yes, but that song is the centerpiece of the album, and you can’t deprive it of its context! The first three tracks make up a worldbeat orgy wherein Byrne (1) wrestles with violence and goes crazy, (2) confronts knowledge and raps about facts, and (3) relates the curve of our planet to the curves on a woman and forges a postpunk creation story: “The world moves on a woman’s hips”. The meaning of life? I’d buy it, although the stray oracular insight comes at the peak of side one’s manic polyrhythmic freakout—is it Byrne or the character talking? Or is that question redundant?
Side two forms a cool-down period, but it’s entropic—“the heat goes on” of track one does not go on, and we end in a cold void. “Once In A Lifetime” finds Byrne performing the role of televangelist. Christgau called it the greatest song Byrne will ever write when he reviewed the album. The character is not too removed from the talking head that Byrne and Eno sample the following year on My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’ “America Is Waiting”—in fact, I’ve started to think of Byrne’s performances on Remain as a precursor to the junk culture “mash-up” of Bush of Ghosts: Instead of sampling the multitude of signals around him, Byrne just embodies the impulses: relaying and repeating messages, modulated and distorted, flipping channels and frequencies, one of a million signals seeking our attention. That the albums ends with—wait for it—an impersonation of Joy Division is not ironic; it’s kind of the point. “The Overload” is the inevitable defeat, necessary because it completes the course of entropy, but it’s also a final stray signal. It’s actually quite funny: a warped and blinded tribute to Joy Division gives the Talking Heads their own end-of-the-world album-Closer.
Speaking of signals, Remain In Light gets of a lot of praise for being defiantly world music and bridging the black-white rock gap. After the anxiety and insularity of Fear of Music, however, the Talking Heads had nowhere else to go but outwards into world music and raw noise. The album does both, but they keep the adventurer spirit in check. “House In Motion” explores the existential vertigo of constant travel and visual stimulus, while “Listening Wind” reveals how cultural piracy and touristic appropriation engender terrorism: To make “world” music defines and exploits a source, and an authentic homage might demand questionable sympathies. This is the final frontier, but take some care with the music!
And this is why Byrne seizes the opportunity and forges a motivational sermon about water on “Once In A Lifetime”. The character is too good to waste on pithy observations or satire, but even though the song does both. The water is a metaphor for “go with the flow”, and that’s the message of the song. It’s a celebration of life and living, but it also celebrates how materialism and middle-class aspirations are problems we all share. Life can have no meaning, but when has that not been the case? I don’t know who I am anymore, but that happens to everyone! Words of inspiration from postpunk’s greatest doppelganger.
*The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol 62, Num 2, June 2002.
Personally, I like my Joy Division like I like my coffee: a pool of stark and shining blackness, dangerous and borderline painful if consumed inappropriately; it should make you a little uncomfortable—that’s the price you pay for heightened awareness and sharpened sensation.
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#08: Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
I’ve had that clever opening in my head for weeks now. I felt glad to finally write it. Also, the full post is the best piece of music writing I’ve ever done. It felt really good to knock the song off its pedestal, even if the whole exercise simply amounts to a Closer fan trying to reclaim the band’s pop song.
List in Progress
From my Pitchfork2K-inspired top 80’s list going on at postpunk:
- HM: The Passions - Africa Mine
- HM: Malcolm McLaren & The Ebonettes - Double Dutch
- 35: Stevie Nicks - Edge of Seventeen
- 34: My Bloody Valentine - She Loves You No Less
- 33: Adam & The Ants - Stand and Deliver
- 32: Hüsker Dü - The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill
- 31: Orange Juice - Falling And Laughing
- 30: Hall & Oates - I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
- 29: Martha and the Muffins - Three Hundred Years/Chemistry
- 28: Soft Cell - Tainted Love
- 27: Fugazi - Waiting Room
- 26: Billy Idol - Dancing With Myself
- 25: Laurie Anderson - O Superman (For Massenet)
- 24: Gang of Four - What We All Want
- 23: Mr. Fingers - Can You Feel It?
- 22: Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
- 21: The Fall - Eat Y’self Fitter
- 20: The Human League - Don’t You Want Me
- 19: Sonic Youth - Teen Age Riot
- 18: Cocteau Twins - Lorelei
- 17: Beat Happening - Indian Summer
- 16: Michael Jackson - Beat It
- 15: New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle (Single Version)
- 14: Cyndi Lauper - Girls Just Want To Have Fun
- 13: The Embarrassment - Celebrity Art Party
- 12: Prince & The Revolution - When Doves Cry
- 11: Dexy’s Midnight Runners - Come on Eileen
- 10: Rammelzee vs. K-Rob - Beat Bop
- 09: Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Funky Stuff
my top songs of the 80’s list-in-progress
Pitchfork’s top 00’s song countdown inspired me to finally start and follow through on my long backburnered 80’s track-down over at postpunk, and I’m already 10 songs in!
In order to make the project doable (I am writing blurbs as well), I chose 35 songs with room for a few last-minute impulse/oh-shit-i-missed-that inclusions as “honorable mentions”. All told, there should be 40 songs on the final list.
- HM1: The Passions - Africa Mine
- #35: Stevie Nicks - Edge of Seventeen
- #34: My Bloody Valentine - She Loves You No Less
- #33: Adam & The Ants - Stand and Deliver
- #32: Hüsker Dü - The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill
- #31: Orange Juice - Falling And Laughing
- #30: Hall & Oates - I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
- #29: Martha and the Muffins - Three Hundred Years/Chemistry
- #28: Soft Cell - Tainted Love
- #27: Fugazi - Waiting Room
It’s funny reading some of P2K postmortems while I produce/publish this list, because I am dealing with reader expectations and responses on a song by song basis. It’s nice to see something like “Edge of Seventeen”—generally loved, but overlooked by a lot of 80’s canons—do quite strongly in terms of Tumblr notes/playcount. My two most idiosyncratic and obscure choices so far—“Africa Mine” and “Three Hundred Years/Chemistry”—have signifcantly fewer plays than my hours-old Fugazi post (the ratio is like 5:2).
Of course, these are imperfect metrics for measuring response, since you have to account for how packageable the post is (a tl;dr post discourages reblogs and hence plays by non-followers) and consider how the reader experiences the posts (if they check once a day, they should see two of my posts in reverse order but will likely only budget their attention on one of the songs).
