Stevie Wonder "I Just Called To Say I Love You"
Bruce Springsteen was also kind of cheesy on the surface with Born in the USA. After Nebraska, I feel like he kind of earned that singing-like-it's-the-most-important-thing-in-the-world thing he was known for. All the working class anthems are now kind of perfect here. I like a lot of the songs. I don't know if I need to share any because they're so well known and I try to point to the obscure. You know all those singles from this album? "Glory Days," "Dancing In The Dark," "Darlington County," "No Surrender," etc? Yeah, I think they're great too!
But now I'm super cool and hip. I listen to punk rock and obscure soul and other things spoken about on this blog.
The only Hüsker Dü album I own is Zen Arcade. I think I should get more. I think I like it more than other Bob Mould projects. But that's just me. I want to hear him rock out a little more because he's good at that. But this album is a good mix of punk and pop and other boundaries of punk that were broken as they recorded this. It's hard to pick one track because of all the different directions it goes in but since I said I like to hear Mould rock out here's a pretty straightforward punk rock track.
Hüsker Dü "I'll Never Forget You"
Speaking of fierce, Scratch Acid may be the fiercest punk rock in my collection. Yow screams with such intensity and I'm pretty excited I have a few years of material from the collection The Greatest Gift. I went to the Touch & Go 25th anniversary block party thing a few years ago and it featured (among lots of other amazing acts) a Scratch Acid reunion. At this time however I was suffering from an unfortunate bout with plantar fasciitis and couldn't stand for very long. I suffered hard for my rock & roll but as I stood in the huge gathering crowd for (I think it was) Sally Timms or something (something Mekons related), the pain increased and I hadn't yet gotten into Scratch Acid so I was the one person leaving the area as Scratch Acid was setting up and people were highly confused by my actions. If I had made the effort to listen to them before this I probably would have stuck it out...but it was an all day thing, man! My foot was killing me! I still heard them but I could have been up in it, around the 10th row of people. Regrets. Here is an awesomely sleazy song that just kills my feet and your ear drums (turn it up loud!).
Scratch Acid "She Said"
Now a completely different but still vaguely punk rock thing: The Pogues! I first heard The Pogues in high school when I was watching a public access music video show (they mostly played punk rock) and some Pogues live performance played after a Rancid song. I think I remember thinking of them as not punk, just a Celtic band, and as I was sooooo punk rock I considered it something of a guilty pleasure (Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly were the celtic PUNK bands, after all!). Now I just feel guilty for ever having any guilt about it. I loved the ugly/beautiful thing that I can't quite explain. It's a perfect ugly/beautiful combination, what they do. Not afraid to sound ugly in the vocals, screaming, but having the backing of perfectly executed Celtic folk, they have become my favorite drinking music. Red Roses For Me is actually my second Pogues purchase (after If I Should Fall From Grace With God, which I'll talk about when we hit 1988). There are just a ton of great songs on here, I want to be in a crowded pub raising a pint and singing these songs. When I went to Ireland last year I listened to this album to get excited and for a week before the trip this song kept getting in my head and got me very very very excited:
The Pogues "Streams of Whiskey"
Can I please go back there tomorrow?
I hadn't heard from Leonard Cohen in a while but here he is! Various Positions has hints of cheesy 80s production (not as bad as I'm Your Man, however) but it's mostly pretty solidly grounded. There's a kind of weird echo on the vocals but it does just kind of give it more weight. It has "Hallelujah" on it so what else do you need to know? One of the greatest songs ever written, a song I have to stop everything to listen to when it comes on. Even if Jeff Buckley's version is the definitive version, there's a lot to like about Cohen's original version.
Hip hop! Afrika Bambaataa took the next logical step (or the first logical step?) and featured James Brown on a track, "Unity Part 1 (The Third Coming)." It's kickin'! And then I had my intro to Fat Boys, which epitomizes the whole novelty thing that hip hop may have been in danger of falling into. I quite enjoy Fat Boys, but the stuff from 1984 seems a little too disco. Still could be fun to listen to at a party. But a new group came along to push hip hop forward, to rescue it from obscurity by taking things a little more seriously. Run-D.M.C. is of course who I'm talking about. Their back-and-forth vocals are really cool, really good on my short attention span. Here they are being socially conscious before backpacking was a thing (related to hip hop).
Run-D.M.C. "Wake Up"
Is Purple Rain the crowning Prince (& The Revolution) achievement? Just brilliant front to back, all over, I feel like it's similar to Born in the USA in that I can't really pick out an obscure track because the whole thing is so well loved. I don't know what I can say about this album because I don't have personal stories about it and everything's been said. Brilliant songwriting, Prince kind of lasted longer than Michael Jackson and while he didn't have a Thriller I think his sustained career during this period makes him the real king of pop. And the way he incorporates rock & roll, particularly on the closing title track, is pretty epic. Did you see him do that song at the super bowl halftime show that one time? I think he's the best super bowl halftime performer ever.
...And another classic by "Weird Al" Yankovic. In 3-D really pushed his game forward. This is no longer bedroom (or bathroom or whatever) recordings. No more banging on an accordion case for percussion. No more need to have everything accordion based (but he still uses it a lot). The parodies sound closer to the originals production-wise. I think it being the early 80s lended itself well to this, because so many popular songs already sounded goofy. Particularly "Safety Dance." Of course a song about The Brady Bunch would sound funny set to that melody. Because it's a funny sound. "Eat It" was one of his biggest hits ever, "I Lost on Jeopardy" was one of my personal favorites (particularly the video!), and "Nature Trail To Hell" made me nervous to get this tape because it had the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks word in the title and I didn't want to get in trouble (I looked at this tape a lot of times before I bought it and kept going to different Weird Al tapes...it was probably one of my last Weird Al tape purchases as I collected them all). But what I'm going to share here is his first in a series of brilliant polkas he put together on almost all of his albums. Medleys of popular songs done in polka style. My first exposure to a lot of these songs. I thought it'd be a fun lesson in music history to listen to all the polkas sequentially, but then I realized he's all over the map here. His later albums mostly covered current hits, but this one jumps back and forth between the 80s and the 60s (and I know later on he'd do one entirely devoted to Bohemian Rhapsody and another devoted to the Stones) so it wouldn't really be in order. Still. Here's a quick rundown of what we've covered and where we are now in this AEFAE project.
"Weird Al" Yankovic "Polkas on 45"
Other stuff to say about stuff:
- The Cars' "Drive" is so 1984.
- The Vandals' When In Rome Do As The Vandals is too damn goofy. Actually I think it's the goofiness of the whole album that makes the satire "Slap of Love" not sit right with me. Too serious of a subject to approach in that way when everything else on the album is about skinheads not being allowed in mohawk town and space nazis and such. I don't know, I'm having a hard time explaining this.
- Depeche Mode. I don't have whichever album this is but "Blasphemous Rumours" is a damn good song.
- Serge Gainsbourg's Love on the Beat is an odd one. Essentially taking the Serge Gainsbourg formula but replacing the beautiful orchestral arrangements with cheesy 80s beats (and English choruses that only hint about what he's singing about in French). I can't quite get behind it. We do get our first sampling of Charlotte Gainsbourg though, the very young girl (12 years old!) singing on "Lemon Incest." Creepy that that's the name of the song but I couldn't tell you what it's about.
- Madonna's "Like A Virgin" is a song I always move back and forth between Weird Al's version when I sing it and don't think about it too much. "Better give me all your gauze nurse" etc.
- Van Halen was "Hot For Teacher" (and you know, they had that whole album 1984 in 1984 but I only have "Hot For Teacher").
- R.E.M. I liked Reckoning more. Good jangly guitars that would soon dominate the indie rock world. Hey! We're getting into the indie rock world now!
- Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!
- Carmel had another brilliant cut "Bad Day." Love that voice!
- Queen was back to rockin' on The Works. I feel like "Radio Ga Ga" is more relevant today than it was in 1984.
- Dead Kennedys' "Kinky Sex Makes The World Go 'Round" is a super effective creepy track that is just way too full of truth.
- 99 Luftballons.
Next time:
1985. The best Cure album? Brian Ferry solo? Dead Kennedys have changed a lot since the 70s. Descendents are back on here. Fishbone! The last great album according to Stephin Merritt (Psychocandy). Mekons! the end of Minor Threat! Prince continues to own the world (in a day). Rites of Spring (whoa emo's here already??). Everybody Wants To Rule The World. Tom Waits continues to be amazing. And another classic from Weird Al.
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