A few years back, I found myself playing a trivia game at a house party on New Year's Eve - yes, me! - at a New Year's Eve party! - and one aspect of the game went something along the lines of "hum that tune." One partner on a team would draw a card that had the name of a pop song on it, and that person's job was to merely hum the tune and not sing it, and the other partner had exactly sixty seconds in which he or she needed to guess the name of the tune, or else the whole team would be docked 50 bazillion points and receive ridicule from the twelve other participants looking on heartlessly. This night I was partnered with a woman who possessed the right level of enthusiasm but, let's just say, a less than stellar level of humming skills. She pulled a card and stared at the song title. "Oh, OK, I know this one!" The timer began, and she proceeded to make this noise: "Eh Uh Eh Uh Ehhh-uhhhh!" I recognized nothing. "Eh Uh Eh Uh Ehhh-uhhhh!" Still drawing blanks. She kept uttering the same exact incomprehensible collection of syllables. Sweat trickled down my face as the grains of sand in the hourglass hurtled toward the bottom, but, try as I might, a song title would not come. Her performance became infused with a more desperate air, arms flailing and eyes pleading, but I couldn't even name a song title in jest. Finally, the clock expired. She thrust the card into my face and shouted, "God damn it, 'Groove Is In the Heart'!" Yes, it turned out that the song she had been trying to hum was Deee-Lite's "Groove is In the Heart." Gathering my wits, I explained myself like so: "There are so many sections of "Groove is In the Heart" that you could hum! You could hum the "Ah couldn't ask for anothah, I-I-I-I-I-Ah!" You could even hum the bass line and I probably would have gotten it." But alas, 'twas not to be. The groove had clearly not been in our hearts that night.
Those encountering "Groove is In the Heart" upon its release in 1990 could have been forgiven for believing that a new breed of dance-pop was suddenly about to dominate the coming decade - one distinctly separate from the synth-dominated sounds of the '80s. Dance-pop that would be kaleidescopic, free-wheeling, all-inclusive, genre-bending. Nope. Instead, we mostly ended up with stuff like "C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)" and "Tootsie Roll." But think of what could have been. "Groove Is In the Heart" has a little something for everybody:
Quirky guest ramblings from former James Brown/Parliament-Funkadelic bassist and lead professor of Funk University (look it up) Bootsy Collins (e.g. "Ehhh-astronomical!")
Guest horns from arguably James Brown's two most prominent sidemen, Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley
Guest rap from Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest (back when A Tribe Called Quest had barely even begun its "quest" to exist - I think their first album had only been released months prior)
Sample of the theme from Green Acres
Slide whistle
Congas, cowbells, shakers, tambourines, and every percussion instrument under the sun
Shout-out to Horton Hears a Who
Did I mention the slide whistle?
I mean something for everybody. When this song hit the airwaves in 1990, ten-year-old Little Earl didn't have the slightest inkling of the significance of any of the hipster cameos listed above, but I could tell you one thing: this song grooved. I also assumed, not having seen the video, that lead vocalist and live-action Scooby Doo character Lady Miss Kier was black. She sounds more black than Caron Wheeler from Soul II Soul (and is certainly the finest white singer to ever sing the words "succotash wish.") Wait, scratch the Scooby Doo reference. You know who she looks like? I swear, she's a dead ringer for Brian Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
In one sense, I'm inclined to describe "Groove Is In the Heart" as a swinging retro-'60s bachelor pad floor stomper a la "Love Shack" or "Good Thing" (to quote my man Todd In the Shadows, "You know, as much as I love 'Groove Is In the Heart,' I always liked Deee-Lite more the first time heard them ... when they were called the B-52's"). (Also, I would have recommended that you check out Todd's video if you wanted to learn more about who exactly the two other guys in the "band" were, the scene Deee-Lite allegedly sprang from, why they vanished virtually as soon as they arrived, and basically all the other stuff I was too lazy to write about ... except it looks like YouTube pulled some copyright crap on his ass. Edit:Someone else re-posted it.) But in another sense, it's actually a song more in line with the cut-and-paste, "sampledelica," pre-Biz Markie/Gilbert O'Sullivan lawsuit era of hip-hop. While Bootsy Collins appears in the video holding a bass guitar, he does not, at least according to Wikipedia, play one note of bass on the song. Thankfully Deee-Lite had the good sense to rescue a glorious bass line from the obscure Herbie Hancock track "Bring Down the Birds," where it would have otherwise languished for all eternity in the moldy basements of jazz-loving assholes worldwide.
Sadly, while the groove was obviously, beyond a reasonable doubt, in the heart, for Deee-Lite, the groove was definitely not in the charts, as they never managed to score another Top 40 hit. After having listened to the song's parent album, World Clique, I wonder if this might have simply been a case of false advertising. Anyone who had bought the album hoping to hear more bright, campy, hook-filled nuggets of goodness along the lines of the "big hit" would have probably wondered if they'd bought the wrong CD, because frankly, the other tracks sound more like downtempo Lisa Stansfield Eurodance than paisley-tinted lounge-pop. And nothing increases the odds of One Hit Wonder status like a big hit that's unrepresentative of the group's overall sound (just ask Strawberry Alarm Clock, or Blind Melon). But let me say this: the list of acts who had more Top 40 hits than Deee-Lite, but who never had a hit even half as enjoyable as "Groove Is In the Heart," might be a long one. May it be poorly hummed in trivia games for all eternity. Favorite YouTube comments:
I feel like I was dropped into a lava lamp
People be asking for more cowbell, but I'm like, needs more slide whistle.
After further review Groove is still in the heart
True science fact: Every time this video is played a new drag queen is born.
The 1960s, as brought to you by 1990.
This is where the eighties backed up into the seventies.
I feel like I'm watching a Sims house party
What if this is the only thing aliens know about earth
This must be what a dog feels when it sticks it's face out the car window.
This is exactly what you see when your are sitting in the library on LSD.
When you figure out how to turn on the microwave with your head still inside of it
I feel like this is what it looks like after you've eaten that weird cactus
If you don't dance to this song, you're probably an accountant who drives a beige Toyota Camry 😁
Girl got more moves than a ten board chess match.
If this is Dee-lite, then I wanna see Dee-regular.
Well, at least they weren't those disrespectful, ungrateful young cannibals that you see roaming the streets at all odd hours, besmirching the good reputation of our town. No siree. Nothing but fine, upstanding, proper young cannibals in this band.
If someone had taken a poll, back around 1983 or so, asking close followers of the British Ska Revival who they might have thought, out of all the musicians involved, would form the nucleus of a spin-off group that would eventually release a massive US #1 album in 1989 that would feature two massive US #1 singles, I doubt many of those responding would have answered, "Well, the bassist and the guitarist from the English Beat, obviously."
One might have put some money on Graham "Suggs" McPherson, lead singer of Madness, a band that, unlike the English Beat, actually scored a US top 10 hit. It probably wouldn't have been a terrible stretch to envision Terry Hall and his Sideshow Bob haircut making a more forceful appearance on the American charts in one form or another, be it with the Fun Boy Three, a new line-up of the Specials, or some other off-the-wall side project yet to be conceived. If you'd have said English Beat lead vocalist Dave Wakeling and his toasting sidekick Ranking Roger, you would have been in the ballpark at least, as they went on to form General Public, something of a punk/ska supergroup (featuring members of the Clash, the Specials, and Dexys Midnight Runners!), which scored a US #27 hit with "Tenderness."
The top 30. Right. That's about what you'd expect from an English Beat side project. Well, Andy Cox and David Steele were, shall we say ... "hungry" for more. But just who were they going to find to assist them with devouring all that succulent human flesh?
Roland Gift has a singing style so choked and so pinched, he makes Robin Gibb sound like Tom Jones. If I'm in a less charitable mood, I might describe him as one of those singers who - Thom Yorke is another for me - equates "poor pronunciation" with "emotion" and "passion." Look, Sam Cooke didn't have to mumble and gurgle to sound soulful, you know? Let's just say that if I didn't like so many of the other elements in the Fine Young Cannibals' sound, Gift's idiosyncratic style might get on my nerves a bit more. As it is, I can roll with his Mick Jagger-circa-1981 vocal affectations.
Between 1990 and 2010, I always chuckled a bit whenever I thought about The Raw & the Cooked, because for about a year it must have seemed like the Fine Young Cannibals were going to be the biggest thing ever, and then POOF! - they vanished into the woods like a Donner Party casualty. "Ha ha ha," I thought to myself. "Can you believe all those people who got so excited about the Fine Young Cannibals?? Man, people are so clueless." Then, sometime around 2011, I actually listened to the album. You know what? I probably would have gotten excited about the Fine Young Cannibals too.
In all my years of '80s music fandom, I don't know if I've ever heard anything quite like it. Wikipedia lists the album's genre as "alternative rock/new wave/soul/dance-rock"; AMG's Jo-Anne Greene likewise refers to a "shopping list of genres" such as "Mod, funk, Motown, British beat, R&B, punk, rock, and even disco..." I mean hell, why not just throw in a steel guitar and cross country and western off the list too? But I don't think the album (which, to clarify, was actually the band's second) comes off like one of those intentionally eclectic Prince/Beck-style genre-hopping exercises. It just sounds like a bunch of British guys goofing around and making the kind of music they've always secretly been into. As a means for established new wave musicians to try a little something different in a low-key, unambitious way, without much in the way of heavy critical or commercial expectations, the Fine Young Cannibals remind me of the Tom Tom Club or the Power Station. And those Tom Tom Club and Power Station albums turned out pretty good!
For instance: In the Wacky and Yet Surprisingly Awesome Cover Version Hall of Fame, I think FYC's remake of the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love" might deserve its own wing (right next to Judas Priest's remake of "Diamonds and Rust" and Scissor Sisters' version of "Comfortably Numb"). It swings, it grooves, it shimmies, it shakes - makes me wonder what they could've done with "New Rose," "White Riot," or "12 X U," you know?
While the jangly "Don't Look Back" was the album's third most successful US single, I would place the third and fourth tracks, "I'm Not the Man I Used to Be" and "I'm Not Satisfied," only a notch or two behind the mega-hits on the enjoyment scale. If a couple of cuts seem to tread water, at least they're slotted towards the end of the album where I don't really notice them. At 35 minutes, The Raw & The Cooked is short and sweet and doesn't strain for unnecessary significance.
So, the two big hits. They were hits, they were big, and you know why. On "She Drives Me Crazy," Gift really emits that "three-year-old toddler" sex appeal; at times I get the impression that he needs a quick diaper change. On the borderline incomprehensible verses, he kind of sounds like a painfully shy schoolgirl forced to give a book report in front of the entire class. I used to think he sang, "She drives me crazy/And no one cares." Yes, you're right! No one cares about this stupid crush you have, Roland. But damn, what a snare sound. Honestly, until I read the album's Wikipedia page, I had no idea just how much thought and energy went into that one simple effect:
...the unique snare drum "pop" sound on "She Drives Me Crazy" was created by [producer David] Z recording the snare drum portion separately. A speaker was then placed on top of the snare drum, and a microphone below. The original recording of the snare drum part was played back through the speaker and re-recorded. Reflecting on creating the snare sound with Mix Online in 2001, David Z said: "I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone. As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with." Dan Daley of the website added:
But the coup de grace for the sound was when Z pumped the processed and blended sample through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end. The whole thing was limited slightly and then sent to a track on a roll of Ampex 456 running on a Studer A800 at 15 ips. Only a slight amount of reverb was added to the track later on. The sonic result was closer to a hollow wood block sound than any snare found on a conventional rock record...
Personally, I would have increased the lower end on the Shure 57, ran the echo through an Ampex 236, not a 456, and placed the microphone behind an EK-XG with anti-reverb limiter, but that's just me. I guess it still came out sounding pretty good regardless. The deliberately artificial percussion pushes the song into dance-pop territory, but the roaring guitar pushes it right back into rock, and the whole track is like a giant see-saw between these two impulses, and in the end, I think we all came out the winners in this battle.
As white British '80s Motown homages go, "Good Thing" just might give "Town Called Malice" and "High Fidelity" a run for its money. The opening guitar strum kicks things off like a gun at a race track, and the bridge, with its "whoo-hoo-hoo" backing vocals, sounds like Holland-Dozier-Holland snorting Smokey Robinson's coke with Norman Whitfield rolling up the bills. But how many Motown singles sported a boogie woogie piano solo as hot as this one's? Small epiphany: I just realized that the sound at 2:05 is not, as I had assumed for years, a saxophone playing exactly two notes, but Roland Gift singing "Waaah-haaah." The man could have had a second career as a saxophone impersonator. His closing "Good gaaah! Gooh!" suggests an attack of involuntary esophagospasms, but the backing vocalists don't sound the least bit concerned (and the video is like an extended three-minute riff on the Quadrophenia album cover).
So then what the hell happened? Why did an album that hit such an artistic and commercial sweet spot become Gift, Cox, and Steele's last meal? From Wikipedia:
The band's record label and manager had never previously experienced success the size of The Raw & the Cooked, and "they didn't know how to handle it." In the words of Gift, "they kept saying to us our next record had to be even bigger which was really stupid. That was one of the main things that killed it for me." As such, the band never recorded a follow up album, and after a hiatus that began in 1992, their first and only song recorded and released after the album was "The Flame" for their 1996 compilation album The Finest, and they subsequently disbanded. Gift said "We just stopped wanting to do it. You might wake up one day and think 'I'm out' but you don't realise it's been at the back of your mind for a while. It was hard to stick to how we appraised the band originally, which was to make great music."
Well, sometimes even the most ravenous cannibals simply lose their taste for carrion.
This one doesn't mess around. Before you even have a chance to ask yourself, "Hmm, in what manner is this particular Phil Collins song going to commence?," BLAM! You're down on the mat with blood coming out of your nose and the referee's already counting to ten.
The peppy little intro to "Something Happened On the Way to Heaven" has always conjured up an image in my mind of Phil Collins as a congenial game show host jogging out from behind the curtain to greet the contestants at the start of the broadcast. "Welcome back to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire! And now, here's your host, Phil Collins!" It's like the late '80s equivalent of the instrumental rendition of Otis Redding's "I Can't Turn You Loose" that plays as the Blues Brothers take the stage. Scratch that: it's like the theme music for Fox Sports Sunday, complete with synthesized bass blasts, buzzing guitars, and ear-piercing trumpets. I can practically hear Joe Buck chiming in now: "It's a beautiful afternoon here at Mile High Stadium, where the Denver Broncos host the Kansas City Chiefs with the AFC West championship on the line."
The above observation aside, I don't have a whole lot to say about "Something Happened On the Way to Heaven," other than that I love it from start to finish and top to bottom, just like every other Phil Collins hit I love to death, even though I probably shouldn't. To quote Phil's clear artistic equal, Radiohead, "Everything is in its right place." Quite what heaven has to do with any of this I have no idea. It's certainly a little avant-garde that the title only appears once, in the middle of a verse. Didn't this song come out around the same time as All Dogs Go to Heaven? For that presumably coincidental reason, I've always associated it with an animated canine voiced by Burt Reynolds, but that's probably way off base. However, I just glanced at the song's Wikipedia page and smiled knowingly to myself, as I recognized that the photo used on the single sleeve is a still from Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, a highly surreal, sweet, romantic, off-beat film that never seems to make "Greatest Films" lists but which I highly recommend to anyone who has a taste for post-war British cinema (perhaps even more highly than The Red Shoes).
All right, fine, I guess I better listen to the lyrics?
Aaaaaand ... I'm back. Sounds like another bitter break-up song. Which ex-wife was this written about again?
I'd like to single out the magnificent bridge, which is the the kind of bridge that pop songs don't seem to feature anymore, where a sudden key change descends from on high, utterly transforming the feel of the track for about twenty seconds before swiftly returning to the celestial kingdom from whence it came. Phil had more beautiful bridges in his arsenal than the metro areas of New York and San Francisco combined. Hi-Yo!
And then, Phil finally provided the world with the doggie daydream video it was longing for. Given that this was 1989, I think the likeliest explanation is that Phil and the boys were killing time in the hotel room, happened to catch an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos on TV, and concluded, "You know what people love more than anything? Dogs doing stupid stuff. Let's film a video ... from the point of view ... of a dog!" I mean sure, Madonna and Paula Abdul could get all "fancy" with David Fincher if they felt like it, but as far as Phil Collins was concerned, nothing beats the cinematic power of a back-up singer stepping in dog shit and a bass player's shoe receiving an unexpected sprinkling of dog pee. George Michael, you can keep your sexy supermodels: Phil Collins's videos have dog pee. Not to mention evocative "doggie daydream" sequences a la Fellini, where our canine friend fantasizes that he's A) the hero of a silent film and B) the main guest at a royal feast (frankly, he'd probably be just as satisfied with Purina). Roll over Anita Ekberg. No, I mean, literally roll over, you've become a dog and you're starring in a Phil Collins video.
Surprisingly, according to Phil, the "heaven" reference is a tad more significant than it initially appears to be. From In The Air Tonight:
It had been a long, sweet ride, but by '88, the market for horse tranquilizer was finally bottoming out. Crack was the thing now, but that shit was for ghetto kids - I rolled with class, you feel me? It was time to either kick the juice for good, or get creative.
I just couldn't take the first step. I couldn't admit I had a problem - not to my ex-wives, not to Rot Rot, not even to my drum kit. I decided to get creative.
Me and a roadie raided a Sussex race track just before dawn. I tell you, there's nothing a crowbar, a blowtorch, and a can of WD-40 can't do. I got back to the country house and, having absentmindedly locked myself out, crawled through the doggie door in the kitchen. As the humiliation swept over me, the words of Julio, my number one dealer who, having read the writing on the wall, had finally retired to St. Kitts & Nevis two months prior, rang in my ears: "You can't mix it too pure, Felipe. You need to lace it with a diluting agent. You can't shoot what the horse shoots. You dance with death, hombre." Fuck that asshole, I thought to myself as I pressed play on my VHS copy of Slutty Step-Wives of Slovenia, which, I had to admit, wasn't quite as good on the 32nd viewing as it had been on the 31st viewing, then dashed to the kitchen, where I promptly poured the bag of tranquilizer into a blender, along with a bottle of cough syrup and a squirt of chocolate milk, slammed the lid onto that sucker, and hit "puree."
The first couple of minutes were sheer equestrian bliss, but then ... well, I knew something was wrong, terribly wrong. My patented gated reverb drum sound began to ring in my head, drowning out my thoughts, smothering me with its nightmarish din. Suddenly I was floating up, up, up toward the light. This is it, I thought. Julio was right all along. I'd had one shot of horse tranquilizer too many. I was finally about to meet my end.
Figures from the past twirled by me, in a manner reminiscent of the figures from Dorothy's life in Kansas twirling by her window as she clings to her bed inside the tornado. I saw the Turkish soothsayer, the Mauritanian circus performer, that FBI agent we bumped off in San Diego - they were all spinning around me, laughing, cackling. There was Phillip Bailey, and Frida from ABBA, and Bob Geldof. Away in the distance, I caught a glimpse of an imposing figure. It seemed like ... St. Peter at the pearly gates? Or was it Gabriel the angel, blowing his horn? As I came closer, a chill ran through my bones.
It was Peter Gabriel.
"Phil, now that you're dead, I'm going to re-join Genesis and re-record all of your Genesis songs ... with my vocals!" He chortled with gusto, his head tilted back, his eyes gleaming. "And then I'm going to re-record all your solo songs ... with my vocals!!"
"No! No ... where am I? There's been a mistake, I tell you, I've got to go back!"
Suddenly one of my ex-wives appeared, and then another one, and then another one. Ex-wives kept multiplying and multiplying, and before I knew it, I was surrounded by 16 ex-wives. "You have a choice to make, Phil." They were speaking to me in unison. "You can die like this. Or you can return to earth, on one condition."
"Yes, what's that? I'll do it! You name it, I'll do it."
"You finally quit that stuff ... for good."
Something happened on the way to heaven. What happened was that, after years of struggle, I finally came to terms with my horse tranquilizer addiction.
The choice, while difficult, was clear. I tumbled back to earth. When I came to, I felt a warm liquid seeping through my pants. The dog was peeing on my leg. This was the final indignity. I crawled up off the floor, took a deep breath, and poured the rest of that chemical crap down the garbage disposal. From that moment on, I pledged to soothe my troubles with a perfectly acceptable substitute:
Wow, 2019! What a year, huh? All that STUFF that happened. It was nuts! Right? And let's not forget all those people that died. But, then, there were all those people that lived too! Crazy!
I don't have much to say about the state of music anymore. By now I've mainly retreated into my own world of music (sitting in a bunker), with only the occasional bit of popular music piercing through (here behind my wall). I couldn't even tell you what's in the Top 40 anymore, maybe a Kanye song, or maybe Drake? I heard there's someone named Lizzo? I dunno. With that caveat, here are some songs that managed to break through.
5 - Lebanon Hanover - "Babes of the 80s" (She Past Away Remix)
I have to give credit where credit is due. Youtube's algorithm is remarkably good at zeroing in on a specific music preference and offering more of it up for your listening pleasure. Here we have a song brought forth by our algorithmical gods, bestowed onto me, and I now bestow it on to you.
I've never heard of the band Lebanon Hanover, but these guys goth, and they goth hard. Yes, I just turned goth into a verb. This song is steeped in late-night murky spooky club dance. But look, what w'ere really here for is the VIDEO. And what a marvelous video it is.
This video is an amazing capsule of 80's dance culture. Look at these people! When modern entertainment tries to recreate the 80s (Stranger Things et. al.) it could never dream of achieving what we see here. Just look at the lanky, sweaty guy at 1:06, or the 80's version of Jersey Shore in his jacket at 1:25 and 3:27. There's also this amazingly average looking couple at 4:20 who dance perfectly in time with the actual song.
Then at 2:15 we have one of the most amazing specimens you could possibly hope to find. This guy saw the video for A Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran" and ran straight toward some marvelous hair. Holy New Wave Batman!
Ok, so I can tell that some of this video looks a little more recent. The mohawked woman who starts off the video and a few people shortly thereafter look like they were probably filmed in the past decade. Also, the more I watch the video the more I know I've seen some of this old footage before, I just can't remember where from. So this is probably not some long lost footage that the Swiss duo Lebanon Hanover have been sitting for 30 years. But wow. A nice, moody dark wave club song and a fantastic little video to go with it.
4 - Childish Gambino - "Redbone"
Alright, I realize I'm a couple years late to this song, but by god is this thing funky. I'll confess this only here on this very blog, but whenever this song starts up within about three seconds my urge to engage in some substances legal in my state begins to skyrocket. It practically demands it. Mr. Gambino (or should we say, everyone's second favorite Hans Solo) sure has an ear for the funkiest of grooves.
3 - Charli XCX & Christine and the Queen - "Gone"
You may recall that I had a Charli XCX song on last year's top 5. I put Charli on the list again this year because I find her pop experimentation intriguing. She's pushes at the boundaries of what pop can be. For example, on this year's album Charli which includes last year's pick "1999", she has a follow up called "2099" - and it sounds just like that. Like some sort of bizarre pop music from the future. I honestly think it sounds horrible. But you know what? I'm glad someone's at least trying to create something different in the pop music space.
With the video for "Gone" we have Charli and genderqueer artist Christine and Queens having some sort of sexual power fantasy strapped to cars in the rain thing going on, and damn do they bring the energy. Especially Christine, she just throws her whole self into the endeavor. It's quite impressive.
2 - Chvrches - "Never Say Die"
I said at the beginning of this post how I've largely retreated into music and artists I'm already familiar with. Why, just last year I had a Charli XCX song on this list, and I've mentioned Chvrches in my yearly top ten's at leasttwice before. This track is actually off of 2018's album Love Is Dead that I didn't get around listening to until this year. With Love is Dead the band decided to go with an outside producer for the first time, enlisting guidance by bringing in Eurythmic's Dave Stewart. It's a much glossier, almost pop-like album. It's a good album, but it feels to me like a lot of the weirder, stranger edges of Chvrches have been slowly sanded off with each subsequent album. Many songs sound a little too pop friendly. I miss the stranger tracks like their debut album's "Science/Visions", or "Lungs".
That being said, there are some good songs to be found on Love Is Dead and "Never Say Die" is one of them. I don't really have much to say about the track - I like the sparkly synths and the way it fades off at the end, lending the impression that it goes on forever.
1 - Mila Mar - "A Song For Me"
With all the shit going on in the world, and with the multitude of stress in my own life (did I mention I had twin boys this year?) I needed something calm. Mila Mar's "A Song For Me" was my calming anchor. Mila Mar is this little German group I stumbled upon many years ago that musically is difficult to describe. They kinda alternate between world music, opera, and light pop music. It's a Mazzy Star situation as well - the name of the band is Mila Mar, but the amazing voice behind it is Anke Hachfeld, who I've read has a ridiculous four octave range (she performs solo under the name Milù).
You can hear Anke's versatility on this track, and if you're interested in hearing more you couldn't do any better than listen to their track "Was Bleibt" (What Remains), that would make Richard Wagner weep with envy (someone give her a viking helmet already, for God's sake!).
"A Song For Me" begins calmly and slowly, with notes that almost sound like a lullaby or children's song. Sung in a made up language, a la Sigur Ros, the song has no real lyrics, just impassioned morphemes that express great emotion. The song slowly gathers steam, with drums coming in near the end to help lift it to a triumphant finish. It's the perfect song to wake up to in the morning (which I did many times) and it's my favorite song of 2019.
Take that Patagonia vest-wearing attorney, that cat meme-obsessed housewife, that Bible-thumping Mormon schoolteacher, that Tesla-driving tech bro, gather them together at a wedding reception, play "Love Shack" and "Roam" on the stereo system, and what will they be doing? They will be dancing. Sure as the lord made little green apples, they will be dancing.
Herein lies the beauty of '80s music. No matter how weird your band, no matter how how "deviant" the majority of the record-buying public might have deemed your lifestyle, no matter how unlikely it would have been that you and your listeners would have ever frequented the same zip code, with the right song, you could still crash into the mainstream and find yourself permanently lodged there for all eternity. Witness Devo and "Whip It." Witness the Clash and "Rock the Casbah." And with all due respect to "Rock Lobster," in 1989, The B-52's did this not once, but twice. Little did the straitlaced public know, however, that the ride to the top hadn't been all fish and candy.
To those paying attention in the early '80s, the B-52's probably came off like a non-stop party (in bounds or out of bounds). It would have taken a serious dose of bad vibes to kill that buzz. Well, if anything could do it, a band member dying of AIDS might have been just the thing. From Wikipedia:
During the recording [of their follow-up to Whammy!], guitarist Wilson had been suffering from AIDS, though none of the other band members were aware of his illness except for Strickland, as he "did not want anyone to worry about him or fuss about him." Wilson died from his illness on October 12, 1985, at the age of 32 ... Cindy Wilson was devastated by her brother's death, and her bandmates were depressed about Ricky's passing. The band went into seclusion and did not tour to promote their album. This was the beginning of an extended hiatus from their musical careers.
Many bands break up for trifling reasons. The guitarist stole the drummer's toothbrush. Their last single only peaked at #7 instead of #6. You know, little stuff. A member dying of AIDS ... is not that kind of reason. Talk about a party out of bounds. If the B-52's had honestly called it quits at that point, who could have blamed them?
But cue the saccharine made-for-TV movie music, because in arguably the most feel-good twist in all of '80s pop, not only did the B-52's re-group after the passing of Ricky Wilson, they essentially tripled their popularity. "Love Shack" and "Roam" were certainly the first B-52's songs I ever heard, although, to be fair, I didn't frequent gay clubs very often when I was nine years old.
"Love Shack" and "Roam" are so much more ... how can I put this? ... melodically graceful than the usual B-52's fare. It's a little suspicious. Even their best tracks tended to sound like free association jam sessions that barely skirted novelty status. "Love Shack" and "Roam" are like ... actual songs. At times I've wondered if they weren't even written by the band themselves, but it turns out the only outside contributor was Robert Waldrop, lyricist of "Roam." The traces of post-punk from their debut album apparently weren't allowed into this particular love shack. What I find so uplifting about these two post-Ricky hits is that they aren't mournful or defeatist in the least. The B-52's literally partied their grief away, and the public must have found the unexpected positivity infectious - assuming they were even aware that one of the non-singing members had died anyway (I mean, there's the two girls in wigs, the awkward MC guy, and ... some other people?). Like the Pretenders before them, the B-52's turned New Wave tragedy to New Wave triumph. I'm tempted to recommend this approach to other bands, but if biblically bleak misfortune was truly the fuel that down-and-out recording artists needed in order to return to commercial relevance, then DeBarge would have had as many comebacks as Cher by now.
Fred Schneider was lucky, I say - damn lucky. Because the two other singers in his band possessed such rich, powerful, distinctive, sensual voices, it allowed him to get away with murder. Funny, but back in the day I never thought there was anything remotely weird about Schneider's off-kilter delivery (which Wikipedia defines with a German word too magnificent to be real: "sprechgesang"). Sure, their male singer sounded like Jerry Lewis on Benzedrine, but come on, that David Bowie guy sounded pretty weird too, and no one seemed to comment on that. He knows just when to drop in and just when to cut out, hardly ever stepping over Kate and Cindy's parts (Flava Flav, take note). He's like the spice, not the key ingredient.
Look: you know "Love Shack," I know "Love Shack" ... what can I say about "Love Shack" other than that it grooves harder and more effortlessly than most of the '60s dance singles it's imitating (mainly the Temptations' "Psychedelic Shack") and feels about as dated to me as an Ansel Adams photo of Half Dome. Highlights:
0:01 - Opening drum fill possibly lifted from the Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song," followed by handclaps possibly lifted from the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" (all perfectly allowed, of course)
0:29 - Mmm, those harmonies on "Lookin' for the love ... getaway" - eat your heart out, Bee Gees
0:59 - The little keyboard glissando that punctuates the double-timed drums after "get too-geh-thuh!"
1:47 - Cindy stretching "highway" into a four-syllable word, resembling something like "highway-uhh-eee!"
3:44 - The horns taking several seconds to haphazardly slide downward at the start of the "call and response" section, as if someone had just unplugged their power cable
3:58 - The surprisingly lusty "call and response" section, which sports a good deal more of a "battle of the sexes" feel than the corresponding section from the Isley Brothers' "Shout" that most likely inspired it
4:48 - Fred hollering "Your what?" and Cindy following with three of the most misinterpreted words in all of '80s pop. "Hen room ... busted"? "Can rule ... resting"? When informed one day that the words she utters are "tin roof ... rusted," I thought to myself, "How does that make any more sense than all the other mondegreens people have come up with over the years?"
4:53 - The "crowd" inside this supposed "Love Shack" (I assume made up of the B-52's and sundry companions horsing around in the studio), having continuously kept its presence relegated to the background (a la Johnny Rivers' "Live at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go" hits like "Memphis" and "Seventh Son") suddenly letting out a prominent yelp or two in reaction to the news of Cindy's tin roof allegedly rusting
Watching the "Love Shack" video is always a frustrating experience for me because I'm so used to listening to the 5:34 album version, and the video features the 4:18 single version, which chops up the call-and-response section so thoroughly that, I mean, they might as well have cut out the whole thing, but otherwise I find it a hoot from start to finish, looking like the Russ Meyer/John Waters collaboration that the world was just not deserving enough to receive. The roof of the Love Shack - excuse me, "Shaque D'Amour" - is a giant chess board! They pour soap suds into your martini! Even the goats are having a great time! Does this look like the sight of a band whose guitarist just passed? Well, that's probably how Ricky would have wanted it.
As for "Roam": while it's not quite as quotable and not quite as kitschy as "Love Shack," I'd say it's just as infectious in its own swirling, kaleidoscopic way, not to mention just as popular (both songs peaked at #3 in the US). It has something that very few B-52's songs have: wistfulness. I think Fred wisely knew to sit this one out. Question: have handclaps ever made a chorus worse? If anyone out there can find an example of this, please mail your response to Little Earl c/o Cosmic American Blog, 113 7th Ave., New York, NY 10026. A colleague at work recently asked me to name my top five favorite songs produced by Nile Rodgers, offering "Roam" as a possibility. I nodded and said, "Oh yeah, that's probably one," as if I was well aware that Nile Rodgers had produced "Roam." But I wasn't! Nevertheless, I kept my cool under pressure. Hemingway would have been proud. Funny but the production doesn't sound markedly different from the production on "Love Shack," which was produced by Don Was. I mentioned that I got a Pee-Wee's Playhouse vibe from the "Stand" video, but I definitely get a Pee-Wee's Playhouse vibe from the "Roam" video, which features the band members literally "roaming the world" via blue screen (I wonder if they've found Lisa Stansfield's baby) and what appears to be hand-drawn, stop-motion graphics. Check out Fred's face as a banana flies through a donut hole at 1:26. The studio they filmed it in was probably so cheap, I wouldn't be surprised if the tin roof had rusted.
See, if you want to knock the pop music of 1989, you have to remember that there were also real, thoughtful, ambitious, oddball, flesh-and-blood bands like R.E.M. floating around at the time as well, right out there in broad daylight, for crying out loud. At this point, a band like R.E.M. weren't just having "alternative" hits; they were having "actual" hits. Once the sole province of comic book-collecting Art History majors, R.E.M. were now appealing even to the jocks and cheerleaders who were probably pointing and laughing at long-time R.E.M. fans on their way to the latest pep rally.
I'm glad that "Stand" (which peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100) wasn't R.E.M.'s first top ten hit. Instead, I think it was a perfect "second" hit. Dear God, can you imagine? If "Stand" had been R.E.M.'s first hit, it could have easily sucked them into years of undeserved ridicule from low-information record buyers, like, say, what happened to the Flaming Lips with "She Don't Use Jelly." But because "The One I Love" sounded so firmly like the work of a serious, brooding, fiery, artistically credible rock band, I feel like "Stand" was able to take their whole Southern gothic persona in a lighter direction without derailing that persona entirely. Also: smart move to follow up their goofiest-ever single with a gnarly, riff-heavy, hard-rocking ode to the U.S. government's deadly use of Agent Orange - just in case anyone was about to accuse them of having gone "soft" or "selling out."
Granted, I wasn't around during the Chronic Town days and I can't bitch about having listened to R.E.M. back when they were still "good" in 1982 (*eye roll*), but I feel like R.E.M.'s late '80s move toward greater commercial success came about in a very organic, respectable way, with the band genuinely evolving in a more radio-friendly direction and the radio genuinely evolving in a more "left of the dial" direction simultaneously. I doubt that, during the making of Document and Green, the boys were really sitting around thinking, "All right, we need to write some hits!" - unlike, say, my impression of the Ramones when they recorded End of the Century (and the Ramones would have killed for a hit the size of "Stand"). I was quite surprised to have learned many years ago that R.E.M. had always been somewhat commercially successful even from the get-go, with Murmur charting in the Top 40 and "Radio Free Europe" actually being judged on American Bandstand. Don't believe me? Behold the most mesmerizing, most surreal, most uncategorizeable YouTube clip you will ever lay your eyes on:
What is this? What is going on here? This may be the greatest two minutes of '80s television I have ever seen. If you switched out "Radio Free Europe" with Kool & the Gang's "Celebration" on the audio track and simply observed the visuals in front of you, you would find absolutely nothing amiss. I love every single dancer in this clip. I love the black guy in a tux thrusting his hips forward as if he were grooving to Rick James, I love the white couple on the balcony whose entire style of dancing is simply to flip around 180 degrees over and over again, I love the blonde in high heels and tan short shorts with the impressive, shall we say, derriere, I love the blonde in the referee shirt kickboxing in place - I love every God-given second of this clip. Were these kids thinking about how R.E.M. "marked the shift from post-punk to alternative"? Did these kids know that R.E.M. were "laying the groundwork for a new network of venues that would help kick-start the modern rock revolution"? Oh heyyyll no. They didn't give a shit about any of that. They just wanted to dance! And the song got a 95? Pretty good! The purity of this clip can never be taken away from me.
My point is, you didn't exactly see Husker Du's "New Day Rising" ever getting played on American Bandstand. Still, "Stand" is the kind of song that could have been written by Ren and Stimpy, or perhaps Homer Simpson on a good day, or Lloyd and Harry from Dumb and Dumber on a really good day. (Like a few people my age, my initial exposure to "Stand" was from its use as the theme tune to Chris Elliott's Fox sitcom Get A Life - it suited the "adult trapped in adolescence" attitude of the show so well, I simply assumed it had been composed for that purpose). Like the Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" before it, "Stand" is what happens when highly intelligent people write an intentionally dumb song. And it wouldn't be the last time either. See this on-the-nose comment from YouTube: "R.E.M. (1988): 'Stand' is our dumbest song. R.E.M. (1991): (Releases 'Shiny Happy People.') R.E.M. (1991): 'Stand' is no longer our dumbest song."
The herky-jerky organ intro conjures up a playful fairground atmosphere (Being for the benefit of Mr. Stipe!), which Mike Mills promptly farts all over with a couple of meaty bass plucks, and off we go. The chord progression is straight out of "La Bamba" or "Twist and Shout"; perhaps the Georgians had been inspired by Los Lobos's recent #1 remake of the former, or Ferris Bueller's Day Off's memorable revival of the latter? Not the usual sources of R.E.M.'s inspiration, if so, but I will allow it. Other favorite touches:
The xylophone during the second verse, adding to the song's whole "Fisher-Price" aura
The chirping backing vocals that seem to peek out from behind Michael Stipe during the third verse: "Your feet (feet!) are going to be on the ground/Your head (head!) is there to move you around." This is what happens when your song has been hijacked by all those high-pitched gnomes who were hiding in your garden.
The ultra-compressed, terrifyingly metallic-sounding background shouts of "Stand!" during the last chorus before the key change, which turn the title into less of an exhortation and more of a military command
Stipe's deliberately moronic pronunciation of the final "Stannnnnnn-duh!"
So I think what they're saying is ... that we are supposed to stand?
If there is a more joyous video for "Stand" than the one R.E.M. made, I have not seen it. The vibe I get is of a ragtag cluster of local musicians simply inviting a bunch of friends to town and saying, "Hey, who wants to be in our version of Pee Wee's Playhouse?" The video comes across like the Southern version of Talking Heads' "Wild Wild Life," except this time with some actual wildlife in it. The dancers look more like the habitués of the local bookstore than the supermodels one usually finds on MTV, their choreography admirably hit-or-miss. "Stand" is apparently fun for the whole family, be they kids drawing chalk circles on the pavement, or little old ladies tending their gardens. Let's not forget the obligatory shots of the Georgian countryside, and, holy shit, each member of R.E.M. is jumping into the air and morphing into another member before our very eyes!! (And check out the hair on that lead singer at 3:03.) Honestly, I watch this and I just want to move to Athens, Georgia and frolic in the fields with R.E.M. and all their bohemian art school buddies.
In summary: "Stand" may have been a tasty hint of the alternative explosion that was just around the corner, but it doesn't feel much like an explosion. It feels more like a whoopie cushion. Then again, sometimes a well-placed, strategically employed whoopie cushion can liven up the party like nothing else.
As you all wait in anticipation for my favorite songs of the year list, here's a few songs that got stuck in my head this year. I didn't want to completely clutter up my top 5 with retro picks, so I thought I'd throw them into their own blog post.
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Eric Clapton - "It's In The Way That You Use It"
The older I get the more I find myself retreating into older music, especially music from when I was young. It's strange to realize that you are no longer young. I mean, I don't feel old, I often think of myself as some sort of recent college grad, but recently I started realizing how a lot of music that I listen to that I consider "recent" is now closing in on ten or even twenty years old. Yikes! This is what Boomers must feel like when they hear a Beatles song playing over an iPhone ad - hey I remember when this was fresh! I think I'm starting to understand.
Like the following song on this list, I really only fell in love with this song for the extended riff that closes out the song. I've never really listened to Eric Clapton much but holy shit, this guy can rock a guitar! The bit that starts right around the 2:58 minute mark rocks my socks. I also kinda love the little horn section that punctuates the guitar. Then starting at 3:37 Clapton just makes the guitar sing. I had this riff stuck in my head for months. I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would be there, playing over and over in my head, like some carnival ride I enjoyed but couldn't get off of.
The video is that outdated form of motion picture marketing that intersperses cuts from the film with those of the band/artist. Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" might be the pinnacle (or nadir) of this form (and like other Bryan Adams omissions from the Internet, the original video for that song seems to not exist online). Here we see Clapton standing under a blue light alone with nothing but his guitar while various clips play from Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money" (with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise!). It's really not much of a video - and the song itself, outside of the guitar, is not much either.
Mötley Crüe - "Home Sweet Home"
Now here's a video I actually remember liking at the time it debuted. Yes, like many when I was a wee lad and my music tastes were just starting to develop, my friends and I listened to whatever was popular at the time, which in my case was late 80s hair metal, or what would later be called by the cartoon idiots Beavis and Butthead: butt-rock.
As an aside, upon research for this post, I've discovered that the definition of butt-rock has changed over the years. For me it means the kind of rock that was prevalent in the late 80s right before grunge hit. Think Mötley Crüe, Winger, or Def Leppard. Now when I look online it seems the meaning has changed to the kind of rock that came after grunge/alternative. Think Puddle of Mudd, Limp Bizkit, or any other nu-metal band. Strange.
Anyway, this is once again a song that got stuck in my head, not because of the song itself, but because of the guitar bit that features about two-thirds of the way through. Beginning at 2:03 Mick Mars builds this incredible riff that, like Mr. Clapton's contribution above, I just cannot get out of my damn head. This thing rides down the center fissure of my brain hemispheres like Luke flies the Death Star trench run. I simply want it to go on for longer - I would take a five minute version of this riff alone.
I chose the "'91 Remix" version because this is the video version I remember the most. The '91 version actually peaked at 37 in January of 1992 (the Crüe's last top 40 hit). It's amazing to think how just how far into the 90s hair metal lasted. I think there's a misconception that the moment grunge came into being, hair metal vanished. But they really did coexist for a while. The same week "Home Sweet Home" hit its peak "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was no. 9. But they were both destined to be bested by everyone's favorite "Ladies-and-gentlemen-Mr.-Elton-John!" hit "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me" coming in at no. 4 that week by a former member of Wham!.
Madonna - "Bad Girl"
While I absolutely love 80s Madonna I also very much like the not quite as popular 90s Madonna. Now that she's been around so long we might refer to anything post "Vogue" as middle-period Madonna. She went and got all sexual and experimental. Yes, the Erotica album has a lot of filler (I mean, a lot) but there's some amazing tracks on the thing as well.
Enter track six - "Bad Girl". I guess I've always liked this song a bit, but I ran into this song earlier this year and yowza, this thing turned into a major earworm for me. There's an almost hypnotic way she delivers the lines, where some phrases are said quickly, but other more drawn out, that just grabs me. The repeat of the pre-chorus after the bridge at 3:37 (right after Christopher Walken is done dancing) is a wonderful bit of raw Madonna emotion. I can't get enough.
I enjoy the unresolved melancholy of this song. She's not mad at her ex-lover - she's mad at herself. It's a song you'd sing to yourself after a breakup on a cloudy, rainy day.
When I ran into this video earlier this year I had kinda forgotten about it. "Oh yeah, it's the one with Christopher Walken doing a detectivey Wings of Desire thing." But upon re-watching it this year I could tell without confirmation that once again it's a David Fincher directed Madonna video (see "Express Yourself", "Vogue", "Oh Father"). The reason I knew this is because as I watched the video it indelibly reminded me of the video for Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" (also directed by Fincher). A moody cinematic whodunit with a detective-like figure trying to figure out a death featuring an attractive woman? BINGO. I guess you could say Fincher was, uh, developing a style.
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Well that's it for now. Stay tuned for my upcoming favorite songs of the year!
SERIOUS. This song is so SERIOUS. You've heard of Curious George? Well how about Serious George? And if people didn't like Serious George? Then you know what? Maybe George didn't feel like being their kind of pop star. He didn't need no Man in the Yellow Hat buying his damn music.
My family didn't have MTV in our cable package back in 1990, but somehow I must have caught the "Praying for Time" video on another, less expensive channel. Apparently it was a video so arresting, even those lowly network channels knew they had to broadcast it at some point. You know the video for "One More Try," where George is just standing there in a gothic-looking apartment for six minutes and virtually nothing happens, but it's mesmerizing anyway? The video for "Praying for Time" is like the video for "One More Try," except without the video. Forget George Michael (if you were hoping to catch a glimpse of The Bearded One, pull up a chair 'cause it might be a while); there isn't even any other nice stuff to look at. The entire video consists of the lyrics appearing and disappearing on a black screen. That's it. That's all she wrote. No if's, and's or but's. They say that if you stare long enough at this video, you'll begin to see stubble. Now, plenty of alternative acts, such as The Replacements and the Pixies, had turned their music videos into metaphorical middle fingers, but none of those acts were multi-platinum superstars, were they? With the video for "Praying for Time," George was all but saying to the record-listening public, "You want a video? Here's your fuckin' video."
Ten-year-old me thought this was the most brilliant concept anyone had ever conceived of in the history of popular entertainment.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I feel like, by this time, videos had steadily been growing more and more opulent, more and more expensive, more and more indulgent. By 1990, videos were such a "thing." Hell, if I recall correctly, MTV was airing "making of" documentaries about the making of music videos! Suddenly, along came a video that was so bare-bones, so basic, calling it a video was like calling a Hot Pocket a meal, or calling Monaco a country. The media and the gossip columnists and the hoi-polloi were all sitting around, as they did with every other mega-star of the era, wondering what could George Michael possibly be coming up with next? And he gave them ... the total opposite of that. With one simple gesture, he was essentially expressing to the unthinking masses, "Who gives a crap about 'the next George Michael video'? I've had it with all this 'blowing your mind with my next video' shit. Just listen to the fucking song, fer Chrissakes." A gesture which, ironically, blew my mind.
You see, the "Praying for Time" video was, in my tiny pop music world, that rarest of creatures: something I had never seen a recording artist do before. I was also, at that age, entirely unfamiliar with, say, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Metal Machine Music, or Tusk. Every pop singer I'd ever encountered seemed to be desperately trying to give the people exactly what they wanted. As far as I was concerned, this video, and the "content" of the lyrics, meant one of two things: instant career suicide, or a complete reinvention that would take George's success to an entirely new level. It didn't end up being either of those things, but career context aside, I've always thought this was some good shit. "Praying for Time" is serious, all right - seriously awesome.
Now that I have listened (without prejudice) to pre-1980s pop music, I realize that, with its methodical acoustic chug, "Praying for Time" reeks of that solo John Lennon, "Instant Karma!"/"Mind Games"/"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" vibe. George apparently gave the engineer one solitary instruction: "TREBLE. NEEDZ MOAR TREBLE." Seriously, you could blast this sucker in the next room and I wouldn't even feel it through the walls, that's how little bass there is. And ECHO. An entire Lennon solo album's worth of echo - on one song. George wanted to make it SNAP in your ears, like an infant's wail.
If I were in a less generous mood, I might suggest that the lyrics of "Praying for Time" betray the songwriter's unfamiliarity with a more philosophical or political style of writing. Sure, "One More Try" and "Kissing a Fool" successfully took his post-Wham! music in a more "adult" direction, but if "Praying for Time" had a subtitle, it would be "I Am An Important Artist Now." In places he seems a bit in over his head. "I guess somewhere along the way/He must have let us all out to play"? Let us all out to play? That sounds kind of ... awesome! I love playing! I think what George was trying to say was that, in the words of Trent Reznor, "God is dead/And no one cares/And if there is a hell/I'll see you there," but the lyric makes God sound like the universe's best PE teacher. "Your television takes a stand"? Pretty sure my television doesn't have any thoughts on AIDS or Apartheid, last time I checked. "And what was over there ... is over here"? Holy shit, stuff is there, then it's here, and I just can't handle how stuff keeps moving from there to here! (The surface banality of the lyric is arguably rendered comical by the massive chord change beneath the word "here"). Throughout the song I can practically hear George thinking, "OK, so how can I make this deep?" What rhymes with "yours"? How about "door"? Does "scream from behind your door" sound dramatic, even though it's kind of generic? Like his heroes Stevie Wonder and Bernie Taupin before him, I think he just shrugged and thought, "Eh, close enough." It's the kind of song that, if sung on the school playground, would have been easy to make raspberry noises at.
Yet given George's untimely passing, I think the song plays a bit differently now than it did in 1990, or even in 2015. Before, one was tempted to chuckle at our dear Georgios Kyriacos's sudden attempt to become Billy Bragg. But now, he sounds like an omniscient prophet of doom, howling from beyond the grave, damning us mere mortals for the foolishness of our ways. Now the lyrics come off as poignant, pointed, bitter, and uncompromising. "Charity is a coat you wear twice a year"? See, that's why I never give to charity at all: because at least no one can accuse me of pretending to care for appearance's sake. Frankly, it's hard not to love a US chart-topping single that suggests God has disowned all of humanity, as if he were the strict cantor father in The Jazz Singer ("I have no son!"). The YouTube comments section is littered with a thousand variations of "George was so ahead of his time," "This song could have been written today," and "Sadly this is still relevant." "Praying For Time" is like George Michael's own "Imagine": good before, but even better now that he's dead.
I think the chorus is what keeps the song from becoming a preachy diatribe from some rich pop star who has suddenly realized that he "cares." George doesn't pretend to have any answers other than to, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "behave decently in an indecent world." "It's hard to love," he sings, but that doesn't mean you should cease doing it. God may have stopped keeping score, but to George, that isn't permission to suddenly become an eager member of the "What's mine is mine and not yours" crowd. God may have stopped keeping score, you rich Yuppie tightwad, but George Michael certainly hasn't. "Wounded skies above": now there's an image for you. Notice how George doesn't himself say that "it's much, much too late," but that the wounded skies above are saying it, which suggests that he personally might disagree with the skies and that he still believes the human race can be saved. It takes some guts to disagree with the wounded sky, you know what I'm saying? I'm inclined to interpret the final line as George proposing a legal loophole to God's judgment, like the knight in The Seventh Seal trying to cheat death via a board game. "Hmm, so if the skies are saying that it's too late, maybe what we should be praying for isn't 'peace' or 'wisdom' or 'love' or any of that crap, but 'time.'" Whoa. Professor Higglediggle writes:
"Praying For Time" resituates the temporal intransigence of the cosmos in a post-Nietzschean framework, proposing the elasticity of human experience without undermining the value of what Heidegger referred to as "Dasien," or the "being for whom being is a question." Michael's declaration that "God's stopped keeping score" suggests an embrace of Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism, but this tendency is immediately countered by the concept of "play," which (re)purposes Sartre's notion of man as "being condemned to be free" as a jest by a parental agent whose indifference renders the universe absurd, a concept promulgated by the track's music video which, in the words of Camus, illustrates "the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world" with its intermittent flashes of language divorced from further visual embellishment, forcing the viewer to negate any inherent meaning and create his/her own ethical values in response to the confrontational void.
I'm not aware of too many hits by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, but I know what I know about this one, if you know what I mean.
In retrospect, a better name for Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians might have been Edie Brickell & the Proto-Slackers. "What I Am" is like the inaugural salvo of '90s slacker rock. If there existed a Mount Rushmore of slacker rock, Edie Brickell's face would surely be on it, alongside Alex Chilton's, Gordon Gano's, and Paul Westerberg's. I've heard it said that if one smokes a little too much pot, and if one is not listening too closely to "What I Am," one might literally hear her sing the lyrics "Oh well, whatever, nevermind." Its potent aura of detached apathy would rapidly become ubiquitous, but must have seemed novel in 1989, when this peaked at #7. I feel like no piece of news, no matter how significant, could have punctured Edie's veneer of coffee house cool. "Edie, the Berlin Wall just came down!" "I dig it, man." "Edie, Hitler just exterminated 6 million Jews!" "Whatever man, religion is a smile on a dog." "Edie, aliens just landed on the White House lawn!" "Hey, cool, do they wanna come to my poetry reading tomorrow night?" It takes a lot to rile Edie up.
My guess is that roughly the same amount of people only know of "What I Am" because they've asked themselves the question, "Hey, what is Paul Simon's wife famous for?" as the amount of people who know that Edie Brickell ended up marrying Paul Simon because they asked themselves the question, "Hey, whatever happened to that singer who did 'What I Am'?" If you crunched the numbers, I swear it would break about even. I'll bet many casual music fans know this song but are still unaware that the singer ended up marrying Paul Simon. I mean let's face it, on the celebrity couple totem pole, they're not exactly John and Yoko, or Madonna and Sean Penn. They don't perform together. They don't pose naked on album covers together. They seem like normal people. At least she doesn't owe her fame to her husband - unlike her husband, of course, who owes his fame entirely to Art Garfunkel.
But back to the song. Seriously, I don't hear a shred of '80s here. If you told me that "What I Am" came out in 1993, I would, without hesitation, believe you. At a quick glance, it appears to be in the folk-based, Suzanne Vega/Tracy Chapman vein, but upon closer inspection, it's got more than a hint of funk to it. The wah-wah guitar solo wouldn't have been out of place on a Spin Doctors record. Here is the blend that Sheryl, Alanis, Sophie B. Hawkins and company would take to the bank, my friends.
Just look at 'em! She's got hippie chick hair, jeans, a beaded necklace, and she spends 80% of the video not giving a fuck where the camera is. The bassist is wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and has a goatee, for crying out loud. They look like they just returned from an exhausting round of hackey sack outside the local Peace Corp. office. Are you positive they never toured with Blues Traveler and Phish at some point during the OJ trial? The ultimate irony of Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians is that Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians hardly benefited from the apathetic, flannel-drenched wave they helped usher in. Not that they would have cared anyway.
A sullen widow cries in the dark. A train whistle howls in the distance. An unrelenting torrent of droplets pelts the glass pane. Humanity gazes achingly into the fevered belly of its own corroded soul. The Midwestern sky dramatically severs itself in two as the American Dream groans with Rockwellian rage. I bring you ... Belinda Carlisle's "Summer Rain."
During that first fateful listen to Belinda's Her Greatest Hits in December of 2010, I must admit that I was not terribly impressed with the material I had not heard on the radio before, which was about ... 70% of the work before me? That said, "Summer Rain," at least, struck me as "pleasant." "Hey, if you've gotta fill out your greatest hits collection with a bunch of random album tracks, you could do a hell of a lot worse," is roughly what I thought, in between clicks of Mahjong Titans. Turns out that, despite my never having heard it before, "Summer Rain" had actually been a hit - not a huge hit, mind you, but a respectable one: it peaked at #30 in the US and #23 in the UK. In fact, it is, to date, her very last US Top 40 hit, Go-Go or solo (to be fair, she's still around and, hey, maybe a remix of one of those tracks from her Kundalini yoga album sung in Gurmuhki - I am not making this up - could always catch on out of nowhere). Amusingly enough, the single did best in Australia, peaking at #6; supposedly, there is an Australian "Summer Rain" dance that the audience performs whenever Belinda sings this Down Under (which I imagine is more impressive than the dance she performs in the video).
But, as with "Leave a Light On," it was a tiny detail I spotted on the song's Wikipedia page that made me do a Jim Carrey-style double-take and re-evaluate my initial indifference. Hold on, did I just read that the string arrangement was done by ... Paul Buckmaster?
You mean the Paul Buckmaster?
The same Paul Buckmaster who devised the string arrangements for David Bowie's "Space Oddity"? The Rolling Stones' "Moonlight Mile"? Harry Nilsson's "Without You"? Carly Simon's "You're So Vain"? You mean the same Paul Buckmaster who crafted all those haunting string arrangements on my cherished early '70s Elton John albums? You know, the self-titled album, Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water, etc.? We're talking "Your Song," "Burn Down the Mission," "Levon," "Have Mercy On the Criminal." That Paul Buckmaster?
Let's get something straight here. Landing Paul Buckmaster would not have been like landing some random record industry professional to write your string arrangements for you. Landing Paul Buckmaster would have been like landing George Harrison to play your guitar solo for you. Buckmaster string arrangements were distinctive pieces of work. Buckmaster string arrangements were vigorous, brooding, forceful, bold, violent. Buckmaster string arrangements rocked you like a guitar riff rocked you. Buckmaster string arrangements grabbed you by the lapel and said, "Did you just say that string arrangements are only meant to be heard in the background?" Buckmaster's string arrangements were prominent.
Now, I don't know if it was Rick Nowels, or Rick Nowels's buddy, or someone further on up the MCA chain who got Paul Buckmaster to do the string arrangement for "Summer Rain," but I do know this: Belinda knew what she was getting. How do I know this? In Lips Unsealed, she goes out of her way to state that Elton John was one of her musical heroes (I swear to God, we have the exact same taste in music). And sure, lots people are casual Elton John fans who wouldn't know Paul Buckmaster from Grandmaster Flash, but, come on, she knew. Just check out this recently-posted cover of "I Need You To Turn To," a deep cut from Elton's self-titled 1970 breakthrough album, and tell me that she wasn't stoked back in 1989 that she snagged Paul Buckmaster to do the string arrangement on "Summer Rain." Yeah. She knew.
So after seeing that little factoid on Wikipedia, I thought to myself, "All right, guess I need to listen to this shit again." And ... you can see where this is going. The Buckmaster/Elton John connection got my initial attention, but I quickly realized that what I had on my hands here was another sleeper Belinda gem. Sure, it might have received some airplay in 1990, but it hasn't received any airplay since - and I'm not entirely sure why that is, because I'd rather hear "Summer Rain" in the department store than the umpteenth airing of "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You." I'd put "Summer Rain" up there with anything else Belinda ever did, and coming from me, by God, that is saying something. So would she; Belinda has gone on record as stating that "Summer Rain" is probably her personal favorite of all her solo tracks. "Summer Rain" dares to give Yuppie Rock a good name.
Because "Summer Rain" is bleaker than Leonard Cohen's worst nightmares. From Wikipedia: "The song is about a man who goes away to war and leaves his wife, saying that nothing will change—they will be together forever and always ... The song is set in the present as his widow sings it, remembering the last time she saw him." She's singing the song to her DEAD LOVER. This is some poetic melancholy shit people. And here I was, just assuming it was another bland love song with a string arrangement that was not done by Paul Buckmaster. Never judge a book by its cover:
Whispering our goodbyes, waiting for a train I was dancing with my baby in the summer rain I can hear him saying "nothing will change" Come dance with me baby, in the summer rain
I remember the rain on our skin And his kisses hotter than the Santa Ana winds Whispering our goodbyes, waiting for a train I was dancing with my baby in the summer rain
I remember laughing 'till we almost cried There at station that night I remember looking in his eyes
Oh my love, it's you and that I dream of Oh my love, since that day Somewhere in my heart I'm always Dancing with you in the summer rain
Doesn't matter what I do now Doesn't matter what I say Somewhere in my heart I'm always Dancing with you in the summer rain
You see, "Summer Rain" is a bit more ... narrative-driven than B.C.'s usual fare. To paraphrase Linda Rondstadt and Aaron Neville, I don't know much about songwriters Robbie Seidman and Maria Vidal, but I know I love them, since they provided a refreshing change of pace from the usual Nowels-Shipley Hallmark-fest ("Love Never Dies," "Vision of You," etc.). Do the lyrics explicitly mention her lover's death? Do the lyrics of "American Pie" explicitly mention Buddy Holly? It's called subtlety, people. The most blatant hint is the line "It was the last time that I saw him, in the summer rain." Maybe he just skipped town after he got back from duty. Look, who am I to question Wikipedia? I also hope that Seidman and Vidal were not intending the story to take place in Southern California, despite the reference to the Santa Ana winds, as any native Californian knows that it does not rain in the summer. Period. Sure, about once every three to four years there will be a freak summer thunderstorm, but it's on the rare side. In fact, if it actually did rain in California in the summer, I might be finishing this blog post from my home computer and not my work computer instead (thank you, PG&E). And one more thing: Southern California is not a region littered with trains. I imagine Belinda and her doomed soldier to be waving their tearful goodbyes somewhere in the South, or the Midwest. I expect the geographical references in my forgotten Belinda Carlisle Yuppie Rock hits to be accurate, damn it.
So yes, I came for the string arrangement (which, like all Buckmaster arrangements, caresses the track in its dionysian grip, and which can be heard more extensively on the album mix), but I stayed for the melodrama. A couple of nice touches: 1) the verses are powered along by what sounds like a marimba (how many Belinda songs can claim that?); 2) the low, buzzing drone of guitar right before the second and third chorus, like a hive of cicadas lurking in the humid evening gloom. The overall air of restraint arguably makes the grimness of the lyrics all the more effective, as if Belinda is too catatonic to vent her grief properly. She's too dead inside to aim for true catharsis.
I feel ambivalent about Belinda letting her inner country singer loose on her delivery of the word "dayy-aynce," but nothing gets me going like the sight of Belinda in a long black short-sleeved dress (with just the right hint of cleavage) "dayy-ayncing" in an old rustic barn while CGI clouds zoom eerily past the window. I believe this was her "early 1990" look: hair still red, but straightened out and clipped just above her shoulders, with a dose of (fake?) black eyelashes. And if you were expecting me to complain about the sight of Belinda drenched by rain, you are going to be mistaken. What else? The director really went for that 4th of July/Main Street U.S.A. aesthetic, complete with sepia-tinted shots of brass band and an impressively WASPy fake family standing next to Belinda on the ol' family porch, waving cluelessly in slow motion (your son is never coming back, you fools!). My favorite shots are the ones of Belinda in a long black trenchcoat (0:04, 1:31, 2:45, 3:10, 3:27), strolling dejectedly along the seaside. Let's call this her "sexy grieving widow" look. And how about all those sexy shots of fighter planes, gravestones, sonar screens, and radar dishes? After putting it off for several years, I just recently re-watched The Deer Hunter, and, honestly, throw in a couple of shots of sadistic Vietcong guards forcing Belinda's hubby to play Russian roulette in a bamboo cage, and this video would pretty much amount to the same thing.
There seems to be an amusing tug of war in the YouTube comments between those praising Belinda for her "classiness" as opposed to the female stars of today, and those pointing out that Belinda might have been even more fucked up than the skankiest pop whores of 2019, but just knew how to hide it better. Why argue when the correct answer is "all of the above"?
Wearing a long black dress, still looks hotter than most of the pop singers today.
a video from a time when women didnt need to dress like whores to sell their music.
Oh the memories... One of Belinda's most beautiful love songs! She looks so Beautiful and classic, reminds me of a younger Priscilla Presley. I think she looked great as a Blonde, but have always loved that fierce Auburn on her!
I would dance with Belinda in the Summer Rain, sunshine, or in the snow if I had to!
heres the difference between now and then.....belinda was hot and sexy but her career didnt depend on it because she was a real musician. she could sing, she could write songs and as a guy i genuinely liked her music. the same cant be said for 99 percent of todays female pop stars. the 80s had a balance between sexuality and innocence where i not only wanted to fuck her but wouldnt mind waking up next to her every day, where todays women, my urge is to fuck them then send them packing.
eh? sorry to contradict but this was the era when madonna was masterbating on stage wearing JPG conical bras!
She was very luck to get off so easily with the American public. Belinda and crew did more coke and partied more than Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or any of the other divas out there today. Of course Belinda had talent. :D
no one, no female singer, that I can think of, can ope their throat and just let it out like Belinda Carlisle!!!!! One in a million, baby!
Such a perfect pop song. Runaway Horses deserves a Pitchfork review getting a 10 and hipsters discovering the greatest pop album of the late 80s!
Why is she sniffing her armpit?
she's not - ever seen flamenco dancers? B smell like summer rain if you are wondering - she's perfect and extraordinary.
