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A few episodes ago, I talked about the musical coming of age – i.e. that point in your life when you start to consciously decide what music is “yours”, not your parents’ or siblings’ or peers’ or whatever the culture tells you it should be. Though I do think it happens to almost 100% of everyone, it’s not a rule. But if it were, like any rule, it’s the exceptions that prove it. This here song by Chic is one of those exceptions.

I was almost 10 when “Le Freak” was released. And though by then I’d already gotten into the Beatles and Sean Cassidy and other pop of the day (especially songs my dad played in his live gigs) and Grease and Saturday Night Fever, among many other things, for some reason I remember this song having way more immediate impact on me. It was the first 45 single I bought with my own money, at K-Mart. I didn’t just want it, I NEEDED it. The spare yet compelling and never boring production. The positivity. The call to throw off all the pressure and just FREAK OUT. The infinite funkiness. It’s never left me. Part of the proof of that is that I bought this song TWICE. First, the 45 in 1978 (as discussed in Week 141), and then the 12” single in 1986 – when I was heavily into DJing. I couldn’t imagine a dance set that didn’t include this. And with all the tremendous changes in production, style & taste in those eight years, it shows the genius and perfect-ness of this song that it still hit home.

Staccato funk has been a part of my repertoire for decades. Here’s an example that meshes funk & pop & rock & grunge:

NICK - “Your Sister” (from the album The Metrogrande Sessions)

Do you like this song? Do you know who Nile Rogers is? Are you into funk at all? What song do you remember being the first one you HAD to own? Discuss dammit!

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I grew up with rap. Right alongside of it. Okay, so when I was really young it was in proto form (Gil Scott-Heron, etc.), but as soon as I hit my pre-preteens, it took hold of me and never let go. “Apache (Jump On It)” started it. “Planet Rock”, Kurtis Blow, & “Jam On It” continued it. And then Run-D.M.C. and The Beastie Boys cemented it. And all along that journey was everything else that came with rap culture. The big sneaks with the bigger laces. Parachute pants. The movies. And ALL of the dancing – popping, locking, breaking, etc. Yeah, I did it too. I got decent at popping & locking, but really sadly mediocre at everything else.

Back when you couldn’t just go to YouTube to learn how to do pretty much anything for free, you had to be resourceful. At least until this week’s record came out, as part of a flood of other records and tapes and books and video cassettes and whatever else. Breakdance is an honest to Yeezus INSTRUCTIONAL LP. There are the songs, of course. But then there’s also the giant poster inside with step-by-step photos for several dances, a definition of breakdancing, and a glossary of related terms like “bite” and “homeboy” and “fresh”. It’s mission was to teach you everything it could about rap culture – and yes it was “rap” to the suburban masses back then. Nowhere on this record will you see the word hip-hop. Though that phrase had been around since the beginning, it didn’t enter the mainstream until really the late 1980s or later.

Instructional albums have been around way longer than this one, but usually those were for more established dances. To have the juggernaut K-Tel release an album all about a “street dance” shows you how pervasive rap music was becoming even then. Though none of us could have guessed it would become the dominant and most viable genre in popular music.

If you’ve been following these posts, you already know I’ve been writing & producing rap/hip-hop forever. Of those tunes, this one probably best fits what we’re discussing here:

REC - "Let It Wreck Your Mind" (from the album Syncopy for the Weird)

Have you ever tried this kind of dancing? What connection if any do you have to early rap? Discuss dammit!

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Instrumentals, especially dance instrumentals, can be super boring. Most of them exist solely to keep the beat & mood going in a club or mix. Comfort food for ravers. With that in mind, and with the strict rules put on songs like this (long intros, BPM within a very small range, breakdowns and buildups coming as expected), not a lot of thought has to go into creating for a dance instrumental to work. And that’s totally fine – it serves its purpose to a T.

BUT there are artists who have taken the dance/techno instrumental (or mostly instrumental) to more interesting places. Moby. Fatboy Slim. Skrillex. People who know more about this could name more obscure artists. The pioneers of artful instrumental dance are of course Kraftwerk (RIP Florian). Kraftwerk may have done more to influence 1980s music than any other artist. Listen to them and Depeche Mode back to back and you’ll get it. And then listen to house, industrial, drum and bass, glitch hop, and any other kind of techno or EDM. It is and has been everywhere, for decades.

Part of the reason it’s so ubiquitous is because of George Kranz & The Art of Noise. The latter in particular were essentially the Kraftwerk of my generation. They made instrumental dance not only interesting but popular, at a time when Trevor Horn’s (an AoN founder) production/style was dominating much of the charts. It eventually became big-‘80s cliché, overused, and was probably one reason Art of Noise didn’t last long. But while it was big it really set a high bar, and it showed how versatile and expressive sampling could be. And George Kranz reminds us never to mess with German techno.

I don’t do a lot of instrumentals, but I DO do a lot of techno glitchy stuff, including this vocally minimal one:

REC - “Love In Stockholm” (from the album Distance To Empty)

Do you know these artists? Do you have any affinity for electronic dance music? Discuss dammit!

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Following along with last week’s housecleaning, this week is a smaller and less significant batch of albums. Their greatest commonality is they almost exactly span what would be considered my “childhood years”. Other than that it’s a damn eclectic mix of artists you’d be hard pressed to find listed in the same genre, let alone the same playlist. It’s how I roll. SO … off the top of my head:

Psychedelic Furs

Lou Reed

Talking Heads

Yes

--The Yes Album – Yes was the best prog rock band. Critics may give that title to Genesis, and I 100% get why. But pound for pound, Yes was more consistent. Sure, they dipped into overindulgence in the mid-late 1970s, but what prog band didn’t. I frankly find some of early Genesis unlistenable. But that’s HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE, and for two reasons: A. I prefer Jon Anderson’s voice to early Peter Gabriel (he’d get way more mellifluous as he aged); and B. I’m a Romantic, and while Genesis had their brief dabblings in Romanticism once Phil Collins took the helm, Yes was Romantic from start to finish. And their vocal harmonies kicked way more ass.

Are you into any of these artists? Would you listen to the playlist I created? Could you create an even more disjointed playlist? Discuss dammit!

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When I started these posts 4 years ago, I had NO PLAN. So it’s no surprise I’ve hit a roadblock. I had an idea to do each album individually. Which could have worked if I'd kept to text only. When I kicked off video, it all went 8-track shaped. I took an album as an opportunity to talk about the artist in general, not thinking ahead to what the hell would I talk about for their NEXT album. And every week, when I leafed through my collection, I’d skip over albums from bands I already did. Which created a backlog. THIS WEEK is my chance to rectify that. Get ready for the explosion.

THE CURE

PRINCE

U2

There you go. Did it feel as cleansing to you as it did to me? Great, now go check out my NEW BOX SET:

REC - The Weird Objective - a five-album multi-genre box set

Are you into any of these artists? What artists are in your top five? Do you get as obsessed with music as I do? Discuss dammit!

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*If you don’t know the Beastie Boys by now, stop reading this and go find out. Get their EXCELLENT Beastie Boys Book and/or watch the Spike Jonze doc that comes out tomorrow. I might whip through some of their history in the video, but I’m not going to flesh it out here.*

Beastie Boys are top 10 for me. Not in a revolving “these 50 bands could easily be my top 10” sense. Real no joke never out top 10. Here’s why:

1. They kicked it off right when I was the age to most appreciate them.

2. They were funny from the get-go – serious about music but never too serious about themselves.

3. They’re from NYC, a place I was in love with decades before I moved here.

4. They showed me that otherwise totally uncool white boys could rap if they wanted to.

5. They took hip hop to places it hadn’t been, yet still respected its roots and the people who pioneered it.

6. They evolved. Musically. Professionally. Personally. They never quit growing and exploring.

7. They mixed it up. They were never content to stick to the boom bap, because they were too curious not to always find something else to weave into their sound.

8. They LOVE music of all kinds. Love and respect and revere and take the piss out of but still know what good listening means.

9. They were never quite what you thought they were.

It’s still quite hard for me to believe that Adam Yauch is dead, and has been for eight years. Like Prince or Bowie or Cobain or Lennon, the world doesn’t seem right without them in it. It’s like they’re still here. Do I wish the other two Beasties would still make music? Hell yes! Do I understand why they don’t and totally respect it? Hell yes! But it hurts not to look forward to their next release every few years.

So what’s so special about this 12”? First, it’s the only thing of theirs I have on vinyl. Second, these songs were not hits in the USA, yet I liked them better than some of the hits from Licensed to Ill. Third, the B side was written by their compatriots and early tour mates, Run-D.M.C. And fourth, the style from Side A to Side B has a real past-present-future shift. “She’s On It” has that Rick Rubin heavy metal/rap hybrid, while “Slow and Low” pairs a BOOMING 808 kick with what sound like live guitar band samples. It’s more than the subtle shift it sounds like. A song like “Slow and Low” both pulled from the 808-heavy past, and presaged their cut and paste work on Paul’s Boutique. *Side note: my partner and I were down at the site of Paul’s Boutique in the “before days”, and there’s a cool little Beasties tribute mural there.*

When their first album came out, and subsequently 12” singles like this one here, my brother and my DJ-ing partner/friend learned the lyrics and rapped them at school dances over the instrumental tracks. I’m fairly sure I was Ad Rock, my bro was MCA, and my friend Mike S. was Mike D. We absorbed it so early on, that it became part of our DNA. You can hear that plain as day on a song like this:

REC - "Let It Wreck Your Mind" (formerly "I Took One for Me" - from the album Syncopy for the Weird)

Do you have any history with the Beasties? With any kind of hip hop? Discuss dammit!

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I never understood people who only listen to one or two kinds of music. Life is way more intricate and interesting than that. I believe your emotional maturity and openness are directly reflected in the type of music you listen to (and in other art you consume). I love punk. I love heavy metal. I love hip-hop. I love funk. I love grunge. I love about 35-400 other genres and subgenres, many of which are hard core, kick-ass, in your face. But I don’t play. I don’t front. I don’t posture. I love any music that’s good (subjective, whatever, if you don’t know what I mean then send me a comment!). That includes music that is way NOT in your face. Such as this week’s selection.

Musical taste is as nature/nurture as everything else. We’re born with certain proclivities, and then we are exposed to music through our family & friends, which further influences our tastes. BUT I think there’s a point in everyone’s life when they take charge. When they set aside nature/nurture and decide for themselves what music they want to get into. They were choosing and shaping as young’uns too, but this is different.  It’s an active, conscious decision to potentially throw out (or more certainly reembrace) everything you learned about music in favor of things that become “exclusively” yours – those passion bands and artists that speak to you and “only you”. The music that makes your tastes distinct from those of your parents or older siblings or other influencers. For me that was around age 15. For others it’s way later or way earlier.

Air Supply came to me just before my musical coming-of-age. Y’all know I love songcraft. And these guys had it, or knew it when they heard it. PLUS sometimes you just need to mellow out. To feel the sunset in your ears. To actually see the heartstrings being pulled. That’s what Air Supply is for. Not to mention, there is NO BETTER NAME for a band that provides (yes, present tense – they’re still out there and in fact never stopped) a cool, refreshing breeze of music? Nope.

Yes, shortly after their heyday my tastes shifted drastically. But I never let music like this go. And to this day you can hear that in some of what I do. Especially including this song:

REC - “Up All Day” (from the album The Sunshine Seminar)

A quick side note: Air Supply is from Australia. Like INXS. Like Silverchair. Like AC/DC. I’m convinced that bands from Australia and Canada have a way of distilling American-style music into its essential parts, and coming up with versions that are often tighter and more on the nose than what American acts do. Too many examples from both countries to get into here. I’ll discuss this more in my video version.

Do you remember/like/hate these guys? Do they qualify as yacht rock? Do you have mellow-out music you prefer? What are some artists or songs from your pre-awakening period that you still dig? Discuss dammit!

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Everything comes from something. The Beatles came from a mix of skiffle and American popular music of the 1950s. Bach wouldn’t have been Bach with out the lovely and talented Deiterich Buxtehude. Nirvana name checked both the Pixies and the Monkees, and damn if you can’t hear that convergence. (Fans of New Order, you know where I’m going with this.) Back in the late 1970s, goth emerged from the punk/post-punk scene as its own subgenre. Darker, sparser, more brooding, more atmospheric, but still raw like punk. Bauhaus. Siouxsie and the Banshees, some of what the Cure did. And Joy Division.

When you have a suicidal frontman, it’s no surprise what comes out is depressive, even Divisive. But don’t overlook the Joy part of the equation. Ian Curtis and the band created music that reflected the life struggle to wring joy out of pain & suffering. It’s why their music was both dark and danceable. When he died, the remaining band members reformed into New Order – an appropriate name all things considered. And the new order of business for them was to create music that inspired people to move despite the occasional bleakness of life. Which they did. Better & better for years. Hell, their albums in this century often have moments that are as good as their best work. Yes, New Order is still doing New Stuff.

When certain fans think of New Order, they then immediately think of Depeche Mode (a band that’s also still pumping out excellent work to this day). Lots of parallels, and fans know well the divergences. The main commonalities are this: they’re both new wave bands merging electronic with rock, creating thumping and often ambiently beautiful songs that lyrically explore the darker aspects of inner & outer life. “True Faith” is one of New Order’s pinnacles, a perfect representation of all of those aspects.

So much of what I do involves the exploration of negative or uncomfortable feelings in the context of beat-driven, electronic, ambient, rock music. The most obvious example of this is from The Sunshine Seminar:

REC - “Any Universe” (from the album The Sunshine Seminar)

Do you have any experience with new wave or post punk or goth or techno? Do you remember when you could only be a fan of either New Order OR Depeche Mode, but not both? Do you enjoy when artists illustrate universal feelings of despondency & unsurety et al., but in a funky way? Discuss dammit!

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Life ain’t black and white. That’s not a revelation, and yet we constantly have to be reminded of it, because our brains WANT IT TO BE. It’s much more comfortable to slot things into categories. WELL if there’s one thing you know about me, it’s that I prefer artists who defy categorization. In most cases – like Prince or The Beatles or Bowie – those artists genre hop at will. They don’t let walls or rules contain them. In other cases – like this week’s band, The Smiths – they don’t so much genre hop as they create their own brand new genre.

There are so many reasons to love The Smiths. Morrissey’s incomparable voice. Johnny Marr’s genius guitar. The surprising (though it shouldn’t be to anyone who knows them) number of catchy pop hooks. Their not giving a shit about trends. But the thing I’ve always liked best about them is they lived in the grey. They melded happy-ish or lush & mellow-ish songs, with straight up sad and often harrowing lyrics. Like reveling in mud. All good music comes from a place of joy. Even the hardest, bleakest dirge metal is written and performed with joy. Joy is not happiness. It’s the pumping blood and breathing air of life. The Smith’s ability to revel in the joy of sadness was an instant heart-drug to me.  Still is.

From Strangeways, “Girlfriend in a Coma” is the perfect example of a happy sounding song with bleak lyrics. But really the entire album is exemplary and amazing. It would be unwieldy for me to list the numerous songs I’ve written that juxtapose happy music with sad lyrics. Dozens easily. Really there’s not even one definitive one. So here’s one of the latest:

REC - “Lost Found” (from the album Sympathy for the Weird)

What do you think of The Smiths? What other artists can you name who have happy music with sad lyrics, OR sad music with happy lyrics (like The Cure’s “Love Song” or Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies”)? Do you prefer black and white music, or do you swim in the grey too? Discuss dammit!

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One of the great things about revisiting the past is finding out how wrong you are. A memory gets stuck in your head, but not in a big & clear way like something seminal or life changing. Then, like a mental game of Telephone, the memory gets warped. It gets stored in your brain as a warp and overwrites the old memory. Other thoughts & feelings get attached to this warped version, which slowly becomes “real” and takes on more significance than it ever had a right to. BUT the overwriting is not digital, it’s analog. It’s like recording on a cassette that already has something on it. Sometimes the original content bleeds through.

For years I remembered The Alarm as a pet band – a runt that never quite grew to full size, but you loved anyway. I pumped up this memory and gave it more weight. The Alarm was “my band”. The Alarm’s music inspired me. The Alarm were amazing and should have been big, not the U2 also-rans they eventually became. THEN I pull this album out of my collection, listen to it, read up on them, and realize I’m giving this whole thing way too much credit. It took some digging to find out why I cared about them at all. And I discovered this: They had a minor hit in 1987 called “Rescue Me”. It sounded so much like U2 that I thought, YES, I am ready to get into them. So I waited for their new album, and in 1989 I bought it. This one. And I was underwhelmed. I have very little recall of any of these songs.

It’s not a judgment. They were a very good band. Their name still sparks feelings of post-new-wave-Brit coolness in me. It’s just that, like with so many bands I had the wrong impression about, I landed on them just after that particular iteration of their sound peaked – thus “the one after the good one”. We all have an idea of where an artist is heading, and we’re all way more finicky than we let on. If a band meets our unspoken expectations, we love them more. If a band repeats itself, we hang on and hope they keep growing. If a band pivots wildly, we’re confused and have to decide whether we love the pivot for its chance-taking genius, or they’ve lost their way and we’re done with them. And it’s all about what hits the heart. For a brief moment in 1987, The Alarm hit my heart. This album didn’t – didn’t do what I wanted them to do – needy & arrogant & presumptuous. That’s what being a music fan is.

And that’s why it’s hard for everyone. Hard for the fan who wants what they want, but not too on the nose or it’s boring. Hard – I say way harder – for the artist, who, if they don’t succumb to the pressures of trends or popularity or what someone else says to do, is only trying to follow the muse. To create from the soul. No, artists can’t expect fans to follow their every whim or be as chuffed about a change of direction or so-called innovation as they are. But fans – we need to be patient. Loving. Forgiving. Accepting of the human side of creation. We need to actually listen and listen again and listen again and give things a real chance.

Listen to these two songs. They’re separated by about 20 years. Does it sound like the same artist? Are the changes a journey you would have taken with me?

NICK - “Too Good To Me” (from the album What It Is)

REC - “Polymath” (from the album Syzygy for the Weird)

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