This last weekend, for whatever reason while I was browsing my YouTube homepage on my TV, and it started showing me some 80s music videos. First, it showed me a quiz, a "name that tune" kind of thing. I did very well. 80s pop culture, especially 80s pop music, is really kinda my thing, and there are very few songs that I don't know. Out of a good 50 or so songs, I missed one, although I know both the one that I should have picked and the one that I did pick; I just don't really care for either so I didn't recognize them on just a deliberately vague five second sample. And I completely whiffed a Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duet that I don't remember ever hearing, but I had little to no interest in Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers or anything country during the 80s. Although I'm sure this was a crossover on the charts.
I listened to some Wang Chung and The Cars, including the entirety of the Hearbeat City album, by far the Cars' best work. Then I got a recommendation for The Hooters "And We Danced." I didn't think that the Hooters were an 80s band at all; I probably was mixing them up with Hootie and the Blowfish. But for whatever reason, I played it, and the song seemed quite familiar, and certainly very 80s. I was shocked to find that, even at this point, there are still 80s bands who actually had genuine hits even, that were kind of not on my radar.
Coincidentally, they're originally from Philadephia, and I spent the week last week in Lehigh Valley myself, having flown into Philly and traveled by rental car to Macungie.
I listened to a number of their songs, and "And We Danced" was the only one that sounded familiar to me, and the only one that I thought good enough to make sure that I grabbed and and added to my collection. What a great song! I doubt that I actually missed this one, but it had fallen through the cracks and I forgot about it in the meantime. The nostalgic, even at the time it was filmed in 1985 or so, music video, with its kind of pseudo-50s Americana at the drive-in vibe is also fantastic. Just a great song all around. I can't believe that didn't already know about it and didn't know who the Hooters were, even... even though I recognized the song when I heard it.
Another great song that I think has been overlooked, although at least I hadn't forgotten it, because I had it on an old Rhino collection, is Charlie Sexton's "Beat So Lonely", which has a similar kind of sound to me, even though it's not really the same kind of song. You can hear it in Some Kind of Wonderful even though it's not on the soundtrack album released for the movie, oddly. He recorded that thing when he was 16, co-written by him, sung by him, and great guitar licks performed by him too. Talented guy. And a fellow Texan! I won't even gripe about his Austin upbringing; it was early enough that Austin wasn't too crazy yet in the 70s and early 80s, and he wouldn't have been in the music industry if he hadn't been in Austin, no doubt.
Going over some of my tracks; remixes and cover versions, in particular. For whatever reason, I think I may have had more cover versions of "But Not Tonight" than any other Depeche Mode track. I certainly had at least twice as many as I do for "Never Let Me Down Again" even though the later is one of DM's signature tracks. For "Enjoy the Silence" I actually have relatively few cover versions, but tons of remixes, many of them bootleg remixes. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, or if that's not really enough data that I should try to make anything of it. But I'll take a stab at it anyway, because nothing has ever stopped me from venturing my opinion on things, even if I also freely admit that it's a just so story. I think "But Not Tonight" is actually one of DM's best tracks, and I think it's actually one of their most popular tracks, and one that people really like in spite of the fact that the band itself doesn't seem to.
The band kind of dumped on Sire Records, the American partner of Mute, who released "But Not Tonight" as a single because they got it on the soundtrack of a "dodgy" movie (which, admittedly, seems to have been somewhat of a flop) and the failure of the single was part of what convinced DM to write off the possibility of major success in America. At least for a year or so; when they did the Masses Tour they realized somehow that they were actually huge, especially after the risky Rose Bowl show was a gigantic smash.
But they also didn't like that "But Not Tonight" was released, and they've rarely played it. Alan famously wrote it off, saying that they spent nine days remixing "Stripped" and whipped off "But Not Tonight" in just a couple of hours or something. So what? How much time you spend working on a song isn't necessarily indicative of how good it is. Now, granted, "Stripped" is also a great song, and one of DM's most iconic too. But if DM had actually embraced "But Not Tonight" it could be too. It's clearly well-loved. It's clearly frequently covered. I do see, however, fewer bootleg mixes of it, for whatever reason, but not none. (Dominatrix and Kaiser, for example, both pop up. But they've remixed almost everything DM.)
As an aside, although I don't think this song was the first place I encountered the word "debauchery", of course, it's certainly the song that made it a word that I was very familiar with. I love to use the word debauchery and debauch, all thanks to you, "But Not Tonight!"
Of the cover versions, many are more or less similar to the original, except with a stronger Scandinavian accent, or something like that. I think the best ones are Æon Rings, which is a little different, but still excellent, and I also like Fotonovela and Jimmy Somerville's versions for being significantly different. Scott Weiland, late lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots did an absolutely killer version; very delicate and fragile. Really highlights the lyrics and their theme. A version by New Life Generation is probably the best of the "faithful" covers, by which I mean that it changes very little, but just enough to be at least as interesting as a good remix.
Sigh. I'm not sure if I'm amused or annoyed. While reading of the fantasy opera of elvish singers in Middenheim for the Carnival which is the backdrop for the Power Behind the Throne module, I came across this very dated early 80s British pop culture reference.
Elven niuromaintiech music, with its complex vocal sounds, its performers’ eye-catching costumes has found an enduring audience among the other races of the Old World. The audience at this recital show their admiration of the performers by imitating their bizarrely-cut clothes, elaborate hairstyles, and lavishly-applied makeup. Those attending this recital are treated to performances by perennial favourites Adamantiel ‘Prince Charming’ Dandihyweiman, the Elven League, and the so-called ‘Wild Elves’ themselves, Duriandian Leboniel and his quintet (who plan to honour the city of Ulric with their popular ditty ‘Hungry Like the White Wolf ’).
While that's a cheeky reference to New Romantic music, it's a pretty dubious claim to have said nearly 40 years after the fact that it's found an enduring audience, or that the strange fashion and make-up affectations of the New Romantics look like anything at all these days that anyone would recognize. I'm not even sure that the references to Adam Ant and his two hits "Prince Charming" or "Stand And Deliver" (from whence the line Dandy Highwayman, referenced as a pun above) are even remembered. A reference to the Human League is more straightforward, as is about four Duran Duran references in a row "Wild Boys", Duran Duran almost said outright in the name, Simon Lebon, and of course "Hungry Like the Wolf"... but Duran Duran does at least have some enduring popularity. Heck, I saw them in concert last year, and it was pretty packed. Although the Depeche Mode concert was more packed and the tickets more expensive too. I guess they have even more enduring popularity when all is said and done.
It is somewhat ironic that the publishing house that literally brought us the word grimdark from the tagline of their futuristic variation on the game, although it applies equally well to the fantasy version, is at the same time so invested in these corny puns, but there it is. Even when the first version of this adventure was written in the 80s itself, this might have been pretty obscure. Maybe not in Britain, I suppose.
The reference the next page down to Wilhelm Pikewaver's famous play A Knight's Midsummer Dream is possibly even more ridiculous. Pikewaver? Really?
And a couple of pages after that, a reference to "What A Swell Party This Is"; holy crap, is it written for my dad? He's nearly 80, but he's always loved High Society. If he hadn't, I doubt I'd have recognized that reference.
I always meant to post this, but didn't get around to it; last month my wife and I went and saw Duran Duran in concert (we've also seen Air Supply, which kind of made me chuckle when my wife told me she had tickets for that, but it ended up being a good show. We didn't see very many people younger than us at either show, though. Or at Depeche Mode earlier this year.) In the wake of that concert, I discovered that the version of "The Reflex" I had on my phone was the single version, remixed/produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic (who was one of the opening bands). I had noticed this before, but always forgotten it and forgotten to update my files until after the concert. The album version is so much better, but I had that languishing... on my album, not even ripped to a mp3 where I could take it with me easily. I highly recommend that you check the two versions out side by side and let me know what you think. I think the album version is tons better than the single version, but the single version is closer to the one that gets played live most of the time.
Other than that; how was the show? Excellent! I had actually bought Duran Duran tickets for my wife (before we were even engaged) thirty years ago, but then she had to be out of town for a wedding she was in. Since I already had the ticket and nobody to take, I ended up taking her little sister, which was kinda funny. She was only about 16-17 or so, if I recall.
Little did we know, of course, back in 1983 when Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out with "The Reflex" and "Union of the Snake" and "New Moon on Monday" and whatever other singles came out to support that album, that Duran Duran were on the verge of a breakup, and the next time they went back to the studio, they'd be down two out of five members, and produce the album Notorious that is really only good for the song "Notorious" itself. I guess "Skin Trade" is OK. This state of diminished success continued until the time of the first concert I went to, which supported the recently released (at the time) so-called "Wedding Album" with hits like "Come Undone" and "Ordinary World." Some other tracks were successful at the time, although they're mostly forgotten now, like "UMF" and "Too Much Information."
For years, I wore that "Wedding Album" concert t-shirt. Finally, thirty years after the concert that my wife couldn't go to me with, we went and saw Duran Duran together. By now, they have more back catalog, but they also recognize and accept that their fans want to hear their 80s and early 90s stuff far more than anything else. The show was really good.
Sadly, the concert t-shirts weren't great, and for some bizarre reason, they had low stock, so we couldn't even get the ones that we wanted. That would probably be my only complaint. Well, that and the fact that they never play "New Moon on Monday" anymore. That was always my favorite classic line-up song, and it's kind of a forgotten one nowadays.
I've always been a big Duran Duran fan. I admit that Depeche Mode kind of hits my identity in terms of what kind of music I like more than Duran Duran does, but DD is up there in my esteem as a pop culture icon.
Plus, Roger's back. Andy probably won't come back again, and that's actually probably for the best, sadly, but the boys seem pretty classy; they don't talk bad about Andy and the drama he caused, and had a nice tribute to him when they were inducted in the Hall of Fame and he couldn't make it because of his cancer.
Poor Stephen Duffy's gotta be kickin' himself that he bailed on the band way early, and had much less to show for it. But "Kiss Me" is a great song too.
I am coming to consider Depeche Mode a band of the past. Oh, of course I know that they've been around all along, but very little of what they've put out in the last 30 years or so has really impressed me that much. The Playing the Angel and Ultra albums were relatively good. Songs of Faith and Devotion had a few good songs. They haven't added very many "top tier" songs to their repertoire since Violator though. "Wrong", "Precious", "It's No Good", "Martyr", and maybe b-sides "Ghost" and "Oh Well". Maybe a few other tracks here and there are almost good enough to be top tier.
It's early, but so far I'm considering the newly dropped single (just three hours ago!) "Ghosts Again" from the upcoming Memento Mori album might qualify. So far, very good.
I particularly appreciate how Dave is singing more normally. He's had a really affected style to his vocals in recent years, like he's trying to be a bluesy, rocky torch icon. I haven't really liked it. Granted, his voice has probably been somewhat damaged by the abuse that he's subjected himself to, and I don't expect it to sound now when he's in his 60s like he did 35 years ago barely into his 20s. But, apparently he can sound more like that than he's chosen to, because it's a bit more classic here.
I know Depeche Mode have kind of changed their tone, themes and sound over the decades too, but listening to a live stream from Vaughn George, someone in the chat made a good point, which he picked up on and talked about too—it kind of has a b-side vibe to it. The b-sides were often where Depeche Mode wandered a little further afield from their "trademark sound" and did stuff a little bit more experimental, or sometimes less experimental and more poppy.
The video is unusual also in that it kind of looks like it was filmed on some leftover 80s set. I can't find the video now, but there was one of them—I thought it was an alternate video for "But Not Tonight" that looks very similar, if not even almost recycled. On the other hand, Martin and Dave—but especially Martin—are looking really quite old. Man, what happened to his face in the last few years? He almost looks closer to 80 than to 60. His face almost looks older than my dad's, and I'm only about ten years younger than Depeche Mode themselves.
Anyway, after many years of disappointment with what was once my favorite band, I'm cautiously optimistic after this quite good start.
My wife got me tickets to their upcoming show, in just a couple of months. It's likely that this is their swan song, although we'll see. It's very unlikely I'll see them again, and it's very unlikely that their show will be like their shows in the past, just because they're getting so much older. They're not even doing a third of the stops on this tour that they did for Angel. Alan left the band decades ago now, and Fletch died during the covid nonsense "suddenly." Make of that what you will. The last time I saw them was quite a long time ago now, during the Playing the Angel tour. One last hurrah for both them and me, in a way.
It seems appropriate, as we enter summertime, to recall the 1987 hit single "Boys (Summertime Love)" by one-hit wonder Sabrina. Not in the US, where nobody seems to have heard of this song, or even the entire italo-disco genre at all (a small handful of italo-disco songs did chart as pop songs, but nobody thought of them as a discrete genre, they were just 80s synthesizer pop songs, like "Tarzan Boy" and "Gloria" and "Self-Control". Even discogs doesn't call the latter two italo-disco songs, but rather synthpop and disco. (Seriously, lolwut?) So I recognize that unless my audience is both my age and either European or South American, they probably have not ever heard this song. But it was a big hit in most of the rest of the Western and pseudo-Western world.
While this was not really typical for music videos, it was apparently very typical for Italian "magazine shows" that were more overtly sexy, and the video was originally recorded with the intention to be the latter rather than the former. But the music video has become quite well-known via YouTube because... well, I suppose that's pretty obvious. As the comments in some of the video versions say, "I came for the hits, and stayed for the.... "
Regardless, I've seen concert videos of Sabrina singing this song too; she clearly knew exactly why she was popular. While she was a competent vocalist, the reality is that millions of girls could have sung the song just as capably; but it is unlikely that millions of girls could have flaunted their assets and drawn as much attention as easily as she did.
In any case, this link ISN'T the music video, it's just the song with the single cover.
It's amazing that at this point in my life and this point in time, I can still discover lost "hits" of the 80s that I haven't heard before. In this case, because it wasn't ever a hit in the US, although still... I've been pretty in touch, I thought, with the post punk and early New Wave scene in the UK, and ferreted out all kinds of tracks from that era.
I discovered this because Mark Reeder remixed a cover of it about ten years ago, and that's the track that YouTube eventually led me to. But once I heard it, I of course had to go hear the original, plus some pretty decent other covers by the Foo Fighters, Linoleum and Dubstar.
There's a bunch of totally unlikeable know-it-all betas trying to prove something by commenting in the comments section below all of the cover versions how they like the original better. Wow, how nice. Thanks for sharing. So glad that I got to hear how OG you are. You're so cool. Honestly, all of these versions were great.
Here's the Mark Reeder remix version of Sam Taylor-Wood's cover version. It's the first one I heard. I don't know that I think it's my favorite. The original is more post punk rather than electronic, and this Sam Taylor-Wood was a good remix, but the Pet Shop Boys had their hands all over most of the other versions, and tried to take credit for producing all if it and just getting her as a vocalist, or something. This isn't a good look on them, as their remix is a train wreck.
I was running around listening to remixes of Depeche Mode songs when YouTube recommended it, particularly their under-rated track "If You Want" from the Some Great Reward album, and the last Alan Wilder-penned track to make an appearance.
Well... I should probably double-check that. There might be a lingering b-side that still made it out after this one.
Dominatrix RMX is an outfit that's done tons of bootleg remixes that are very high quality. The "Shake the Disease", "But Not Tonight" and "The Sun and the Rainfall" remixes all particularly stood out to me this time around, but I've been familiar with the guy for some time. Apparently, his YouTube channel went down for a while, and he brought it back and reuploaded a lot of stuff with new videos. Not sure why.
Ironically... how did I miss this? I mean, I never played the GTA games, but if it was in the Vice City soundtrack, I should have heard of it. But somehow... it slipped through the cracks.
UPDATE: Vice City Stories. I never paid attention to the soundtrack for that game, actually.
I've been listening to some Joan Jett. I've known her biggest hits, like "I Love Rock N Roll" and "Bad Reputation" because I remember when they were new in the 80s. I somehow never heard "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" until recently, or if I had, I'd forgotten it.
It's a great song. Of course, like many Joan Jett songs, it's a cover. Something else I didn't realize even after I rediscovered it, at least for a time. And the original artist and writer was Gary Glitter and his band manager. Given that the chorus says, "Do you wanna touch? Do you wanna touch? Do you wanna touch me... there?" that's really creepy for a guy who was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for possession of child pornography and child molestation, including having a sex with a girl under the age of 13, and several other accounts of attempted rape and sexual assault. He was kicked out of Cambodia and Vietnam for child abuse. Yes, the "Me love you long time" countries kicked him out for being too perverted.
Too bad. I do like a couple of Glitter songs, but it's hard sometimes to listen to them knowing what we know now about the guy. Then again, I suspect almost all entertainers are secretly (or today, not so secretly even) absolutely terrible people. It's not like Joan Jett was a keeper either. So maybe it's a little unfair to judge him so harshly and yet let, I dunno... someone like Jared Leto have a pass. (Not to suggest that Glitter's judgement is unfair. Merely that it should also be applied to many other celebrities.)
By the way, Morbius isn't a terrible movie. It's similar to the Tom Hardy Venom. Midnight's Edge claims that to its credit it has no agenda and has no wokeness whatsoever. That's not, however, quite true. Anyone who thought that a character named Martine Bankcroft was a Hispanic woman living in an apartment that looks like it has the same interior decorator as your typical mom and pop Mexican restaurant is nuts. That's a clear case of race-swapping. Sure enough, the original character was blonde and as American as you get, as opposed to this Fake American version. The hate never stops.
But since nobody knows the Morbius characters, I suppose they thought they could get away with it and nobody would pay attention to the name, or think it odd that a population that's nearly a full standard deviation lower in IQ than the white population would produce this brilliant woman scientist. It's not impossible, just... very statistically unlikely. Then again, I suppose its statistically unlikely that a guy with a rare, unnamed terminal blood disease would turn into a vampire by taking a shot made from vampire bat DNA too.
It's not the only thing you need to understand what's going on—and has been for many, many years—in politics of Western Civilization, but it's a nice chunk of the puzzle. Once you understand the psychological dysfunction of the Left, and what causes that particular rot to ebb and flow over time and through history, then suddenly all kinds of things that otherwise wouldn't make sense.
It explains, among other things, the rise and fall of Empires from Rome to Austria-Hungary to the Soviets to the Americans—meaning that our near term future is pretty clear unless there's some kind of renewal project in the works, which clearly there is not. It explains the cycle of renewal and wickedness seen throughout the Old Testament. It even explains the so-called "pride cycle" that LDS teachers like to talk about; pride cycle being perhaps not the most nitpickety accurate label for it. Pride, vanity, ego and foolishness just being a natural consequence of r-selection and an environment that allows it to prosper and grow. Maybe pride cycle works in the sense that in encourages better behavior than what comes naturally to r-strategists in an r-selected environment, at least, but the titular pride is a reaction rather than a cause.
It also implies a kind of disheartening inevitability to the cyclical nature of these things. There's a meme I see going around based on a quote from a somewhat esoteric post-apoc fiction novel called Those Who Remain which runs as follows: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." Kind of the r-selection K-selection cycle laid out in bumper sticker fashion, really.
Anyway, I'm thinking of this because I recently listened to Kick by INXS all the way through recently, something that I haven't done in quite a few years. Oh, sure—I've digitally spun a few of their notable songs from the album here and there, without really paying too much attention to what they're saying. "Devil Inside", "I Need You Tonight", "New Sensation" and "Never Tear Us Apart", of course, are all great pop songs, but maybe tracks like "Guns in the Sky" are a bit less memorable, and it's been a good 20-30 years since I've heard that one.
Listening/watching/reading of pop culture from that era, especially if its full of liberal messaging, makes the r-selection so incredibly obvious. The messaging was much heavier in Kick than I remembered. It almost saturates it, really. Hearing the whole thing back to back, especially starting with "Guns in the Sky" which is probably one of the most overt of all of them on the track, made it much clearer than it had been when I was a teenager. It came out in, what October 87, right? And the singles releases, which still mattered back then when people listened to the radio for the music and watched MTV for the videos, straggled out for about a year from September 87 to August 88 or so. (Technically the last single from the album was in Spring 89, but by then nobody was paying attention anymore. I have no memory of "Mystify" being a single at all, although apparently it hit No. 17 in the US. Where was I? Probably having kicked the radio habit by then and listening to my Depeche Mode CDs.)
Anyway, the idea that because they're scared of a strong Soviet Union, and therefore, they're even more scared that the USA was also strong as a defense against them is really kind of shocking, and their demands that we put that all aside, become super submissive, and somehow everything will turn into a John Lennon "Imagine" utopia (which to a normal person is actually, of course, a dystopian nightmare) seems so bizarre to me, and out of touch. How can anyone who knows anything at all about 1) history, 2) psychology, 3) human nature, etc. ever think that this was a good idea?
It makes me curious, if there really is any renewal possible when the toxicity of these terrible, delusional r-strategist ideas have so thoroughly infiltrated and soaked into multiple generations now of the American people. Without a major crash, hard reset, and the growth of a new post-American society built on different values by the remnants of the K-strategist population that hopefully remains afterwards, it certainly seems impossible now. Renewal projects in past empires that had similar cultural rot were, at best, time buyers for a few more good years or decades if you were lucky. Either that or the Second Coming of Christ and the onset of the Millennial period is imminent. However, I think its kind of hubristic to think that because of problems in my society that the entire world must be imminently ready for the hard reset. Maybe it's true, but then again, it's not like Christians haven't thought that for centuries and, of course, been wrong.
In any case, the political messaging of The Joshua Tree from the same year was very obvious (although to be fair, I didn't really love that album, and for the most part, I'd play just the first three tracks, and then rewind the cassette back to the beginning. The rest of the album, despite multiple attempts, never grew on me.) But the reality is that Kick is probably more political than even that consumately political album.
I'm always amused when I hear of unexpected timelessness in works of art. By this I mean two things. The first is amply illustrated by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, one of the most famous composers of the Romantic era from Tsarist Russia. Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose what is today popularly known as "The 1812 Overture" for the 1880 dedication of the Cathedral of Christ, which had been commissioned way back when the victory of 1812 was still relatively fresh, by Tsar Alexander I. (Sadly, the original was torn down a few decades later by Stalin, in one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism, a hallmark of Marxists then and now. It has, however since been rebuilt.) It was written fairly quickly, and Tchaikovsky himself was not a fan of it, saying that it would be, "Very loud and noisy, but [without] artistic merit, because I wrote it without warmth and without love."
But artists should not be the authoritative commentators on their own work. The 1812 Overture is, of course, one of the most popular titles of the "classical" music repertoire, and made his estate a fair bit of money. Popularity is, of course, not necessarily an indication of merit, but popularity that lasts decades and spans many nations and peoples, ususally indicates a kind of timeless greatness that few works of art are able to achieve. Sometimes this itself is seen as undesireable; there certainly exists a kind of snobbish exclusiveness to art appreciation in which if a work doesn't gain widespread approval of the "masses" then that's seen as indicative of some kind of quality, but that's really just pretentiousness, snobbery and is really quite childish and stupid, in my opinion. Widespread appeal is not something to be shunned, unless you confuse widespread appeal with novelty or faddish appeal. The two things are really quite different. Maybe Tchaikovsky himself thought his work was bourgeois or low-brow, but it was enduringly popular and ultimately a timeless classic.
In fact, much of what we now consider high-brow entertainment from a bygone era was originally low brow entertainment anyway. Shakespeare and Dickens are almost synonymous with "Great English Literature™" but both were wildly entertaining to the masses at the time. In fact, I sometimes wonder if their migration to being percieved as high brow has more to do with the fact that as the culture and language have changed, they've become a bit more difficult to appreciate today, so it appeals to the snob who only wants to like stuff that the bourgeousie doesn't. (Which, really, is the only explanation at all for the advent of "modern art" and all of its associated perambulations.)
A little closer to home, I'm amused by stories of how OMD's best hit, "If You Leave" was literally written as an emergency overnight and became their biggest hit, especially in America. OMD themselves seem to be alternatively annoyed by this and willing to embrace it. But the reality is that that situation isn't too unusual; a lot of bands don't actually much like or appreciate their own biggest hits, the ones that go on to have an enduring audience years or even decades after their release. Sometimes like in the case of Tchaikovsky and OMD, it may be related to how little time they spent on writing it, relatively speaking. Honestly, though, I truly believe that the constraint of not having time or opportunity for overthinking often makes art (or literature or music) much better. This is in line with something that's always stuck with me from Dean Wesley Smith's famous advice about writing at pulp speed and killing the sacred cows of writing. (https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/killing-the-top-ten-sacred-covers-of-publishing-3-rewriting/) Spending more time on something usually has very quickly diminishing returns for improving the quality of something. Or, to use the phrase from the link: "No matter how much you stir a steaming pile of crap, it's still a steaming pile of crap." If the work is good, it's probably pretty good right out the gate and doesn't need nearly as much rework as you think. If it's not, spending more time on it isn't likely to make it much better.
We got dumped on, along with much of the Western world, especially America, and I spent a good hour and a half huffing big piles of snow out of our driveway and walkway this morning instead of jumping right on work, like I'd normally have done. I probably should have woken up my teenaged son, but I was caught a bit off guard by how much snow we had, so I didn't, and before I realized that I was a bit over my head in terms of getting it down quickly, I was already well underway and just went with it. Because sitting outside in the snow shoveling by myself for the better part of an hour and half (maybe about an hour, really—after that my neighbor was out too and we chatted while we worked a bit) is a good excuse to think about stuff. Granted, your mind is likely to wander anyway. Anyway, in the order I thought of them, here's a summary of some of the stuff that crossed my mind.
1) I had some Beach Boys songs stuck in my head while working, at least for a while, and I got to thinking of the British Invasion, which put the entire music style of the Beach Boys and their pop trajectory out of business—with the curious exception of the Beach Boys themselves, who weathered the change fairly well for a time. As near as I can tell, however, with the exception of the Beatles, almost nobody who's not a Boomer is very impressed with the British Invasion music, and even the Beatles themselves are mostly coasting on the reputation that the Boomers gave them. It's not fair to say that the Boomers made the Beatles while the Beatles had no talent; they were talented, and would have probably been stars regardless. But the best band ever? That's a bizarre boomer affectation that some other people have believed because they repeat it like parrots. The reality is that other than the boomers, the Beatles stock isn't really super high, and I have a feeling that when the last boomer finally dies, the Beatles will become more or less as forgotten as Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee or Guy Lombardo is now; known to a few music historians, and not exactly unappreciated by those who hear them, but otherwise getting a shrug of ignorance from the mainstream.
2) Why has "marketing" or whomever it is that's done this, collapsed generations so that entire generations are now "missing" from the list of generations? Everyone knows the boomers for various reasons—most of them unflattering—and the same is true for the Millennials. (Also unflattering.) And everyone knows Generation-X, although their profile is more understated compared to their narcissistic, attention-whoring older groups mentioned before. But the boomers didn't give way to Gen-x who in turn gave way to the Millennials; book-ending Gen-X are two other generations which are largely forgotten for some reason; Generation Jones and Generation-Y. Why this is the case isn't exactly clear to me, as there are notable differences between those generations and the ones on either end of them, so combining them is a poor idea if you want to understand the generations generally, I think.
3) Speaking of which, in some ways, you can define the generations by the pop culture of their time. (The same can be done to some degree with decades in general, although the 60s, for instance, would come across as schizophrenic if done this way; the early 60s was what most people think the 50s were like, and the late 60s and early 70s is what most people think of when they think of the 60s. If from a pop culture music perspective, the Boomers are defined by the British Invasion, you could almost suggest that Generation-X is defined in large part by the second British Invasion, and the impact that its music made on domestic music in general. It seems like the sinking of Gen-X music in the 90s in favor of the grunge wave could be compared to the Disco Demolition Night and the backlash against disco that it represented. However, the backlash in the late 70s was real and organic; the backlash against New Wave was artificial and driven by the labels looking for some way to reorient themselves. The 80s was even more defined by the tribalized music subcultures than by the second British invasion itself, and the New Wave pop was, if anything, the closest thing to mainstream success during much of the decade until some hair band rock started reasserting itself; artists like Bon Jovi, Poison, etc. But later in the 90s, grunge itself kinda disappeared, as well as the rest of the self-important, "activist" type music that was so popular in the 90s, to be replaced by pop music that sounded more like an organic growth from where the 80s had been. Gen-Y's music seems to have been a strange discontinuity that we've mostly "paved over" and ignore as much as we can, as if it never really was important. In general, if you're still pretty young, in your 20s, and you find yourself thinking something akin to "kids today and their terrible music" your generational cohort has probably recently rolled over.
4) The gamma male personality is one that can be made or not at a pivotal point in a young person's life. Some people naturally have that tendency, of course—especially if they're a little different than mainstream in their interests or personality. Someone who, like me, for instance, grew up liking science fiction, liked academic curiousity (on certain topics, at least), was fascinated with Dungeons & Dragons, and listened to aggressively stylish music and disassociated myself especially from country music, which in Texas in the 80s, was a pretty mainstream kinda thing—can find themselves outside of "polite society" in the cutthroat Lord of the Flies environment that is the American school system. Guys like Adam Reader of the Professor of Rock channel on Youtube, for instance, talk a lot about being bullied, and hiding from it in their walkmans, or whatever. This is exactly what you don't want to do if avoiding turning out gamma is your goal. Don't hide. Don't look for an amenable authority like a teacher or whatever to fight your battles for you. You have to figure out a way to deal with it yourself. If you don't, you'll lay patterns for resentment, lack of self-respect, and bitter entitlement that will be extremely difficult to overcome as an adult; the hallmarks of the gamma male personality. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean getting into fist fights with would be bullies, although often that is the best solution, but it does mean that you need to come up with something that you are responsible for to deal with the situation, so that you know that you solved your own problems, and have the confidence and self-respect that comes from exactly that pattern. And if you are going to go different than the world—something that as a practicing Christian, I certainly encourage—then you also have to develop the habit of simply not caring very much what other people think of you, because the world will never accept you, because you reject it.
5) On a lighter note, for literally years I had been trying—albeit not in any kind of concerted way—to figure out this minor hit from the middle 80s that I had heard a few times on the radio, but never got the title or artist, and then couldn't find. I stumbled across it completely by accident recently; "Calling America" by Electric Light Orchestra. So... nice! Although those guys were pretty whack looking, even for by 80s standards. Like the comments in this video point out; the leader of the band looks like your stereotypical campus marijuana dealer.
An underrated, underappreciated when it was new, and sometimes forgotten gem of the 80s (in favor of their bigger hit I Ran), Space Age Love Song is really the best song A Flock of Seagulls ever did, and one of the better love songs of the 80s in general. The original is brilliant, but this much more recent collaborative affair with the Prague Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra is magical. Michael Score, the lead singer and main guy for A Flock said that while the band came together fairly quickly, they struggled to find a guitar player, and had at least a dozen guys come in. Most of them heard the synth heavy sound, which in the very early 80s was deemed sufficient, I guess, and asked them why they wanted a guitar player at all. But Score knew that their sound would need it (he was a big fan of more guitar-heavy traditional indie stuff; the name of the band comes from a line from a Stranglers song, for instance, that they'd just seen in concert together). Can you imagine this song without that insistent guitar riff? It really makes the song what it is, and replacing it with some analog synth voice would have been devastating to the sound.
Anyway, a bit random, I know, but there it is. To make up for my randomness, I'll point out that I'm making updates to more Ad Astra planetary data sheets, I'm just not posting them on my blog. Because I'm also unhappy with the format of Google Sites these days, I'll actually probably transfer them to some offline format (like an odf doc, probably), and if I share them again, it'll be en masse as a pdf.
Watch the original version of the song here with clips from a very early 90s (but still classic 80s style) rom-com movie with a young Jennifer Connelly. Again: magical. I don't necessarily buy into it myself, but there's a consistent theme among many on the internet that Jennifer Connelly in the middle to late 80s (and she still squeeks by in this video, although her buy-by date would be approaching fast) is the most beautiful woman of an entire generation. Again; while I don't necessarily agree with that, she is certainly a beautiful woman, or at least was back then. That can't be denied.
I'm going to just throw this out there, in case anyone is interested in this kind of thing. John Foxx (real name Dennis Leigh) is a fascinating fellow. I'm actually quite surprised; he's very nearly my parents' age (only short by two or three years from my dad) and I'm not exactly young anymore either. He came to prominence—of sorts—in his very late twenties and earliest thirties as the front-man and in fact main man for Ultravox! (later Ultravox without the exclamation) which was a kind of art school and krautrock influenced punk band at first, but which later produced what is largely considered the very first synthpop song ("Hiroshima Mon Amour") in 1977 and the very first synthpop album (Systems of Romance in 1978.) Gary Numan is gushingly effusive of his work, especially on Systems, but he left the band in the late 70s and went solo. Here, sadly, two ironic things happened.
First, Billy Currie, the synth player for Ultravox, recruited Midge Ure, whom he had met on a Gary Numan tour and on the Visage project, to be the lead singer and guitar player for the new Ultravox, which had four absolutely fabulous, classic synthpop or new wave albums—not as electronic as something like Depeche Mode, for example. They had a real drummer, a real bass player, and plenty of guitar, for instance. The string of albums: Vienna, Rage in Eden, Quartet, and Lament are all very much worth chasing down. They were remastered and re-released with all kinds of bonus tracks back in 2008 or 2009 or so, and I've had these versions for a number of years.
In 1980, Foxx released Metamatic as his solo album, the culmination of the direction he was headed following Systems of Romance. It's quite a wonderful album; a kind of cyberpunk soundtrack, before there was a cyberpunk (Foxx himself credit J. G. Ballard as a very British version of some of the same themes as Philip K. Dick, for instance. However, by the time he did it, Kraftwerk had already done The Man-Machine, which actually had pop (or at least poppish) songs on it in the same style, and Gary Numan had already released Replicas (as Tubeway Army) and The Pleasure Principle, and for that matter, The Human League had already released Dignity of Labour EP and Reproduction. This meant that Foxx's Metamatic sounded derivative, even though he was one of the first to actually do this, and most of those follow up acts (especially Numan) were in fact derivative of him instead of the other way around.
In any case, this type of really cold, dystopian, proto-cyberpunk type of very late 70s early 80s art school synthpop didn't last all that long before stuff that was warmer and more accessible and pop-oriented started overtaking it, including, of course, Vince Clark's output first with Depeche Mode, then Yazoo, then Erasure, etc. Human League's own output after the founding members left the band in the hands of the lead singer that they recruited, who came out with Dare! and the hit single "Don't You Want Me" etc. This type of synthpop is very dark, but it's not the same kind of dark as Depeche Mode later evolved into. Even relatively dark stuff like Visage and early Midge Ure Ultravox doesn't really sound quite like it. Listening to Metamatic compared to Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward, for instance, which came out just a few years later, they barely sound like the same kind of band at all, even though they were, curiously, using the same kinds of instrumentation (completely electronic), both worked closely with engineer Gareth Jones, and the Depeche Mode work was partially recorded in John Foxx's own studio in Highbury.
I strongly recommend finding on Spotify or YouTube the following albums and listening to them as best you can:
Ultravox
Ha! Ha! Ha! (1977)
Systems of Romance (1978)
Vienna (1980)
Rage in Eden (1981)
Quartet (1982)
Lament (1984)
John Foxx
Metamatic (1980)
Shifting City (1997) (But get the deluxe version which has the Omnidelic Exotour with remakes of much of his earlier work)
Visage
Visage (1980)
The Anvil (1982)
Beat Boy (1984)
The Human League
Reproduction (1979) (Get the deluxe version that has all of the Dignity of Labour EP included in the bonus tracks)
Travelogue (1980)
Tubeway Army
Tubeway Army (1978) (This is probably comparable to Ultravox's Ha! Ha! Ha! in that it's not really very electronic but punk, for the most part, although the early electronic roots seen here are probably what stand out as the most memorable.)
Replicas (1979)
Gary Numan
The Pleasure Principle (1979)
And just for some more context, it wouldn't hurt to listen to the Joy Division albums from 1978-1980 or so (can't remember their exact dates) and maybe the first couple of New Order albums. And, while you're at it, maybe the first three or four OMD albums.
Although I talk about Depeche Mode a lot, and it does seem like most of the subsequent synthpop scene is more influenced by Depeche Mode and/or Erasure than any of these guys, it's fascinating to see this kind of strange, very late 70s early 80s proto-cyberpunk dystopian type of synthpop that was developing in parallel. Maybe it was more of a dead end, or maybe it contributed to what later became industrial music or sorts, but either way, it's a fascinating period with some fascinating releases.
I talk a lot about Depeche Mode, and their best stuff is my favorite pop music, in large part because of it's underground, new wave edginess, polished, dark melancholic sound, and high quality of songwriting.
Of course, DM didn't operate in a vacuum. Vince Clark's change of the sound from a more traditional guitar and rock based structure to electronic music came about because he heard an OMD song. The New Romantic movement, to which Depeche Mode arguably never really belonged, although they looked like maybe they could have back in 1980-81 or so, had a lot of really great synthpop bands that would have sounded very similar to Depeche Mode in many ways. Actually, they were considerably darker and more menacing in most cases than early Depeche Mode, although later Depeche Mode mostly swapped that again, although not under the aegis of New Romanticism as a fashion movement, at least. Arguably, thought, the music and artistic aspects of it remain unchanged.
Here I'm talking about bands like Visage, Duran Duran, and Spandau Ballet. Boy George is also a quintessential New Romantic, but he's mostly devolved into a bit of a joke because his songs were campy and the Adam Sandler flic The Wedding Singer made fun of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" so much. In America, New Romanticism wasn't really a thing, but once bands like Duran Duran lost the worst of their "gay imagery" on their eponymous first release, then they were able to be labeled the Second British Invasion, a kind of slightly edgy, dance-oriented synthesizer driven pop. Their second album Rio and their third, Seven and the Ragged Tiger with heavily played, highly produced, fun to watch music videos on new cable channel MTV being a major driver of their success. Duran Duran were often compared to Spandau Ballet, who also had at least a few American hits (everyone knows "True", at a bare minimum, although a few other tracks are familiar to many) but I always thought they were better compared, in many ways, to the Midge Ure classic line-up of Ultravox. Two member of this version of Ultravox were linked with Visage (Midge Ure and Billie Curie), and by sound and tone and mood and theme, they were quite similar to the early Duran Duran releases. They weren't really New Romantics, although they were often labeled such by the press; probably because they sounded like New Romantics and had two members who had been in Visage, but New Romanticism was always more of a visual/fashion movement than anything else, and New Romantic music could sound nearly identical to non-New Romantic synthpop or electronic music going to at the same time alongside New Romanticism. (Like OMD, Human League, New Order, Soft Cell, etc.) Unlike Duran Duran, they weren't young, art-school pretty boys either, they were rather more established musicians who had been in the punk and early new wave scene for some time, including the earlier punk and post-punk iteration of Ultravox, the Rich Kids, and others.
Anyway, Ultravox had been around through much of the later 70s, and are often credited with inventing the first synthpop song, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour", and the world's first synthpop album (although not super commercially successful, it is praised highly by Gary Numan and others, who said it was his single biggest musical inspiration) in Systems of Romance. But that version of the band imploded when lead singer John Foxx got tired of struggling with the band, went solo, released Metamatic (which ironically, due to some issues of timing, sounds derivative of Gary Numan in many respects) and the band reformed about a year or so later after Billie Currie had toured with Numan and done the first release of the Visage project, etc. He had met Midge Ure during this time, and invited him to helm Ultravox, and this line-up released four of the best, although sadly under-rated and unknown (at least in America) New Romantic or new wave or synthpop or whatever you want to call it albums during the early to mid-80s. I mean, they're just real classics—almost every track is good, and they have a very fresh sound, even today, almost 40 years later. They gradually drifted over this four album arc into a somewhat more mainstream sound, but they still manage to maintain that new wave edge. After the four albums, they put out a greatest hits album, canned Warren Cann, the drummer, and put out a fifth album with this slightly revised line-up, but it was a fan and critical flop, and Midge Ure left the band afterwards and that was that.
But Vienna, Rage in Eden, Quartet and Lament are all fabulous albums, and anyone who has any appreciation for 80s new wave Second British Invasion music should own all four and wonder to himself why Ultravox didn't get the same recognition that Duran Duran did. Although it's worth pointing out that in the UK, they did have a number of hits. Like Duran Duran, they also had a string of visually striking music videos. I discovered them, albeit a few years after the fact, when I got the Collection CD, which admittedly does have most of the highlights of this era. We kinda fell in love with their sound at my house when I was a teenager, and heck—my younger brother even went through a phase where he tried to grow Midge Ure's trademark pointed sideburns, as seen on the "Vienna" video, and honestly, throughout much of this era. (He was too young to pull it off, and it wasn't right without the mustache anyway.)
Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
A little personal history before I get too far into this; I didn't really "get into" music until, oh, about 1986 or 1987 or so. I liked music, and I was picky about what I liked, but I mostly just listened to what was on the radio or MTV and didn't give a whole lot of thought to who I liked or why, just what songs I liked and why. The number of songs that I liked spread a wide gamut of what was more or less popular throughout the 70s and 80s, but it's curious that one of the first that really sticks out in my mind, because a good friend of mine and I both liked it, was "People Are People" back in 1984 or so when I was 12 years old. A year or two later, I was finally starting to pay attention to bands specifically, and my first favorite bands, who's backcatalog I went and collected, were a-ha and Duran Duran. Clearly, the 80s new wave and synthpop were where I was headed, but what I needed was something a little heavier; less of a pop-star lightweight. Duran Duran was actually much more artistic than their string of hits would suggest, and I was surprised (pleasantly) on picking up a-ha's albums (I had three at the time; Hunting High and Low, Scoundrel Days, and Stay on These Roads) that they were a bit more artistic and moody than I expected just based on hits I'd heard on the radio like "Take On Me."
I still wasn't completely sure what kind of music I really liked yet, though; I was just as likely to be into hair rock bands like Def Leppard or Bon Jovi at this point. This all changed when I first heard "Strangelove" on a slightly more edgy new wave station broadcasting out of Houston that we had access to in Bryan. I fairly quickly picked up Music For the Masses on cassette tape; it would have been in the first dozen that I bought, at least, and I listened to it over and over again, curiously, often while I was also reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time. Despite the fact that Depeche Mode was obviously a very modern band at the time, and probably in fact even much more ahead of their time than most other musicians working, it really fit with the Victorian Gothic horror vibe of Dracula shockingly well. (This may also explain why I liked Little 15 much more than I otherwise might have; it sounded even more Gothic, Victorian, and horror-sounding than anything else on the album.)
Anyway, I loved Music for the Masses. I still do; I see it as one of the best electronic music albums of all time ever released. It's possible that it's not exactly as innovative or artistic as Black Celebration, but maybe that's not exactly fair; it does have its share of strange tracks as well as stuff that had a lot of potential to be hits (and they were hits to a large degree too.)
One thing that Masses did, which Depeche Mode went on to do for most of their subsequent albums, at least for a while, and which many other synthpop artists imitated, was include these little codas, or extra hidden tracks, if you will; after a song ended, there was a kind of interesting little instrumental coda attached. Another odd thing that it did was it had a very long gap after Pimpf before it did this coda; several minutes on cassette tape, although it's less on the CD version.
I've never experienced Music For the Masses without the bonus tracks on side 2 of the cassette, or just later on the CD. To me, they are just part of the required tracklist on the album, and while having them separated by sides on the cassette made them stand apart from the rest of the album, no doubt, I still can't really consider them as not part of the album. This is both cool and yet also kind of odd, as they don't fit musically quite as well as the album tracks proper. Agent Orange is a spooky but not particularly exciting instrumental, then there are two "dub-like" remixes of songs from the main album, and then "Pleasure, Little Treasure", which is a b-side to "Never Let Me Down Again."
Curiously, I usually didn't much like Pleasure Little Treasure at first, thinking that the really big, hoaky guitar sounds didn't fit, but there is a mix on the maxi-single CD that I really enjoy a lot.
But the "album version", noting that it's not technically an album track, is not my favorite. I don't hate it, but it sounds like a b-side, not something that really fit. Noting that these bonus tracks really don't exactly fit with the rest of the album, I'm going to exclude them from eligibility as being the track that I'd remove; all four of them would be top candidates, but shouldn't really be considered, since according to the band itself, they're not part of the album anyway; they're bonus tracks!
Music For the Masses is also interesting in that it's the first time that Depeche Mode really embraced guitars again. They (hoaky guitars in Pleasure, Little Treasure excepted) kept them somewhat subtle; in fact, I didn't even recognize them for what they were at first—although that's because in many ways I was expecting them to be an electronic band, and I wasn't expecting guitars, so I just expected that it was some synthesizer sound that sounded like a guitar. It's very curious that when you watch, assuming you can still find it, the documentary Sometimes You Do Need Some New Jokes, you'll see that their new production partner, David Bascombe, had to give them permission to use guitars. The band kinda wanted to, but worried that because their brand was an electronic band, that it wouldn't fly. They were even more nervous about making them a much bigger part of their sound the next time they were in the studio for Violator, but given the success of that album, they decided to jump whole hog on the guitar thing. This isn't to say that they became a rock instead of electronic band overnight, but it is fair to say that Depeche Mode did gradually become... I dunno, actually not really an electronic band anymore, but a kind of unusual bluesy band that retained some legacy of their past as an electronic band. It's fair to say that this coincides with their fan base kinda losing steam when it comes to excitement about their offerings, but let's not get ahead of ourselves too much...
Anyway, I'll talk about the tracklist as I go through the questions, to some degree.
1) I would lose I Want You Now. It's pretty bad. The Martin Gore weird ballads are almost always the ones that I can do without, and this is certainly one of them that just doesn't work. I guess I can kinda sorta appreciate the willingness to do something different; but most of those experiments would have been better off not done, quite honestly, or at least not committed as album tracks. As an aside, there is an interesting Alan Wilder Reconstruction mix of this track that... I don't know that it "saves" it, but it works a little better, at least. The bootleg remix collections, Editing the Mode also showed how this song could have worked by adding this long piano intro that's actually quite good.
I used to think Pimpf was a loser too, but to be honest with you, the black and white video collection Strange convinced me otherwise, and ever since then, I've had a kind of odd appreciation for the track. Although, Martin Gore is really strange. I used to wonder if he was gay, but he's married to a woman; I think he's just really weird and beta, kinda how John Lennon was.
2) In some ways, Music For the Masses was not intended to be radical. The documentary (good luck finding it; I used to watch it on Youtube, but it's since been blocked due to copyright) Sometimes You Do Need Some New Jokes, it refers to Music for the Masses as almost a tribute to their fans, really—a kind of deliberate "this is where we are right now"; I dunno. I'm not 100% sure that that distinction is meaningful; but I find Music for the Masses as an album that polishes and perfects and expands on the work of Black Celebration moreso than one that goes a new direction, really. I wouldn't call it an innovative album. Black Celebration was the one that was innovative, and Music For the Masses in many respects explored the same place with a few new sounds, with a new producer, and maybe a somewhat new vibe, but still kind of the same place. That said, as Alan Wilder said, much of what they did this time around was influenced by his own listening to a lot of Phillip Glass and the minimalists; there's a lot of starting off with a theme, and then adding and layering more and more elements until you get a really rich crescendo near the end where everything is going at once. Perhaps the song that best encapsulates this is Behind the Wheel, and Alan compares it to those optical illusion pictures where you have a square staircase that goes up and yet somehow after running the four sides you're back where you started instead of at the top. It's also interesting, because if you listen specifically to Dave's voice, the melody is almost non-existent. It is only a couple of notes repeated, and Gore's backing track vocals actually are more like a melody.
It's another one where there's a single version that's significantly different than the album version, and the album version has a droning, dark menace that the single version lacks.
3) I've probably listened to Strangelove the most, although that's a tough call. It's possible that Never Let Me Down Again or Behind the Wheel are tracks that I've heard as often, though. I said this before on some of the earlier albums, but I usually tend to just listen to the album through, and if I skip around, it's mostly just to bypass I Want You Now. This was especially true for the years when I had this on cassette tape, but realistically, I still prefer to hear the album that way. The fact that many of the songs run together enhances this habit; without manually fading out the end of Never Let Me Down Again, for instance, there's a jarring jump at the end unless you just go straight to The Things You Said. This carries forward for many of the tracks (and it did so as well on Black Celebration, and there's a bit of it in their two earlier albums too here and there.) As the singles, where I had remixes of them, and worked them into DJ setlists when I was running dances, or what-have-you, those were certainly the ones I preferred the most because they were the ones people would know.
As an aside, Martin Gore's vocals on The Things You Said are among the last time I really liked one of his ballads. I don't like many of them. A curious thing, though—because I didn't really know much about the band other than the albums, at least until the internet came along later, I couldn't as easily detect things like who was singing; Martin and Dave would swap out more frequently than you'd think, and Martin almost always did backing vocals even when Dave sang, which meant that I didn't always know who was doing what, and the sound of Depeche Mode's voice was a jumble in my mind between the two of them. This seems odd to me now, as I find their voices very distinctive and easy to pick out from each other, but I didn't necessarily have this same ability back when this was the most recent DM album I you could get. Besides, Dave's voice has changed over time, and he didn't always sing in the same style from album to album.
4) That's another tough one. The three singles mentioned above are certainly contenders, and I think the only other ones that could possibly match them in terms of how much do I like them would be Sacred or Nothing. (Little 15 is too unusual to be a favorite, although I do like it a lot.) At this point, I'm not sure I have anything much to add other than that Strangelove has gotten a little tired to me over the years; I probably heard it maybe a few times too many, so it's not likely to be the one I pick (although in more recent years, it's kind of making a comeback, because I haven't listened to Depeche Mode day in and day out nearly as much as I used to when I was younger.) I'd probably pick Sacred; an unappreciated uptempo, even danceable track that was, luckily, on the 101 setlist, but which otherwise got very little attention from the band, in spite of its obvious appeal.
5) Ten out of ten. This is peak Depeche Mode. As I said above, they didn't necessarily move the needle from where they'd been at Black Celebration, but they further explored, in a way that didn't feel repetitive or derivative, the same territory. It feels like polishing something that wasn't broke rather than taking a new direction. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, because I'll continue to review the remainder of their albums (eventually) but even the megahits Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion, which tend to be many fans' favorites, were steps backwards in my opinion, from their peak here at Music for the Masses. In spite of the presence of DM's most iconic track(s?) Enjoy the Silence and maybe Personal Jesus, the albums overall don't live up to this standard, and the direction of being noisy and unpolished was not an improvement on where they were.
Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
Black Celebration was the second Depeche Mode album I picked up, I think, about 1988 or so. It would have still been fairly newish, but not so new that Music For the Masses wasn't already out, because it was Strangelove specifically that brought me back to Depeche Mode in a big way. One could say that it makes a triptych of sorts with the albums Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward as the albums Gareth Jones produced, bringing his indie industrial methods to the band, which guys like Alan Wilder adopted and adapted readily and quickly, turning them into their own hallmark sounds. I rather tend to see it as the middle part of a triptych along with Some Great Reward and Music for the Masses as the mature, dark, aggressive electronic music sound that I associated with the band so strongly during the 80s.
It's a longer album than Some Great Reward; or rather, at least it has more tracks. It's arguably even more "artistic" if you will, with a number of songs that not only weren't ever going to be singles, they were even strange as album tracks or b-sides. Luckily, most of these experimental art tracks are short; but they actually add considerably to the album as a whole (with one exception, which I can't stand.)
The Black Celebration era is also notable for a number of non-album tracks of some note. Shake the Disease maybe doesn't quite have the right sound to fit on this album; it's certainly not dark enough to work. But, along with its b-side, Flexible, it featured prominently on the compilation Catching Up With Depeche Mode, and it is actually one of the boys' better tracks. Martin Gore said so as well, for whatever that's worth, and he regrets that it doesn't really fit in with the albums, because he thinks that it makes it unfortunately kind of not have a place, and get under-rated. He might be right, but they've done all that they can to promote the track even so; it usually plays in all of their live shows even now, for instance. The other single of this era was "It's Called a Heart" which the band didn't like, and many fans now consider it pretty forgettable too. It would have fit on the album even less well than Shake the Disease would have, although its b-side was Fly on the Windsceen, which was remixed and added as the second track.
But Not Tonight is another odd case. It isn't usually listed as one of the album tracks in rereleases, and is stuck in with the bonus tracks, but of course, I always had the US release (both in cassette tape and later CD) and it's just the last track on the album in the US. This is another one that the band themselves don't love, although they've gradually accepted that the fans seem to, and they've added it to some of their live sets in the last few years, at least, finally. In fact, curiously, I think the whole album works much better with it as the end, even though it has a different feel than the rest of the album. Black Celebration is on the whole so unrelentingly dark, that having this relatively lighter (but only relatively; if Erasure had done it, it wouldn't be considered light, for instance) it somehow seems like a cathartic coda to the album that the album needs in order to feel complete.
Of course, much of that is probably driven by the fact that I never heard the album without it and had no idea that it wasn't on the album in the UK until after I'd had the US release for years and listened to it hundreds if not thousands of times. With the deluxe edition re-release, the video documentary (which you used to be able to watch on Youtube, but now you can't seem to find it anywhere) Martin Gore paraphrased Daniel Miller, Mute's owner, as describing the album as: It's not good enough, there aren't any singles, and it'll never get played on the radio. Black Celebration has become a real cult classic, though, and it did have some successful singles after all, as well as being integral to building up a groundswell of sleeper fans in the US. I still think it stands alone as the best album, the most cohesive (even with But Not Tonight at the end!) and the one that feels the most like a solid piece of art. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's perfect: the weird ballads Sometimes and It Doesn't Matter Two are both strange; the former sounding like it's trying to be a remake (almost) of Somebody in a way. And the even stranger ballad Dressed in Black is just terrible and kind of embarrassing; it's a little hard to listen to. (A lot of the Martin Gore sung ballads are.) On the other hand, the strange ballad World Full of Nothing is brilliant and I consider it one of the stand-out tracks of the album.
The cover art is also a bit weird, and although I'm so used to it that it's hard for me to imagine anything else, I also have no idea what it's getting at, and apparently nobody from the band or the label ever really liked the piece that the photographer turned in either.
Anyway, on to the questions:
1) I would absolutely lose Dressed In Black. I really don't like that song at all. It has very little to redeem it other than at least it fits the tone of the rest of the album, I guess.
2) Stripped is the most radical, especially as it was released as a very unlikely single. The sampling is also just really strange; Dave Gahan's car starting is the opening of the song, a slowed down and treated sample of a motorcycle engine makes up the bassline, and sampled fireworks feature in the end of the song. It also features a single little strum on an acoustic guitar. Now, the band used a handful of guitars in Construction Time Again, but since they'd built their identity on being an electronic band, they had avidly avoided them for a long time too. Of course, I think they did kinda like them, and the producer on their next album kind of gave them the "go ahead" if you will to use them if they wanted to, and Music For the Masses has quite a bit of guitar in it, although it's often more subtle than you'd think, and for a while, I didn't actually recognize most of the uses of it, because it was kind of in the background. Now don't get me wrong; radical isn't a problem. Stripped is one of my favorite songs of all time, and certainly a standout on this album.
3) Which song have I listened to the most? I'm actually not sure. It's certainly either Stripped, Question of Time or But Not Tonight, but I don't know which of those three would really be in the lead.
4) But Not Tonight is my favorite song. It actually always probably was, although a few others give it at least a little bit of a challenge. This is odd because it's technically not part of the album, but again, because I have the US version and always have, it is as far as I'm concerned, because it is on my release, and it's not called out as a bonus track or anything even. I've long tried to wrangle down every remix of it I could find, but there weren't a lot (the Stripped maxi-single has an extended version.) However, the song has been covered a lot, and sometimes it sounds really different than the original in interesting ways. Scott Weiland's cover (lead singer for Stone Temple Pilots) in particular stands out as unique, although I'd wager that most of the covers are by synthpop artists that are at least in some degree similar to Depeche Mode in style (Jimmy Somerville, for instance, or Paradigm, or Elegant Machinery or Æon Rings.)
5) Ten out of ten. Along with Music For the Masses, it is the iconic Depeche Mode album.
Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
1984's Some Great Reward were when Depeche Mode really finally kinda evolved into the Depeche Mode everyone in the 80s thinks that they were. They were musically more mature, with an extremely unique sound; very dark, moody and often aggressive pop music made in many ways like industrial music was, except with pop song structure, and a string of hits that were a bit indie still in most respects. They were accessible, but not too accessible. While Depeche Mode of the first two or three albums were described as fresh-faced nice boys, I doubt anyone would say that about Depeche Mode of this era, with their kind of morally subversive hints at S&M and aggressive religious questioning, black leather and studs, and generally a much more "bad boy" approach.
It's funny, though—the exact same people who usually say that Some Great Reward is much more mature, also clearly point to teen angst as its primary overarching theme, and teen angst is... by definition... very immature. For many years, because I really liked the music, I made excuses and apologias for the themes, assuming that there must be a kind of allegorical vibe to the themes, and maybe there is. Martin Gore doesn't exactly go around discussing the meaning of his songs. But the more I think about it, the more I think that most likely the songs mean what they seem to mean, and the boys from Basildon just enjoyed being kinda bratty and rebellious. It wasn't mature, and in fact, thematically this particular album has aged poorly because of it; or rather, it doesn't mean very much to me anymore. Although I do still think that the music is brilliant, so there's that.
I still prefer Black Celebration and Music For the Masses, but this is the first Depeche Mode album that I really like. It still has lots of Alan Wilder's brilliant touches in the production (he also wrote a song on the album, as well as a B-side to People Are People). The themes, looking back at them now, seem kinda embarrassingly sophomoric. But it is what it is; when I was 17 or so back in the late 80s and very earliest 90s, I loved this album, and I still have a lot of nostalgia about it even so.
Anyway, to the questions:
1) This is actually a tough one. The album only has nine tracks, and they all kind of fit to create an almost symphonic whole, and this is probably the only of almost every DM album where there isn't one that I wish I could leave off. That said, I have to pick something, so either It Doesn't Matter or Stories of Old are the more forgettable of the tracks here. Of the two... urgh. Stories of Old, I guess. It's a toss-up.
2) Depeche Mode was consistently radical about a lot of things by this time. I think Blasphemous Rumours, especially as a single release, with it's really bizarre sounds, almost complete lack of percussion, etc. probably deserves the nod. Not because of the theme; as a Christian myself, I've seen people ask those kinds of questions routinely when they're twelve years old, and if at ten years older than that, they still think those are deep questions to doubt faith because of stuff like that, you're just spiritually and emotionally quite immature. But as an emotional and sonic achievement, the song is really something else.
3) I'm sure it's People Are People. Not only did I listen to it on the radio when it was new (although at the time, I wasn't paying nearly as much attention to music, so I didn't even know who it was) but I also had the fix-up compilation album People Are People too, and I had the 12" on vinyl pretty early. Plus, c'mon. It's really classic. I've never understood why the band themselves don't like this song very much and avoided playing it for years.
4) Curiously, Alan Wilder isn't well known as a song-writer; he penned two songs on the earlier album, one on this, and a few b-sides, at least some of which were instrumentals anyway. He doesn't even think of himself as much of a song writer. But for Some Great Reward, I think the one track he penned, If You Want, is my favorite, and it grew into my favorite fairly early.
To be fair, I don't listen to this stuff as much as I used to. It's been the better part of two decades since I really had loads of Depeche Mode in regular rotation, even though they were so pivotal to the formation of my taste in music in so many ways. So, I haven't necessarily changed the songs that I like best in a long time.
5) Nine out of ten. One of the best. I only mark it down because of the preponderance of embarrassingly juvenile themes and thinking that they were deep or something.
Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
Construction Time Again is a transitional album, although honestly, you could say that about almost all of the Depeche Mode albums; they were rarely content to retread what they had just done. If A Broken Frame was Martin Gore's first effort, and portions of it were him trying to still sound like Vince Clark, intermingled with his own early song-writing sensibilities, Construction Time is him feeling both more confident and experienced at song writing, and yet also veering off into a tangent thematically, talking a lot about a bunch of strange socio-economic and political themes, although doing so in a deliberately vague way. Importantly, it is also the album where Depeche Mode brought sampling and innovative recording to the mainstream; working with Gareth Jones, but not in a musique concrete kind of way; the techniques used by Einsturblahblahblah Neubaten (Collapsing New Buildings. That I can say. Although it tends to get the Fad Gadget song stuck in my head when I do.)
But it never sounded (to me, at least) like Depeche Mode had "arrived" at their classic iteration quite yet. Maybe that's not fair, and maybe it's an artifact of how I came into Depeche Mode a little later in the 80s, and Construction Time Again was back catalog by the time I got it, but maybe it's also because some of their experimentation was a little odd; it was fun to see them experimenting, but some of those experiments were best... not repeated, maybe. I, of course, first heard Depeche Mode when People Are People was popular enough to be on the radio, but it wasn't until Strangelove was on the radio that I really got into them and went and started buying their stuff. Music For the Masses was my first Depeche Mode album (and it was still pretty new at the time in 1988 or so) and to me, the triptych of Some Great Reward, Black Celebration and Music For the Masses was the fully matured Depeche Mode sound. (I'm one of the very few DM fans who actually think Violator was a step-backward into some hoakiness on occasion, and bad production (single versions of many of their tracks were better than the album versions.) To me, Construction Time Again was a weird little detour on their way to Some Great Reward. Although obviously, it has some great tracks, especially the timeless classic Everything Counts.
1) This is actually surprisingly tough. I really don't much like Pipeline, but at the same time, I appreciate the innovation in it. Just based on how much I like it, I think this one needs to go, but in terms of maybe tracks that don't do anything "new" or particularly interesting, but are just solid album tracks, I'd probably have to say Two Minute Warning or More Than a Party more deserves the cut. Can I punt and say Get the Balance Right, which they did cut? I know, I know. I'll go with Pipeline; it would have been just as innovative as a b-side, I suppose.
2) I think either Pipeline or Told You So counts here. Pipeline was probably more innovative in that it didn't even bother having a melody or stuff like that, which wasn't necessarily a great concept of an experiment. Told You So is really frantic and very kind of interesting and unlikely for what ended up being a single release, at least in some regions.
3) Well, clearly Everything Counts is the one I've heard the most. It's the most accessible, and it was released twice (live version in 1988 from 101). They also end pretty much every concert with it. I haven't necessarily tried to hear it the most, but I have regardless.
4) My favorite song, for many years, has been The Landscape Is Changing. The switch into a different instrumental coda has always sounded great to me. But... for many years? Still today? I'm not sure. That's a tough call. And Then... is surprisingly iconic to me too; it's a great track, and the album wouldn't be the same without it being in the place that it is in the album. And at the end of the day, Everything Counts still hasn't gotten tired or stale to me yet, in spite of a bit of cheesiness in the theme. I think when all is said and done, I'll actually pick that one: Everything Counts.
5) I don't know that it's improved on A Broken Frame, in terms of how easy is it to listen to. It's more mature in some ways, and stretches in interesting ways, but in other ways, that didn't necessarily make it any better. So, so far, all three of the first Depeche Mode albums get the same rating, seven out of ten.
Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
A Broken Frame, of course, the second album, but the first penned by Martin Gore. Because of it, it doesn't sound like Speak & Spell; it's a much moodier, darker album--although not nearly as dark as Depeche Mode later got. There were, however, two tracks that were obviously meant to sound like Vince Clark; Meaning of Love and A Photograph of You. Which are both good songs, but which don't fit the rest of the album very well. And while moody, the mood isn't nearly as dark as it was going to be in a couple more years.
Anyway, to answer the specific questions:
1) Satellite. Without question. This song is so weird and I just can't stand listening to it, quite frankly. It's not even successful in an experimental way, it's just very strange and unlikable and difficult to listen to.
2) I think I'll pick Leave In Silence. It's maybe not quite as musically radical as Monument or Shouldn't Have Done That, but it is pretty radical for a single, and it really didn't sound like anything else on the radio at the time. In fact, releasing it was an extremely bold move at the time, because who would have thought that the band that released Just Can't Get Enough and New Life would lead off a sophomore album.
3) The Sun and the Rainfall is the song I listen to the most. It's truly beautiful, and I've tried to round up every bootleg variant of it that I could. It also seems to really be a fan favorite too; one of those kind of cult classics.
4) The Sun and the Rainfall is also my favorite track. It really is great.
5) Seven out of ten. Very different than Speak & Spell, but of similar quality. It's fun to see the seeds of the darker Depeche Mode already starting to pop up too.
Vaughn George is doing a youtube series where he reviews all of the Depeche Mode albums in order, and he asks five questions in each:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
Annotated, in my version, of course! I have to discuss why!
1) This is really easy. "What's Your Name?" It's terrible, it's embarrassing; even they think so. It just doesn't fit, it's too stupid.
2) I actually think Photographic, even though it's the oldest, is the one that is the most radical. The layered little melodies, all of which are catchy, but which are just part of the tapestry of the song overall, are really quite genius, and the tone, being somewhat more serious than much of the rest of the album. Of course, the entire album was radical in the sense of taking electronic music; which had otherwise been very artsy-fartsy up to this point, and making a bunch of pop songs out of it was pretty unusual (although Human League did the same thing with Dare right about the same time.
3) Clearly "Just Can't Get Enough." Not necessarily on purpose, but it's just so ubiquitous. Curiously, because for most of the time I had the American version on cassette before I had any other version, I didn't have the "normal" version of this track, though, I had what I later heard was called the Split Mix on the single.
4) That's a little bit harder of a question, but I actually think I'm going to go with the B-side Ice Machine. It's another one that doesn't feel so... Vince Clarky, I guess. A lot of people have called this an Erasure album with a different vocalist, and while that's not really fair, I can see the point. A lot of the songs sound very Vince Clarky, and wouldn't have sounded at all out of place if Andy Bell had sung them and they'd appeared on Wonderland. But sometimes, even Vince Clark doesn't sound exactly like Vince Clark; and Photograph and Ice Machine are the ones I think that qualify here.
Now, that doesn't mean that I dislike Vince Clark for picking it here; I just feel like Depeche Mode and Erasure are too divergent from each other for me to really get my mind around the fact that they were one and same back in 1980 and 81. And I didn't really hear this until I was buying up Depeche Mode's back catalog in 1988 or so, after Music For the Masses had already come out. This probably made this album stand out as very unusual in a way that I certainly wouldn't have thought if I'd been listening to Depeche Mode from the beginning (in fact, I might well have struggled with the new direction of Martin Gore and Alan Wilder's direction later in the decade, shocking though that sounds now). So Vince Clark Depeche Mode songs just sound odd and out of place to me; I kind of like listening to the songs that sound like they wouldn't be so far out of place a year or two later.
5) This is hard. It's hardly my favorite of the DM albums, and it doesn't even sound like a DM album in most cases, but because it's so different, it can't really be "ranked" with them either. I guess out of ten, I'd give it a seven.
Likely, I'll get ahead of Vaughn. He's only halfway through Some Great Reward right now, but of course, he gives you a lot more content on the topic than I do. But then again, I don't know how often I'll make an update, and as we get to the more recent albums, I'll probably just peter out, because I don't even like them very much, honestly. It's hard for me to talk about them, because I don't listen to them if I can help it most of the time.
