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  • The Thursday Night Awesome: Yello “I Love You” (1983)

    Oh yeah. Yello. If you’ve heard of Yello at all, those are the first words that will pop into your head: Oo-oo-oo-ooh yeah. And then: Chick. Chicka-chickaaah. But the signature hit by the Zurich, Switzerland-based studio duo of Boris Blank and Dieter Meier – the one you hear as Ferris Bueller frantically scrambles to get home to bed before either of his parents or the school principal realize he was ever gone – was really sort of the beginning of the end of Yello’s awesomeness. They’d put out three ridiculously inventive electronic dance records, often satirizing the culture of consumption and celebrity with both the oversold charm and the unabashed cynicism of an election year politician, but with later records like One Second (1986), Flag (1988), and Zebra (1991), their music started to compliment the culture of excess more than critique it, sort of internalizing the expensive emptiness they had always represented the opposite of.

    No longer satire, Yello’s music became the soundtrack – literally – for late 80s trash culture, showing up in movies like She Devil (the Rosanne Barr vs. Meryl Streep divorce-revenge dark comedy, which I actually love), Nuns on the Run, and – oh gawd, no – The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. No question their later records are stylish and they sound really good (I actually like Flag a lot), but they’re missing a lot of the impish fun of their early singles, like this one from their third full-length You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess: “I Love You”. (I know.)

  • The Thursday Morning Awesome: Chumbawamba “She’s Got All the Friends” (2000)

    From their sorely underappreciated album WYSIWYG (their first new album following their breakout hit “Tubthumping”), here’s Chumbawamba and their – [giggle] – affectionate tribute to Paris Hilton and her ilk. “You can buy your friends, but I’ll hate you for free.”

  • The Wednesday Night Awesome: Cocteau Twins “Iceblink Luck” (1990)


    In the early 80s, the Cocteau Twins invented an ethereal pop hybrid with a throw-out-the-rulebook post-punk ethos and a gift for swirling gothic ambience: all ripply underwater basslines, and the nonsensical (and often wordless) but lovely (in a brittle sort of way) vocals of lead singer Elisabeth Fraser; sounds that were paired with appropriately evocative-bordering-on-gibberish song titles (“Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops”) and album cover art (by Vaughan Oliver/23 Envelope, whose work is as synonymous with the Cocteau Twins as Roger Dean’s is with Yes) that was beautifully and tantalizingly non-representative. (What is that black stuff on the cover of The Pink Opaque? Tar? Leather? Water?) A Cocteau Twins record wasn’t just a collection of songs – it was an art object.

    Still, by mid-decade, it seems that they had painted themselves into a musical corner, and their albums were increasingly devoid of ideas and drifting off into new age banality. With their 1988 album, Blue Bell Knoll, their first to be picked up by a major U.S. label, the group flirted with a more radio-friendly pop sound. The band’s melodies were still doodly and Fraser’s vocals, while never prettier, were just as indecipherably abstract as ever; but the beats were bigger and the guitars – especially the bass – felt more concrete. Two years later, the group made a jarring leap into straightforward pop with their 1990 album Heaven or Las Vegas. For the first time ever, Fraser was singing words and phrases that actually meant something when you strung them together; meanwhile the melodies were less flighty, more singable, and the production was all shiny surfaces. The album’s lead single was “Iceblink Luck”, probably the happiest song the band ever recorded. Though, of all their songs, it’s probably (by design) the one that came closest to hitting the U.S. pop charts, this is one of those cases where a conscious “selling out” also resulted in an improbable artistic peak.