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  • A look at 1983… and the ways I find music I like

    Was 1983 really 30 years ago?

    I had a surreal experience this morning as I struggled to wake up with some strong coffee. I turned on the TV and switched the channel to nuvoTV, a channel devoted to modern Latino entertainment. I’m not Latino, but I’d rather watch re-runs of the old television show, Fame, than any of the morning news shows. This morning, the episode of Fame that aired was a concert they did highlighting the hits of 1983. Songs like “Billie Jean”, “Beat It”, “Sweet Dreams are Made of This”, “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, “Take Me To Heart”, and “Electric Avenue” were performed in rapid succession, giving viewers a look at 1983. It was like the soundtrack of my youth was being badly covered right before my very eyes. Suddenly, I felt horribly old. The throbbing pain in my hip this morning doesn’t help matters.

    The camera panned over the audience and I saw lots of adolescents in the crowd with feathered and winged hair. Up on the stage, actor Billy Hufsey wore a white Members Only jacket as he and actress Cynthia Gibb sang “We’ve Got Tonite”, a song originally made famous by Bob Seger in 1978 and turned into a duet by Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton. He was soon joined by the late Gene Anthony Ray and Debbie Allen, who sang a duet of Lionel Richie’s “You Are”, while Carlo Imperato and Valerie Landsburg singing “Never Gonna Let You Go”, by Sergio Mendez. Then there was the show stopper! Irene Cara, who starred in the film version of Fame and was on my favorite children’s show, The Electric Company back in the day, came on stage in a sequined jump suit to sing the theme to Flashdance. It was followed by a totally overwrought cover rendition of “Up Where We Belong” originally sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. Of course, Irene Cara sang the last song, the theme song for both the movie and television show, Fame. It was a very glitzy, high speed show. It was very… 1983.


    Valerie Landsburg sings “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Love Is A Battlefield”…

    I mainly watch old episodes of Fame for fun. When I was young, I paid attention to the storylines and characters. I looked up to them. Thirty years later, I think the show is very cheesy. It’s still entertaining, but in a different way. Now I like to watch it because I enjoy snarking on it. Sometimes the show is so snarkworthy that I post clips on a friend’s Facebook page, knowing that she gets it! Then it occurs to me that in 1983, thirty years ago meant 1953, which back then seemed positively ancient. Even today, it seems like 1983 is not as different as 2013 was. Is that just because I’m so old?

    Where did all the years go? It seems like yesterday I was a ten year old kid who loved all the new music on the radio. Nowadays, I find out about new music on the Internet, mostly. Sometimes I hear it on television, too. I also find a lot of good music on YouTube, if you can believe that. In fact, last night I was watching an adorable pet video from YouTube and noticed that I liked the music in the background. Using Shazam, I found out the name of the song and the musicians who performed it, The Ipanemas, a Brazilian band that has been around for over forty years. I downloaded the album.


    This inspired me to buy music!

    Last night was not the first time I’ve found music in that way, either. A few months ago, I was watching a gymnastics montage someone made and I liked the background music. The video had a link to YouTube, so I downloaded the album. Later, I reviewed it on Epinions.com, realizing that the piece that had led me to download was pretty much the only music on the album that I really liked a lot.


    And this inspired me to buy music, too…

    It occurs to me that thirty years ago, finding music in this fashion would have been unthinkable. Back then, I found music on the radio and sometimes television. The music I heard was usually popular stuff, which explains why I enjoy so much cheesy music from the past. Today’s young people have a vast array of places to find good music. I can go to any number of sources to find music I like and my choices can be tailored. In 1983, no one was thinking about Internet radio sites like Spotify or Pandora.com.

    In a way, I think it’s kind of sad that traditional radio has sort of gone out of style. When I was in college, I was a disc jockey for the campus radio station. It was a lot of fun and a great way to be part of the community. Likewise, when I was growing up, listening to local radio stations was a great way to connect to the local community. I still remember a lot of the disc jockeys I used to listen to back in the day… and I listened not just because of the music, but because I liked the radio personalities, too. Today, I would be hard-pressed to tell you who any of the local disc jockeys are in my community. I don’t listen to the radio anymore, so I’ve lost that connection. In fact, the only time I listen to local radio is when there’s a weather emergency and the power is out.

    Maybe I should commit to listening to the radio again. I could take it a step further and pull out some blank cassettes so I can tape the music. On the other hand, even local disc jockeys have kind of gone the way of the dodo bird. Nowadays, everything is syndicated, just like on television. *Sigh*… this makes me wonder how we’ll be finding music in 2043.

  • #14 album of 2012 – Paralytic Stalks by Of Montreal

    Artist: Of Montreal

    Album: Paralytic Stalks

    Perhaps it’s because the real ending of the Beatles was so disappointing — four men who’d pushed each other to brilliance got tired of doing so, released a spotty final record, and spread outward to fairly ordinary musical careers — but sometimes I’ll see a new and unrelated record as if it of_montreal_paralytic_stalkswere an alternate Choose Your Own Adventure of the Beatles’ story. Of Montreal’s Paralytic Stalks, for example, is the version where John and Paul and George and Ringo go ahead and loathe each other, but express it in bitter lyrics and a deepening creative tension where they’re ever more inclined each year to reach in and screw with each other’s songs, yanking them back and forth in increasingly unlikely directions. Without ever messing up their best melodies. Oh, and they’ve kept doing this long enough to be as influenced by disco and Parliament/ Funkadelic as by modernist orchestral music… although Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road remain in sight and in mind at most times.

    In reality, Of Montreal are a shifting collective led by an American named Kevin Barnes. They began playing giggly psychedelic folk, developed a leftist political edge, then tightened their sound to make a couple of ebullient but professional pop records, Satanic Panic in the Attic (’04) and the Sunlandic Twins (’05), both of which sound more than a little like the Magical Mystery Tour re-done with drum machines, synthesizers, and funky electronic bass. Barnes sold one of his catchiest songs, Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games, to Outback Steakhouse for rewriting with jingle lyrics, a tribute to commercialized gluttony which sits quite poorly with attacks on the greed of politicians. So after a few defensive and snotty interviews, he started writing about topics he could bring sincerity (and redeeming sly humor) to, like his favorite drugs and sex acts. The songs over several albums got less catchy and more complex, which often is a trade I’m happy with, but which in this case mostly lost me. I may or may not have been influenced by the time I waited 2+ hours past Of Montreal’s scheduled stage appearance at Gate City Noise before they showed up, stoned out of their minds and barely able to half-remember their songs … but not, I assume, rejecting that night’s paycheck either.

    Paralytic Stalks is a triumph, though. On the one hand, it’s overstuffed and bursting with some of my favorite melodies Of Montreal have ever recorded. On another hand, it’s as expressively vicious (outwardly and inwardly) a set of relationship lyrics as I’ve ever seen, which also makes its periodic stumbles towards truce and redemption more powerful. On a third hand — Paralytic Stalks being a deformed creature with many non-standard body parts — it combines Barnes’s long-established interests in psychedelia, pop, funk, cabaret, and disco with a brand new interest in strings and flutes, long droning tone clusters, and outbreaks of free-jazz orchestration. All of which are used with the expressionist power of a Edvard Munch painting, and are reined in to bring a form of peace.

    The poppiest moments make sense to explore first. Spiteful Intervention is the obvious single, even with dissonant strings and harpsichord peeking around the edges and rickety drums collapsing in the background. Beginning with dramatic narration-singing — “It’s fucking sad that we need a tragedy to occur to gain a fresh perspective in our lives/ Nothing happens for a reason, there’s no use pretending, you know the sad truth as well as I” — it moves into lilting sing-song over ’80s dance-pop. Then it launches into the acrobatic chorus melody: “I spend my waking hours haunting my own life/ I made the one I love start crying tonight/ and it felt good! Still, there must be some more elegant solution”. The melody spins its own memorable variations and continues: “Lately all I can produce is psychotic vitriol/ that really should fill me with guilt”. The backup singing supports a mood like the mad laughter before a breakdown. Yet it’s the catchiest thing — and if quite exaggerated from the worst things I’ve ever felt (so far) about anyone I loved, it’s recognizably vivid.

    Dour Parentage, riding in on massed flutes and echoey drums, is top-notch experimental Stevie Wonder with modern recording technology.  We Will Commit Wolf Murder is a pretty ’80s dance tune and love song, chopped and screwed: the vocal production and instrumental arrangements changing almost every line, and the sentiments along the line of “Someone’s terrorized my psyche to get even/ Lately you’re the only human I believe in” and “I’m considered ugly from every angle/ You’re the only beauty I don’t want to strangle”. Malefic Dowery is genteel pre-rock drawing-room pop, with a bit of hymnal a-capella, about how “Now I feel that you’re provoking me with your fidelity/ that your loyalty and affections are somehow a vulpine act of hostility/ Now we’re a bore, we’re afternoon TV”. It’s sort of a love song too.

    The long tracks, 7 to 13 minutes, are the ones with the thorniest passages. I don’t find ’em difficult — my Dad was (among other things) a minor-but-talented modernist composer who played me Bartok and Penderecki when I visited him — but for those of you who do, I’ll point out simply that the weird classicisms aren’t a gimmick; they’re *used*, in a surprisingly straightforward way. The songs start with hummable melodies (especially Wintered Debts, like Paul McCartney and Marvin Gaye getting together to taunt you personally, and Authentic Pyrrhic Remission, soulful and sunny). They move into weird tonalities, slowly-evolving repetitions, and aggressive dynamics when the lyrics get, well, even more desperate than usual. They return to pleasant tunes (not the same as they began with) in search of partial resolutions. I’d hate to marry someone like Kevin Barnes; well, that isn’t news. There are nights — not too many, but some — when I’d hate to marry someone like me either. Paralytic Stalks is a masterful evocation of that. Not bad for such good pop songs.

    – Brian Block

    To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

     

  • “Hey man, is that Freedom Rock?”

    Gone are the days of television promoted albums like Freedom Rock…

    When I was coming along back in the 70s and 80s, I watched A LOT of TV. And I watched a lot, even though I had a hobby that took a lot of time in the afternoons. I was a veritable television fiend back in my early days and I’m sad to say, nothing’s changed in terms of my television viewing habits. In fact, I even tend to watch a lot of the same shows I watched thirty years ago if I can find them on the boob tube. Case in point, I still watch multiple episodes of The Brady Bunch every afternoon, unless something else, like a particularly compelling episode of Jerry Springer, has otherwise caught my attention.

    One thing I have noticed, however, is that the era of compilation albums being promoted on TV is now apparently over. I’m sure that’s because nowadays, a lot of people, myself included, download individual songs instead of purchasing compact discs. In fact, it looks like a lot of people aren’t even bothering to buy music the way they used to. I notice a lot of my Facebook friends listen to Pandora or Spotify or any of the other Internet radio stations that are now available to everyone.

    I can’t help it, though. I miss the ads for compilation albums. Fellow Pop Rock Nation writer and Facebook friend George Bounacos sometimes engages me in games of SongPop. He once marveled at my skill at that particular game. I have to admit, a large part of the reason I’m good at SongPop is because besides having very eclectic musical tastes, I learned an awful lot about music trivia by watching ads like the one for Freedom Rock.


    Remember this ad? It used to air all the time, with its scrolling snippets of classic songs that were popular before I was born or when I was too young to care.

    Freedom Rock was not the only ad that educated me about music. There were so many of them. I remember back in the late 1970s and early 80s, there would be ads for K-Tel records. I have heard that K-Tel compilations were of somewhat dubious quality. I wouldn’t know from personal experience because I never owned one. But I remember the ads…


    I don’t remember this specific ad, but I do remember so many like it. Actually, as a fan of 70s music, I’d probably love to own the collection being advertised here. I love me some Starbuck, after all.

    Some of the ads were hilarious. For instance, check out this commercial for a music collection directed to those who enjoy R&B and soul music.


    I’ve been an adult for well over twenty years and I’ve never known any of my friends to get all dressed up and have a group date at someone else’s apartment where they slow danced to an album they got in the mail. However, I have to admit this commercial kills me, especially when the guy at the end says, “No, my brother! You’ve got to buy your own!” Some friend, huh?

    If you preferred more Wonder bread style music, you could purchase Lost In Love.


    Looks like the folks in this ad were more interested in sitting on the couch, drinking wine, necking, and listening to some of the love song classics of the late 1980s… Hey, that compilation even had Donny Osmond’s comeback single, “Sacred Emotion”. Haven’t heard that one in a long while. I remember how people made fun of Donny in the late 80s for trying to reclaim his music career. Bear in mind that I was a teenager back then!

    For those who loved southern rock, there was Goin’ South. I would have liked this album, too…

    I actually own a couple of albums that were once hawked on TV. I purchased a “highlights” version of Easy Rock in Columbia, South Carolina back when I was in graduate school. It’s actually a great CD. I would have liked to have bought the double disc set advertised here…


    I used to listen to this all the time while writing and editing public health articles for the bureau of epidemiology where I worked at the time. It was great for concentrating.

    I also own Pure Funk, another great TV compilation disc. But besides being a great mix of music, Pure Funk had a hilarious commercial that went with it!


    Pure Funk was made by the same folks who brought us all three volumes of Pure Disco… also great fun!

    I know these types of ads haven’t gone away completely. I’ve seen the infomercials for the Time-Life Singers and Songwriters collection, for instance.


    This particular compilation has been hawked for at least twenty-three years. I remember when I was a freshman in college, someone who lived in my dorm had actually ordered the double disc set that was being sold back then. It must have done well, since they’ve expanded it. I would probably buy this if I weren’t already a compulsive music collection who downloads at the drop of a hat. I don’t know that I want to see a whole infomercial dedicated to it, though.

    Freedom Rock is probably among my favorite of all the compilation album ads. Time marches on, though, and with the decline of albums we’ve seen the decline of other associated things. I remember when I bought my first copy of the soundtrack for Purple Rain, it was on vinyl… and I got a free poster with it! LPs also allowed for some impressive artwork. I remember when I first bought Michael Jackson’s Thriller, it had drawings MJ had done in the liner notes. CDs don’t lend themselves as well to that. And digital downloads pretty much eliminate art. Even the downloads I’ve had that came with digital booklets pretty much get ignored. When I was younger and bought a record, I’d listen to the music and pore over the innards… if they came with them.

    I know I’m a Luddite. Oh well. George can take comfort in the fact that I don’t listen to newer music as much and don’t get exposed to it as much because the compilation ads have declined. That makes me less of a SongPop contender. And I can take comfort in the fact that Amazon sells a lot of those albums that used to not be available in stores!