Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1980
by Scott Miller

"The World's a Mess, It's In My Kiss" - X
1980 was probably the last pivotal music year except for 1991. Things didn't go from fun and rocking to not and not like on January 1st in Boogie Nights, but something about that aspect of the movie sure got a strong "yep" from me. The eighties were chilling, sobering—AIDS, the death of John Lennon, Joy Division and Factory Records, and the death of Ian Curtis. It had started to feel like punk and new wave didn't quite work anymore, but a lot of good stuff happened. Bands were casting around, and it felt like there should be a next great thing, it just wasn't there yet. Uh, ska? X seemed a little three years ago, with the punk names and the Xs, like, had Los Angeles been thinking the whole thing over all this time? This song sounds fantastic to my ears today, especially the Ray Manzarek organ, and John Doe's resonant and complex singing, of which Exene's voice is something like a secret ingredient.

"That's Entertainment" - The Jam
This is very lovely—much more musical than the Jam usually sound; I wonder: is that the key to its Morrissey certification, or is it the lyrics? It took a long time for it to bug me that I didn't quite know what the lyrical point here was. I suppose it's sort of, "Real life—that's my entertainment." There's something quaintly twentieth-century about that—entertainment was a kind of god, hypostatic. Who's getting the "kick in the balls" could matter less than the sheer richness of the fabric of life. Now that's no longer poetry, it's YouTube.

"Sister Europe" - The Psychedelic Furs
Wow, that Steve Lillywhite snare sound screams "eighties." As with most certifiably forward-looking developments, the Furs gave some impression of being the opposite: "psychedelic" meant out-of-date, right? The reverb and the (winningly sharp) sax were happening Brit things but they still read as ghostly apparitions along with the "stupid" Steinway and Charles Aznavour. I saw them live; they were incredible.

"I Got You" - Split Enz
"I don't know why sometimes I get frightened"—that is one classic chorus. I don't know the whole Finn brothers history, but frequently enough I hear something remarkable from their early seventies cabaret prog period. The terse, mechanical vocal delivery here typifies the later new wave style of hitmakers like the Cars and Devo. This is a more inspired composition than anything on Freedom Of Choice, though "Gates Of Steel" comes close.

"Sheba" - Mike Oldfield
This perfectly gorgeous, rather new agey melody from the guy who did the theme from The Exorcist is sung in what may be some exotic language, but I would not be shocked to learn is someone's good faith attempt to write a song in actual baby talk, like "Neegy Noggy Noo." The number of people I've played this for and had love it is, well, zero, but I'm no closer to backing down.

"The Great Curve" [edit] - Talking Heads
Remain In Light was vastly influential; I never heard the words "world beat" before that album. I was a little disappointed, myself. I've heard they went into the studio with no songs, and that would go a long way toward explaining why I didn't hear any songs. This may in fact have been the record to convince the world it didn't need songs—maybe this and "Rapper's Delight." That's refreshingly paradigm-shifting and all, but close enough to "out of ideas" to bode a long sustainability crisis. "Once In a Lifetime" is intriguing and gets all the airtime; "The Great Curve" has the most musical resonance, with its folk, blues, Spanish, and African overtones. This is also the best and wildest Adrian Belew guitar solo on record. It's simply staggering.

"Requiem" - Killing Joke
They reminded me of Black Sabbath—people in such a dark mood they spontaneously invent a variety of heavy metal. These are folks who actually believed nuclear holocaust was coming any day (not to suggest that in 1980 that was delusional). I think this is my favorite heavy, sinister guitar riff ever.

"Wicked Gravity" - Jim Carroll Band
Jim Carroll was already pretty famous because of the Basketball Diaries, so it was a little tricky to listen to this album both because I was wondering if a poet trying to think and act like a singer was resulting in something forced, and because I was wondering if it would be an embarrassing trotting around of his misspent youth as a marketing move. "Wicked Gravity" may even be a little bit about that in lines like "It's where silence can teach me to sing" and "They think the pearls I wear are pills." But besides the fact that this is good rock music, he could clearly innovate at the level of the delivery—bending notes into the glides of speech, repeating the middle words of couplets for emphasis like, "My guardians quit, they quit before they started their search."

"Watching the Wheels" - John Lennon
Lyrically, this is John at his contentious, outside-the-box best: he's out of the world of trying to validate himself in the arena of fame, and he invites us to join him. Musically, Jack Douglas's unfocused production makes it an uphill struggle for Double Fantasy, but "Watching the Wheels" shines through. Yoko's "Walking On Thin Ice" was actually pretty good, too.

"Eugene" - Essential Logic
1980 was a big year for saxophone, with plenty of thanks going to Lora Logic and Essential Logic. This is a fantastic, dense sound, with spectacularly adventurous harmonic intervals and chord progressions. It's really no less than genius that it all hangs together so well. The words seem to be one of those near-sci-fi indictments of the human species; I believe I hear the line "you never earned your fossil fuels." The vocals have a peculiar throaty quality that I find refreshing and strangely appropriate to the subject matter.

"Stomping All Over the World" - Kimberley Rew
Fresh from the Soft Boys, with a pop directness and no fear of confrontation (check out "Hey War Pig"), Kimberley Rew came on like a big indie force, and surprised the world with the megahit-capable Katrina and the Waves. "I'll go stomping all over the world/Just to get back to my blue eyed girl" is about as perfectly as you can do simple, fat-as-hell analog era pop rock.

"Up the Neck" - Pretenders
"I rubbed my face in the sweat that ran down his chest/It was all very run of the mill/But I noticed his scent started to change somehow/His face went berserk and the veins bulged on his brow/I said, 'baby, ah sweetheart'." That's an amazingly disturbing and well-dramatized passage from "Up The Neck," one of a few great songs from the Pretenders' classic Chris Thomas produced debut. I was torn between this and "Precious," which also has high-impact dramatic crescendos. That's more of a rocker, but this is the best Chrissie Hynde ever was at working an almost easy listening soul territory for the purpose of sharing and humanizing emotions of distress.

"Noise In This World" - The English Beat
There were other aspects than "world beat" to a general taste for rhythmic quirkiness that flourished in 1980—it pains me to leave off "Fa Ce La" from Crazy Rhythms by the Feelies—and the highest profile beat du jour was ska, which has kept resurfacing every couple of years ever since. "Mirror In the Bathroom" was the hit, but my favorite was the bold, modern-jazz-tinged "Noise In This World." The melody on "crossed-out names in your address book" is from another planet, and I love the weird harmony sax outbursts.

"Kingdom Of Love" - The Soft Boys
The horror movie garage rock of Underwater Moonlight came right out of nowhere, and took some time to find an audience—but eventually did, thanks to the extremely insightful folks at London's Bucketfull Of Brains magazine, my early eighties music bible. The teasing twin guitars of "Kingdom" are too good to ignore, but there are many other stunning and diverse moments, e.g. the crazed build-up of "Insanely Jealous" or the chiming Vincent Price peculiarity of the B-side "Strange."

"New Amsterdam" - Elvis Costello and the Attractions
Another eighties thing: reverb—okay again. I couldn't deal with the dream-state Stax soul of Get Happy!! at first. I just thought E.C. should quit with the play-acting and do whatever was supposed to come after new wave. Sound like a confused opinion? You should have heard the music I was trying to make myself (that's sarcasm; you should not in fact hear that music). Anyway, I've since figured out he just needs to stretch himself a lot, so let him, but the first song I took to was the seductive "New Amsterdam." Another thing I learned to just go with was the lyric sets made up entirely of figures of speech; there's a certain illumination to be revealed there—a sort of, "See—this is what people mean when they talk like that!"

"Can't Make Love" - Wall Of Voodoo
And another eighties thing: drum machine. There were the Young Marble Giants ("Final Day": another omission I regret), I forget who else. It got me to thinking if I couldn't hold a band together, there was always that—even tried to make it work, contributing to the usually painful music I made in 1980. Anyway, no one did it better than Wall Of Voodoo. Steve Wynn and I went to see Wall Of Voodoo and Gun Club at the Whiskey at about this time, coming away with polar opposite opinions about which band was good. Stan Ridgway was hilarious, and the three-synth onslaught had an otherworldly, brain-buzzing power. "I'm a nice guy but I don't love you/I just want to sleep with you" delivered as one of Stan's wiseacre Will Rogers asides is so unexpected it's almost critique.

"Black and White" - The dB's
Chris Stamey's B-Side "Soul Kiss" grabbed me first: "Yes, your party dress/It was my obsession/Now I'm impervious to that/It's your soul kiss, that's what I miss." I think that was my very first marveling at the devilry with words and music that was Chris's gift. But "Black and White" is in its own way just as nervy, and arguably the first college rock classic. The string arpeggio style has to have been formative for Pete Buck. Drummer Will Rigby and bassist Gene Holder do amazing work here, too.

"Rescue" - Echo and the Bunnymen
I don't follow British influence genealogy with any authority, but it sure seems like Ian MacCulloch had completely developed the U2 style by the time I heard it from anyone else, like U2. That was the cred with which I decorate what is already the chorus hook of the decade that is, "Won't you come on down to my/Won't you come on down to my rescue." The bass is threatening to be too busy, but wins the gamble with a tough, uningratiating bark to the otherwise thin sound, leaving power in reserve to fuel the payoff moments.

"Tell Me When My Light Turns Green" - Dexy's Midnight Runners
If the art of record production slipped in the eighties, don't blame Pete Wingfield's pistol-hot production of Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. This song wasn't as well-known as "Geno," which in turn wasn't as well-known as "Come On, Eileen," but it's the one. Built around one of the all-time best sax riffs ever, it features a decidedly weird, yelpy vocal from Kevin Rowland that is actually a fairly amazing technical achievement. He has a lot to say, too; his internal dialog spills over into memorable album credit interjections like, "Old clothes do not make a tortured artist"—which ironically complements the Smiths-inventing duotone archive photo graphic of a youth with bags packed as people hustle into a street.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" - Joy Division
"Love Will Tear Us Apart" cuts immediately to the core truth of relationship distress: "When routine bites hard and ambitions are low, and resentment rides high." With some of the hardest Rs since Johnny Cash, Ian Curtis sounded American, inviting a Jim Morrison comparison even beyond that of his recent untimely death. With the likes of "Atrocity Exhibition," he had soon enough established an unchallenged reputation as the darkest lyricist going, and it was not a play-acted dark, but immediate, accurate, unembellished, and shared unflinchingly. "Why is the bedroom so cold, turned away on your side/Is my timing that flawed, our respect run so dry?" Only after "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is it obvious how clumsily breakup songs ordinarily try to get at the point, when the point is simple: resentment riding high; respect run dry. Twenty-Four Hour Party People has it that the drums were recorded on the roof of the studio; whatever the case, the drums and the drum sound are awe-inspiring. The snare/tom intro, rolling in with those big acoustic chords, is immense. Martin Hannett's production is uncanny; you always hear the word "spare," but the way the bass and keyboards hint around the chords without too much commitment is a matter of rare delicacy. (And you would hear that 16th-note hi-hat pattern everywhere after this.) Ian's is a heart that speaks in plain language across the gulf of death: resist resentment; find respect.