February 3, 2009
that's me in the corner
2/3/09
I would like to say a word on behalf of Howard Jones. Perhaps he's not as cool as your other '80s artists, and his production style hasn't aged particularly well, but I heard "Like To Get To Know You Well" in the car tonight, and let's just say the motherfucker knows how to write a song.
The thing about "The Eighties" is this: whenever a decade is fetishized, romanticized and sold back to us for consumption, the conveyor belt of nostalgia only has so much room on it. The songs that boomeranged back through the '80s Revival™ seem largely random - we get "Rock Lobster" (which was almost never heard in the actual 1980s) yet never hear a song, like, say, "It's a Mistake" by Men at Work or "Sussudio" by Phil Collins, even though those songs were on endlessly.
"Major Tom, Part II" makes the cut, "Suddenly Last Summer" does not. "Take My Breath Away" does, "Harden My Heart" does not. You get the picture. And sadly for Howard Jones, barely any of his pop songs have made it across the chasm.
Think back to "New Song" (you know, don't crack up, bend your brain, see both sides, throw off your mental chains) or "What is Love" or "Life in One Day". Better yet, take all of the clichéd Yamaha synth sounds out of "No One is to Blame", and you've got a huge hit for some artist today - the vocal line is easily that good. Last week, I heard Lucy in the car seat singing the refrain from "Things Can Only Get Better" (whoa whoa whoa-aa whoa whoa whoa-aa-aa) after hearing part of it earlier.
What Howard Jones needed, and did not have, was the essential recipe for any band/artist to achieve true commercial greatness: a successful album in the era after their initial breakthrough. For our generation, there was a pretty huge rift in culture between 1988 and 1992; if you survived that, you could survive anything.
The Pet Shop Boys could have been an electronic oddity from the '80s, but zoomed back in 1993 with "Very", one of the best albums of the genre. New Order could have been stuck in Mancunian gloom, but broke through again in '93 with "Republic". U2 and REM solidified their wavering foothold on the music scene with "Achtung Baby" and "Out of Time", respectively.
But for the rest of these musicians, like Howard Jones, there are but a few archivists like me left, the ones who still remember the feel and the mood of that old era; the songs that were actually on the radio and in our hindbrains, the smells of a time untouched by relentless nostalgia and the dry-humping of the endless Irony Machine. I can still hear The Budster singing along to "No One is to Blame" - on cassette - in his fourth-floor dorm room in Hinton James, and that makes all the difference.
Posted by Ian Williams at February 3, 2009 11:37 PMHoward Jones -- I haven't thought of him in, well, decades. I did like him in the 80s, though, as well as some of the post-Eagles sounds of Glenn Frey and Don Henley ("Dirty Laundry" anyone? My college's hockey team now blasts that song through the PA system when they first skate onto the ice). I also was into Phil Collins's solo music.
Anyone else besides lame me think "Rob Pattinson" when they saw Howard's hair in the pic above? If not, congrats. If so, you know way too much about the "Twilight" phenomenon!
And do you feel scared?
I do.
But I won't stop and falter.
And if we throw it all away,
Things can only get better.
BTW, the video for "What Is Love" was great.
"Dream into Action" was a great album. (Well, to listen to. I'm not astute to know anything about music production. I just know what I like.)
What really surprises me is that Rick Springfield (don't laugh), for all the great rock songs he made in the early '80s, is barely ever played or referred to. I hosted a trivia game a few years ago and there was a group of twentysomethings from Australia playing and even THEY couldn't identify his songs.
I have the LP single extended version of "things can only get better"--fabulous black and white cover than now for all the world looks to me like the negative imaging of all the ipod commercials. hmmmmmm. love this post. thanx.
Howard Jones is fantastic, and I heard one of the DJs on XM go off on the fact that all of his music, even the melancholy stuff, has the promise of happiness and greatness mixed in. Things Can Only Get Better seems to be the spine of his career.
I would say that Thompson Twins are also sufferers of their untranslatable style. The songs themselves are really smart musically, and they were really fun to dance to when we could dance to music that sounded like that. And the lyric, that everyone knows "You ask if I love you... well, what can I say? You know that I do, and that this is just one of those games that we play..." That's some fantastic writing there.
Men At Work survive a little better, although they're also largely lost. The song "Overkill" is a ridiculously powerful pop song, and this was a time for music when you had to be more than some jagg-off with a guitar or a keyboard.
The top of the popcharts now contain songs that require one of two things - 1) Snark and the ability to play six chords on a guitar, plus a hopelessly attractive lead singer, or 2) Production values that require the full scope, bredth and finance that can only be provided by a multinational corporation.
That's not to say the music now is worse than in the 80s, the fact is we have access to a lot more now and our lives aren't dominated by the charts the way they once were. But in terms of having a cultural touchstone, a #1 hit that best describes an era, the big hit from 2008 was TI's "You Can Do Whatever You Want", a horrible atonal song that people laughed *at* as much as they sang along with. Compared even to "Jump" or "Shout" or "Centerfold" or "Maneater"... I don't think it's a function of my advanced age to think the charts are no longer where we should look for any cultural meaning.
i wish you hadn't said "ssusudio"... that's gonna be in my doggone head all day long!
Take that, Annie!
Seth, I can't believe you got here before me!
.......... (blank horror)
Sean--really?!?!? Howard Jones, "Big Hair No Voice"? The cardinal flaw of Howard Jones, to me, was always his thin, reedy, unexpressive, whingy nonsinging. Where's richness, texture? Hell, where's volume? He practically choked on himself, "Does a-ny-bah-dee-louv-eh-ne-bah-dee-ah-noh-weh.."
I'm equally awestruck that you, who has such a finely tuned ear for great vocals, would give ups to the seizure-inducing badness that is the Thompson Twins. The lines you referenced are to me the lyric nadir of the 80s decade. Again, the vocals are...are...just beyond my capacity to describe...limp mohawks and Alice-in-Wonderland hats surge forth in my memory like so many pieces of nightmare dredged up from a deep, dark, blessedly forgotten place.
I'm duly humbled...
I've always laughed at my mom because she seemed so stuck in the 50s and 60s musically. Then I realized one day that I had stopped flipping stations whenever a song came on that I didn't know or like. A gob of stations available to me on XM and I stay tuned to the 80s channel, with only the occasional jump over to the 90s channel.
That, or I'm listening/belting along to the Clef Hangers or another college a cappella group - also the music of my "good ol' days." But even that isn't as good as it used to be. I don't know enough about music production to make a truly educated comment, but I do know they're doing something different with CAP these days. It sounds waaay too realistic, if that makes any sense. Too smooth, too produced. It makes me sad. If I wanted to listen to the real version, well...I would.
Anyway, I LOVE the acoustic version of "Overkill" by Colin Hay...as featured on Scrubs. ;-)
Oops, sleep deprivation at work - that should have been CAC, not CAP.
Like jje - I'm stuck in the 80s. Pretty much all I listen to is Sirius 22 - First Wave. The iPod pretty much the same thing, mostly early 80s alternative (Howard included), with the exception of my favorite college bands like Dillon Fence, The Connells, and Fighting Gravity.
Ha! The Connells, Dillon Fence, INXS and Rush combined to make the soundtrack of my Carolina experience back in the early 90's. Oh yes, and I can't remember ever walking into Bub's on Thursday nights and NOT hearing Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam.
Okay, granted, that's all '90's music. But I was still trying to shake Michael Jackson and Men at Work in the eighties.
(I do, however, have a special place in my heart for 80's music since that's how I got to know Ian. Not through Wednesday's Child, but through Ian's Delightful Early 80's Mix. Still have that tape somewhere...)
So that's what happened to the original early 80s mix...
Well, the 80s were a fascinating time in pop music (and, more broadly, cultural) history. For me, the "real" 80s was '79-85, with the latter half of the decade degenerating into formulaic wretched excess (with exceptions). But in the first years, it seemed like anything was possible and people were willing to try anything (as long as it was new).
Annie, do you think it's possible you were just a little too young to properly appreciate the 80s??
As for Howard Jones specifically, I'm reminded of Paul Simon's self-assessment: "My voice doesn't do my songs justice." Surely as true in Mr. Jones's case. Still, I love his songs and like Sean have always dug the positive message.
Lately I mostly listen to college radio, 90.3 (WRLC Rutgers) and 103.3 (WPRB Princeton). I like a lot of music right now, but it seems very little on mainstream pop radio.
Coincidentally, perhaps, this week I've been listening to General Public's "All the Rage" (on original cassette). Good songs, overproduced.
Next up: INXS's "The Swing", for me a real time machine of an album....
This is one guy's opinion here, but it's impossible to judge the quality of a person's voice on a recording. The only thing you can really get within a stone's throw of is range, and even that can be manipulated.
The idea of listening to a singer's voice and trying to assess it's capacity, especially on recordings created during the magical excesses of the 80s, had never even crossed my mind.
I suppose if it had, then I'd have to remove not only the music I mentioned, but also Dream Academy, Shriekback, General Public, Van Halen, John Lennon, REO speedwagon, The Human League, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Culture Club and Pet Shop Boys.
Of course, we'd still have the vocal greats of the era, like Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie and Kenny Loggins. I just... these guys just don't mean that much to me. Although, if someone's doing the Ave Maria, I'd rather listen to the last three than anyone on the previous list.
That being said, I happen to love Paul Simon's voice. There's something just so beautiful about the straight tone pitches, especially when he's really reaching. One "Still Crazy", when he hits the bridge and just cries out "FOOOUUURRR in the morning/Crapped out/Yawning..." it's heart-shuddering.
I too have a real appreciation for Paul Simon's voice, and am in NO way taking a stand against the 80s. One of my favorite bands of yesteryear: Journey. No lie. Even though I understand Sean's point about not being able to truly hear a singer's true vocal quality within and among 80s production values, there is still a bright line between the pipes of, yes I'm saying it, Steve Perry and many of Sean's well-chosen examples of underwhelming singers of that decade. (Noteworthy strong difference of opinion: I think Boy George has one of the most delicious voices of the 80s! Who could resist?!?!?)
Lest I be misunderstood: I will wallow in the 80s with the best of 'em. Duran Duran, Men at Work, Rush, mmmmmm FOREIGNER, Styx--I loved them all, as well as the more enduring Clash & U2 (took me awhile to warm up to REM--for a long time, my reaction to them was: "What a terrible singer!")
I heard "No One Ever is to Blame" at Marshalls about 90 minutes ago!
i don't know, as far as pop music goes, i like the song 'you can have whatever you like' and i also like 'live your life'.
but then again, my venn diagram of 80's music i love overlaps with a bunch of these like thompson twins, pet shop boys, shriekback, new order, and general public just scanning the various lists. but those are not as big as like, klymaxx, lisa lisa, zapp and roger, and the time, for example. those are huge, like permanent tattoos on my 80's brain. i just love beat and bass oriented stuff full of synths and drum machines and all the studio production that goes along with it. i would take some jimmy jam and terry lewis produced riff with a scratched cd skipping over somebody whining about life in a northern town. i think i bypassed pretty much everything folk-tinged or anything you couldn't dance to. i mean, dance like, with a groove, not some kicking and hopping in a circle riverdance type thing.
i just think there is no good objective basis to figure out which 80's songs deserve the hall of fame, it just depends on your perspective.
i could actually rant forever on this subject but i have to go to a meeting in the ladies room, i'll be back real soon.
wow ok here is a weird coincidence speaking of 80's inspirations, the track called "mixed up" i co-wrote for kuuma just got added to stompy, it's a new release, electro single- check it out, you will LOVE IT ;)
Last night I had the strangest dream
I sailed away to China
In a little row boat to find ya
You said you had to get your laundry clean
Didn't want no one to hold you
What does that mean?OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHH, Matthew Wilder - where have you gone?