Forget all about equality: this is one of the greatest productions of the 1980s.
I mentioned in my review for Nouvelle Vague’s 3 that I found the French pop group’s cover of the 1984 Depeche Mode single “Master and Servant” lacking. Now, I don’t really want to rag on Nouvelle Vague (I do like the group’s music), but there’s simply no way that anemic faux-blues version could ever stand up to the source material. The original “Master and Servant” features the members of Depeche Mode in their musical prime, partway between their awkward early teen idols years and on the road to fulfilling their destiny as gloomy stadium gods. It’s also a song that shouldn’t be toned down into some easy listening version. After all, this is a tune explicitly about BDSM, a topic the group addresses both lyrically and sonically with full gusto. It’s no wonder that when Depeche Mode was creating this record, its chief inspiration was “Relax”, the innuendo-laced smash hit by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Ah, “Relax”: quite possibly the greatest dance track of the 1980s. The result of the occasionally inconsiderate creative drive of producer Trevor Horn (who was so intent on crafting a megahit for his label ZTT he didn’t even let the band play its instruments on the record), it’s a dancefloor masterpiece built upon an urgent, pounding bassline in the key of E and hooks that hit the listener with the force of a cinderblock. Oh, and its suggestive delivery (not to mention its promo material, the record sleeve, the original music video...) contained more than a few winks to the subject of hardcore homosexual sex. Despite a belated BBC Radio ban due to its content, “Relax” became a trans-Atlantic blockbuster and an inescapable pop culture phenomenon, exemplified by those legendary “Frankie Say Relax” T-shirts. To this day few dance songs can match its sheer power. Obviously somebody had to try and top it at some point. Enter the boys from Basildon, England.
Parklife is like a dream date -- it's smart, it's funny, it rocks, it's tender, it gets your blood pumping, and when it's over, you can't wait to do it all over again.
In honor of the 15th anniversary of its release, Blur’s Parklife has gotten a lot of extra play on my iPod lately. 1990s Britpop comprises an alarming percentage of my life’s all-time hit parade, with the bulk of it emerging from smack in the middle of that decade—Oasis’s What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?; Supergrass’s I Should Coco; Bluetones’s Expecting to Fly; Seahorses’ Do It Yourself. And Parklife is noteworthy for the fact that it is the only Blur CD I love. In fact, it is the only Blur CD I like. If we’re really getting honest here, it is the only Blur CD that doesn’t put me to sleep.
I’m not alone in my enthusiasm, as Parklife remains the band’s best-selling release. It was my first introduction to the band, their two previous discs having somehow eluded me. Lots of people feel partial to their first taste of a favorite band—usually not to the complete exclusion of the rest of their catalogue, however. I really tried! After Parklife grabbed me and took up permanent residence in my collection, I marched right out and got Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish. Later, I faithfully lined up when The Great Escape and all subsequent releases came out. They all ended up in the resale pile. Modern Life Is Rubbish is the one that comes closest to Parklife‘s greatness. “Advert” is in the same vein as the exuberantly manic “Bank Holiday”, but just doesn’t take it far enough. Vocalist/lyricist Damon Albarn’s party trick, Songs About Guys with Funny Names, started with Rubbish‘s “Colin Zeal”, and continued on through later releases with “Ernold Same” and “Dan Abnormal”. But it is on Parklife, with “Jubilee” and “Tracy Jacks” (and even Bill Barrett from “Magic America”) that Albarn’s characters are the most fleshed out, the funniest, and the most tragic.
The bottom line is this: what Parklife has that none of Blur’s other records have is balls. I don’t know if the band let up on the weed-smoking or had a brief fling with amphetamines during its recording, but everything else these dudes ever made is a crashing bore to me. Sure, “Song 2” is a crowd-pleaser that will never fail to get me pumped up for the hockey game, but that’s about it. Parklife is like a dream date—it’s smart, it’s funny, it rocks, it’s tender, it gets your blood pumping, and when it’s over, you can’t wait to do it all over again.
August marked the 30th anniversary of the release of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, the first single by goth pioneers Bauhaus. I knew in the back of my head that the song would hit the three-decade mark this year, but the exact date of release slipped my mind, otherwise I would’ve written a glowing tribute to the song two months ago. My forgetfulness works out all right, given that there’s no better time to ruminate on “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” than in the light of Halloween.
Listening to “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” provides the rare opportunity to hear a style of music emerge fully-formed. Sure, there were clear influences (David Bowie) and important predecessors (Joy Division). But on that 1979 release, Bauhaus pulled all that had come before it together to present something unique: goth. In this nine-and-a-half-minute requiem for the actor who played the title character in the classic 1931 film version of Dracula, Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins lay out all the tricks of the form for later practitioners to follow: the ominous bassline, the spectral guitar, the foreboding low-range vocals, and (of course) the horror-movie imagery. Most importantly, Bauhaus constructs the perfect mood: sepulchral, gloomy, and with a hint of fear. Will Hollywood’s most famous bloodsucker stay in his tomb? When Peter Murphy switches his mannered intonations from commenting “Bela Lugosi’s dead” to repeating the word “undead”, it seems frighteningly unlikely.
Even if one is not a fan of gothic rock (and there are a lot of people who aren’t, finding it too pretentious, too introverted, too silly), Bauhaus’s importance as the author of the first goth single cannot be denied. But there’s another honor owed to “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” that is largely unrecognized: it can be very well be called the first true alternative rock record.
On its release, Pulp's This Is Hardcore was derided as a commercial and artistic disappointment. Not so ten years later. Was the music ahead of its time, or did critics just have to reach their 30s to appreciate it?
Rock journalists have a habit of bending a band’s history into a Behind the Music-style template. Said band struggles through a few years of obscurity. Said band releases an album that catapults them into superstardom. Huge tours, massive amounts of drugs and internal arguments, combined with the inability to cope with newfound fame begin to corrode said band. And if the lead singer of said band band is famously standoffish to the press, and the follow-up album either contains no discernible hits or challenges listener expectations, the album is written off as a “career suicide” album.
Pulp’s This Is Hardcore quickly joined Faith No More’s Angel Dust and Nirvana’s In Utero as a perceived career suicide album upon its release. It certainly fit the career suicide mold: The album didn’t contain any instantaneously appealing songs like their previous album Different Class, the band was going through some heavy internal conflict and lead singer Jarvis Cocker opted to jet to New York to decompress over the holidays. Alone. Around this time, longtime Pulp guitarist/violinist Russell Senior left the band.
Down a longtime bandmember and in full isolation mode, Cocker could have easily written an album about what an utter bitch fame was. But just as he was able to strike a universal chord with the class warfare call to arms classics “Miss Shapes” and “Common People”, Jarvis tackled something even scarier than fame backlash: the inevitable acceleration of middle age.
In belated recognition of the recent release of Beatles CD remasters, I thought I should briefly discuss my favorite Beatles song.
“Dear Prudence” is the second track on the group’s 1968 double album The Beatles (more commonly referred to as “The White Album”). It was one of several songs the band members wrote during their early 1968 trip to study meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India. John Lennon wrote the song about attempts to get one of his fellow meditation students, actress Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence, to come out of her room after suffering a panic attack. During recording sessions for “The White Album”, Paul McCartney played bass, piano, and drums on the song, the latter the result of the temporary resignation of drummer Ringo Starr from the group.
The most distinctive aspect of “Dear Prudence” is its ethereal, almost foreboding quality, something which is quite uncommon in the Beatles’ discography. The song’s sound is partially due to the fact that the group recorded it on eight-track equipment. However, the arrangement of much of the song is intentionally sparse; after the upbeat power-chord Beach Boys homage of album opener “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Dear Prudence” wafts onto the record like a gentle breeze. At first “Dear Prudence” seems nothing more than low-key ballad wrapped in sadness; its strength lies in how it builds up to a fantastic finish that banishes the negative atmosphere just like the sun breaking through on a cloudy day.
Retrospective accounts of British alternative rock circa 1991-1992 have it that the domestic indie scene was filled with faceless hordes of shoegazers with no ambition until Suede emerged to kick off the Britpop movement. That’s a bit unfair; while there were quite of few interchangeable UK alt-rock bands at the time that couldn’t hold a candle to top-flight contemporaries like the Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine, they could still crack out the occasional great song.
Adorable’s “Sunshine Smile” is a perfect example. The Coventry, England group was one of the lower-tier acts on Creation Records wiped off the map in the wake of the rise of Britpop. While now forgotten, the band did manage this fantastic 1992 single that steadily rolls out and envelopes the listener over the course of its five-minute length.
Adorable’s debut single starts out simple enough, with a chiming lead riff that is delivered at a leisurely pace. However, after the first verse the song’s unassuming nature gives way to loud, swooping chords and swirling leads. Throughout, vocalist Piotr Fijalkowski sings the song’s sun-kissed lyrics in a relaxed, contented manner that allows the peaks and the valleys of the music to float around him. The apex of “Sunshine Smile” is its outro, where the group increases the tempo and wraps the tail-end of the song in coils of pedal-drenched melody.
At its core, shoegaze was psychedelic rock reconfigured for a new generation. Adorable did its forbearers proud by crafting this kaleidoscopic pop gem full of lovestruck optimism (and the group earns bonus points for throwing in a reference to “How Does It Feel to Feel” by The Creation). For a band characterized as arrogant in its press interviews, Adorable definitely had at least one thing worth boasting about.
