It’s a little known fact that I am a highly-qualified mixtape maker. This is due in large part to the fact that my beloved old car (a sporty little Mazda, known affectionately as ‘The Moz’) only had a tape deck, and also to the fact that I usually had vast distances to drive between home, college and work thanks to living in Deepest Rural Florida. If I wanted music for my hour+ car rides, I’d have to whip up a mixtape. Soon, my friends were making them for me, too, and we started exchanging them as tokens of affection and mutual awesomeness.
Now, of course, I take public transport and I don’t have a tape deck which means I don’t get a chance to properly exercise my skills any more. If you’ve read High Fidelity, you know just how much work is involved in making a proper mix, and while it can be an extremely arduous process, it’s ultimately rewarding. While I don’t miss the long, long drives I used to have, I do miss making mixtapes.
Then I figured, hey, that’s what I have a music-related blog for, right? So, without further ado, here is a very brief Audio Visual Mixtape for your enjoyment.
Kate Bush-’Running Up That Hill’ (1985)
(Favorite line: ‘Tell me, we both matter, don’t we?’ OH MY GOD. Actually, pretty much every line in this song is gold.)
Depeche Mode- ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ (1986)
Is it homoerotic? Is it a reference to drug and alcohol addiction? Really, it’s just a great song.
Magnetic Fields- ‘Crazy For You (But Not That Crazy)’ (1999)
(Favorite Line: I pretended you were Jesus. You were just dying to save me.) I think this might be a fan video, but if it is, it’s extremely well done.
And to end on a happier note:
Pixies-’Here Comes Your Man’ (1989)
I may be weird, but Pixies make me happy. Then again, so do the Smiths. I’ve never sung karaoke before, but if I were going to, I would probably choose this song.
Wow, that took longer than I expected! My mixtape-making muscles really are out of shape. Hm. Maybe I should make the Audio Visual Mixtape a weekly thing, just to make sure I keep my skills honed.
OK, I know this video of the literal version of A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’ is making the rounds and you’ve all probably already seen it, but I don’t care! I loved this video and song when I was just a wee girl. I have very vivid memories of running to the tv and dancing around gleefully whenever it would come on. (According to my mom I also really liked Kylie’s ‘Locomotion’.)
And yes, I realize (woah, I just typed ‘realise’–I’ve officially been in the UK for too long!) that the pipe wrench being brandished towards the end belongs to one of the Evil Dudes in the original. But in this version, Handsome Guy has his own pipe wrench, which makes it all the funnier. Plus, it gives you an excuse to sing ‘Pipe wrench fight!’ at random times. Not that I’ve been doing that, or anything. Ahem.
Without further ado:
Thanks to Chris for sending this to me, and to Petals for sharing the love!
And for comparison, here’s another flashback of the 80s–but this time the literal video is the oringal!
Men At Work ‘Down Under’ (1981 [Australia]/1982 [US] )
Ah, the 80s. Just grab a camera and make a video. Don’t bother choreographing!
As an aside, I don’t know if you’ve heard any of A-Ha’s more recent stuff, but it’s quite good. And Morten Harket (aka Handsome Guy) looks exactly the same as he did almost 30 years ago. Norway must be like some sort of giant crisper drawer.
In the midst of all the news of a potential global recession, plummeting stocks and super banks (the beneficiaries of the deragulation age) asking for handouts from the governement, I’ve suddenly found myself listening to those ultimate Thatcher satarists, Pet Shop Boys. In particular, I’ve been listening to ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’.
This was always one of my favorite tracks to dance to in my clubbing days, and its hook is undeniably catchy and brash, but I didn’t get the subtle, sharp irony of the lyrics until much later. Neil Tennant has said that many people take this song at face value as a celebration of money, venerating the ‘greed is good’ motto that summed up the 80s for so many people. But he also points out that the characters in the song are doomed to failure, that no scheme ever ends up being truly successful, and that they will, in fact, never make money. I like to think that they will, actually. Even if the ‘brains’ of the operation is exaggerating his prowess (as he most likely is), he seems calculating, manipulative and shameless enough to succeed by any means necessary. I just don’t think they’ll keep the money…I think it’s more likely they’d get called out on their shady deals, and like subprime lenders (or Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko) will end up getting caught when everything gets settled.
Yes, I do tend to put too much thought into these things. Why do you ask?
I do love Neil Tennant’s look in this video, incidentally. He looks like a cross between Max Headroom and the Gestapo agent who gets his face melted in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now that’s totally 80s.
The other day I came across a quote from Patti Smith (from her 2007 Guardianinterview) that got me thinking about punk rock and its relationship to conservatism, and how the two have more in common than might first be apparent. I’m still working through my ideas on this particular subject, so this post probably won’t be as coherent as it might be, but when something strikes my interest, I’ve got to get it down. With that in mind, the quote:
“You have to kick doors open yourself. When people come up to me and say, ‘Patti, nobody wants to hear my CD and I don’t have enough money for equipment,’ I say, ‘Well, get a job, y’know?’ That’s what I did. You get people who say, ‘The government won’t give me a grant and I can’t do my art.’ I say, ‘Fuck you, it’s your own fault, you expect the government to give you a hand? The government is corrupt. Do what it takes. You do babysitting jobs, you work in the factory, you work in the bookstore or become a pickpocket, y’know? But whatever. Get a job.’ Work is really good for an artist.” Her features sharpen and there is a fierce set to her mouth. “My son is one of the best guitar players I’ve ever heard. And how does he make his money? He does manual labour, he does landscaping, he digs ditches. He’s out there sometimes eight to 12 hours a day because he lives in Detroit and it’s hard to get work there. But it’s good, it’s good. Artists should work.”
There are a few levels on which this quote can be read. My initial thought was that it’s really an extension of punk’s DIY mentality. It’s the same mentality that says: ‘Don’t just stand in the audience singing along, letting someone else’s songs speak for you, learn three chords and speak for yourself. You don’t have to be good, you just have to have the drive.’ In telling artists not to rely on ‘corrupt’ governments to help them, Smith is carrying the do-it-yourself ethos of punk to its logical terminus.
But on another level, it’s strange to me how this quote evokes the very traditional conservative ideas of rugged individiualism, the kind espoused by Thatcher in the UK and Raegan in the US, where a person’s success or failure is due only to their personal striving, and not influenced in any way by outside factors. It’s the kind of logic I would expect from a conservative politician (perhaps bordering on Libertarian), but certainly not from a woman deemed the ‘Godmother of punk’. I think there are probably many punk rockers who feel the same–like I said, it’s the most logical end to the DIY mentality.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think hard work is good for a person, artist or not, and I think it would be wrong to rely on others to do things for you entirely if you’ve got the means to do them yourself. But then I think about how many punk rock artists in the 1970s were on the dole and who used that money (government money!) to fund their music, and that blunts the point somewhat (perhaps not Smith’s personally, but in general). I also think of all the working class kids in the UK who, for the first time, were able to go to art college, which had been the traditional realm of the middle class, and who later went on to found punk and new wave bands because the government helped fund their studies. Like it or not, the government had a hand to play in punk and new wave’s development, both negatively and positively.
I don’t know. I’m sure many punk fans would be uncomfortable with me equating the movement in any way with ideas of conservatism, especially the conservatism of Thatcher and Reagan. Still, perhaps they were not as far apart as they might initially seem.
I was thinking the other day about musical virtuosity/showmanship and how it goes in and out of favor on a fairly regular basis. One minute people are oohing and ahhing over the epic guitar solo in ‘Hotel California’ (1976), and the next minute a whole genre based on the idea of the anti-virtuoso bursts from the underground into the mainstream (1977). The pendulum has been swinging back and forth since the idea of ‘pop music’ came into existence, with debates about authenticity raging the whole way.
New wave is often defined by its use of technology–namely the synthesizer, but also drum machines, samplers, etc–in a way that rock music has not been. To a lot of rock purists, new wave’s reliance on these technologies has made it seem somehow less ‘authentic’ than traditional drum-bass-guitar setups. In contrast with punk’s sound (which has been described as something like a pure ‘line of noise’), all that noodling on synths can come across as pretentious, over-complicated, and, dare I say it…inauthentic. It’s the same line of thought that calls overt displays of virtuosity as inauthentic. When punk was king, virtuosity was out. Three chords and a dream, man, anything else is just a waste of time!
What’s ironic, though, is that the very synths and machines that got (and still get) new wave accused of in-authenticity were the same machines that allowed the most un-virtuosic people to become musicians. While I don’t have the exact quote on-hand, Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode has pointed out that they played synthesizers because they were easier to learn than guitars–and considering that most of Fletch’s act consists of two-fingered playing and enthusiastic clapping, I think it’s safe to say that the man is no virtuoso. Synthesizers were cheap, they were easy to learn and you could build entire songs out of them with just a few interesting sounds. Now, before I get to broad in my brush strokes here I will point out that this is in no way indicative of every new wave artist; Alan Wilder is a classically trained musician, and Annie Lennox went to the Royal Academy of Music, to name just two examples. Still, one of the exciting things about new wave, and about synthesizers becoming affordable for the first time, is that amateur musicians who might not be able to afford lessons, guitars or any of the standard trappings of pop music had the chance to make music and experiment with new sounds, pushing pop music into unexpected and exciting new territory. In my view, new wave is one of the best examples of the democratization of music through technology. Music for anyone who has a mind to make it. What could be more authentic than that?
It surprises some people to find out just how interested I am in masculinity. After all, don’t feminists like me just care about ‘women’s stuff’ (which, I’m assuming, means debating whether strappy sandals are oppressive and talking about how to ‘empower’ myself by reading Cosmo)? And while I’m not one to shy away from the political importance of the personal aesthetics or the potential for political work in pop culture publications*, those things really aren’t as important as feminism’s potential to help us understand the very nature of gender.
Anyway. What does this have to do with new wave? Well, like I said, I find masculinity very interesting. How are ideas of masculinity shaped by current events? By the market? By popular culture? By long tradition/the longue duree narrative? Science? Art? The list goes on. The 1980s were a particularly volatile time on a lot of those fronts, particularly in terms of politics, economics and popular culture. It was the convergence of all of these which led to two related but distinct forms of ‘new’ masculinity. The first was the eponymous ‘New Man’ who arose not long after the ‘New Woman’ of the 1970s took the weight of the corporate world on her heavily-padded shoulders. He was a creature of mainstream marketing, a so-called ‘feminine’ man who would do housework, who was in touch with his feelings, and who, more importantly, cared about his appearance in a way that only women had been encouraged to do before. In other words: Cha-ching! What could be better in the midst of a bear market than discovering, like vast reserves of North Sea oil, a whole huge, untapped consumer base? Masculinity and male sexuality were commodified , placed for mainstream public consumption for the sake of commerce (which, interestingly enough, women’s sexuality has always been used for). Men were encouraged to embrace their true natures and buy, buy buy! You could say the metrosexual male is just the ‘New Man’ with a new wardrobe and some designer stubble and you wouldn’t be far from the truth.
Fluid masculinity, on the other hand, is more slippery, no pun intended. It’s a concept of masculinity that refuses to be defined clearly. It’s masculinity which won’t adhere to the strict old rules of what makes someone a man, but won’t be cast out as feminine other, either. I know I go on and on about Morrissey, but he’s really the best avatar I can think of. Is he gay? Is he straight? Is he just aesexual? In a society in which, as he so rightly says, ‘most people keep their brains between their legs’, his desire to conceal what he’s thinking, so to speak, leaves us in a lurch. A celibate is, in some ways, as worrying to traditional views of heteronormative society as a homosexual; after all they both actively shun the basic unit of society: the traditional nuclear family. However, someone who refuses to be defined by this (or any other) form of normative masculinity without allowing himself to be fully marked out as ‘wrong’ or ‘other’, creates far more potential for a destablizing force. This, of course, is just the example of Morrissey, but what he represents, that fluidity of definition that won’t adhere to any sort of rigid binary, is an idea that came to the fore in the 1980s (though, of course, pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality is by no means unique to that decade—it’s a part of rock n roll’s longue duree narrative, after all). And you can’t market to someone you can’t define.
Really, I would call both the ‘New Man’ and the ‘fluidly’ masculine man two sides of the same coin, products of the inherent instability of the gender binary. The former, of course, had more to do with revenue than revolution, but the motion and momentum was there and is there still. And hey, they both had great hair, and that’s got to count for something right?
You may rightly be wondering why this blog seems to have suddenly disintegrated, going from a mildly entertaining collection of musings on the 1980s—and opera and bird watching—to…nothing. I have a very good reason for that: I haven’t been writing anything! To be fair, I spent a month this summer zooming about various extremely rural places in Florida and France (fun fact: it’s essentially the same in both places, except that one has a Denny’s). But that was all the way back in July, and we’re now into the deep and honeyed sunshine of September, and even my procrastination has limits.
The good news is that I finally received my Masters degree, so I am officially over-educated. Yes, folks, I am now a Master of New Wave-ology! (Technically, a Master of Letters in Music History, but I like the first title better.)
The bad news is that this particular post won’t have much substance to it, as it’s really more of a way to break radio silence before I begin writing again in earnest. However, I do have a few topics up my sleeve, to whit: the idea of ‘fluid’ masculinity vs. the idea of the New Man, both topics that came to the fore in the repressed and remarkably-dressed 1980s, rock’s ‘authenticity’ and pop’s ‘artificiality’, and perhaps a retrospective on the many hairstyles of Simon Le Bon. I don’t know, we’ll have to see.
Again, I apologize for the long silence on the blogfront (oh god, I sound like a character out of Juno), but I hope you’ll stay tuned.
And just to sweeten the deal, here’s a little something from the days of music video’s infancy for you to enjoy.
Few subjects are as contentious in the world of opera as who sings the best version of a beloved aria. Music is often judged by highly specific and subjective criteria, and this is especially acute within classical music, where a musician’s ears are fine-tuned like scientific instruments and emotional investment in particular composers, works or songs often runs extremely deep. For instance: In college I used to refer to Chopin as my dead Polish composer boyfriend. I’m just sayin’. (Lutosławski and I were just friends. )
Recently an ad here has been running a slick instrumental version of Puccini’s ‘Un Bel Di’, probably the best-known piece from Madama Butterfly . I have no idea what the ad is for, because my eyes usually glaze over the instant I recognize the music. This ad may not compel me to buy whatever product it’s pushing, but it sure has compelled me to look up ‘Un Bel Di’ on YouTube and listen obsessively. Here is one of the very best versions I’ve ever heard (and that’s saying something):
This is such a joyous, soaring song, so full of hope and promise, and that makes the truth of what will eventually happen to Cio-cio san all the more devastating. I think this tension between the beauty of the song and the ugliness of the reality in the opera is partly what gives ‘Un Bel Di’ its impact. Well, that and it’s got an exquisite melody. I’ve never heard a version quite as effortless as this one. She makes it seem so easy, but trust me, this song is anything but. In fact, I’m tired just thinking about it!
If you look over at the sidebar on this page that contains my (admittedly modest) blogroll, you will notice a certain electronica musician amongst its ranks. He has a download ep coming out tomorrow and it is, if I may say so, very good. So, if you’re a fan of music that combines catchy melodies with synthesizer-goodness (and you should be if you’re reading this blog), be sure to check it out.
If you heard the sound of a heavenly host of Seraphim blaring trumpets and singing Allelujah with their flaming swords held aloft and their six wings all unfurled coming from somewhere in the North of England, don’t worry, it’s not another miraculous virgin birth. It’s just that I finally handed in my thesis! Again! Second time’s a charm, I say. Let’s just hope my theory chapter had enough theory in it!
I think I may be in a bit of shock, not having anything (academic) to do for the first time in nearly two years.
Hopefully soon I’ll have a post written up that briefly sums up the concepts of performance, performity and mis-performance within the genre of new wave music. This covers all sorts of things, from boys wearing eyeliner and girls cropping their hair, to the use of synthesizers instead of guitars, and the discussing of (often painful or taboo) private emotions in fun pop songs; all the stuff we know and love about new wave!
And now to celebrate, here’s a shot of pure pop sunshine (with added vitamin C):
Orange Juice, ‘Rip it Up’ (1982– a very good year, if I may say so!)
