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.

I have been struck down by the Cold of DOOM for the past few days, so any meaningful work in the world of new wave (le monde de la nouvelle vague) has been shoved to the wayside in favor of naps, hot showers, pathetic whinging and the occasional cup of fresh ginger tea.

In a fortuitous turn of events I stumbled across this recipe for ‘Orange Ginger Spice Drink’ via trusty ol’ TasteSpotting. It’s much nicer than my usual ginger tea, which is just grated ginger in hot water.  It’s a life saver when you’re struck down by a Cold of DOOM (and trust me, at some point, we will all be struck down). Unfortunately I don’t have any agave nectar, but honey does the trick just fine—and as an added bonus, honey has antimicrobial properties, too! Hooray, honey!

Now I think I’m going to whip up a batch of this, whinge pathetically for a bit, and then go to bed and hope this cold will release me from its foul clutches. More new wave action to come, I promise!

I suppose this entry will be courting more controversy (though who knew the Royal Family’s income was so controversial? Certainly not I!), but never mind: I’m going to say something nice about Margaret Thatcher. Well, perhaps ‘nice’ isn’t the correct word. Rather, I want to raise a few questions about the way she and her policies are viewed.

I have been to a few lectures on trade unionism which inevitably come back to the Iron Lady and her systematic dismantling of trade unions in the UK. Since many of the people (including people my age) in these lectures have been or are currently involved in trade unions, there is obviously a lot of ire directed towards her. I also live in what was once the coal mining capital of the country, and there is a lot of nostalgia for the old coal mining glory days. But I have to wonder— many of these people are also doubtlessly environmental activists (I can think of at least two, who are amongst the most vocal in their dislike of Thatcher’s closure of the mines). Surely they must realize that the coal mining industry has a terribly destructive impact on the environment.

I won’t go so far as to say Thatcher closed coal mines in an attempt to be greener, because the concept barely existed during the early part of her tenure as Prime Minister and she doesn’t strike me as a ‘green’ politician, anyway. But still, if the coal mines were still open, would these anti-Thatcherites be so kindly-disposed towards them, or would they be campaigning to close them on environmental grounds rather than economic ones?

I don’t know.

I also didn’t know until very recently that she was one of the only Conservatives to support the bill to decriminalize male homosexuality or that she voted in favor of legalizing abortion, which are some pretty liberal moves given her image as the ultimate conservative. I find these things especially interesting and confusing, considering her government’s later support of the homophobic Clause 28 — though she herself called it ‘unnecessary’— and her intense focus on the nuclear family. (Remember ‘There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women, and there are families.’?) Her earlier pro-choice, pro-gay stances seem to clash almost irreconcilably with her later stances.

I certainly find her the most interesting of the modern UK Prime Ministers, if only because she’s so incredibly controversial. I will say that I disagree with the vast majority of things she did and stood for—her glowing admiration for Enoch Powell being just one example. But by the same token I think her time in office was far more complex than its often made out to be.

What does this have to do with new wave? Well, a lot, actually. New wave was less overtly politically motivated than punk rock but it was still embedded within the extremely turbulent social climate of the early Thatcher years (and the early Reagan years in the US). Most new wave artists didn’t take an explicitly political agenda in their music, but much of their music and image is a reaction to the political and social climate of the day, especially in terms of gender identity. Clause 28 in particular, which outlawed the ‘intentional promotion’ of homosexuality in schools, was symbolic of the climate of British politics at the time, and its passing into law (it wasn’t repealed until 2003) represented a sort of tacit condemnation of anyone who identified with anything beyond the narrow definition of normative sexual identity. Looking at it in this light, the pretty boys of Duran Duran or Depeche Mode with their gelled hair, eyeliner, earrings and occasional forays into homoeroticism (see ‘Wild Boys’ or ‘Never Let Me Down Again’) despite actually being heterosexual can be seen as committing a fairly subversive act: boldly identifying themselves as outside traditional definitions of gender identity at a time when it was not allowed—and these were working class boys! And not only that, they did it for an audience of millions. Obviously I don’t mean to say they invented this type of subversion. After all David Bowie had pranced around in spandex and glitter less than a decade before. It’s just that they made it marketable, they made it mainstream rather than extreme, and there’s something especially thrilling about that.

Of course, it also ties back into the class relations issue as well, since, as I said earlier, new wave artists often had a working class background—exactly the kind of people who were hit hardest by Thatcher’s economic policies and the rapidly increasing cost of living. So even though many of these artists rose to international fame and made millions of dollars, like Paul McCartney they were also still rooted in the working classes, with all the attendant loyalties.
And now I’m thinking of Morrissey here: “We won’t vote conservative, because we never have.” Ah. And on that note, I’d better sign off before I get a brick coming through my window.

I once wrote a paper on the role of technology in popular music. Amidst all the talk of MIDI, MP2 vs. MP3, the comodification of sounds into discrete objects, the analogue-to-digital shift of the 1970s and the subsequent resurgence of analogue nostalgia, there was a throwaway remark that really struck me as perhaps the most interesting subject out of the whole discussion. It was this: When it comes to digital music, particularly music that relies heavily on sampling, traditional Western notation (dots and lines on a staff, in other words) quickly becomes inadequate, if not entirely obsolete. It is music, Timothy Taylor says, almost as an aside, that is unconcerned with fixed pitches, or even the tempered scale as a whole. How, then, do we treat it? How do we notate it? How do we describe what we mean? Traditional music notation is really nothing more than a symbolic language— but what do we do when the symbols can no longer be applied?

This may not be as mind blowing to some as it is to me, but, as a classically trained musician, a large part of my life (and indeed my identity) has been bound up in the idea that music can be represented in this way, that all Western music, no matter how modern, abstract or Wagnerian can be described as a series of dots on a page. Not romantic in any way, I’ll grant you (and I’ll be the first to admit that music theory was always my weakest subject in school), but still—it was something that seemed to universally apply to Western music and any music created in the Western style. What happens when this no longer applies? What happens to music when it moves beyond the boundary of the page, the tyranny of pen and ink? I don’t mean to suggest that it enters some sort of ‘pure’ existence in a cybernetic meadow watched over by machines of loving grace or anything, but it does beg the question of well, what does happen to it then? Obviously, as I’ve stated above, all music can be broken up into discrete bits of information, so it’s not as though the digital revolution, such as it is, will abolish data-as-music/music-as-data—but again… what does it actually mean?

Obviously I don’t have an answer for that, or I’d have said so already. Funnily enough, I started this blog entry not having a clue what to say. Never get me started.

PS—I almost titled this ‘Some of us can only live in songs of love and trouble’. Because I’m 16, apparently. However, if I ever have a band, ‘Songs of Love and Trouble’ is so going to be the name of our debut album. Because, like I said, I’m 16.

Many people make it a goal to read 52 books in a year. That’s one book a week, every week, during the course of one year. These people are all more ambitious than I am. I mean no disrespect to those who do this, but I can’t possibly fathom how you can enjoy and retain anything from a book if you have to frantically finish the whole thing by Friday in order to keep on track. I’m sure there are people out there who can do this, but I’m not one of them.

I’m a girl of more modest goals when it comes to things like that. One book a month (that’s 12 books a year for those of you playing along at home) is really more my speed. I only started doing this in 2006, and of course that September I started my degree, during which time I read constantly, but almost never for pleasure. Overall 2006 was a good year, though I fell short of my goal by a considerable margin. In addition to three Nabokov novels (Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire), I finally got around to reading American Gods, The Great Gatsby, The Orchid Thief and The Virgin Suicides.

I’d like to pick this up again this year, and I think I’ve already made a fairly good start. I just finished The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson’s memoir of growing up in Des Moines—I guess after all these years I’ve finally taken an interest in my roots— and before that I read Shakespeare, a biography of the Bard by, yep, Bill Bryson. I decided to take a break from all that Brysoning and I’m currently rekindling my love for Neil Gaiman with the short story collection Smoke and Mirrors (is there anyone who can be so gentle and humorous when talking about death, demons and dismemberment?).

Beyond that, however, I have no idea what I want to read. I’m the sort of person who finds a book she likes and then reads it over and over again, until the book’s falling apart and the story embeds itself in my bones. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but I do feel like I may be missing out on all those unread books. If you have any suggestions for some must-read material, send it my way!

People often ask me what it is that makes me a fan of new wave. This is a fair question, especially since, before I got into college and got exposed to the wonders of 80s night clubbing, I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to anything released in the 1980s. It’s a question I’ve put some thought into, but I still don’t know if I have a satisfactory answer. First and foremost I like it because it’s catchy. I’m a singer, and I make no apologies for being intensely drawn to melodies, which new wave music has in spades. Pop songs are extremely difficult to do well, and part of the mark of a good pop artist is the ability to make it seem easy, effortless, and fun. The surface of a good pop song is so shiny and attractive that it’s easy to disregard the work that went into it on a deeper level. New wave artists excel in this, which plays a large part in why they’re not often taken seriously. The music’s fun. It’s catchy. You can dance to it. These are all reasons why I like it, but they’re also reasons why not many people want to give the genre any respect.

On another level, I love new wave because it’s full of contradiction. It’s pop music whose seeming mindlessness actually belies a deeper social consciousness. It’s music for people who are confused about the world and about their place in it, but who insist on having a good time anyway. New wavers perhaps aren’t as overtly angry as punk rockers, but they do share a lot of the same misgivings about the society around them and they do have something to say. Punk, generally, embraced nihilism. New wave was a more cynical music. Punk wanted to destroy the future; new wave knew it could not stop it from coming, but it was going to party anyway. That contradiction is what first drew me to the music. I remember dancing in my patented Molly-Ringwald-being-chased-by-bees style to the music pumping out at ludicrous volumes from the club speakers and thinking ‘this is some of the saddest happy music I’ve ever heard’. The tension created by these differences—dark lyrics and dark subjects layered over exuberant melodies and rhythms—began to convince me that there was more to new wave than I had previously thought.

On the whole, new wave has yet to be really looked at and appreciated in the way that, say, the 50s rock n roll or 60s psychedelic movements are now, and I think that’s due to a.) the fact that there hasn’t been all that much time for retrospection and people are still coming to grips with things that happened in the 1980s, and b.) most people (academics especially) don’t realize that new wave actually has a lot to say about where it comes from and who it’s for. This will come in time, I hope. And, of course, I hope to be one of the ones bringing these things about.

It seems fitting to start this blog off with a shout-out to another, infinitely more useful, website: Sacred DM: The Online Depeche Mode Archive . It’s a veritable treasure trove of Depeche Mode articles. If Depeche Mode have* appeared in print anywhere in the English-speaking world, it will be here. And if it’s not here, it is probably in the process of being put here.

I recently finished my Masters thesis, which focused on class, gender and political identity in pop music in the early 80s—the Thatcher-Reagan era. My entire third chapter was devoted to Depeche Mode. I learned in the course of trying to write it that there are virtually no resources for people interested in analyzing this particular time period in pop music history, and so this resource proved to be invaluable. If you’re a fan of Depeche Mode, or even just interested in pop music journalism throughout the last 20+ years, I highly recommend checking this site out.

*Yes, I said ‘have’ and not ‘has’. I live in England now, where apparently collective noun agreement is way more complicated than it is in the US. It takes some getting used to, I know.

Oh hi! Welcome to my blog.

I’m not sure what I’ll put here yet, though I have a few ideas germinating —or is that percolating?—in my head. Most likely this blog will be a melange of non-Pitchfork-endorsed music rambling, the occasional bookish rant and just a soupçon of pop cultural analysis. It will, in short, be following the very well-established format that makes up the majority of the twenty-something blogosphere (what a terrible word). Hopefully, though, it will be interesting. And, as you can already tell, it will be full of hyphenated words and parenthetical phrases.

If there’s anything you want to talk about here, let me know. No? Well, maybe we should both sleep on it then.