The Best Music of 1980

April 24, 2009

All Music Guide recently posted their retrospective on the music of 1980. The further back these retrospectives go, the more albums that I missed or just never got around to purchasing are brought to my attention (I don’t own The River, for the love of Mike!). You may find some music to explore in the article as well, so read the whole thing, definitely including the comments.

I’ve made my own list, as I did with their 1993 retrospective. This time I’ll make a few comments.

Classic or Near-classic

The Clash – London Calling. Technically released at the tail end of 1979, but generally considered an ’80s album. There are more classics on this album than most albums have songs. A strong contender for greatest album ever made.

Joy Division – Closer. A perfectly realized masterpiece.

Blue Angel – Blue Angel. It’s easy to understand why this album landed Cyndi Lauper a solo contract. It’s not easy to understand why so few people have heard this terrific album. I plan a write-up on this in the near future.

Prince – Dirty Mind. Worst cover art in history, but a great album that includes the masterful “When You Were Mine,” later covered memorably by Cyndi Lauper. Plus, dude nails his sister! How fucked up is that?

Gang of Four – Entertainment! Technically 1979, but Rolling Stone had it in its top albums of the ’80s, so I’m guessing it didn’t come to the Colonies until then.

X – Los Angeles. Fucked-up rockabilly that sounds like nothing before or since (except for a couple other X albums).

AC/DC – Back in Black. Yes, I’m sick of it, too, but are you going tell me it doesn’t belong here? Are you going to tell Angus?

The Feelies – Crazy Rhythms. Would someone please get this record back in print?

Public Image Ltd. – Metal Box/Second Edition. Again, I think 1979, but again, I think it was releases Stateside in 1980 as it was, again, in Rolling Stone‘s best of the 80s list.

Pretty Damned Great

Dire Straits – Making Movies. Just short of classic, with some classic songs. “Skateaway” gives me goosebumps.

Barbra Streisand – Guilty. The album has only her name on it, but that’s Barry Gibb standing next to her on the cover, and it’s just as much his album–he wrote it, produced it, duets on three songs, and (with his brothers) sings backup throughout. The gorgeous “Woman in Love” is just one of the expertly-crafted pop songs that fill this album.

Motörhead – Ace of Spades. The thundering title classic would be enough to get this album remembered, but it’s got a lot more where that one came from.

Teena Marie – Irons in the Fire. She has never gotten the respect she deserves as critics have mostly ignored the oddity of a white singer who sold a large percentage of her records to a black audience. On her third album, she asserts herself by writing and producing the whole thing for the first, but not last, time.

Honorable Mention

Warren Zevon – Stand in the Fire. Including a live album in the above sections didn’t seem quite right, but this rowdy set needed to be mentioned somewhere.

The Clash – Sandinista! This three-record mess has too much great material to leave out entirely.

The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry. I haven’t heard it in ages, but I know a lot of the songs by heart.

David Bowie – Scary Monsters. My copy was stolen and I haven’t replaced it yet. I recall loving a lot of it, being iffy on some. I’d like to hear it again before ranking it properly.

Below the fold!

A 1980 YouTube mixtape including some of the above. Just for you! ♥♥♥!

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Gordon Winslow

A defense of Kid Rock

August 6, 2008

Believe it or not, in response to Matt’s post, I’m going to mount a defense of Kid Rock.

Kid Rock is, like me, from Michigan, and released his first album in 1990. He was in the Detroit area, and I had just started college at the University of Michigan, not too far down the road. His debut was on a major label, or at least distributed by one, so he got plenty of local press. However, the album went nowhere and Kid Rock was dropped.

He moved to an independent label for 1993′s The Polyfuze Method, which is when we ended up one degree of separation from each other. I was fighting the University bureaucracy at the time, trying to book musical acts at the student union. A kid who joined my committee was in a band that had gotten some attention, and had also started his own label. One project he was working on for the label, which I don’t think ever got off the ground, was a Hank Williams Sr. tribute record featuring local talent. He was telling me about it, and was excited because Kid Rock had agreed to participate. I scoffed at the notion and asked what he was going to cover. I was told he was going to do “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle.” After a bit more scoffing mixed with a some amazement that Kid Rock had ever heard the song, the guy told me that, actually, Kid Rock loved Hank.

Needless to say, this struck me as very strange. His most famous song at the time was “Yodelin’ in the Valley,” which, title notwithstanding, is not country–it’s a straight rap number about…well, this is a family site.

Anyway, Kid Rock continued to work very hard, and half a decade later had his breakthrough. Even though I wasn’t always crazy about his music (although I liked some of it) I respected him because I’d seen, from a short distance, how hard he’d worked to get where he was.

Sure enough, another album down the road comes “Picture,” and country radio picked it up. I imagine a lot of people were surprised by this. I may have been surprised that country radio picked it up, but I wasn’t surprised that he’d done a straight country song because I knew from way-back-when that he was a country fan.

So I’m not sure it’s fair throw him in with the other interlopers. He’s got some roots, there, and he first hit the country chart back in 2002. It makes a lot more sense to me than Jessica Simpson.

Now, “Picture” is at least a country song. “All Summer Long” is not, but you can’t blame Kid Rock if country stations have decided to play it–I’m sure he’s happy to be exposed to as broad an audience as possible, but he doesn’t program the radio playlists. And you can dislike the song (I don’t care for it myself), but you can’t fairly accuse him of “ripping off” “Werewolves of London” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” He’s singing about a time in the past that he associates with those classic rock songs, and he uses the songs to highlight that. He mentions “Sweet Home Alabama” in the song and the video shows a turntable spinning Excitable Boy. In spirit, I would say it’s very close to “I Walk the Line (Revisited)” by Rodney Crowell, which uses generous portions of its namesake.

I’m back on board that ’49 Ford in 1956
Long before the sun came up, way out in the sticks
The headlight showed a two-rut roadway, back up in the pines
First time I heard Johnny Cash sing “I Walk the Line”

Speaking of rap guys and “Sweet Home Alabama,” didn’t the Geto Boys sample that song?

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Posted by Gordon Winslow

Warren Zevon’s self-titled album to be re-released

August 3, 2008

While writing a comment on Jason’s Pixies/Black Francis post, I stumbled across the news that Warren Zevon’s self-titled album will be getting the remastering treatment with bonus tracks.

The bonus tracks on other Zevon re-releases have been nothing special, so these are likely not worth getting excited about. However, the album itself is a masterpiece, one of my all time favorites, so I’ll happily shell out for it again if they improve the sound. Warren put out many good albums in his career, but he would never better this one.

No release date announced yet.

I have a lot of unreleased Zevon recordings, mostly live stuff. To their immense credit, the Zevon family has no problem with people distributing Warren’s recordings so long as they are not commercially available, so I’ll sort through it all one of these days and post some of the best stuff.

Here’s “Carmelita,” from the above-mentioned album. This song has been covered many times, most famously by Linda Ronstadt, Flaco Jiménez and Dwight Yoakam, and GG Allin. Not as a quartet, although that certainly would have been interesting.

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Posted by Gordon Winslow

Black Francis – Threshold Apprehension

August 2, 2008

As we all know by now, Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, has re-adopted the Black Francis moniker and released two albums under that name, 2007′s Bluefinger and 2008′s SVN Fingers.  Others know that I am a rabid Pixies fan and have faithfully followed Frank Black’s career since the dissolution of the Pixies in 1992.  I’ve seen Frank live four times, twice with his former band The Catholics and twice on the Pixies reunion tour in 2004.  That’s not a lot, I suppose, but I was a poor college student for a long time, so concerts were an infrequent luxury.

Anyway, when Frank Black started hinting at new Pixies material being recorded in 2007, I couldn’t hide my glee.  New material from my favorite band of all time after a 15 year hiatus sounded too good to be true.  Slowly, new recordings began to surface.  The Pixies had apparently been recruited to record a song for one of the Shrek movies, and the result was the Kim Deal-penned “Bam Thwok”.  The song is a fun, bouncy, slightly Muppet-sounding (Wocka wocka wocka!) tune, and I would hazard a guess that Frank Black used the opportunity to extend a laurel of peace to Kim in allowing the band to record this tune.  It doesn’t come close to any of the Pixies best stuff, but it still sounds decidedly Pixies-like thanks to Joey Santiago’s blistering, tyrannosaurus guitar roars.  By the way, the guy from Dreamworks who requested the song didn’t like the end product, so the song was not used in the Shrek film.  Probably a good thing, because Mike Myers is a douche, and the Pixies have never exactly been kid’s movie fodder.

Next, the band was recruited for a tribute album to the late Warren Zevon titled Enjoy Every Sandwich.  The end result was their cover of “Ain’t That Pretty At All.”  Here’s where I got all giddy.  The chemistry between Kim and Frank in this song is so amazing, and they sound like they are having a fucking blast.  To hear that manic scream again after Frank Black’s recent forays into softer Americana territory warmed this fantard’s soul.

Unfortunately, that was all we got.  From all the rumors I’ve read on the intarwebs, it would seem that Kim Deal was just not interested in making a new album with the band.  She has, however, begun producing material with her band The Breeders again.  Perhaps the relationship between her and Black Francis never fully healed, or perhaps it was just as thorny as it always was.  Either way, the likelihood of any more new Pixies material is slim.  Boo hoo.

Now we have the return of Black Francis.  What has it yielded?  So far, not a whole lot.  I’m a little confused as to why he felt the need to resurrect the old name.  If you buy these records and are expecting to hear the Pixies, you won’t get it.  If you go in expecting to hear Frank Black, you won’t wuite get that either.  What we get is a blending of the two.  At times, many of the songs off of the Black Francis records sound like they would fit in perfectly on a Frank Black and the Catholics album.  Every now and then, however, he comes close to the sound that defined his old band.  I think the closest has come so far is with the song “Threshold Apprehension.”  Full of Black Francis’s trademark yelps, and backing vocals that almost sound like they could have come from Kim Deal herself, this was the first song off Bluefinger that I heard.

So Black Francis is back, and he is rocking out.  He’s just not quite giving us Pixies-level quality yet.  I’m glad he’s back on a rock ‘n’ roll kick, and I think the latest albums show a promise of good things to come.  However, one thing that is noticably absent from these recordings is Joey’s guitar.  Black Francis, call Joey.  Get him to do your next record with you.  Please!  Thank you.

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Posted by Jason Austinite

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