New York's (originaly from Philly) Book of Love made the best synth pop in America in the 80s and possibly ever. They were also a very fun show to see live (saw them in early '89 in a dining hall at the University of Rochester). The combination of crisp, bold rhythm tracks and the low-pitched vocals of Susan Ottaviano made for a rich sound that suited the dance floor scene very well (contrasting with the likes of New Order, Depeche Mode, and the Smiths). Their studio production was perfect. And the band had a lot of fun with the music.
Here's their biggest hit "Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls", which actually got some pop radio airplay:
For Halloween, I wanted to link to the song "Witchcraft", but I couldn't find it on Youtube. So here's a cover by a duo called Ejector. I recommend picking up Book of Love's original (much better but just as fun)...
This morning, NPR had a story about an opera commissioned to celebrate five paintings by Edward Hopper. Great idea; certainly his art is well deserving. The problem is the genre. Opera, especially contemporary American opera, in my opinion, is one of the least beautiful, in fact I would even use the term ugly, uses of the human voice imaginable. Listen to the clips from the radio piece and tell me you don't agree. I like classical music a lot. I especially like to hear contemporary classical music becuase it's interesting and often explores new musical territory. But putting that dissonant caterwauling over the top of it makes it unlistenable. Yes, this is art. And art doesn't have to be about beauty. But for me, music has to be at least somewhat about beauty, or I simply don't have time for it.
As the last post of my series on good music by cliche-ishly popular bands, I have to briefly mention Rush. Coming of age male in the 80s in the Northeast, listening to AOR radio, Rush was unavoidable. Anyone in the other gender (generally, but there have been exceptions) and with a different background, has a much less likely chance of "getting" Rush. Rush is a lot of musical punch from three guys who are virtuosos. It's rock and roll glory, of by and for introverted geeks. You have to spend a lot of time in your bedroom emulating this stuff to play like this (and armies of introverted guys have done this, even myself on keyboards occasionally). You have to have grown up in this lonely existence (or among fellow lonely travellers) to understand what Rush is about and to appreciate their music. This is the soundtrack to a certain type of existence. Rush (and their fans) take a lot of undeservered crap from people who have never been there (those people have other brands of patheticness in their backgrounds and have migrated to other music, which, in turn, Rush fans don't understand).
Here is a live version of my favorite Rush song, "Analog Kid". It gives a good look at how three guys can produce such a big sound onstage:
SD/LA’s Ratt was a transitional 80s metal band, self identified as “glam” metal. They were transitional musically between the early 80s harder metal of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden (actually in retrospect, a lot of this material doesn’t sound so hard today) and the like (by whom they were surely heavily influenced) and the full-on hair metal glammers of the late 80s and 90s. I mention them here because of a single song, their best known, “Round and Round” (1984) which stands out. The rest of their material that I’ve heard is pedestrian stuff. Hundreds of bands were playing this sound in garages and small bars all over the place. But “Round and Round” provides evidence that somebody in that band (if they indeed wrote the song; nothing on their Wikipedia pages indicates who wrote it) could write songs. There are unconventional chord changes in both the intro/chorus (an A flat augmented E flat major to a G flat augmented D flat major to a B major) and verse (E flat major to G flat major), providing for possibly the most unique hooks in any metal song that I’ve heard.
The video stars Milton Bearle and is pretty funny.
Might as well make this a Scandinavian pop trifecta. I haven't followed them after their first U.S. album The Sign (1993) (they have since become international pop superstars), but Sweden's Ace of Base impressed me a lot, not with the singles off this album, which were catchy but did not stand up to massive radio overplay, but with several of the non-singles (or non-US singles). In particular, I recommend "Young and Proud", "Dancer In a Daydream", "Wheel of Fortune", "Happy Nation", and "Voulez-Vous Danser". Hooky, atmospheric dance music with great vocals and textures.
While we’re on the subject of Scandinavian pop, I have to mention Norway’s a-ha, who although taken somewhat lightly as pretty boys at the time, cultivated a unique sound through some really nice songwriting in the late 80s. They broke through in 1985 with one of the most innovative videos ever; Take On Me remains probably the only well known a-ha song, and it’s a good one. Each of their first three albums contains gems, that at least in the states, were pretty much undiscovered by anyone close to the mainstream. Off 1985’s Hunting High and Low there were “The Blue Sky” and “Dream Myself Alive”. Off the 1986 album Scoundrel Days there were “We’re Looking for the Whales” and “The Weight of the Wind” and off 1988’s Stay on these Roads there were “The Blood that Moves the Body”, “Hurry Home”, and “The Living Daylights”, which was the theme of the 1987 James Bond movie of the same title (this was the first Timothy Dalton Bond movie and is my second favorite of the series - Maryam d'Abo rocked my world in this movie; but still, my favorite Bond movie by far is For Your Eyes Only)
While the backing instrumentals and production of A-ha were prone to the synthetic affectation and overproduction of the times, the alternately high and deep vocals of Morten Harket, the highly varied songwriting, and the ever so slightly Nordic atmospherics that are injected around the edges make the sound worth revisiting.
Here’s a movie version of the video for "The Living Daylights". Easily my favorite theme of the Bond movies.
Most people know ABBA from Dancing Queen and maybe Take a Chance on Me and like to dance to these tunes at parties but otherwise kind of laugh the band off as lightweight pop by 1970s Euros, unaware of the full oeuvre. Yes, they made a lot of clunker songs (the ones that made their two disc ABBA Gold greatest hits set were notably: Thank You For the Music, When All is Said and Done, and The Way Old Friends Do). Their massive worldwide popularity allowed them to be easily dismissed as not musically noteworthy, but again bland homogeneity or pure unsophistication of the fandom shouldn’t by itself condemn the music.
Admittedly, I discovered ABBA like almost everyone else in the U.S. did: Dancing Queen was played hourly on every AM Top 40 station in the country (or at least the ones in Rochester) through the winter of 1976. In the early 80s I got the TV-advertised 8-Track The Magic of ABBA, which contained their quintessential hits repertoire, and I listened to it incessantly.
The good songs are really well written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, who of course became world renowned composers of musicals. But the most important aspect of ABBA’s sound are the rich vocal harmonies by Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog. These are often multilayered in the studio tracks, with complex, often slightly discordant chord configurations evocative of Eastern Europe. The production and arrangement of most of their songs are superior for their period. They later got caught into the vortex of disco and later pop trends (but note that Dancing Queen, which became identified as a disco standard, came out about two years before the period in which disco dominated pop. Pretty visionary considering that disco evolved from American soul and funk.)
Three songs that emphasize the best of the ABBA sound are
S.O.S. (1975) [embedding was not available for this video]
Sheffield UK’s Def Leppard managed to get its version of early metal-pop into heavy rotation on both rock and Top 40 radio well before hair metal came to the fore and they did it (at least for a while, from 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry, through virtually the entire 1983 album Pyromania, clearly their best, to a few good tracks from 1987’s Hysteria) with uncomplicated hard rock that was directly in the lineage that Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath forged in the previous decade. Def Leppard also appears to have drawn from the orchestrality of Queen, evident most in their backing vocal harmonies. Queen had a long reign in the late 70s and early 80s as one of the most popular rock bands worldwide and probably influenced just about every rock artist of the 80s one way or another.
Photograph was one of the first 45s I ever bought and is a pop/hard rock masterpiece. Def Leppard’s sound perfectly evokes the always gothically romantic sound of metal but in a shorter, poppier format than either goth or metal bands. And it’s clear in their videos that the band itself never took things too seriously, which looking back is refreshing considering both the utter lack of songwriting talent that the later hair metal bands demonstrated and the clichéd heaviness and faked sinistrality that most metal likes to couch itself in.
Coming Under Fire (embedded above – sound only) is a quintessentially structured pop-metal track. Solid hooks, tight (but not overproduced) coordination between bass and drums driving the rhythm, and the urgent atmosphere of metal.
Yes, this band had (and likely still has) probably the most unsophisticated fan base imaginable. But that’s for the hipsters to hate. Enjoy the songs.
I’ve decided to do a series of posts about good songs residing among hugely popular, so popular as to be considered cheesily clichéd, music. Bottom line: sorry hipsters and alternative music purists, radio overplay and massive popularity are not universal markers of bad music (just most of the time).
Aspiring songwriters could learn a lot from Rick Springfield (in fact I wish most “singer-songwriters” I’ve ever heard in my life actually had). Springfield created beautifully crafted (and in most cases perfectly produced) pop songs, period. Whereas most songwriters are lucky to write a hook or two in their entire career, most of Springfield’s hits have three or more hooks per song. Do yourself a favor and pick up Rick’s Greatest Hits and listen to any of the following songs: Don’t Talk to Strangers, What Kind of Fool Am I, Human Touch, Love Somebody, Bop ‘Til You Drop.
Which brings us to Rick’s greatest hit, Jesse’s Girl (video below), which in 1981 dominated the US charts for a long time. Why most people liked it at the time, I don’t know. Why I liked it then and now, is that it is simply one of the best pop songs ever made in the rock idiom. Songs this good are immune to overplay in my brain. I could listen to them forever.
The genius in this song begins immediately: the basic guitar riff is simple but perfect, immediately guiding us into the initial verse hook. The verse has a B part that introduces a new vocal hook, with nice high harmonies. (Only Springfield could work the lyric “And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it.” into a single line so seamlessly.) Then we have the central hook of the chorus. After the second chorus a completely new hook enters that you would have to call a bridge. Then we return to the guitar riff underneath the chorus, which works as a kind of new intro, ushering in the most cleanly-entering guitar solo you’ll ever hear (according to the video, played by Springfield himself. The guy is one of the most fascinating figures of his era: Australian pop star, international TV star, rock star, and he writes his own songs and plays both rhythm and lead guitar on them. I wanted to be him when I was 14. I still want to be him.) This penchant to introduce an entirely new musical hook in the middle or toward the end of a song is reflected in some of his other hits and is seen in several songs by Journey, another artist on whom undeserving scorn is heaped by people who simply know nothing about good music.
This is great music folks. Empirical fact. Listen and learn.
From the China Tea House in Centereach, NY. Not a lot of curry here, but that's OK. A nice delayed spicyness and a very balanced mixed of meat (pretty fresh) and veggies.
Posts
