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.
For some Wednesday morning sweetness, try the whimisical, jazz-steeped pop of Prefab Sprout. This is some of the best songwriting in 80s/90s pop, with many embedded dynamic changes (although not in the posted song) and unconventional tempos and rhythms. The vocal of Paddy McAloon and high, airy harmonies of Wendy Smith are also fantastic. Looking for Atlantis from 1990 is on the pure pop end of their spectrum. Enjoy.
While we're in this genre (sort of; I guess the 80s derivation of 70s soul/R&B), here's a song that got a large amount of airplay on Top-40 stations but because of this I thought never really got taken seriously. The Mary Jane Girls were a Rick James joint through and through (right down to their name, apparently). In My House (1983) is just a really well-crafted pop song, from its strong synth-breaks to the tight vocal harmonies, demonstrating that at the time, the Rick James orbit was a pretty good place to be.
And by this I mean the transition from the 70s to the 80s. This was possibly the most varied and interesting time in the history of pop music. I began this period as a young lad who had been listening mostly to top-40 on AM radio, which means everything from motown to country to disco to rock. Here's a song that, like most on AM, got massively overplayed, but which in this case I never got sick of: Deja Vu by Dionne Warwick (co-written by Isaac Hayes). I really like the mellowness and laid back tempo and the atmosphere evoked by the instrumentation. And it looks like Paul Klee was resurrected to make the video.
I fully stipulate that David Bowie is one of the most important and influential musicians of the rock era. However, a true Bowie aficionado would tell you that I am not worthy of being called a Bowie fan because my favorite Bowie album, in fact the only segment of his oeuvre that I listen to with any kind of regularity, is Let’s Dance (1983). My impression is that many Bowie fans view this as somewhat of an 80s pop sellout. (Admittedly, production by Nile Rodgers, who helped invent the Funk/R&B sound that would come to be called disco in the late 70s with his band, Chic, likely adds to this impression. But this is a feature, not a bug, in my view.) I view it as a genius pop album that never gets old even after massive radio overplay of its major hits (the title track, Modern Love, and China Girl – a remake of a Bowie/Iggy Pop tune). Bowie’s voice is all atmosphere, and that’s just the beginning here. The oblique lyrical references, excellent hooks, guitar work (including solos on several tracks by Stevie Ray Vaughan), mark this as possibly the best pop album of its era. Unfortunately, my favorite song from this album, Criminal World, is not on YouTube. So here’s an excellent live version of Cat People (used in the 1982 movie of the same title).
The Portal of Cehl Flegyyyyyyya is currently only large enough to admit small humanoids or demi-humans but has been much larger in the past. It was last used by the minor demon Sha La Na Boixx as she fled back to the Abyss after defeat at the Battle of 1000 Azure Oysters in 320 A.D. A small cult worshipful of Fincevung III, the victorious leader of the Funblech Colony hoplites (a civilization that was wiped out by a large hurricane several years after the battle), has persisted since that time and occasionally leaves colorful strings of beads as tribute, like those seen in the picture. On the night of every (approximately) 1000th full moon since the battle, a thin stream of yellow smoke can be seen emanating from the portal, along with a barely audible, high pitched scream, believed to be the battle cries of several Funblech hoplites who chased Sha La Na Boixx throught the portal and hence achieved immortality.
Every late summer/early fall I turn into a bit of a weather geek, ever since we moved to Long Island several years ago. There can and have been direct hits from hurricanes here. A great site to keep up on the latest hurricane events is at the National Weather Service/ National Hurricane Center. There are up to the hour/minute predictions and images there, which are fascinating to delve into. Perhaps the ultimate site for weather nerds is the Weather Underground, which hosts a hurricane blog run by meteorologist Jeff Masters. This is the best way to get the latest info on storms. The comments section of the blog is very entertaining, but sometimes the amateur comments (it does not appear to be thoroughly moderated) are a little tedious.
Dr. Masters noted in yesterday’s blog post that one of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft had quite a nasty surprise with turbulence flying into Hurricane Felix that day. These are flights run by NOAA that provide vital close-up data (impossible to get from satellites and ground radar) on storms that are necessary for accurate forecasts. He then linked to a narrative of the most harrowing (and last, apparently) flight he was on in a Hurricane Hunter, into Hugo in 1989. This is an absolutely gripping read and I highly recommend it. I freaking hate even minor turbulence on commercial flights. I cannot imagine what the Hurricane Hunters go through routinely.
In my opinion you have to be stone crazy to do that. But I’m really glad those guys do it, because the data they provide saves lives and enables vital ongoing research into the dynamics of hurricanes.
yet I can't help watching it when it comes on. This Heineken ad with the neo-cabaret robot women dancers. Their molt-like form of reproduction is particularly disturbing.
If I ever start a creative consulting/graphic design business, this will be its name and logo (I'll probably get someone to replace this line-drawing faerie with something more artistic). So far Dream-Pop Concepts has only produced one Christmas card.
Jen's Chinese Restaurant in Port Jefferson Station, NY. Lots of curry but still not spicy enough for me (wo xiang chu hen la shi wu). A very serviceable SCMF, very typical of takeout places in these parts.
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