Posts Tagged ‘1970s’

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Stayin’ aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!

Posted: August 25, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Today at Run-DMSteve we contemplate disco. As the 1970s recede in our rearview mirror we should remind ourselves that the disco phenomenon did not engulf the entire decade. It wasn’t even around long enough to become the theme music to the Carter administration.

Disco had an intense but relatively short initial run, breaking upon the world in 1976 with the release of the film
Saturday Night Fever and cresting in ’77 as punk and New Wave appeared and people got tired of dressing like circus clowns and stuffing themselves into ice-fog-shrouded, money-sucking discotheques. (I miss the fog.)

Disco staggered on, too oblivious or coked-out to die, though the industry probably got some kind of message after Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979, when the White Sox blew up a pile of disco records while beer-soaked anti-disco fans rioted. This is probably not what Ronald Reagan meant by “Morning in America.”

You may believe that such acts as KC & The Sunshine Band (“Shake Shake Shake, Shake Your Booty”), Sister Sledge (“We Are Family”), The O’Jays (“Love Train”), and Chic (“Le Freak”) have had little impact on our civilization. If you believe that you are like so wrong.

This music dovetails to perfection with pop from the ’60s and the ’80s in any Golden Oldies format. You could easily bookend 15 minutes of British Invasion with Donna Summer on one side and Evelyn “Champagne” King on the other, or follow Frankie Goes to Hollywood with Kool & The Gang. The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” has become a traditional, and much-anticipated, part of baseball games, wedding receptions, corporate retreats, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, and Christmas parties, whereas if you’d tried that in 1978 when the song was fresh you would’ve had a fight on your hands.

Burn baby burn! Disco inferno, yeah! Burn baby burn! Gonna burn that mama down!
My problem with disco is not that I regret loving it when I was 21 – I wore a leisure suit and I’m proud – but that I can no longer dance to it. Our dance standards have changed, altered by decades of electronica, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Lady Gaga. Here in 2012, disco sounds slow.

While disco was happening, dances with formal steps sprang up to match the music, but who dances like that anymore? Britney runs rings around Donna and Evelyn with “Womanizer.” Lady Gaga sprints past The Bee-Gees with “Born This Way.” You can get hours of nonstop, hands-in-the-air, jet-propelled glow-stick insanity from any trance artist. (Christopher Lawrence’s Un-Hooked is totally off the hook.) You can’t get any of that from “Well she’s a brick. HOUSE. The lady’s stacked and that’s a fact, ain’t holding nothing back.” Even The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” a signature event when they played it at discos in 1977, sounds today as if The Trammps were dragging their feet. Must’ve been the burden of that extra m.

The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is the 10th best-selling album of all time. Disco is part of our heritage, and though there are no post-graduate programs in Disco Studies (that I know of), the field probably has depths none of us suspect.

But I doubt it.

Get down, get down, get-down-get-down, get down tonight! Oh woo hoo oo hoo hoo hoo hooooo.

How to listen to AC/DC without chipping points off your IQ

Posted: August 24, 2011 in Concert reviews, music, Record reviews
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It’s time for a wee bit of head-banging with today’s special guests, AC/DC. But before I tell you how to cope with these Australian wunderkinder, let’s deal with some of the more common reactions to their music. And people definitely react.

Former co-worker Karrie objects to AC/DC’s “misogynistic lyrics, badly rhyming lyrics, and badly rhyming misogynistic lyrics.”

Former co-worker Curt compares AC/DC to “an expensive, exotic cheese…smells horrid, leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but when paired with the proper wine and foods…it’s exquisite.”

Current wife Special D opines, “They’re really annoying if you’re not drunk.”

Critics: All their songs sound the same!!

Though I enjoy a big blast of AC/DC, I can’t refute these charges. (I never found out what former co-worker Curt thought you could pair them with. Prozac?) However, I believe that AC/DC is the one butt-kicking metal outfit you should listen to because, in today’s time-starved environment, they are by far the most efficient. From Anthrax to White Snake, you’ll never find a band that rocks this hard with all of these strengths:

1) All their songs sound the same? Of course they do. Angus and Malcolm Young only know a couple of riffs. They can’t even get the artillery on “For Those About to Rock” to go off at the right time. But those riffs are good riffs!

2) Because everything sounds the same, you can forget 17 of their 18 albums of original material and just buy Back in Black.

3) Back in Black is the second-biggest selling album of all time. (Thriller is first.) No one will make fun of you for having the vinyl, the CD, the eight-track, or the cassette in your collection because they’ve already seen it in 50 million other collections.

4) If you’re stealing this stuff online, why are you reading this?

5) The album cover is black.

As for the lyrics: You’re listening to the lyrics? Don’t do that. If you do, you’ll quickly realize that the members of AC/DC face some serious hurdles in establishing mutually respectful and beneficial relationships with women. Unfortunately there’s no patch you can download to improve these guys. I’ve grown adept at hearing the words without hearing the meaning. It helps to concentrate on the really loopy declarations, as when Brian Johnson threatens us with…a bell, or when he claims he doesn’t need to be hosed down or that he’s caught “in the middle of a railroad track.” Just step over one of the rails, Brian, you’ll free yourself in a jiffy.

Can women enjoy AC/DC responsibly? In 2003, Special D and I saw an all-female AC/DC tribute band called Hell’s Belles. The guitarist could mimic the Youngs perfectly, and in honor of Bon “Bon is gone” Scott she wore Australian-flag underwear. The singer was a black Janis Joplin who had us thunderstruck from the moment she opened her mouth. The ensemble restricted themselves to the less misogynistic epics, never resorted to bagpipes or cannons, and they even replaced the gong that opens “Hell’s Bells” with a triangle.

The spectacle of a stage full of women playing the music of these sexist birdbrains, coupled with some serious skills, made for an experience that was probably better than seeing the real thing. I’m sure they smelled better, too.

Thank you, AC/DC, for shaking me all night long, or at least for the 36-minute running time of Back in Black. You guys will always rock. Stay away from my wife.

They were the champions

Posted: August 23, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Queen: Greatest Hits
1994
Queen

I am never in the mood for Queen. There is no time of the day or night, no day of the week, no season in which I would choose to listen to Queen. This isn’t because I hate them; I don’t. They’re literate, which means a lot here at the Bureau. They use adjectives that are uncommon in a rock song (“warily”) and when the situation demands it they can concoct their own (“belladonic”). I’m just unmoved by their music.

One thing I do enjoy about Queen is that you can arrange their song titles to tell stories:

Fail Whale
It’s a Hard Life
I’m Going Slightly Mad
I Want to Break Free
I Want It All
Fight From the Inside
Keep Yourself Alive
Don’t Stop Me Now
Another One Bites the Dust

Get a Room
Get Down, Make Love
Spread Your Wings
We Will Rock You
Sheer Heart Attack
Sleeping on the Sidewalk

Placing them within the context of their ’70s contemporaries, Queen is less pompous than Yes, wittier than King Crimson, looser than Traffic, warmer than Pink Floyd, better dressed than Mountain, hipper than The Grateful Dead, kinkier than Steely Dan, nastier than Carole King, more electrifying than War, and smarter than Grand Funk Railroad, though that one is easy. My dog is smarter than Grand Funk Railroad. Queen could toast and eat Bread and wash them down with ELO without missing a beat. They are the Monitor to Black Sabbath’s Merrimack. They are not just superior to Chicago, they make Chicago look like Fall River, Massachusetts. Their song about women with overlarge derrieres is AC/DC with metaphors and flashbacks. AC/DC can barely manage a point of view. And their song about murder, the nature of reality, and Galileo made Wayne’s World possible.

Queen was obviously a respectable unit, but this is music, not quantum mechanics. If you could explain art you wouldn’t need misinformed critics like me. Honk if you love David Bowie.

Caballo sin Nombre

Posted: August 22, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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History: America’s Greatest Hits
1975
America

In 1972 I was one of the legions of musically jaded 16-year-olds who sneered at America’s “Horse with No Name” for this blatant imitation of Neil Young. Of course I played it when no one was around. It’s a drug trip, man! The narrator is wandering in the desert with no flight plan, on board a horse it never occurs to him to name. And the words – more than a hundred repetitions of “La”! What is he smoking, and can I have some?

You can’t outrun the song’s driving bass line. But if you stop mindlessly singing the lyrics and actually hear the words, you’ll be struck by America’s awesome powers of description:

On the first part of the journey,
I was looking at all the life.
There were plants and birds and rocks and things,
There was sand and hills and rings.

That’s a lotta nouns. “Things” pretty much covers everything that isn’t a plant, a bird, or a rock, but just to help us out they mention sand, hills, and rings. So this must be a drug trip because the guy is in the middle of a wasteland on a horse he can’t identify and he’s hallucinating about jewelry.

I could continue but this would lead us to the last line, “But the humans will give no love,” which I suspect they took from another song. I’ll instead point to their liberal use of prepositions in “’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain,” which Bruce Springsteen echoed 15 years later in “Tunnel of Love” when he advised us “to ride on down in through this tunnel of love.”

Enough with the literary sneering. America’s oeuvre may showcase their way without words, but those boys knew how to write a pop song. “Ventura Highway,” “Sister Golden Hair,” “I Need You,” and “Lonely People” (which doesn’t make a lick of sense) make my brain freeze, but they are perfectly constructed pop numbers that will annoy snobs like me for another century. Unfortunately, America is guilty of salvaging the malodorous “Muskrat Love,” possibly from a garbage scow, and turning it into a hit. This led to another version, likewise a hit, by The Captain & Tennille! Surely this act of artistic cross-pollination violated some ban on chemical warfare.

Here’s the bottom line on America. One morning in my junior year, a bunch of us on the way to school sang “I went to school on a bus with no name/it felt good to outrun that old train.” We made up the lyrics as we went along and we were still laughing when we got to class. We had America to thank. We never did name the bus.

She may be a dancing queen, but she’s still underage

Posted: August 21, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Gold: Greatest Hits
1993
More ABBA Gold
1996
What? Still Gold?
OK, I made that one up
ABBA

There was a time in the late 1970s when ABBA ruled. Though they captured the #1 spot on the U.S. Top 40 charts only once (with “Dancing Queen”), everything they recorded for about three years caused a global commotion. ABBA was a cultural force. Without ABBA we wouldn’t have had the film Mama Mia, obviously, but we also wouldn’t have had Muriel’s Wedding. The absence of ABBA would’ve punched a big hole in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I don’t know if it’s a shame or a blessing that ABBA existed before MTV.

Even U2 likes ABBA, or at least they like “Dancing Queen,” and come on, who doesn’t? It’s one of the iconic songs of the ’70s, the perfect companion to The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” and the antidote to just about anything by Queen. Whenever I put on a dance, I could count on “Dancing Queen” to draw every woman onto the dance floor the way Jupiter suctions up moons. Even women who had already left the building felt a disturbance in The Force and surged back inside.

But it’s clear in hindsight – it was clear even while it was happening – that most of ABBA’s songs were solidified crud. It was just a higher grade of crud than what most mainstream pop bands of the era were peddling. Bread and Rod Stewart, for example.

The good songs, though, are very good. “Dancing Queen” exists in a realm beyond criticism. “Take a Chance on Me” is a terrific sing-along number. “S.O.S.” is fun, unless Pierce Brosnan is trying to sing it. “Knowing Me, Knowing You” is not only ABBA’s most complex song, it’s their only song that can be compared to The Beatles without looking ridiculous. How many bands have even one song that can do that? Which reminds me: “Waterloo” should’ve been recorded by Ringo.

Which further reminds me: One of ABBA’s contemporaries, The Cars, are the U.S. version of ABBA. This is particularly evident on “You Might Think” and “Tonight She Comes.” The Cars replaced the female voices with male voices and brought the guitars forward, but otherwise it’s the same froth, different beach.

So here’s a tip of the critic’s pointy hat to Agnetha, Frida, Bjorn, and Benny, and not just because the boys also made the musical Chess. Life wouldn’t have been the same without you. Though I wouldn’t mind living in a world where there was no Fernando to hear the drums and Agnetha and Frida could reliably find a man after midnight.

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