Rescue Missions

This week, I found a set of songs to post, but I didn’t know why they made a set. As I worked with them, the songs told me why they wanted to be together. These songs are rescue missions. Two are songs that I feel should be better known. One is known better than the movie it came from, so it is the movie that is being rescued. And the last song is one that the original artist rescued by recording it again.

Thomas Dolby: Budapest by Blimp

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Thomas Dolby made a splash with She Blinded Me With Science on his debut album. His second album was very different, but still yielded the hit Hyperactive. But Dolby’s third album, Aliens Ate My Buick, is one that many people don’t even know exists. It almost seems that Aliens was an album that Dolby wanted to use to chase his fans away. Suddenly, Dolby got funky, even working with George Clinton. But Budapest by Blimp is another matter. There is a groove here, but it simmers, not cooks. The lyrics sound like a screenplay to an old movie. The song has a coolness that, ironically, allows the emotions of the piece to really come out. I wonder if Erika Badu has ever heard this one, because some of her work reminds me of it.

The Balancing Act: Generator

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The Balancing Act was a group that recorded an EP and two albums for the IRS label in the 1980s. When the label went under, so did the band. They deserved better. The Balancing Act had great energy, and wonderful pop instincts. They blended acoustic and electric instruments perfectly, and they had a gift for using vocal harmonies in just the right places. Generator is one of their slightest lyrics, but that’s not the point here. This song is about hooks, and Generator has them galore. Try and sit still as you listen to this one, but don’t be surprised if you find your toe tapping.

Benoit Charest: Belleville Rendezvous

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Do you remember this one? Bellville Rendezvous was the title song from the animated film The Triplets of Belleville. The song was an Oscar nominee, and was the hit of the Oscar broadcast in its year. Ah, but who ever saw the movie. You have to be crazy to make an animated film for adults only, especially one that tells its story almost entirely without dialog. But The Triplets of Belleville is a great piece of work that I am very happy to have in my personal DVD collection. And I love the song as well.

Paul Simon: Late in the Evening

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Speaking of movies, Paul Simon was in one once. Wrote the music for the soundtrack too. The movie was One Trick Pony in 1980, and by all accounts, it was pretty bad. The album did yield a hit, Late in the Evening, but I always felt that the song was missing something. In 1991, Paul Simon revisited the song for his concert in Central Park, and he showed me exactly what I had been missing.

Simon had released Graceland, and followed it with Rhythm of the Saints, in which he explored the music of Brazil. In 1991, he was playing many of the songs from these albums live, and he needed a band that could handle the tricky rhythms. So Simon’s band for that concert included musicians from both South Africa and Brazil. They didn’t simply lay down the rhythm for Late in the Evening and let it sit there. These musicians had the talent to play with the rhythm without losing it, so they loosened the song up. And now it really cooks. That was the missing ingredient.

Spotlight Song of the Week:

Kingsley Flood: a little too old

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Kingsley Flood is a rock band with five musicians. There is a drummer, bass player, and rhythm guitarist. So far, so good. Then there is a lead guitarist who also plays fiddle, mandolin, and banjo. So it gets interesting. Here is a band that can rock out with the best of them, but they can also sound like a folk group. And Kingsley Flood also has a jazzy side. The fifth member of the group plays trumpet. The thing is, the band shows all of this on their album dust windows, and it all works. On a little too old, you will find all of these elements in one song. And you will hear that it works. Naseem Khuri writes the songs, and shows himself to be a fine writer. He can summon an image, or create a great turn phrase, but always in service of the song.

Radio in the 80s

The music of the 1980s grew out of reactions to what was on the radio. Remember that, in the 1970s, radio was the main way people had of learning about music. AM radio in the 60s was all about the pop charts, but FM radio grew to fill a need to provide alternatives. In the 70s, that meant art-rock and the first wave of singer-songwriters. Meanwhile, the charts were full of lushly produced love ballads and the macho posturing of hard rock. A two word description of the music of the period might be, “artful pose”.

Towards the end of the seventies, some musicians sought to break away from that. The big idea behind punk was to smash down the pose, and present something real. Coming close on its heals, new wave confronted the artful aspect, by presenting ditties, songs the reveled in their disposability, and therefore made great party music. It is ironic that punk itself eventually became a pose. And some of those disposable new wave songs were created with such love that they have become impossible to dispose of. New wave music also reacted to the overt emotionality of 70s ballads by presenting an aloof attitude, and exploring themes of miscommunication and alienation.

Meanwhile, radical changes were in store for radio itself. By the mid 80s, MTV had become the main source of new music, with radio following its lead. As MTV scaled back their music programming later, the internet took over, and radio permanently lost its primacy. Meanwhile, radio stations were being bought up, and becoming parts of large corporations. This tended to homogenize what could be heard on the air. The corporate owners also created niche programming, so that a station might only play country, or only hits of the 70s.

Songwriters were thinking about all of this as the late 70s became the 80s became the early 90s. And sometimes, they wrote music about it.

Elvis Costello: Radio Radio

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Elvis Costello thought about how listening to music on the radio could limit or broaden, but mostly limit, your choices. And his conclusions became a classic. Costello considers how a musician must rely on radio to gain and hold an audience, and how this can dictate what and how you play. This is both more and less true now than it was thirty years ago. Radio formats are stricter than ever, and maximizing your reach on the internet may mean making artistic compromises too. But it is also easier than ever to seek out unusual music.

Thomas Dolby: Radio Silence

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Where Elvis Costello’s radio tries to dictate what kind of music he makes and sells, Thomas Dolby’s serves to expose him to the world. Radio Silence is all about keeping secrets and maintaining privacy in an age of communication overload.

Wall of Voodoo: Mexican Radio

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Stan Ridgeway of Wall of Voodoo presents radio in a foreign language as a metaphor. Lines of communication are open, but no communication is occurring. There must also be mutual understanding, no matter what the technology.

Chris Whitley: Dust Radio

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In all these radio songs, Dust Radio gives off the most puzzling signal. Chris Whitley even emphasizes this. The song ends with a potential listener retuning the radio to try to get a better signal, and getting other stations by mistake. Whitley seems to be saying that this relationship feels so strong to him that it must be giving off its own signal, but it is nevertheless a private thing.

R. E. M.: Radio Song

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R. E. M.’s Radio Song brings us full circle. R. E. M. had been a cult band throughout the 80s, never achieving mass success. By 1991, they were leading off an album with this song, about how a song can get stuck in your head. There is a definite element of sour grapes here. Ironically, the second song on this same album would get stuck in a lot of people’s heads. It was called Losing My Religion.

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Fund drive update: Thank you to my first donors. Your help is greatly appreciated. I have also received useful advice from someone who could not afford a donation, but wanted to help. That means a lot to me. Thank you as well.

For a Song: Mulu The Rain Forest

Thomas Dolby: Mulu The Rain Forest

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Synth-pop was a 19080s offshoot of new wave music which entailed one or two musicians “playing” programmed keyboards and singing. The results often sounded robotic, (which was sometimes exactly the point). The sounds in this music were artificial and sterile, expressing alienation in a new way. The ideas were interesting for a while, but to me this music got boring after a while.

Thomas Dolby burst onto the scene with She Blinded Me With Science, and his music was immediately labeled synth-pop. But Dolby was doing something else. He used synthesizers, yes, but in combination with instruments like electric guitar and actual drums, as opposed to drum machines. And Dolby never wanted his music to sound chilly or alienated. Rather, Dolby was interested in exploring different music textures.

With the release of Dolby’s second album, The Flat Earth, this became clearer. The Flat Earth is all about musical textures and words that follow from the sound. The album starts and finishes with the two singles, Dissidents and Hyperactive. But in between, Dolby takes on a journey to the land of dreams and back again. The destination of this journey is Mulu The Rain Forest. Here, the listener is in some aboriginal dreamtime. The lyrics are simple, but they are almost beside the point. The vocal is just one more sound that transports us into the dream. The rhythm and the melody both splinter and regroup throughout the song. Finally the dream ends, and the rest of the album wakes us, refreshed, and perhaps wiser to the mysteries.

I don’t know what I have personally learned from this. But The Flat Earth is an album I never tire of going back to. And, for me, Mulu The Rain Forest is the centerpiece of the album.