Waxing Nostalgic: Dead Kennedys, “Insight”
Published on May 23rd, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
The Dead Kennedys were one of the most famous punk bands of the Eighties. Formed in San Francisco in 1978, The DKs were also one of the most outspokenly political bands, each song like a sandwich board. They found their arch-nemesis in President Ronald Reagan and his administration and they poked through the hypocrisies that abounded in that hellish decade, demanding a return to integrity and the simple act of telling the truth.
Waxing Nostalgic: Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control”
Published on May 16th, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
Joy Division was the ultimate Manchester band, encapsulating that town’s darkness, smoke, and despair in their music as surely as if they had encased it in Lucite. It’s a paperweight. It’s a time capsule. It’s like eavesdropping on someone’s lowest thoughts, hearing the sounds their brains make, the constant loop that brings about madness.
Waxing Nostalgic: Freedy Johnston, This Perfect World
Published on May 2nd, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
Maybe it’s the phrase “singer/songwriter” that makes my asshole clench up. I think of the douchebag in Animal House singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” until John Belushi, in his infinite wisdom, comes along and smashes the schmuck’s thrift-store guitar against the wall, shattering the vehicle of his lousy poetry into millions of pieces.
Waxing Nostalgic: The Final Dot – Duran Duran
Published on April 25th, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
Hello. My name is X, and I’m a Duran Duran fan. I was one in the Eighties. I am still one today. There is nothing hipsterish about this claim. I am not misappropriating anything. It is not ironic or tongue in cheek. I have danced on the valentine. I have lit my torch and waved it for the New Moon on Monday. I have reached up for the sunrise, met El Presidenté and had my last chance on the stairway.
Waxing Nostalgic: Golden Palominos, “Buenos Aires”
Published on April 11th, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
It’s not fair to call the Golden Palominos a supergroup. They were one, but they were beyond that. The Golden Palominos were a collaboration of musicians, heroes of the deep underground, with a lineup that rotated from album to album, changing styles and moods, sometimes drastically, with every release.
Accessibility was not their strong suit.
Waxing Nostalgic: Failure, “Wonderful Life”
Published on April 4th, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
The college rock scene was disintegrating in the mid-Nineties, and the Alternative Nation was annexing everything. Think of it as the Continental Drift of rock and roll. Bands had one leg on underground radio and the other on the set of a blue-tinted video with spinning chairs and dystopian decay, hoping to get some MTV rotation. But the college scene and the MTV kids started moving away from each other, both sides saying, “It’s not me, it’s you.”
Waxing Nostalgic: The Five Eighties Bands You Should Still Be Listening To
Published on March 28th, 2014 in: Listicles, Music, Top Five Lists, Waxing Nostalgic |
I’ve been writing this column for a year now, completely immersing myself in coming up with new words about old music. A lot of it, frankly, just doesn’t hold up. It’s the aural equivalent of parachute pants. Why did we like it? Why did we buy it? What were we thinking? Were we all mad? Nobody would be caught dead in parachute pants these days.
Some bands still make the grade, though, and are still insanely listenable after all these years. Following are the bands I implore you to listen to again, or maybe for the first time.
Waxing Nostalgic: In Front of a Live Audience
Published on March 21st, 2014 in: Listicles, Music, Top Five Lists, Waxing Nostalgic |
I’ve talked to people who can’t get into live albums. The recording is rarely clean. The crowd noise can be a distraction. It’s obvious when someone screws up. They don’t like to hear the in-between song banter.
I understand how those things could detract from one’s enjoyment of the music, but man, when a live album is done right, it’s pure dynamite. That aural snapshot of a band at a specific point in time fascinates me. It’s a time capsule. When the crowd is into it, clapping and screaming at all the right times, a live album is truly the next best thing to being there.
In chronological order, here are some live albums from older artists that stay on rotation in my personal earholes.
Waxing Nostalgic: Cheap Trick, “Dream Police”
Published on March 14th, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
It’s difficult to gauge just how popular Cheap Trick really got. Even though their live version of “I Want You to Want Me” hit the top ten and the album At Budokan sold millions, most people seem to think of them as “those guys that did that one song.”
Waxing Nostalgic: The Bolshoi, “Books on the Bonfire”
Published on March 7th, 2014 in: Music, Waxing Nostalgic |
There was always an undercurrent of darkness beneath the neon veneer of the Eighties. We just weren’t sure how to label it. We had Gothic music, we had dark alternative, we had the beginnings of darkwave, but those left a pretty wide berth. We had to listen to music without necessarily putting a label on it.
I wish we did that more often, now.