// Category Archive for: Waxing Nostalgic

Waxing Nostalgic: Devo, “Beautiful World”

By Jeffery X Martin

Americans were all primed for the Eighties. It was a decade where something was supposed to happen. Perhaps we all had a touch of Orwellian paranoia, a sense of not knowing which way to lean or who to trust. It was like a great atmospheric pressure swell that needed to break, dark heavy clouds heralding the coming shitstorm. We lived under the constant threat of nuclear war, fearing the goose-step marching of fascists and neo-Nazis down our tree-lined suburban streets. We also went to see The Cannonball Run enough times to make it the sixth highest grossing film of 1981. What were we thinking? Even now, it is hard to believe that anyone needed escapism that badly.

I realize that, if you weren’t there, the Eighties seem shiny and gleeful, like a candy cane on a Ferris wheel. That’s bullshit. Doom and gloom surrounded us and we continued to distract ourselves from it all with whatever we could find. We had to. Nobody wants to wake up every single fucking morning, facing their own mortality! Hell yes, I’ll take that Rubik’s Cube. I’ll play with the colors and make weird geometric designs, whatever, man, just don’t let Reagan push that Big Red Button!

Should we deal with the clear and present danger or should we play with the cool shiny distraction? We’ll take that distraction every time. And why?

We’re devolving.

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Waxing Nostalgic: The Pretenders, “Tattooed Love Boys”

By Jeffery X Martin

We have to talk about sex. I know this makes some folks uncomfortable. I’ll try to be gentle. However, if you are, or plan on, becoming a regular reader of this column (and golly, I hope you do), please realize this is going to happen once in a while. I write about music from the late Seventies and all throughout the Eighties. Those were formative years for me. Music is intertwined with those emotions and those memories. I would be surprised if the same were not true for you (and golly, I hope it is).

For instance: in the year 1980, I was eleven. Sweet, innocent, a little on the chubby side and completely unprepared for what was going to happen when she walked into my life. This woman would both destroy me and make me feel alive. She made me feel things . . . all the things. I had to look up words and ask other people—older people—what her phrases meant.

I’m talking about Chrissie Hynde.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Alice Cooper, “Clones (We’re All)”

By Jeffery X Martin

Oh, my gods, you guys, it’s 1980! There’s robots and test tube babies and shit! The New Wave is here, and guitar strings are quickly being replaced by wires. Dynamic stage shows are becoming starkly lit installations of performance art. Humanoid beings stand behind keyboards bathed in shadow, soundtracking Dystopia before your bionically enhanced eyes. Science fiction is now science fact and music has embraced it, just like they did the Crybaby pedal and the phrase, “Hey now, mama.”

It was a scary time for traditional rock and roll. Normal rock fans were scorned and mocked, gathering in the alleys at night like Morlocks, forced to live on the streets in makeshift shelters composed entirely of Rumours and Frampton Comes Alive! gatefold album covers. If rock and roll wasn’t dead, it was in a coma and we knew, we knew it was serious. We also knew if anyone could save us, it was the Son of Satan himself, Alice Cooper.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Robert Hazard, “Escalator Of Life”

By Jeffery X Martin

As a writer, I am in love with the English language. It’s my tool, it’s my crutch, it is my weapon. While I hate to see the language abused and used poorly, I enjoy it when other creative people grab hold of it and whip it around, make it snap and do things it normally wouldn’t. This usually happens in the area of analogies, similes, and metaphors. And I must admit: I love ’em when they’re bad. If you can take a bad comparison and make it work on your behalf, make it seem credible and acceptable, then you’ve accomplished something. It’s a dubious and weird thing, but a thing, nonetheless.

Let us ponder, then, the most excellent badness of Robert Hazard’s “Escalator of Life.”

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Ben Folds Five, Whatever And Ever Amen

By Jesse Roth

The end of every school year is always filled with a mix of emotions. There’s the excitement of finally being done with another grueling, possibly boring 180 days of state-sanctioned education. There’s a tinge of sadness that you may not see your friends for a whole three months, or possibly forever. And for some of us, there’s that mix of bitterness and angst that you feel in regards to your not-so-beloved alma mater and its denizens, briefly interrupted by daydreams of busting out and becoming someone other than some unknown dork hanging out in the hallways.

How does a person properly sum up these various feelings regarding the newly completed school year, other than trite yearbook quotes or lame pranks? For this awkward teen, it involved the passenger seat of mom’s car, my middle finger, and Ben Folds Five.
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Stereolab, Mars Audiac Quintet

By Jemiah Jefferson

“Listen to this,” my friend Ben said to me on a happily semi-spontaneous trip to my fortress of solitude in San Francisco. “This is the most static music I’ve ever heard.”

Ben had spent the entire evening turning me onto bands that I would go on to love—Soul Coughing among them, but that’s another story—and I was starved for new sounds to get into, having listened to a steady diet of Brian Eno for some years.

It was a dark and grim time in my life, when I found the city of my hopes and aspirations to be merely a vast wasteland of things I couldn’t afford and people I couldn’t be. There was a lot of banked, formless anger I couldn’t voice, and a lot of beauty all around me that I observed which nobody else seemed to notice.
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Me Unchained: Beat Happening, The US Navy, And Me

By Emily Carney

Some personal history: at the age of 19, I joined the United States Navy. The reason why I joined the military was ostensibly to get money for college. After many struggles (too many to mention, or else this article would be at least 100 pages long), I went to my first (and only) ship, the USS George Washington, CVN 73, in January 1999. I was one of the only women in my department at the time, and certain higher-ups (chiefs and officers) made it abundantly clear that my 100-pound frame would not make it in the US Navy. I was terrified.
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Before They Were Big: Gwar, Pop Will Eat Itself, Oingo Boingo

By Christian Lipski

“Before They Were Big” could also be seen as “Before They Sold Out,” or “Before They Got Good,” depending on your point of view. What I really mean is that these albums are from the artists’ earlier days, before what would become their more popular period. In my own personal opinion, these particular records are some of my favorites from the artists. While I don’t begrudge any band the opportunity to become successful and evolve one’s style, I do like having their earlier stuff around.
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After They Split: Limahl, ‘Don’t Suppose’ and Kaja, ‘Extra Play’

By Less Lee Moore

I received Kajagoogoo’s White Feathers at my 13th birthday party. I’d asked for it on cassette because my family and I were going to Disneyworld the next day and I wanted to be able to listen to it on my Walkman. (Ah, the pre-digital age when you had to have blank tapes handy and couldn’t just rip a CD to your hard drive and then transfer it to your MP3 player.)

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The Cramps, Smell Of Female

By Christian Lipski

“Ladies and Gentlemen, live from the Peppermint Lounge, The Cramps”
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