Category: Music

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Music

The Soundtrack from My Personal Coming-Of-Age Film, Part Deux

A couple of weeks ago, in an entry titled The Soundtrack to My Personal Coming-Of-Age Film, I lamented that the Billboard Top 100 wasn’t representative of the sort of stuff I listened to. I was a regular listener of CFNY (better known these days as 102.1 The Edge) back then. I looked around for some CFNY charts, which led me to the Spirit of Radio site, which publishes CFNY’s old charts.

Here’s the chart from the year I graduated from high school — 1987 — with the ones I particularly liked in bold, and the ones I particularly disliked in strikeout text. Note how much this chart differs from the 1987 Billboard chart.

  1. U2: The Joshua Tree

    This was one of the instigators of that false notion a lot of late 80s musicians had: “slower” means “deeper”. This is similar to another false notion that got its start in the early 90s and still plagues indie rock today: “angry and bitter” means “honest and sincere”.

  2. New Order: Substance
  3. R.E.M.: Document
  4. Depeche Mode: Music for the Masses
  5. The Cult: Electric
  6. The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come
  7. Sting: Nothing But the Sun
  9. The Cure: Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

    The Cure went all over the stylistic map with this one and made an album packed with gems. It brings me back to dancing with the death-bunnies at Montreal’s “Thunderdome” club.

  10. Echo and the Bunnymen: Echo and the Bunnymen
  11. Blue Rodeo: Outskirts
  12. Pink Floyd: A Momentary Lapse of Reason

    My roommate Mark used to play this quite often, so hearing Learning to Fly always takes me back to hanging out in Crazy Go Nuts University’s Leonard Hall, room 313.

  13. INXS: Kick
  14. Pet Shop Boys: Actually
  15. The Northern Pikes: Big Blue Sky
  16. The Housemartins: The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death

    Before he became Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook was in this happy Britpop band.

  17. 54.40: Show Me
  18. Billy Idol: Vital Idol
  19. Chalk Circle: Mending Wall
  20. Level 42: Running in the Family
  21. Various Artists: La Bamba Original Soundtrack
  22. Suzanne Vega: Solitude Standing
  23. Eurythmics: Savage
  24. Robbie Robertson: Robbie Robertson
  25. The Alarm: Eye of the Hurricane
  26. David Bowie: Never Let me Down
  27. Sinead O’Connor: The Lion and the Cobra

    “Don’t call me sweetheart, just call me Joe…” Before she went bonkers, she made some pretty good music.

  28. The Box: Closer Together
  29. Men Without Hats: Pop Goes the World
  30. ABC: Alphabet City
  31. Icehouse: Man of Colours
  32. Bryan Ferry: Bete Noire
  33. Erasure: Circus
  34. Prince: Sign O the Times
  35. Love and Rockets: Earth-Sun-Moon
  36. Yes: Big Generator
  37. The Jesus and Mary Chain: Darklands
  38. The Sisters of Mercy: Floodland

    Want a good 80s goth collection? Get Fad Gadget’s Collapsing New People, some Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, a little Alien Sex Fiend, the Batastrophe EP by Specimen and of course, this album, which features the original pre-Ofra Haza version of “This Corrosion”.

  39. Rock and Hyde: Under the Volcano
  40. Gene Loves Jezebel: House of Dolls
  41. Gowan: Great Dirty World
  42. The Grapes of Wrath: Treehouse

    “Now and Again” was by far the better Grapes of Wrath album.

  43. FM: Tonight
  44. Crowded House: Crowded House
  45. The Smiths: Louder Than Bombs

    Another must-have if you’re trying to put together a definitive 80s alt-rock collection.

  46. George Harrison: Cloud Nine
  47. The Silencers: A Letter from St. Paul
  48. Grateful Dead: In the Dark

    The Dead are forever associated in my mind with a lack of volition and hygiene.

  49. Simply Red: Men and Women

    I could never get into Simply Red, either.

  50. That Petrol Emotion: Babble

    One of the best eighties albums you never heard.

  51. Rush: Hold Your Fire
  52. Squeeze: Babylon and On

    Much better than their previous attempt, Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti, but still no Argybargy.

  53. 10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe
  54. Roger Waters: Radio Kaos
  55. Hoodoo Gurus: Blow Your Cool
  56. Hugh Marsh: Shakin’ the Pumpkin

    A violin player rocks out and gets interesting results. Notable track on this album: Rules Were Made to be Broken, a primer on Nazi Germany’s hatred of jazz. They called it “Judeo-Negroid music”.

  57. Skinny Puppy: Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate

    “This is stuff by a guy who used to be in Images in Vogue?” I asked when I first heard it.

  58. The Style Council: The Cost of Loving
  59. Flesh for Lulu: Long Live the New Flesh
  60. Gino Vanelli: Big Dreamers Never Sleep
  61. The Proclaimers: This is the Story
  62. Public Image Limited: Happy
  63. The Screaming Blue Messiahs: I Wanna Be a Flintstone (12″ Single)
  64. Yello: One Second

    “Ohhhhhhhhh yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhh (chicka-chickahhhh!)” How many movie soundtracks did that song end up on, anyway?

  65. Van Morrison: Poetic Champions Compose
  66. The Nylons: Happy Together
  67. The Psychedelic Furs: Midnight to Midnight
  68. Swing Out Sister: It’s Better to Travel
  69. Julian Cope: Saint Julian
  70. David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive

    Brian Eno for the Doc Martens and spiky-hair set!

  71. The Cars: Door to Door
  72. The Dead Milkmen: Bucky Fellini
  73. The Mighty Lemon Drops: Out of Hand
  74. Alison Moyet: Raindancing
  75. M/A/R/R/S: Pump Up the Volume

    George and I played this a lot back in Leonard Hall.

  76. Hunters and Collectors: Living Daylight
  77. The Blow Monkeys: She was Only a Grocer’s Daughter
  78. Thrashing Doves: Bedrock Vice

    I was seeing a rather wacky girl at the time and I associate the big single on this album, Beautiful Imbalance, along with the entire Singles: 45 and Under album by Squeeze with her.

  79. Run DMC: Raisin’ Hell
  80. Manteca: Fire Me Up
  81. Various Artists: In Demand
  82. Bruce Cockburn: Waiting for a Miracle

    My friend Yann and I used to have this favourite Cockburn joke: If a tree fell on Bruce Cockburn, would anybody care? He’s just too damned earnest, even for me.

  83. The Big Supreme: Don’t Walk
  84. Wire: The Ideal Copy
  85. Skid Roper and Mojo Nixon: Bo-day-shus!

    Everybody remembers Elvis is Everywhere, but Don’t Want No Foo-Foo Haircut on My Head/cite> was also pretty good.

  86. The BoDeans: Outside Looking In
  87. The Dolphin Brothers: Catch the Fall
  88. The Call: Into the Woods
Categories
Music

Beach Boys, meet Kanye West. Kanye, these are the Beach Boys. Now go make some nice music.

[via Horklog] West Sounds = Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds + Kanye West’s (The College Dropout + Late Registration).

Download the album before the copyright cops take the site down!

Categories
Music

Henry Rollins’ “William Shatner” Story

Photo: Henry Rollins, Adrian Belew, Ben Folds and William Shatner sitting at a table, presumably sometime during the recording of 'I Can't Get Behind That'.
Left to right: Henry Rollins, Adrian Belew, Ben Folds and William Effing Shatner.
I wish I’d been invited to this jam session!

If you haven’t yet picked up William Shatner’s album, Has Been, one of the best albums of last year, do it! It’s a great, offbeat collection of songs and spoken word tracks that more than makes up for the grevious sins of his first album, The Transformed Man (which features his now-classic manglings of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Mr. Tambourine Man).

One of the tracks I love on Has Been is I Can’t Get Behind That!, a call-and-response rant in which Shatner and Rollins take turns ranting about everyday things that drive them crazy, with drums providing a wild backbeat and Adrian Belew doing what he does best on guitar.

If you liked that track, like Henry Rollins or just like a story well told, you should give this a listen: it’s Henry Rollins telling the story of how I Can’t Get Behind That! got made [6.0MB, MP3]. Henry tells the story with his trademark intensity and energy as well as some oddball-but-enjoyable tangents. It’s 25 minutes long, but well worth it.

Categories
Music

I’m Enjoying This Album

Photo: Album cover of Kanye West's 'Late Registration'.

Funny, that’s exactly what I looked like at Crazy Go Nuts University.

Late Registration is a good follow-up to College Dropout

(and hey, two album titles I can sympathize with!*), which I have also

recently purchased. It’s a perfect companion to Common’s album Be, another excellent hip-hop album released this year.

(* Special message to my in-laws: Long story. Not as bad as it sounds. I’ll gladly tell all at dinner when I come down to Boston.)

If you’d rather take some music critic’s word over mine, see Rolling Stone’s review, The Guardian’s review and Pitchfork’s review.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

The Soundtrack from My Personal Coming-Of-Age Film

[via Daimnation!] Damian Penny picked up the meme, and I’m running with it:

…find the Top 100 songs from the year you graduated from high school,

list ’em on your site, highlight the ones you like and cross out the

ones you hate. You underline your favorite, and ignore the ones to

which you’re kind of indifferent.

That’s a tricky one for me: the Billboard Top 100 for 1987 is hardly representative of what I was listening to back then:

  • The Dead Milkmen: Eat Your Paisley
  • The Smiths: Strangeways Here We Come / Louder Than Bombs / The World Won’t Listen
  • Sigue Sigue Sputnik: Flaunt It
  • Indochine: Au Zenith
  • Level 42: True Colours / A Physical Presence / Running in the Family
  • Scritti Politti: Cupid & Psyche ’85

  • Joy Division: Substance
  • New Order: Substance
  • Kate Bush: Hounds of Love
  • Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill
  • Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy
  • Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes
  • Specimen: Batastrophe
  • Generation X: Kiss Me Deadly
  • Public Image Ltd.: Album
  • XTC: Skylarking
  • Images in Vogue
  • Skinny Puppy
  • Big Audio Dynamite: This is Big Audio Dynamite
  • Ministry, when Alain Jorgensen was still singing with his fake British accent

The CFNY playlist for that year (the former name of what is now “102.1 The Edge”;

it was a better and more eclectic station back then) would be a better

list to work from. Still, here’s my run at the Billboard Top 100, with

a couple of stories to boot.

Scroll down to the end of this entry for a special musical treat!

1. “Faith”…..George Michael
I

didn’t pay much attention to this song when it came out in 1987. It

would take another three years before it came onto my musical radar.

As I’ve mentioned a million zillion times before, I was from the first generation of regular DJs at Clark Hall Pub, a pub run by the engineering students at Crazy Go Nuts University. With the help of supportive managers like Ryan, George, “Beeker” and other great DJs like “Turner”, Lisa, “Archie” and “Johnny O”, we turned the pub into the place you went to when you were tired of the standard musical fare.

Our strong tendency towards alt-rock didn’t mean that we avoided the

classic rock or pop tunes; we just provided a more interesting mix of

songs. It wasn’t unusual to hear a set in which ABBA’s Dancing Queen was followed by Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hotrod, or have KMFDM’s industrial dance hit Godlike followed by Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy (or to see our resident nice-guy skinhead Glen Sloan and me go-go dancing on top of the DJ booth to both).

Certain cheese-pop songs, like the aforementioned I’m Too Sexy or Boney M’s Rasputin

had wide cross-over appeal. Whenever one of these tunes came on, people

rushed the dance floor, whether they were popsters, classic rockers,

alt-rock snobs or one of our small but loyal contingent of goths. My

friend Leesh (then one of our gang, now George’s wife) used to call

songs that appealed to you despite your knowing better “the secret top

ten — songs you’re too cool to like”.

The big “secret top ten song” at Clark Hall Pub was George Michael’s Faith.

One of the managers had bought the album from a bargain bin at the

local CD store and added it to the pub’s then-small music library.

Someone had played Faith on a lark and it turned out to be an

unexpected hit. A little while later, a tradition had formed: as soon

as you heard the opening organ intro — a pipe-organ treatment of the

Wham! song (I Don’t Want Your) Freedom

— you had to stand on your chair. As soon as the guitar chords

started, you clasped your hands above your head and did pelvic thrusts

in homage to George Michael’s dance moves.

This song brings back happy memories: sitting in the DJ booth (arguably

the best seat in the house), high-fiving the guys, chatting up the

girls and enjoying my favourite cocktail at the time: Crown Royal and

cranberry juice*.

* To my father-in-law, who is also an aficionado of Crown Royal: Hey, I was young then.

2. “Alone”…..Heart
3. “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” …..Whitney Houston
4. “C’est la Vie”…..Robbie Nevil
5. “Shake You Down”…..Gregory Abbott
6. “La Bamba”…..Los Lobos
7. “Livin’ On A Prayer”…..Bon Jovi
8. “Here I Go Again”…..Whitesnake
9. “Heaven Is A Place On Earth”…..Belinda Carlisle
10. “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life”…..Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes
11. “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”…..Starship
12. “I Think We’re Alone Now”…..Tiffany
13. “With Or Without You”…..U2
14. “At This Moment”…..Billy Vera and the Beaters
15. “Keep Your Hands To Yourself”…..Georgia Satellites
16. “Heart And Soul”…..T’Pau
17. “Open Your Heart”…..Madonna
18. “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”…..Whitney Houston
19. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”…..U2
20. “Looking For A New Love”…..Jody Watley
21. “Don’t Dream It’s Over”…..Crowded House
22. “Is This Love”…..Whitesnake
23. “Shake Your Love”…..Debbie Gibson
24. “Shakedown”…..Bob Seger
25. “Notorious”…..Duran Duran
26. “I Want Your Sex”…..George Michael
27. “The Lady In Red”…..Chris DeBurgh
28. “Always”…..Atlantic Starr
29. “Head To Toe”…..Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam

30. “Mony Mony”…..Billy Idol
In

1987, I was the keyboard player in A.K.A., a band made up of my friends

from high school. Our set list had a large number of Billy Idol

numbers, and to this day I retain a lot of useless information about

Billy (some examples: his real name is William Broad, his girlfriend at

the time was Perry Lister, his hit Dancing with Myself is actually

borrowed from his old band, Generation X and in his “unauthorized

biography”, he claimed to be fond of German expressionistic cinema).

Mony Mony was probably one of our better numbers, and as the keyboard player, the instrumental gave me an opportunity to shine.

I have heard a handful of theories as to why one should shout “Hey

motherfucker, get laid, get fucked!” (the north Toronto alternate with

less cussing was “Oy, bubby, zaidy, get bagels, get lox!”) after every

line in the verses. My favourite one is that the original — performed

by Tommy James and the Shondells — was on the radio when Billy lost

his virginity.

31. “Only In My Dreams”…..Debbie Gibson
32. “Land Of Confusion”…..Genesis
33. “Lost In Emotion”….Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam
34. “Should’ve Known Better”…..Richard Marx
35. “You Keep Me Hanging On”…..Kim Wilde
36. “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”…..Samantha Fox
37. “Lean On Me”…..Club Nouveau
38. “Catch Me (I’m Falling)”…..Poison
39. “I Knew You Were Waiting”…..Aretha Franklin & George Michael
40. “(I Just) Died In Your Arms”…..Cutting Crew
41. “Control”…..Janet Jackson
42. “Somewhere Out There”…..Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram
43. “U Got The Look”…..Prince
44. “Don’t You Want Me”…..Jody Watley
45. “Jacob’s Ladder”…..Huey Lewis and the News
46. “I Heard A Rumour”…..Bananarama
47. “Little Lies”…..Fleetwood Mac
48. “Songbird”…..Kenny G

49. “Breakout”…..Swing Out Sister
A

cute funky 80’s brit-pop bauble by a competent but otherwise

unremarkable band. It’s probably more notable for the memories

associated with it.

I had completed all my required high school courses by the end of 1986.

In the second half of the school year — the first half of 1987 — a

had only one course on my schedule: THM 5A0, an experimental technical

course called “Pneumatics, Hydraulics and Robotics”. This course had a

class three times a week and consisted of three hours of classes plus a

little extra lab time for labs. (My final assignment: a programmable

deep-frying vending machine. Genius!)

This incredibly light schedule meant that I had copious amounts of

spare time. Some of it I spent working part-time as a clerk in the

Investigations department of the Investment Dealers’ Association of Canada,

preparing reports on deliquent investment brokers. I learned more about

the strock market in those six months than I did in several business

courses at Crazy Go Nuts University.

The rest of the time was spent partying at McGill University, where my

sister did her undergrad studies. About every two or three weeks, I’d

roadtrip to Montreal with my sister’s then-boyfriend Boober (his real

name was Robert; he didn’t like the nickname “Bob” and I thought “Rob”

was too pedestrian for him). Boober would then spend some quality time

with sis, while I’d party with her floormates. I would often facilitate

their partying by doing their Thursday night computer science

assignments while they got primped to go out.

I got involved with one of these floormates, which constituted my

first

serious relationship, which led to my first relationship near-disaster

and was quickly followed by my first

I’d-do-it-again-although-it-was-probably-ill-advised relationship. (It

was with her younger sister. Long story. I should blog it.) The

whole experience was bittersweet — thankfully more sweet than bitter

in the end — and it gave me some experience dating American girls,

which would eventually pay off.

Getting back to the inspiration for this bit of nostalgia: Swing Out Sister’s Breakout was a hit around that time.

50. “Someday”…..Glass Tiger
51. “Bad”…..Michael Jackson
52. “In Too Deep:…..Genesis
53. “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”…..Michael Jackson & Siedah Garrett
54. “La Isla Bonita”…..Madonna
55. “Let’s Wait Awhile”…..Janet Jackson
56. “Luka”…..Suzanne Vega
57. “You Got It All”…..The Jets
58. “Who’s That Girl”…..Madonna
59. “Don’t Mean Nothing”…..Richard Marx
60. “Come On With Me”…..Expose
61. “Will You Still Love Me?”…..Chicago
62. “Wanted Dead Or Alive”…..Bon Jovi
63. “Don’t Disturb This Groove”…..The System
64. “Change Of Heart”…..Cyndi Lauper
65. “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You”…..Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine
66. “Casanova”…..Levert
67. “When Smokey Sings”…..ABC
68.”Is This Love”…..Survivor
69. “The Finer Things”…..Steve Winwood
70. “Rock Steady”…..The Whispers
71. “Big Time”…..Peter Gabriel
72. “Point Of No Return”…..Expose
73. “We’ll Be Together”…..Sting
74. “Something So Strong”…..Crowded House
75. “Victory”…..Kool and the Gang
76. “The One I Love”……R.E.M.
77. “Causing A Commotion”…..Madonna
78. “Sign O’ The Times”…..Prince
79. “Carrie”…..Europe
80. “Mandolin Rain”…..Bruce Hornsby and the Range
81. “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”…..Genesis
82. “Can’t We Try”…..Dan Hill with Vonda Sheppard
83. “Diamonds”…..Herb Albert
84. “Heart Of The Night”…..Bryan Adams
85. “Let Me Be The One”…..Expose
86. “Brilliant Disguise”…..Bruce Springsteen
87. “Midnight Blue”…..Lou Gramm
88. “Just To See Her”…..Smokey Robinson
89. “Doing It All For My Baby”…..Huey Lewis and the News
90. “Valerie”…..Steve Winwood
91. “Cross My Broken Heart”…..The Jets
92. “Ballerina Girl”…..Lionel Richie
93. “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You”…..Glenn Medeiros
94. “It’s A Sin”…..Pet Shop Boys
95. “I’ve Been In Love Before”…..Cutting Crew
96. “Wipeout”…..Fat Boys & Beach Boys
97. “Big Love”…..Fleetwood Mac
98. “Respect Yourself”…..Bruce Willis
99. “Who Will You Run To?…..Heart
100. “Right On Track”…..Breakfast Club

The special musical treat: Billy Idol and Simple Minds make up part of

the soundtrack of my youth and the impressive tape collection I kept in

the Deathmobile (my 1983 Volvo wagon). How’d you like to hear the two

of them in one song? Here’s Billy Idol’s cover of the Simple Minds hit,

Don’t You (Forget About Me) [4.5MB, MP3] taken from his “Greatest Hits” album released a couple of years ago. Enjoy!

Categories
Music

Speaking of Europe’s "The Final Countdown"…

Here’s a link to a video that’s been making the rounds on the

internet’s “you’ve got to see this!” circuit. It’s a video of “Deep

Sunshine”, an

amateur band of teenage boys who have acheived the impossible: they’ve

taken Europe’s cheesy magnum opus, The Final Countdown, and made it worse [link goes to an MP4 video].

Categories
Geek Music

Tucows Ready to Rock With .eu Domains [Updated]

The MP3 included with this entry is no longer available.

EURid, the European registry of

internet domain names, has accredited Tucows to sell .eu (as in

“Europe”) domain names. The countdown has started: we’ll be offering it

later this year.

I suppose I will be expected to learn how to play Europe’s rock anthem, The Final Countdown on accordion. Or maybe on that old Korg Poly 800 synth that Steph gave to me for my birthday.

I’m gonna have to draw the line at growing ’80’s metal hair, though.