This is an album (and album cover) deeply ingrained in my soul and possibly my DNA. I wish I had something smart to say about it, but I mostly just love it unreservedly.
Let me suggest this video as well, which goes further in depth and in some different directions from Mr. Beato's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05hTQC1CZko
I was in one for a few years as well. Every year, I thought Horatio Sanz was going to be my secret weapon. In the early 2000s, "the fat guy on SNL" did not have a great life expectancy.
It's not my place to dig in deeper, but I am impressed that Melissa Etheridge managed to get these gendered-pronoun-less songs recorded and released by her label in 1988. Someone's probably earned a Queer Studies PHD with a dissertation about her early career.
I love the way that the video creates a visual language that is still congruent with the band's identity, while still looking completely of it's time. (The part of 1988 that included free independent weekly newspapers and Church of the Subgenius flyers, at least.)
4, 8, 10
Keep On Truckin' has some prime wokka-chikka going on, it just goes on too long. It either needs to get cut down to a 4-minute single version, or have a little more of a cocaine beat for an extended dance remix.
Midnight Train is unimpeachable.
I have to point out one of my favorite songs from Loc-ed After Dark, Chiba Chiba. It actually took some balls to record such a pro-marijuana song at that time, when musicians were expected to do anti-drug propaganda to get on MTV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-VZktZW8cI
This may be the worst thing to ever result from Nietzsche's writings.
NOTE: THIS IS A JOKE. I do not actually wish to equate this song with the rise of National Socialism. This statement was intended to be hyperbolic, humorous, and ironic. Please do not cancel me.
Though centralized playlists were not a new thing at this point, there was at least one WKRP episode about them, but I think the late-'80s is when the last pockets of resistance were being mopped up.
And the younger music public were no longer listening to Top-40 radio, they were watching MTV, and they were not buying singles. They were buying cassettes and soon were buying CDs, but the cassingle never took off, so mostly they were buying albums. This pushed the average age of the music-buying-and-listening public that determined the Top 100 up.
Also this was, I think, the point that radio station consolidation was getting into high gear. So you no longer had individual, local DJs creating the playlists, they were being built centrally and pushed out to local stations. And the playlists were focused on songs that didn't make listeners want to change the station. Vaguely familiar covers help with that.
"The Most Beautiful Girl" must have been on a K-Tel compilation that I saw the commercial for 10 million times as a kid. Because the phrase and melody "Did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world" is absolutely seared into my brain, but I have no memory whatsoever of the rest of the song.
It's hard to compare, because the average age of Internet users was so much higher at the time, and most of the people who thought Keaton was a terrible choice for Batman at least respected him as a comedic actor.
The issue was really that comics fans wanted a movie that took Batman seriously. The Dark Knight Returns had just come out a couple of years previous, and this looked like the opportunity to get the world to take Batman seriously, and move past the BANG! POW! ZOOM! of the 1966 TV series, which still defined not just Batman, but comics and superheroes in general to much of the public.
The Burton/Keaton Batman actually did help significantly in that regard, even if looking back on it now, it owes more to Batman '66 than we could admit at the time.
I remember hearing "Head Like a Hole" for the first time at the first party back to school in January 1990. (My dorm did an '80s Nostalgia party. We were ironic like that.) I thought "This is a dividing line."
I always liked the idea of Sonic Youth more than their actual music. They were certainly cool as fuck, but I actually like a lot more melody and less discordance in my music.
I did not know that about the lack of Israeli charts. But thinking of the concept of the Israeli singles chart made me listen to Yo Ya, and now my day is 12% better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5xUiayK-Pc
I have never understood how anyone over the age of about 10 could listen to the lyrics and not detect the satire, but I guess McFerrin never really told people not to take it at face value, and people are stupid.
Plus, "The landlord says the rent is late, he may have to litigate" is one of the finest rhymes this side of Sondheim.
6 of 10
I will grant that, but it felt to me like in those four years, NWA and Gangsta Rap were sucking all of the air out of the room for other kinds of rap. But in that time, you did have Fear of a Black Planet, PM Dawn, KRS-One's peak, and Paul's Boutique, among others (plus the sideshow of 2 Live Crew.)
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