Ladies and gentlemen, meet the rarest of breeds in the music world: the protest remix.
It’s unclear which is more inconceivable today: that a major label would release a stinging protest song aimed at the government of an extremely wealthy country, or that the song would crack the Top 40. But thanks to the overwhelming good will that came from Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in late 1984 and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” a few months later, benefit fatigue had thankfully not yet kicked in, and “Sun City,” shepherded by Steven Van Zandt, became a surprise hit in late 1985. Now consider some other curiosities about the track:
– Two of the verses feature rappers, a full six months before Run-DMC and Aerosmith would drop their game-changing collaboration.
- The production was by New York big beat maestro Arthur Baker, who was adored by musicians but not exactly known as a hitmaker.
- The majority of the artists who sang on the record hadn’t scored a Top 40 hit of their own in years, if ever.
Indeed, “Sun City” is about as hipster a benefit/protest record as you’re likely to find. Daryl Hall and John Oates, Pat Benatar and Bruce Springsteen are easily the biggest commercial names at the time to appear on the record, while socially conscious artists like Peter Gabriel, Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett and, of course, Bono would find mainstream success in the coming years. The rest of the contributors are a who’s who of New York cool. Joey Ramone, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Run-DMC, Duke Bootee, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Stiv Bators and Lou Reed all make appearances, as do Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, George Clinton, a pre-comeback Bonnie Raitt, Temptations David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Wolf, and Herbie Hancock. (Jackson Browne contributes as well, though getting him to work on a protest song back then was like shooting fish in a barrel.) Bob Geldof’s name appears on the 12″ single’s back cover, though one wonders if that was the benefit record equivalent to giving Berry Gordy writing credit on a Motown single; whether he contributed to the track or not, you gotta put Bob’s name on it.
The song itself is easily the best of the big benefit singles, with a crazy catchy “I ain’t gonna play Sun City” chorus and a slammin’ rhythm track assembled by Baker. And again, one must give credit to Van Zandt and Baker for leading off the song with rappers, an unprecedented move at the time. Some stations refused to play the song for that very reason – which just seems hilarious in today’s musical climate, where whitey is the odd man out – and that makes its rise into the Top 40 all the more impressive. What, then, would Baker do with the remix?
Go absolutely apeshit, that’s what. The A-side mix is over nine-and-a-half minutes long, and the “Not So Far Away” dub mix is a gargantuan twelve-and-a-half minutes. He samples Daryl Hall’s voice and turns it into a percussion track – something Girl Talk would turn into a copyright supervisor’s nightmare some 20 years later – and allows what I can only assume to be Hancock to noodle for the final five minutes of the dub mix. And, per usual, there are lots and lots of edits, though the credits for those edits go to Albert Cobrera (note the spelling) and Aldo Miran, which has to be the Latin Rascals (Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran) in disguise. Can anyone confirm or deny?
One of my favorite things about the A-side mix was how Baker turned the last lines in the verses sung by Springsteen, Bono and Bobby Womack into a cappella bits, only to bring the track thundering in on that fourth drum beat in the final measure. And man, listen to that Bono vocal. He hasn’t put anything that passionate to tape in ages.
These days, of course, “Sun City” has as much relevance as songs about occupied Germany, since apartheid came to an end in 1994. I am also reminded of a professor of mine who taught a class on the Sociology of Popular Music (help me out, Ohio University grads: he had a wooden leg, and would sometimes turn it around backwards to mess with people): he thought “Sun City” was fascinating because it’s basically musicians singing to other musicians. After all, no one buying this record was about to play Sun City, were they? (You could make a similar argument that Michael Jackson was singing about how he and his fellow pop stars are the world, and the ones who make a brighter day, blah blah blah.) And, adding an extra dose of irony, half of the artists who sing on this record were nowhere near the Sun City concert director’s radar (though if the video below is to be believed, Daryl Hall turned down $2 million to play there), which means that their declaration that they ain’t gonna play Sun City is like me saying that I’m not going to do business in Dubai. It’s good to have principles, but it’s a lot easier to have them when you know that you will never have to exercise them.
Still, you can’t deny that “Sun City” did an incredible job raising the average person’s awareness to an alarming human rights issue, and that was Van Zandt’s primary goal all along. That the song cracked the Top 40 as well was gravy. I will confess that I did not rip either of the tracks below (still need to save up the coin for a USB turntable, right after I plunk down my soul for the upcoming Beatles version of Rock Band), and the dub mix has a skip in it, but hopefully this will make up for it: the video I’ve included for “Sun City” is done “Pop-Up Video” style, woo hoo! Who would have thought that a third of the video’s budget was spent covering Jimmy Cliff’s hotel room?
Post script: I spent a day at Sun City in 1997, and while this may fly in the face of the thousand words before it, I have to say, the place was pretty sweet.
Artists United Against Apartheid – Sun City (12″ mix)
Artists United Against Apartheid – Not So Far Away (Dub mix)
For the life of me, I could not imagine how someone could watch Zbigniew Rybczynski’s eye-popping video for “Close (to the Edit)” and not think that was the coolest song or video ever made. Three guys in business suits bashing the shit out of various instruments to one colossal drum beat (Alan White of Yes, as sampled by Art of Noise founder and producer extraordinaire Trevor Horn), and the main instrumentation consisted of the sound of a car starting at various speeds? (A VW Golf, if Wikipedia is correct) It was a veritable cornucopia of awesomeness! And yet, whenever I sang the song or video’s praises to any of my cooler, macho friends, the response was always the same: “Fag.”
But Fishbone knew how to play the game. For starters, they used their playful nature to their advantage; the lyric may be more focused on the “Ground Zero” part, but the music is “Party,” “Party,” “Party,” which made their tune about dancing when the bombs drop an easy sell. Most importantly, they made great videos – in fact, the video for “Party at Ground Zero” was directed by a young Henry Selick, of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline fame – causing MTV to play the daylights out of them at a time when the channel played few black artists outside of Michael Jackson and Prince. Perhaps it was this blend of originality and fearlessness that convinced our friend Francois Kevorkian to try his hand at a remix of “Ground Zero.” Or maybe it was a fat paycheck from Columbia, one of the two. Either way, the end result is a remix to a song that sported a BPM count in the 190s, which is about 70 beats per minute above the norm at the time. Awesome.
Faith No More were not at all my thing in 1987. Heck, they weren’t my thing in 1990, when they climbed into the upper ranks of modern rock superstardom with the admittedly awesome “Epic.” I spent the spring of 1987 listening to the Smiths (Louder Than Bombs and Hatful of Hollow, which are pretty much the same album), the Style Council (The Cost of Loving), and Love and Rockets (I drove the guy in the dorm room next to me positively nuts with “Kundalini Express.” Didn’t I, Joe?). Then I went home for a weekend – I probably needed to do laundry, ran out of money, or both – and saw a video on “120 Minutes” for some no-name San Francisco band called Faith No More, and suddenly realized what my life was missing: a chain-gang chorus. I went back to school, perused the 12″ singles at the local record store (SchoolKids, holler), and would you look at that; this group of punkers – there was no hard rock scene within the modern rock movement yet, so for the moment, Faith No More were punkers – made a 12″ mix. Now you’re speaking my language.
What has been lost in the nearly two decades since the song’s debut, however, is the fact that a large percentage of the Jane’s fanbase actually hated “Been Caught Stealing” upon first listen. Compared to the more experimental, drawn-out songs like “Three Days” and “Then She Did…”, “Stealing” looked like a sellout move, back in the day when it was still verboten to sell out. Today, of course, it’s the band’s most enduring song. Go figure.
As for the band itself, I will confess to knowing nothing about C.C.C.P. before putting this piece together. AllMusic tells me they’re German, which makes perfect sense in retrospect – listen to the way the female commentator overemphasizes the ‘R’ in ‘USSR,’ and you know that is not her regular accent – not to mention the aggressive keyboard sounds they used as the main hook. And talk about a hook; it’s just one note, but hot damn, is it an unforgettable note. Unk. Unk unk, unkunk, unk unk, unkunk. That, followed with the sixteenth-note back-and-forth sampling between the snare drum and a handclap, and it didn’t really matter what the rest of the song sounded like. Even more incredible is the fact that while this part of the song is going down, there is no drum track. That would never happen today. “Turn the drums back on! They’ll walk off the floor!” Not if your song is awesome, they won’t.
Gabriel, crushed, came back two days later and said, “You want a single? Suck on this, fuckers. ‘You know your culture from your trash / You know your plastic from your cash.’ Boom boom BAP, ba-boom boom BAP!” The eyeballs of every exec in the room morphed into dollar signs. Some of them even howled like dogs.
In fairness to those insane voters, I think I can see why they were so offended by “Blue Light.” It’s bouncy, chock full o’ horns, and has a beat you can dance to, all of which are anathema to anything Roger Waters ever stood for. But that’s sort of the point of solo albums, right? To make the kinds of records that you can’t make with your day job? And never mind the whole day job nonsense – is this song really that far removed rhythmically from “Run Like Hell”? Nope, it really isn’t, and in fact serves as a perfect bridge between “Run Like Hell” and “Dogs of War,” which would appear on the next (Waters-free, augh!) Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Ha fucking ha.
Today we pay tribute to Bradford, England’s Tasmin Archer, a soul popster from the early ’90s who, thanks to her UK #1 smash “Sleeping Satellite,” was quickly dubbed the Female Seal. She was not the Female Seal, of course – anyone who bought the album that spawned “Satellite,” 1993’s Great Expressions, learned that lesson the hard way – but there is no denying that “Satellite” could easily pass for the twin sister of “Crazy.” Both songs have an airy quality to them, and both have dance-ish beats but aren’t exactly danceable. It was an apt, and as favorable, a comparison as Archer was likely to find.
Have you taken a close look at the lyrics to “Obsession” lately? This gives “Every Breath You Take” and “Stan” a run for their money on the Stalker Anthem scale. Bill Wadhams’ lines are harmless enough (“My need to possess you has consumed my soul / My life is trembling, I have no control”), which makes his part of the song an ancestor of sorts to “Baby, One More Time…,” the vulnerable-but-misguided kind of pop song. Astrid Plane’s lines, though, are of the Jame Gumb variety. “I will have you. Yes, I will have you / I will find a way and I will have you / Like a butterfly, a wild butterfly / I will collect you and capture you.” Yikes. Make sure and put the lotion in the basket while you’re at it.