Damn, why won’t this car start?

The most amusing thing in retrospect about “Close (to the Edit),” and Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984), the album that spawned it, is that the first kids in my hometown that gravitated to the Art of Noise were the breakdancers. Their music didn’t quite gel with Mantronix, or Newcleus, or the other electro-funk stuff they were blasting out of their boom boxes – even funnier is the fact that many people just assumed that the Art of Noise were black, solely because of their affiliation with the electro scene – but a big beat is a big beat, and “Close (to the Edit)” has some seriously big beats. The problem, though, was that once the breakdancers gravitated to the album, it was instantly uncool to like the Art of Noise.

Luckily for me, I was already uncool.

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.”

Fuck those guys. (more…)