Welcome to the latest Popdose column to address our overall lack of self-esteem, Mope Like Me. White Label Wednesday fans, fear not — that column is still alive and well and will return next week and every other week after that. But eventually you have to stop dancing and unwind, and that’s what Mope Like Me is all about. Or, as Kurt Cobain once said, it’s about the comfort in being sad.

It only makes sense that I christen this feature with an Aimee Mann song — indeed, I could spend the rest of the year using nothing but Aimee Mann songs — but we begin with “David Denies” for a couple other reasons: one, it’s a viewpoint that various women from my past can unfortunately relate to, and two, it actually calls me out by name in the process.

“David Denies,” from ‘Til Tuesday’s awesome, awesome 1986 album Welcome Home (more on it later), is sung from the point of view of the other woman, detailing her hope that the love of her life will eventually figure out what he wants — and that she’ll be what he wants — but being rather matter-of-fact about the reality of the situation. The song’s power lies in its refusal to wallow in self-pity; the other woman obviously isn’t happy about the situation, but she’s adult enough to know that bitterness and spite will not help her case. And then there’s that chorus.

David denies that he’ll ever change his mind (but he always changes)
David denies, but he’s left his love behind

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Are you ready to rock?! Wait, no, that’s not right, let me try that again…are you ready for some melodic rock?!

The whole reclassification of early ‘80s arena rock as “melodic rock” – there is even a Melodic Rock web site, which is rather popular – is really rather amusing. The implication, of course, is that the category exists in order to separate the melodic rockers of that era from the non-melodic bands…of which there were none. Basically, unless you were a thrash band (Metallica, Anthrax) or an SST band (Husker Du, Minutemen), you were playing melodic rock. Perhaps the fans prefer to call it melodic rock – and make no mistake, the phrase is a fan-driven phenomenon – because they felt that the previous nicknames for the genre, like arena rock, or, God forbid, classic rock, carried a negative connotation with them. They’re not wrong, but rechristening an entire decade’s worth of music as melodic rock doesn’t really change the way any of it sounds.

The new label, however, has proven to be more forgiving than mid-‘80s AOR program directors were in terms of whom is allowed into the secret club. Only now will like-minded rock fans dare to discuss Purple Rainbow – Joe Lynn Turner and Tony Carey in the same band, yo! – and Los Angeles studio rats Mr. Mister in the same breath. Mr. Mister certainly had the chops that their more hard-rocking contemporaries possessed, but the soft rock one-two punch of “Broken Wings” and “Kyrie,” from their 1985 album Welcome to the Real World, sealed their CHR fate. When the band decided to show off those chops on their 1987 album Go On…, the public were even less forgiving than the AOR program directors. Poof, Mr. Mister is finished, and the studio rats scattered to various projects ranging from XTC to the Rembrandts to King Crimson. And that’s just the drummer. (more…)

Popularity: 7% [?]

Scout’s honor, I had no idea this mix even existed until a few months ago, when it popped up on an ‘80s remix message board I frequent. Always a big fan of the song – and sporting a mild crush in my early teens on Tracey Ullman in that ‘50s school girl outfit in the video – I downloaded this mix post haste…

…and couldn’t have been more disappointed. Well, I suppose I could have been more disappointed, but I’m not sure how. Nearly everything I liked about the single version was undermined in one way or another. The only thing that survives is the memory of my crush on Tracey Ullman in that long skirt and knee socks. She changes outfits a few times in the clip, even donning a super-leggy, sparkly dress, but isn’t it funny how she looks sexier when she shows less skin? Millions of young girls could learn a thing or two from that example.

But I am not here to lecture young women on their tendency to dress like unattractive strippers. I am here to talk about “Breakaway,” the follow-up single to Ullman’s only American Top 40 hit – and ultimately Top Ten hit – “They Don’t Know.” For those who, um, don’t know, “They Don’t Know” was written by the late, great Kirsty MacColl, who inspires frequent debates amongst the Popdose staff about who loves her more. (Seriously.) Anyway, the 1983 album from which both singles were spawned, You Broke My Heart in Seventeen Places – MacColl also penned the title track, along with the title track of Ullman’s 1984 album You Caught Me Out, with the help of Boomtown Rats rhythm section Pete Briquette and Simon Crowe – was a ‘60s girl group album released at the tail end of the ‘50s nostalgia trend. That sounds like perfect timing on paper, but both sides of the pond were apparently too dazzled by New Wave and synth pop to give Ullman more than three minutes and two seconds of their time.

Pity, because “Breakaway,” written by folk-rock pioneer-turned Bacharach muse Jackie DeShannon – she also wrote “Needles and Pins” and, holy shit, “Bette Davis Eyes”! – is sixteen different flavors of awesome. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a dance track. With a BPM roughly in the 220’s, which is about 100 beats per minute faster than your typical ‘80s dance track – the only song that a DJ had a chance of blending into this song in a beat mix was the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” (more…)

Popularity: 7% [?]

Let’s just ask the obvious question: how the hell did this song become a hit?

This is not to say that the song is awful so much as it’s really, really lucky. In the spring of 1986, with America still in the throes of Duranmania, bassist John Taylor – who had admitted that he had not so much as burped on a record before – teamed up with Jonathan Elias (he would go on to co-produce the band’s 1988 album Big Thing) to deliver the sexy for Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks. The song, “I Do What I Do,” is an odd little tune – sounding nothing like Duran or the side projects Arcadia and the Power Station – but it had two huge things working in its favor: it was the work of a member of Duran Duran, and it was the work of a member of Duran Duran. Simply put, if “I Do What I Do” had been recorded by any other singer, and released at that or any other time, it would have sunk like a stone.

Again, this is not to say that the song itself is awful (the writer doth protest too much, methinks), but let’s be frank – there ain’t much to it. The vocal covers about six notes, the lyrics’ attempts to be steamy are unintentionally funny (“Is my body heat the right intensity,” gawd), and while it possesses the components of a song – verse, chorus, bridge, solo, etc. – it’s not much of a song. But it’s from a member of Duran Duran! The cute one that plays the bass thingy! Eeeeeeeeeee!

And there you have it. The song becomes a Top 25 single, and an obligatory 12” single is issued to relieve teenage girls around the world of the last of their babysitting money. The direction for the extended mix appears to have been: make the song even less danceable than it already is. John doesn’t get to the first verse until after the four-and-a-half minute mark. What happens up until that point? A whole lot of stop-starting with a sax riff, some vocal snippets – and I do mean snippets – and a wall of electronic percussion. You might, might, be able to dance dirty (or have sex) to the album version. Try to seduce a girl with this mix, and she’ll suffer a grand mal seizure. (more…)

Popularity: 9% [?]

I will not pretend to know more about the Screaming Blue Messiahs than I actually do. All I know is that their singer was bald and the people who liked this band fucking loved them. Take a look at what their first two albums for Elektra are going for on Amazon. Yowza.

As for this, their big “hit,” well, it’s “Walk Like an Egyptian” peppered with “Flintstones” dialogue. That’s it. Still, it’s pretty fun in a dance-around-the-house- with-your-kids kind of way. Yabba- dabba-doo time, kids. Dig in.

Screaming Blue Messiahs – I Wanna Be a Flintstone (Extended Version)

Popularity: 6% [?]

Get ur geek on, fuckers! (Use of ‘fuckers!’ at the end of brief opening sentence copyright of Jeff Giles Inc. All rights reserved.)

First off, if you’re a fan of They Might Be Giants but have not yet bought their most recent children’s album Here Come the 123s, what the hell ya waitin’ fer? It’s awesome. Seriously, even if you don’t have kids, get it for the two “Seven” songs alone.

History points to Flood, They Might Be Giants’ 1990 major label debut, as their halcyon moment, and while that’s true, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The fact is that many fans were rather upset with the Johns for the slick production they employed on the album, not to mention a sillier lyrical approach. (The band corrected this “mistake” on their next album, 1992’s Apollo 18, and to no one’s surprise, it sold a fraction of the copies that Flood sold.) For many, however, this was their introduction to the band, and the newcomers didn’t mind the new style. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one-two punch than “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and their cover of the Four Lads tune “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” (One-two-three punch if you count “Particle Man.”) “Birdhouse” was the MTV favorite, but the band tried something different with the next single. What would be a funny thing to do with a fiddle-heavy cover of a song from the ‘50s?

The answer: let a couple hip-hop DJs remix it.

Oh, those silly remixers and their dialogue sampling. It’s all Prince Paul’s fault, you know. Once De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising became a hit, everyone started trying to out-skit their peers. Not even Fine Young Cannibals records were exempt from Prince Paul’s silliness. (Check out his mix of “Good Thing,” if you can find it.) And speaking of De La Soul, the signature drum beat from “Me, Myself and I” – which surely has roots in a soul song from the ‘70s that I’m not aware of – makes frequent appearances here, as does Janet Jackson’s “edit” from Shep Pettibone’s mixes of “Miss You Much.” And, is that…Kraftwerk? Yep, “The Robots” is here, too. Does it make sense? Not really, but that’s rather fitting in the TMBG universe, isn’t it? Besides, as odd as this mix is, it’s as good as They Might Be Giants remixes got, as anyone who heard those spacey mixes of “The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” can attest.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, we present the Tiny Toons video for “Istanbul,” which is about as genius a collaboration as you’re likely to find. Man, how did we not see these children’s albums coming from a mile away?

They Might Be Giants – Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (Brownsville Mix)

Popularity: 8% [?]

The Eagles dogpiling continues.

First off, if you haven’t had a chance, read Scott Malchus’ great review of Don Felder’s “Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001).” Good stuff. But this writer is fond of anything that makes Glen Frey look like a hack and a douchebag, so there you go.

It’s a safe bet that Don Henley had no idea how dated his work would become. Even his best songs are sealed off from the rest of the world in an aerosol can hair spray-coated bubble. This owes less to his music’s production value – though that was certainly a factor with “Dirty Laundry” – than the fiery anti-Reagan rhetoric that punctuated every song that wasn’t aimed at some fork in the road or other. (Fans of the Eagles’ “Good Day in Hell” just chuckled, hopefully.) In the case of “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” though, both its production and subject matter tie the song to the ground “General’s Daughter”-style, and leave it to die. Yahtzee!

Written by longtime collaborator and ‘70s session guitarist extraordinaire Danny “Kooch” Kortchmar, “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” the second single from Henley’s triple-platinum Building the Perfect Beast, certainly has the spirit of a Henley song, wagging a finger at Americans for having little regard for the atrocities that go on outside its borders. And with a title like that, you may as well go whole hog and make the track as danceable as possible, right? Who knows, maybe Henley and Kooch deliberately went overboard with the keytars and fake horns in order to make a point – a soulless, plastic dance track about soulless, plastic people – and then laughed all the way to the bank when the song went Top Ten. Today, however, it’s the turd in Henley’s punch bowl. (more…)

Popularity: 9% [?]

Meet the rarest of beasts: the heavy metal dance mix.

After the “disappointing” sales figures for Judas Priest’s 1984 album Defenders of the Faith (it merely went platinum), CBS Records gave the band the kind of visionary direction that has made the major labels the shining beacon of business savvy they are today: sell more records. In 1986, that meant ‘add keyboards,’ and Priest, good lads that they were, obliged for their 1986 album Turbo, though whether that was willingly so is not known. Ah, but such concessions are a slippery slope, and one wonders, when the band turned “Turbo Lover” in to the label, if they had any idea that the label would turn around and commission a remix of the track for play in dance clubs.

The move was “too little, too late” on a number of levels. By 1986, rock radio was phasing out the extended mixes that were all the rage two years before – we’re guessing it was those god-awful mixes from ZZ Top’s Afterburner that did the trick – and there wasn’t a club on the planet that was about to give any mix of “Turbo Lover” heavy rotation. The remix was only half the problem, though; Judas Priest was permanently linked to a scene that had simply run out of time. English metal was dead, and not even the bands that were still putting out interesting work (Iron Maiden) could escape it. Casual metal fans were moving on to the Replacements, and the hardcore metal fans hated those goddamn synthesizers. Priest’s goose was cooked before the “Turbo Lover” 12” single left the pressing plant.

In all fairness, the idea of a Judas Priest remix is more offensive than the remix itself. The song is more or less an update of “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’,” the band’s sole foray into the Billboard Hot 100 (it peaked at #67, which means it will surely be in the ‘J’ episode of Bottom Feeders), with a little “Rebel Yell” mixed in for good measure. In other words, it was not the naked ploy to appeal to clubgoers that, say, “Sleeping Bag” was. It was just a rock song with keyboards, and the 12” mix is just a rock song with keyboards and a longer outro. It also had a hilariously bad video, contained below for your amusement. (more…)

Popularity: 9% [?]

For many rock acts that made their mark in the ‘70s, 1985 was the year they faced off against what could be called the New Wave Borg. The rules were simple: assimilate or die. And man, oh man, did they do some crazy things in order to adapt. ZZ Top put artificial record scratching sounds in one of their songs. Dire Straits wrote a song about the very thing that was killing them (MTV), and wound up with the biggest hit of their career. Heart’s hard rockin’ Wilson sisters transformed themselves into porcelain popsters. Bands from the ‘60s (the Monkees, the Moody Blues) would reboot their careers in similar fashion the following year. There is no other way to say it: it was downright terrifying to watch, never mind listen to.

And yet, for as ugly as some of those rock makeovers were (see Dave Steed’s breakdown of the Animals’ New Wave record, if you dare), the musicians that buttered their bread on the opposite end of the musical spectrum suffered even worse. That’s right, I’m speaking of the men who mined the vaults of Mellow Gold.

Dan Fogelberg (R.I.P.) tried reinventing himself as a rocker with “Language of Love,” then abandoned pop for country (by way of bluegrass) after the public didn’t take to his “new style.” Paul Davis (R.I.P.) signed with pop-minded Arista and scored some of his biggest hits, but hated the direction his music was headed and also abandoned pop for country, his first love. In the musician’s equivalent of the last act of the scoundrel, Air Supply was singing Jim Steinman songs. Tick, tick, boom. Wuss rock was dying a gruesome death, and nobody cared.

Gino Vannelli was not going out like that. (more…)

Popularity: 11% [?]

You don’t get much more ‘right place, right time’ than Bryan Ferry and his sole Top 40 entry, “Kiss and Tell.” Despite his superstar status in his native England – 16 Top 40 singles as a member of Roxy Music, 16 Top 40 singles as a solo artist – Ferry couldn’t buy a hit in America. He did have one thing working in his favor, though: MTV. They loved Ferry, putting several of his songs into much higher rotation than his chart success would suggest they deserved. In return, he gave the network the perception of good taste and hipster cool, something that came in handy between the videos for “Tarzan Boy” and “Kyrie.”

In 1987, Ferry went for the brass ring on Bête Noire, using Madonna’s producer (Patrick Leonard), a discarded Smiths song (Johnny Marr gave “Love Changes Everything” to Ferry, who christened it “The Right Stuff”), and, as always, David Gilmour. The album featured Ferry’s trademark sultry lounge cool, but was a decidedly more upbeat affair in comparison to his 1985 solo album Boys & Girls and Roxy Music’s swan song Avalon. That newfound enthusiasm was apparently contagious: Reprise placed the album’s second single, “Kiss and Tell” (download), on the soundtrack for Bright Lights, Big City, where it rubbed shoulders with Depeche Mode, New Order, Prince and M/A/R/R/S. The movie was a crashing bore, but the soundtrack, home to two recent Top 40 hits (New Order’s “True Faith” and M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume”), was a modest hit out of the box. That modest success lent itself to Ferry, propelling the song to #31 on the US charts, which is ten spots better than it did on the UK charts, strangely enough.

Now for the tough love: the lyrics to “Kiss and Tell” are pretty damn bad, even for a Ferry song. (Hey, I love Ferry as much as anyone, but he was prone to some purple-ass prose.) Ten cents a dance, love for sale, Adam and Eve, faded magazine, flash photograph. Wowzers. Those are not deep thoughts, though feel free to insert your own ‘vapid late-‘80s radio’ joke here. What the song lacked in lyrical prowess, though, it made up for with a catchy chorus and, once mixer Alan Meyerson was finished with it, a monster rhythm section, featuring a typewriter percussion track that predates the score for Atonement by 20 years. Meyerson’s mix is pure muscle, putting a huge flange over the guitar solo and fleshing the rhythm section out with about a dozen percussion tracks. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Meyerson’s 12” mix is that the edit work by the splice-happy Latin Rascals – making their third but by no means last WLW appearance – is more low-key than usual, only flashing their wares after the first chorus. They are, however, given carte blanche on the dub mix (download), and the Rascals waste no time hacking Ferry to bits.

MTV’s love affair with Ferry would end soon after the success of “Kiss and Tell.” The third single from Bête Noire, “Limbo,” received only mild interest, and by the time the ‘90s hit, Ferry was out of the picture completely. And one suspects that Ferry was perfectly fine with that, knowing that the success of “Kiss and Tell” owed more to good fortune than anything. Like most artists’ biggest hits, it is by no means Ferry’s best song, but it’s not an embarrassment, either.

Popularity: 10% [?]