“Gag me with a spoon!” might be your response to any look back at music from the 1980s, the decade that’s best forgotten — if you’re old enough to recall Valley-speak, that is. I myself cringe during VH1’s endless marathons of snarky 20- and 30-somethings waxing pithy about Ray-Gun Era pop culture. On the other hand, I am upset by the continual pillaging of ’80s classics these days for commercial fodder, Madness’ great “Our House” being the latest rip-off victim.
Many CD box sets and compilations are still glorified sucker punches to the stylus cortex of the music fanatic. Yet here are a few hits-and-bonus-track releases celebrating acts prominent in the ’80s that challenged the classic-rock status quo:
Talking Heads, a quartet founded in the culturati cloister of Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design, first came to notice at CBGB in the waning days of New York punk. What most distinguished Talking Heads from the art-rock crowd of yore was their collective admiration for such Third World-informed genres as Afrobeat and early hip-hop, as well as frontman David Byrne’s perfectly timed, paranoid and deadpan persona of The Man In The Oversize Suit. Byrne slyly flipped the script of the ’50s-era Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, the old self-assured paradigm of American manhood secure in a Babbitt-esque orbit of insularity and Philistinism.
Referred to as “Brick,” the recent self-titled Talking Heads set (Sire; Rating: ****) gathering their eight studio albums displays the uncertainty of the post-space age — especially on Talking Heads ’77’s “Psycho Killer,” Remain In Light’s famous “Once In A Lifetime,” Little Creatures’ “Road To Nowhere” — all delivered in Byrne’s nervous, Dadaist phrasing. Meanwhile, married couple Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s side project, Tom Tom Club, produced at least one bona fide hip-hop classic in “Genius Of Love” (if you don’t know, you betta ask Mariah Carey). Byrne himself stepped out with musician-producer Brian Eno, erstwhile member of seminal glam/new wave/electro prototype group Roxy Music, to record My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, an LP titled for Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola’s legendary tome of the same name and that explored the wilder shores of Afrobeat and machine noise.
These external deconstructions of syncretic Africanisms and the more experimental moves of Talking Heads’ early albums — especially the masterpiece Remain In Light — remain dear to serious rock aficionados. Yet it was the oddball geek chic of Byrne in the primitive but arty “Lifetime” video and the spicy whimsy of later hits “Burning Down The House” and “And She Was” that appealed to the masses. This aspect of Talking Heads is what gets canonized today, when ’80s shorthand requires ruthless oversimplification.
If countless Judd Apatow productions and The Wedding Singer etc. have not inured you to the power of Thriller-era pop-rock, it’s worth taking another look at Hall & Oates, revisited here on Rock ‘n Soul, Part 1 (RCA; Rating: *** 1/2). This Philly Soul duo debuted in the ’70s, of course, with singer Daryl Hall best embodying the loaded term “blue-eyed soul,” but their career got its second wind in the early ’80s, backed by such vet sidemen as longtime SNL guitarist/bandleader G.E. Smith. The Philly-centric classics appearing here — “She’s Gone,” “Sara Smile,” “Rich Girl” — remain the pair’s best. Yet show a l’il love to such high-’80s gems as “Kiss On My List” and “One On One,” too. What would the decade’s Brit hit factory Stock-Aitken-Waterman and their muse Rick Astley have done without Hall & Oates’ pioneering work?
Other than the Unholy Trinity of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince, the 1980s’ most enduring and intriguing pop stars were in the maverick (and often androgynous) category that grouped Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club’s Boy George, Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox and volatile rock and soulster Terence Trent D’Arby. The artist now known as Sananda Maitreya (but if his Mama called him Terence, so will I) may have permanently killed his career in the Anglophone West via a series of ego trips and label battles, but he’s beloved in his adopted home of Italy and elsewhere. Do You Love Me Like You Say: The Very Best of Terence Trent D’Arby (Columbia; Rating: *** 1/2) shows that it’s a pity that the SC-born singer-songwriter was critically and commercially the victim of the tacit “one crazy Dada negro at a time” rule that has dogged the black rock and neo-soul genres in succession.
Subconsciously or not, D’Angelo and most other retronuevo urban acts of today pay as much homage to D’Arby as Jackson and Prince for opening space for them in the marketplace. The neo-soul aesthetic is succinctly summarized in such D’Arby chestnuts as “Wishing Well,” “Dance Little Sister” and “She Kissed Me,” as well as those that intersected the Hollyweird radar — “If You All Get To Heaven” (21 Jump Street) and “T.I.T.S./F&J” (Al Pacino/Michelle Pfeiffer rom-com vehicle Frankie & Johnny).
This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2006.
