HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Cutting Crew
“(I Just) Died In Your Arms”
1986 | Virgin Records

When I think about what’s wrong with the 80s, the first thing that pops into my mind is Cutting Crew and their biggest American hit, 1986’s “(I Just) Died In Your Arms.” I was seven years old when Cutting Crew’s first album, Broadcast, dropped and ascended immediately to the top of the American pop charts. I can, very vividly, remember hearing the tune, its staccato synth strings, and Nick Van Eede’s declaration that, “I just died in your arms tonight.” I can also remember, very vividly, thinking that Van Eede’s grammar was awful.

Think about it: One man is so shaken by a lover that he suffers a fatal collapse, is reborn, only to write and record a mawkish ballad about the night? Lovemaking included? I can think of multiple scenarios as to how this could all have happened in one night. One, Van Eede (or his narrator) is a piss-poor lover. It was over so quick that he had time to take a shower and write a song about it. Kind of pathetic (though it happens to everyone, to be sure). Two, lovemaking was not even a factor, and he wrote this song about a hug, or maybe someone administering CPR, in which case, who cares? Sex is always implied in good pop music. Always. If we’re discounting sex between these two, we can safely declare this not a good pop song. Third, this is one of those Dark Tower-esque nights, where the Gunslinger has a story to tell, and time bends sympathetically, lasting until the story’s conclusion. As it happens, Cutting Crew’s Broadcast predates Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass (the Dark Tower volume in which time bends sympathetically to allow Roland to tell his backstory) by twelve years. Fourth, Nick Van Eede is a liar. His titular night never happened, and he’s making up a story to preserve face. It’s fine (it’s occasionally required) to lie within the confines of pop music, but what’s the point of making up a bad story?

Of those four scenarios, none of them change the fact that “(I Just) Died In Your Arms” makes me want to puke in my hat. Nick Van Eede sings like a howling, boring dog. Guitarist Kevin Scott MacMichael sounds like he’s playing in another room, with no monitor to hear what everyone else is playing. The lyrics are inane to the point that I can’t remember anything beyond that dumb, dumb hook. I have just listened to “(I Just) Died In Your Arms” five times in a row, and I cannot find a single redeeming factor about it. Inane dreck is just as harmful as carcinogens and free radicals, and “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” is, indeed, purely inane dreck.

by Brook Pridemore

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Hall and Oates
“Maneater”
H2O
1982 | RCA

Hall and Oates’ biggest hit, 1982’s “Maneater,” sits amid a pile of singles that, in my mind, exist as true multimedia pieces, the music video inseparable from the song. Think about it: can one really listen to that “Lust For Life”-on-downers beat without visualizing that menacing glare on Daryl Hall’s face? Can the casual listener hear that saxophone without seeing Oates’ semi-obscured by shadows, attempting to be cool, but coming off geeky?

Neither the song nor video have aged particularly well, and the single has been mercilessly plowed through the irony machine by numerous bands since – which is easy to understand, when one considers that “Maneater” embodies many of the 1980s clichés that became passé after punk “broke” in 1991 (i.e. that whole grunge thing). But let’s take a look at a few facts about Hall and Oates’ greatest contribution to music — you might be surprised by how cool “Maneater” is.

First, consider the afforementioned Iggy Pop-lite rhythm, bassist “T-Bone” Wolk’s steady, un-fuckwithable groove, and the dual reggae guitar attack by Oates and G.E. Smith. This supposedly lame pop song manages, in a mere four minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to tip it’s hat to punk, new wave and reggae, all while remaining comfortably beneath the un-hip umbrella of Adult Oriented Rock.

A full year before The Police’s punk-reggae synthesis put Synchronicity into eight million homes, Oates and Smith’s tasteful, steadfast jamming on the one and three brought the Two-Tone beat a little closer to mass public consciousness. While Oates is content to palm mute away on a Fender Stratocaster, Smith’s playing a Danelectro, his taste for the crappy-but-dependable guitars falls smack in the dead zone between Dan-Os 60s heyday and late-90s resurgence. And the sax: ubiquitous in 80s pop (thanks in no small part to the fierce playing of Eddie Money and the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons) keeps the band firmly rooted in the popular cultural idioms of 1982, despite their delving into cooler, uncharted sonic waters.
More on Hall and Oates | “Maneater”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Pearl Jam
“Jeremy”
Ten
1991 | Epic

I’ve never given a damn about celebrity gossip. So glancing at the average tabloid is, for me, a more or less completely fictional experience. I think I know that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are still married and adopting babies from impoverished countries, but, Inglorious Basterds excepted, I don’t think I could name a single movie in which either actor starred for years. I know that somebody from Good Charlotte is married to (I think) Ashlee Simpson, but I couldn’t pick either artist’s sound out of a lineup [Editor’s Note: the factual inaccuracies present in the preceding paragraph do well to prove Mr. Pridemore’s lack of pop-cultural awareness].

And I don’t think that I’m behind the times. At all. Modern popular culture’s emphasis has shifted back and forth between quality entertainment and calculated dreck since at least the popularization of television in the 1950s: for every Beatles, there was a Mickey Mouse Club. Punk did its thing in the 70s because “dinosaur” rock, with its ten-minute keyboard solos, had sucked all of the fun out of pop music. And without Paula Abdul and New Kids on the Block to rail against, Nirvana wouldn’t have been Nirvana.

These days though, it seems to me like the artist’s talents are held as secondary, at best, to the amount of inane publicity that can be drummed up around said artist. Look at Britney Spears, who fell into a bucket of crazy for two solid years; two years in which she made no music or movies, but garnered just as much (if not more) media attention for her increasingly weird/disconcerting behavior.

Which leads me to think about one time in my personal pop-culture awareness in which artists used their powers for good instead of evil (if “evil” is too strong a word for your taste, think “inanity”). I think about Pearl Jam, who used popular interest in their breakthrough single, “Jeremy,” to steer cultural awareness toward the harsh reality of what goes on in idyllic American suburbs, and how what many people would consider “teasing” can go awry and send a kid over the edge. The song itself features all of the elements of classic Pearl Jam: flashy bass, muddy guitars and Eddie Vedder’s patented stomping-on-a-dog yell (for effect, listen to the song around the four-minute mark, and imagine that Vedder’s “hoo-hoo” vamp is the product of the singer stomping repeatedly on a wounded dog). It is deadly serious in content and delivery, and the accompanying video – the only fully conceptualized video of Pearl Jam’s “classic” era – is a dark, dark near-six-minute excursion into one kid’s decent into desperation and madness, complete with off-putting shots of his classmates frozen in different positions, low-lit shots of the band, and close-ups of Vedder looking alternately livid, scared and strangely jolly. A more cynical writer than myself would say that the latter is Vedder’s internal adding machine, working out how much money he’s gonna take home; but, truth be told, even Vedder’s “joy” looks painful.
More on Pearl Jam | “Jeremy”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Nelly Furtado
“I’m Like a Bird”
Whoa, Nelly!
2000 | DreamWorks

I have, in the past, laid blame on Alanis Morissette’s hugely successful Jagged Little Pill for sounding the death knell of the early 90s “alternative” rock wave. And, yes, Jagged Little Pill (which holds the distinction of being the best-selling debut album by a female artist) certainly changed the climate of the music industry. Here was an “alternative” rock singer who hadn’t come up through DIY touring and rock clubs; she’d been manufactured and primped for mass consumption. The little window in which credibility was paramount to payola, where Daniel Johnston got signed, Mazzy Star, Pavement, and the Flaming Lips had radio hits, had closed irrevocably. Things got totally (not just mostly) calculated again.

That calculation, however, was cleverly masked in a new, subtler way. For at least the next five years, all new female singers seemed like Alanis clones, each one a sort of 90s era update on Stevie Nicks. Think about it: Meredith Brooks, Tracy Bonham, Macy Gray. Even Jewel’s debut Pieces Of You – which was released the same summer as Jagged Little Pill, but didn’t become a hit for nearly two years – wouldn’t have been the hit it was without Alanis’ earlier young “Earth Mother” posturing. Though, to be fair, Jewel’s “I lived in my van” schtick gives her waaaaay more hippie cred than Alanis’ “I was on You Can’t Do That On Television” bragging rights. Each one of these women, came, had their one hit (except Alanis and Jewel, of course), and went, most of them never heard from again.
More on Nelly Furtado | “I’m Like A Bird”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Eddie Money
“Take Me Home Tonight”
Can’t Hold Back
1986 | Columbia

The trick to elevating a hit song to the status of true classic is twofold. First, embrace the idiocy of pop music. Eddie Money’s biggest hit, “Take Me Home Tonight,” is silly, stupid good fun. Containing many of the most ridiculous conventions of mid-80s pop (pointless saxophone solo, vaguely Asian-sounding keys a la “Turning Japanese”), “Take Me Home Tonight” works first and foremost because, when listening to the song, you can hear the smile on Eddie’s face, you can feel his tongue firmly in cheek. It’s refreshing to hear a song that knows it’s a goof, after years upon years of foolish irony masquerading as high art. Eddie, and everyone involved with the track, is clearly having a good time making the song. And the good time had in the studio translates immediately into a good time had by the listener. There’s no trick to the accessibility of “Take Me Home Tonight,” and that’s why it was such a big hit.
More on Eddie Money | “Take Me Home Tonight”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Madonna
“Crazy For You”
Vision Quest Motion Picture Soundtrack
1985 | Geffen

We’ve talked about Madonna in this column before[link], but it’s a funny kind of summer. There’s a twist to the air that makes Brooklyn feel less like mid-July and more like early May, and I find myself thinking about prom. You know, “Senior Skip Day,” getting really dolled up for the first time in your life. I’m thinking about slow dances, and a song that was pounded into your head all year, almost ruining it, until you heard it while you dancing with someone you cared about. And I think about the class of ‘85, and how many kids must have felt something they hadn’t before, while “Crazy For You” played in the background.

Originally released in the spring of 1985, Madonna’s second #1 hit “Crazy For You” was the lead single for Vision Quest, a coming of age movie starring Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino. I haven’t seen Vision Quest, but apparently Madonna makes her film debut as a club singer in Spokane, Washington, singing “Crazy For You” and “Gambler.” I imagine that if the Spokane portrayed in Vision Quest is anything like “Crazy For You” itself, it must be a film awash with pastel colors, great expectations and obligatory new-wave synths.
More on Madonna | “Crazy For You”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Cracker
“Low”
Kerosene Hat
1993 | Virgin

Not unlike the Mother Love Bone-to-Pearl Jam turnover, Cracker rose out of the ashes of 80s college-radio faves Camper Van Beethoven – loved for their goofy punk classic, “Take The Skinheads Bowling.” They still showed their country-punk roots on their eponymous debut album in 1992. The same brash, irreverent humor that was CVB’s trademark remained a part of the Cracker spirit, best exemplified by tracks like, “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now),” and “Mr. Wrong.” The band’s principal members, singer-guitarist David Lowery and guitarist Johnny Hickman, have since soldiered on with various sidemen, releasing a new cheekily irreverent Cracker album every few years (in between recording new material with the reconstituted Camper) to a small but rabid following.

It’s weird, then, to think that Cracker’s one brief dally with stardom, “Low,” (from their 1993 sophomore album, Kerosene Hat) contains none of that off-putting but lovable sense of humor Lowery has always been known for. “Sometime I wanna take you down / Sometime I wanna get you low.” David Lowery’s tobacco-stained croon made him sound like a lower middleclass ladies’ man – the guy who’s always at the bar, cigarette in one hand, whiskey in the other. He looks good, but he’s still always at the bar (like Billy, who, unsurprisingly is still peeling the labels from his bottles of Bud) David Lowery, who once railed on Club Med, who recorded a cover of the entirety of Fleetwood Mac’s double-album Tusk, now sounds like an old lech in a shitty singles’ bar, coming on to a girl half his age.
More on Cracker | “Low”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Bush
“Glycerine”
Sixteen Stone
1994 | Trauma Records

It was kind of fun to watch big bands of the mid-90s get poised for stadium success on the club level. In the last days of post-Nirvana rock and roll, paying one’s dues was still a necessary step towards coming up into mainstream success. Dave Grohl – former drummer for a band who had played in front of a quarter of a million people MANY times – took his Foo Fighters on the road for the first time in 1995, opening for former Minuteman Mike Watt. Ultimately, Grohl took his own songs back to the stadium (and, God bless him, Mike Watt still jams econo), but on the way, he had to – got to, really – play “This is a Call” and “Big Me” in the same sweaty clubs he’d started out in.

And it was really cool to see the combinations that bands got thrown into on tour. Summer 1995, I got to see Bush and the Toadies – one of whom was about to go supernova and the other to toil in semi-obscurity (albeit with a small, but rabid fanbase), though we didn’t know who yet – on what amounted to a double-headliner bill in Detroit.

The Toadies were good. They looked the part of a legit underground rock band (and probably still had jobs when they weren’t on tour), and they seemed to have fun, even though their songs kind of had that off-kilter rhythm and quirk about them. Bush, though – they  had the stadium-level show down to a science, probably had been rehearsing it in practice spaces at home in England. Frontman Gavin Rossdale gestured to the crowd, and the crowd went wild. Floodlamps painted the four men onstage like gods. They could very well have been lip-syncing, that’s how little one could see through all the smoke and lights. The band played probably everything from their debut, Sixteen Stone, and maybe a B-Side or two. And here was another cool thing about mainstream bands touring their first albums – dudes had no choice but to play the B-sides.
More on Bush | “Glycerine”