EPTThis is part 1. Part 2 is posted here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=329938
Part 3 is coming soon.
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So lately I've been working on a TV commercial featuring a pop song that I heard for the first time when I was twelve years old. My office partner, who's about my age, and I have both been freaking out about this a little bit, because of what a powerful spark of memory music from the past can be. It got me thinking about what my musical associations with times of my life are.
In 1983 I was a twelve-year-old who was in the ninth grade. My dad would turn on the radio as he was driving me to school, and I remember an awful lot of The Police playing:
By 1984, about a year later, I had purchased my first album. This album, folks, was on cassette tape. For those of you who have never seen one of these, this is what a cassette tape looks like:
![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Tdkc60cassette.jpg/250px-Tdkc60cassette.jpg)
The album I bought on cassette tape was Seven and the Ragged Tiger by Duran Duran. Here's the biggest hit from that album:
(omg I just watched that in full. I remembered, dimly, a computer-generated cascade of water, but I couldn't remember what it looked like. Holy mother of God that's primitive... and it probably cost the record company $100,000.)
Around that time, I also picked up a single by Wham!. Do you know what a "single" is? Probably not, since by now the term's been coopted to refer to EPs featuring multiple remixes of a song. Here's what a "single" was from the dawn of recorded music to about my sophomore year in high school:
![[image loading]](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1194/1208655890_3c534ed5c7.jpg)
The single that I bought was "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham!
OK, chew on that for a while. I'll wait.
Done? ok let's move on. (To put that in context, you should understand that nobody, and I mean nobody, had George Michael pegged as gay back then. Also, at age 13, I was completely fascinated by his background singers.)
From 1984 to 1986, most of the music I heard was on the radio. There's too much to list, but it included Madonna, Bananarama, Bronski Beat (now they were openly gay, which back then was "OMG SCANDAL!"), Kenny Loggins (Danger Zone!), Foreigner, and more rare music (today) like the Mary Jane Girls, who were cultivated by Rick James:
Sometime in there I went on a huge Prince kick, because Prince was awesome. He's still awesome, although it's worth listening to Kevin Smith's monologue about trying to work with the guy. Here's a typical song from that period (skip ahead to exactly 1 minute):
OK, so while I still love all this music today, except maybe the Mary Jane Girls, everything I've listed was pure pop. It was the stuff on the radio. The song that helped me make a left turn off that path was this one:
Maybe to your 2012 ears this sounds just like all the rest of the stuff I've posted. In 1985, it was unfamiliar, edgy, hostile, dark music whose listeners hung out in the smoking area at school (do they still have those??) with the Iron Maiden fans. But no, the two groups didn't talk to each other.
(Fun note: I've run into Depeche Mode in person twice as an adult. The first time was in 2002 at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in L.A., when they were playing next door at Staples Center. I was hanging out with friends at the Figueroa Hotel where Depeche Mode was having their end-of-tour party, and my friends and the band and a crapload of Warner Music people wound up around the pool at 1 a.m. Then, seven years later, in 2009, I was on a plane from LAX to Heathrow and looked up to see Andy Fletcher from the band standing six inches from me -- turns out he, Martin Gore, and their tour crew were on the same plane. I wound up right behind them on the way to customs after the flight, and said hello. They were very nice, despite obviously having slept badly on the flight, so I didn't drag it out.)
Funny thing was, and I think most modern listeners would realize it, that distinction was an artificial one. The step from Wham! and Duran Duran to Depeche Mode was never a huge one musically, but back then it formed a social line many people didn't really cross. (Incidentally, I remember my junior year of high school one kid came to school in a Depeche Mode Master and Servant T-shirt, and the other kids really were scandalized.)
Around 1987, at age 16, I started getting into stuff that was a little less poppy. Man, I loved these folks. Timbuk 3 were a husband and wife duo who when performing live would sing with acoustic guitars on stage with a boom box playing a drum machine track recorded on cassette.
(My favorite moment in this video: where the harmonica kicks in and there's a cut to a harmonica sitting on the ground. Awesome! Show, don't tell, as they say!)
Later that year, when I showed up at Harvey Mudd College (where Day[9] and qxc have gone, and also this year listed by Business Week Magazine as the best college for "return on investment," woo!) everyone was listening to that song. I guess for a bunch of physics, chemistry, engineering, and math majors (at that time those were the only four options there) it resonated.
Over the next couple of years, my girlfriend and I reinforced each other's fascination with Depeche Mode, though she also got me into The Cure and Siouxie and the Banshees:
Thing is, I was starting to make a little bit of a left turn, inspired by hearing this on L.A.'s fantastic KROQ radio station in 1989:
Note: That video was shot by Anton Corbijn, an amazing photographer and filmmaker who also made a bunch of hugely popular U2 and Depeche Mode videos around the same time. He also shot the images on the album jacket for U2's The Joshua Tree:
![[image loading]](http://www.u2fanclub.net/media/2009/04/u2-the-joshua-tree.png)
(Also, what's with the eggs???)
Around the time I was a junior in college, though, I went looking for one of my classmates, whose dorm lounge was painted black (with a large replica of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon cover on the wall.) I ran into a girl on whom I'd had a terrible crush before I'd met that girlfriend I'd mentioned, and she was dancing in my friend's completely darkened lounge, illuminated only by a strobe light, listening to this at full volume:
Mind = blown. My girlfriend was not happy at this development. Nor, as it turned out, were my dorm-mates, who staged an intervention with the intention of getting me to turn down my stereo when listening to this stuff. I was clearly in the wrong dorm. (Any Mudders out there: I'd lived in West Dorm my sophomore year but later moved out to South Dorm for the single rooms. Unfortunately, at that time at least, standards of quiet differed.)
Of course, after Front 242 and Ministry, Nine Inch Nails hit the scene around 1990, and around graduation and for a few years thereafter, that joined the soundtrack in my head:
(This particular song is from 1994)
Coming up in part 2:
1) Nine Inch Nails
2) Back to The Police
3) ?????
4) Blue Sky Black Death
(Final note: Did Trent really crucify a rhesus monkey for that video?? That certainly wouldn't fly today, even assuming the monkey were just tied down.)
Really final note: Jumping ahead, here's my musical obsession right now, the morning of the 14th of April, 2012. Doesn't this dude look like mOOnGLaDe??
(Unrelated note: Also, the Titanic sank 100 years ago this morning. About 100 years and seven hours ago, as I write this.)
