In the spirit of my previous post, I decided to open myself to a little more embarassment by presenting a few records that I bought during the 80s that make me wonder "Why?"
In Visible Silence by Art of Noise- It had that song featuring Max Headroom (how 80s!) and apparently they scored a major coup by getting Duane Eddy to play on "Peter Gunn." But, for the most part, this is just boring electronic/synth music tarted up a little to get the dance crowd interested.
Door to Door by The Cars- I'm not sure if it's cool to like the Cars again. Their debut album was one of the first records I ever bought, and made feel all cool and with it. I listened to it to death. Same with Candy-O. I saw them perform live at the Spectrum twice. I looovvved The Cars, despite the fact that each album after Candy-O was slightly worse than the one before it. And then came Door to Door, which was a lot worse than the one before it- in fact, it was so bad I turned it off about halfway through and never listened to it again. So, I'm not sure if I should list this or not, because I never liked it, but it was, for a while, part of the record collection.
Magic Touch by Stanley Jordan- I caught this guy on Carson one night and was blown away by his playing. He was playing two guitar parts at once with his tapping technique. I had to have this album! He was so cool, so innovative, so... bland. Yes, the technique was cool, but his song choice was so boring. "Eleanor Rigby," "The Lady in My Life," "A Child is Born." Next to him, Kenny G. was a swinging jazz hep-cat.
Flash by Jeff Beck- when I was in high school, I took guitar lessons, and my teacher introduced me to the music of Mr. Beck. I could never on my best day play anywhere near as well as him (Beck, not my teacher), but I became quite the fan. And then this came out- I had to buy it- it was Jeff's first album in years. And it sucked. It took a while for that fact to sink in, but sink it did.
The Golden Age of Wireless by Thomas Dolby- We all remember "She Blinded Me With Science." I still think it's an amusing single. But the rest of the album was somewhat disappointing (and by "somewhat" I mean "extremely", and by "disappointing" I mean "horrendous.") A couple of mushy songs, some studio tricks, and that was it. He tried to capture the magic later with "Hyperactive", but we all saw through his shtick by then. (And how sad is it that I know the name of his follow-up song?)
There are plenty more embarassing albums from my collection- Susan Vega, Tracy Chapman, Yello, J. Geils, but that's a post for another day.
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2 comments:
Oh my, I was very much into 80's crap music. Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam with Full Force Five (I Wonder If I Take You Home), Michael (UGH) Jackson (the whole Thriller experience, esp the Vincent Price guest voice over), Atlantic Starr (Freakazoid - what a song), Charlie Sexton, various Brit bands of the dance/electronic/pop persuasion, and the entire Top 40 Countdown with Kasey Kasem every weekend and taping all my flavor of the week songs. All that wasted time!
No matter how bad my collection was, it paled next to my college roommate's. He had absolutely no taste- his philosophy was that music should be upbeat and you can dance to it. If it didn't fit into those two criteria, then it sucked.
His favorite songs were "Walking on Sunshine," "Illegal Alien," and "99 Luftballoons."
I am jealous of his collection for one reason- he has the original "Blue Monday" 12"- the one that looked like a big floppy disk.
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