Fluxblog #291: Christmas Playlist | Tears for Fears • Elvis Costello • Beck/Gorillaz • Thurston Moore
This Wednesday's episode of the new Fluxpod show featured journalist Ryan Broderick for a talk about 100 Gecs and their context in social media subcultures. It's a good one! The next episode comes out tomorrow and it features Rob Sheffield, but it's for Patreon subscribers only, and I promise you these paywalled episodes with Rob are very very good. Next week's free episodes will feature Melanie McClain, who is an A&R for Secretly Group, and Molly Mary O'Brien from the And Introducing podcast for a conversation about Sad Girl indie singers, merch, and uhhh, Hamburger Helper. It's all gonna be fun and interesting stuff, so smash those subscribe buttons.
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This week's playlist is Have Yourself A Funky Little Christmas, a collection of 20th century funk/R&B/reggae holiday classics, and it's definitely one of your best options in terms of having something festive to play that is not at all annoying let alone actively awful! Not the easiest thing for this sort of music, I know... [Apple / Spotify]
This week's posts start with a look back on an old family favorite, and then check in on some older artists with recent work that I'd skipped over for a little while.
November 16th, 2020
Hot Tips For The Boys
Tears for Fears “Break It Down Again”
“Break It Down Again” was released in 1993 and was a solid radio hit, which is sorta surprising in that the aesthetic of the song is extremely un-1993, the point at which post-Nirvana “alternative” sounds had become entirely dominant in the mainstream. It’s one of the last songs to make it out of that fascinating bubble of pop history that I explored in this playlist – the ‘80s mutating into a glossy, self-consciously classy new ‘90s sound that ends up entirely abandoned within a couple years as the major aesthetics of the era are defined by a cohort of artists who favored more raw styles of rock, pop, and hip-hop.
Tears for Fears, a defining band of the ‘80s, showed up a bit late to the ‘90s party partly because Roland Orzabol had become a studio perfectionist in the late ‘80s but mostly because the band was derailed by his acrimonious split with band co-founder Curt Smith. “Break It Down Again” and the rest of the Elemental album sounds like it would have fit right in with the zeitgeist of 1990 or 1991, but in 1993 it’s already a throwback in the midst of a rock scene centered on records like In Utero, Siamese Dream, Vs., and Pablo Honey. Some of Tears for Fears ‘80s contemporaries had at this point successfully reinvented themselves with very ‘90s palettes – U2, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., The Cure – but Orzabol made no such concessions. It’s not clear to me whether this was out of fidelity to a specific artistic vision or because the record was in the works for so long that there was no way to update the sound of it without starting from scratch. Probably a little of both.
“Break It Down Again” is maximalist and bombastic, and absolutely jammed full of ideas. Orzabol was no stranger to this approach – if anything, the band’s 1989 hit “Sowing the Seeds of Love” is twice as dense – but the relatively compact structure of this composition makes the swerves from martial political fanfare to hyperbolic synthesized orchestral hits to smooth layered harmonies feel a bit dizzying. Orzabol gets away with his most highbrow notions and acrobatic feats of arrangement because he’s so gifted with melody, and “Break It Down Again” is so stacked with ear-catching hooks that it feels like it could tip over and crash like a Jenga tower at some points.
The lyrics are just as packed as the composition, to the point that each iteration of the chorus has a new set of lyrics attached to the melody. Orzabol approaches the idea of “breaking it down” from multiple angles: dissolution of both personal relationships and nation states, the deconstruction of masculinity, the erosion of emotional walls and the things that keep you from finding your inner truths, the eventual decay of all things. The song embraces the concept of entropy – not so much in the sense of awaiting oblivion, but in that the end of things allow for new beginnings. The lyrics convey an intriguing blend of cynicism and optimism, to the point that he seems to be begging for destruction as an impetus to change. I don’t know if Orzabol intended this song to espouse accelerationism, but it certainly comes off that way.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 17th, 2020
A Cue Or A Clue
Elvis Costello “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”
“Hetty O’Hara Confidential” is a cautionary tale of a gossip columnist who was once quite powerful but is now outmoded in a time when “everyone has a megaphone.” It’s a brutal portrait of someone who was exceptionally good at her job but a bit drunk on the power that went along with it, and progressively more indifferent to the havoc she could wreak in her subject’s lives by telling all their secrets. Elvis Costello seems a bit awed by her – it’s all written like he’s singing about a formidable opponent. The music, made entirely by Costello, is very playful in tone and a little abrasive in its beats and textures. It’s an outlier for him but the style works, particularly as it places more emphasis on his voice and words.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 18th, 2020
The Permanent Sun
Gorillaz featuring Beck “The Valley of the Pagans”
Beck and Damon Albarn are two of the most versatile artists of all time, both capable of working up to a high standard in a very wide range of styles. So what happens when you put these two clever chameleons together on a track? Well… you basically just get them both on autopilot and singing default-mode melodies over a track that sounds like it was made of spare parts from the Güero and Demon Days records. It’s a good but totally unsurprising song. I think what really happened here is their core styles overlap a bit too neatly, so it just becomes a composite of them both. Albarn’s more interesting collaborations tend to be with artists who he has much less in common with, so there’s a bit of tension in how they push and pull. This is more like two magnets snapping together.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 20th, 2020
Evoke Something Fugitive
Thurston Moore “Calligraphy”
Sonic Youth is one of the most important bands in my personal history but I’ve found it hard to get enthusiastic about Thurston Moore’s post-SY material. This isn’t to say I think it’s been bad but more that when I hear him on his own now it all feels too familiar, like I just know how he plays too well and I’m not surprised by anything he does from one chord to the next. This was a creeping problem in the later Sonic Youth records, but in that situation Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon, and Steve Shelley were bringing their own ideas and impulses to it so no song ever rested entirely on his guitar or his voice. A lot of Moore’s songs now feel less like songwriting and more like a meditative practice, and this is simply him engaging with his instrument in a way that feels most natural and unforced. I get it, but a lot of it doesn’t quite beg to be heard.
“Calligraphy” is an outlier in that Moore’s guitar style is noticeably different in its textures and tones, even if the chord changes and lead parts are very obviously him. It feels more rough and rustic; something about the particular tone of the acoustic guitar reminds me of the smell of burning wood. You can hear peace in his voice but a bit of restlessness in his guitar, like he’s waiting for his body to catch up with his mind.
Buy it from Bandcamp.