Girl group harmonies … fuzzy guitar … heavy bass/drums … farfisa organ … muddy Nick Lowe-style wall-of-sound production … sounds like heaven to me. The video has nothing to do with the lyrics, by the way.
Nostalgia can be a tricky thing. On the surface, “Summer of ’89″ seems like a typical fist-pumping nostalgia rock anthem like “Glory Days” or (ahem) “Summer of ’69.” But then the lyrics get darker and the fates of his friends get grimmer (in a non-funny and non-ironic way). And then about three minutes in, the song takes a kind of odd Violent Femmes style turn which ends with Walker desperately screaming “When do I become?!?” before segueing back into the fist pumping chorus. On the one hand, you can enjoy the perverse twists and turns of this deceptively simple and brilliantly written song. Or you can ignore what I say and just pump your fist in the air like you just don’t care (which the song is good for as well). Enjoy this before Budweiser puts it in a commercial.
On a personal note, there’s nothing in this song that even remotely resembles my summer of ’89, unless I missed a lyric about working at Pizza Hut or mowing lawns.
Comedian Patton Oswalt describes a class from the College of William and Mary that he took as an undergrad. Really funny stuff about the liberal arts.
Recorded in 1988, this is Lou Reed’s diatribe against the bloated bulls–t of the 1980s. Sad to say, this song is more relevant than ever nowadays.
Guns N’ Roses’ killer cover of Peter Laughner’s / The Dead Boys’ sad, nihilistic classic “Ain’t It Fun.” Recorded for their punk cover album “The Spaghetti Incident,” this is the best version of this song I’ve heard. There have been some good versions (Dead Boys, Rollins Band) over the years, but the Guns N’ Roses version is probably the best, in my opinion. It’s probably no coincidence that this ended up on their greatest hits CD. If any song sums up composer Laughner’s life, it’s this song. If you have any interest in what you’ve just read, please read Lester Bangs’ legendary obituary of Laughner “Peter Laughner is Dead” for context (located in the Bangs’ compilation “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung”).
The greatest song to emerge from the Cleveland underground from the mid-late 1970s. I love how this song rides its sinister, minimalistic groove, gradually adding instruments, and then exploding at the end with a magnificent guitar solo by the late Peter Laughner. Arguably, Laughner’s finest moment on record, though it’s well worth it to check out the material he recorded with Rocket from the Tombs and his posthumous solo compilation “Take the Guitar Player for a Ride.”
With the exception of Tom Green’s “Freddy Got Fingered,” this is probably the wildest, weirdest film ever released by 20th Century Fox (or any studio, for that matter). The studio heads at Fox at the time (Richard Zanuck and David Brown) were so desperate to look hip and make money in the late 1960s, they hired sexploitation legend Russ Meyer to direct a pseudo-sequel to their trashy 1967 blockbuster “Valley of the Dolls.” Meyer hired film critic Roger Ebert (yes, THAT Roger Ebert), the only mainstream critic who admitted to appreciating Meyer at the time, to write the screenplay. What resulted was a masterpiece! A twisted, f–ked-up, surreal, insane, X-rated masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Along with “Midnight Cowboy,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and “Last Tango in Paris,” “Beyond” was one of the few major studio X-rated films to be a box-office hit (a $50 million box-office hit, when inflation is taken into account).
This is one of those films where it’s hard to say whether it was intentionally campy, whether it was just so terrible that it’s funny, or something on the level of the meta-comedy of an Andy Kaufman or Sacha Baron Cohen. As Ebert himself said about the tone of this film: “Meyer directed his actors with a poker face, solemnly, discussing the motivations behind each scene. Some of the actors asked me whether their dialogue wasn’t supposed to be humorous, but Meyer discussed it so seriously with them that they hesitated to risk offending him by voicing such a suggestion. The result is that ‘BVD’ has a curious tone all of its own. There have been movies in which the actors played straight knowing they were in satires, and movies which were unintentionally funny because they were so bad or camp. But the tone of ‘BVD’ comes from actors directed at right angles to the material. ‘If the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines, it won’t work,’ Meyer said, and he was right.
The attached clip is a pivotal scene, where the sinister Phil Spector-like music impresario named Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell reveals his true nature to gigolo Lance Rock (gotta love those character names). Lance is less than sensitive in his remarks to Z-Man and pays the price. This scene teaches an important lesson: if you’ve been tied up by some maniac wielding a sword, and said maniac decides to disrobe, the smart move is to be complimentary on the maniac’s equipment. To be fair, though, never having been in that position, I’m only guessing as to what the right move would be. Apparently, when Ebert revealed to Meyer during the script stage that he was making Z-Man a woman, Meyer took it in stride, saying “You can never have too many women in a picture.”
Needless to say, due to the graphic violence and simulated nudity (you’ll know what I mean when you see the clip), not safe for work or little ones.
Aside from “Roxanne’s Revenge,” “Brothers Ain’t S–t” may be Roxanne Shante’s most famous song. This may seem anti-male based on its title, but in reality, it’s a really smart and funny extended rap about the importance of maintaining your dignity and not being taken advantage of. Despite the fact that this is an otherwise positive song, the language on this number is really rough, so not safe for work or little ones.
A terrific hard rock song from The Move, circa 1971. Put to great use in the 1997 film “Boogie Nights” during the 1980 New Year’s Eve scene … right before everything goes to hell for the characters.
Had the Stones started during the mid-1970s, they may have sounded like the Saints. The Saints were considered punk, but mainly for their energy and casually disdainful attitude. No safet pins or spiky hair. Just raw, edgy, bluesy playing with a cool as f–k attitude.
Dave's Strange World 