MUSIC: I Was a Teenage Rhythm King Fan

Amidst the barren late '80s American musical landscape (Mr. Mister or Cutting Crew, take your pick) where import magazines become your paper internet, I somehow managed to stumble on a series of records by UK dance/pop label Rhythm King. Not bad for a Minneapolis Catholic schoolboy in a musical wasteland surrounded by Guns n Roses and classic rock.

Rhythm King started as a Mute label offshoot (odd) and floundered a bit before hitting a stride at the beginning of 1988 with the Cookie Crew-assisted single by The Beatmasters, 'Rok da House':

1988 was the beginning, and probably the peak of their powers. We got the #2 UK single 'Beat Dis' by Bomb the Bass, one of the first sample-heavy singles in the charts:

Similarly sampladelic, on a more RnB/disco tip, S'Express made an even bigger splash with their 'Theme' tune, which became arguably one of the first acid house-tinged #1 singles anywhere; this actually slightly dented the U.S. charts:

The Beatmasters had a sadly neglected debut album and really pushed the subgenre of 'hip-house'; MC Merlin was omnipresent on multiple Rhythm King artists' releases, including this:

Every scene needed a pretty diva and Betty Boo was Rhythm King's, even if her releases didn't hold up as the label's best:

The label really had a pop heyday (1988-90) before creating offshoot labels (Outer Rhythm that released Leftfield and others) and getting a distribution deal with Sony. By the mid-90s they were signing rock acts like Echobelly and Sultans of Ping before ultimately closing by the end of the century.

But who could forget their late '80s moment of not only being on the pulse of pop/dance music but creating it.

MUSIC: Tricks and Treats

I stumbled across a CDR from 2008 with several band names written across the top; Tricky was one of them. I didn't know which album of his it was, so I put it in the car stereo during a night drive somewhere. It was the remastered version of his debut and his immediate zenith, Maxinquaye. 

A simple sidenote to the album is that it birthed the career of Alison Goldfrapp, that's how epic and genre-shaping this album was, and is. Nearly 20 years later (next year will hit that anniversary), it still sounds fresh.

Even though Portishead's Dummy had come out in the fall of '94, Maxinquaye was the quintessential 'trip-hop' album for me. Born from the collective of Massive Attack, Tricky mined darker territory - biographically, lyrically and sonically.

The gem in Tricky's crown was his teenage compatriot Martina Topley-Bird, a smokey-voiced chanteuse who sounds shockingly older than her age and stuck with Tricky (creatively and romantically) for four albums.

From Maxinquaye:

From Nearly God (a Tricky album in all but artist name):

From Pre-Millennial Tension:

From Angels with Dirty Faces:

By the dawn of the new millennium, Tricky had lost the plot a bit. A series of weak albums carried him through most of the decade. In 2008, after a five-year gap of not releasing music, he came back with the decent Knowle West Boy and has completed a trio of albums that may not be as groundbreaking as his early work but restore the quality of his output.

His '90s work is hard to match, even for a modern day Tricky himself.

MUSIC: RoMo No-No

In the fall of 1996, on one of our many (OK, one) transatlantic phone calls, Neil Tennant (lead singer of Pet Shop Boys) and I discussed the current state of UK pop for a newspaper interview.

"How do you feel about this new New Romantic revival?" I asked.

"You mean RoMo? Neil asked, with a laugh. "You know, that never even really happened."

"You mean it was just a press thing?" I asked.

"It wasn't even a press thing. It was only in the Melody Maker!" he laughed again. "But it would have been nice to have a counterpoint to the whole Britpop thing, which is getting a bit 'laddish' at the moment."

[Reminder: find someone who can transfer audio cassette to either a CD or MP3 audio file. It's a great 45 minute interview]

'RoMo' (short for 'Romantic Modernism' - how pretentious, right?) was a short-lived fad in the mid '90s that was a reaction to the 'everyday lad/bloke' look of Oasis and their sound-a-like children. No more jeans and hoodies. RoMo was the first musical retro look back to the '80s.

Taking cues from early Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell and Human League, among many others, RoMo celebrated synths and boys in make up. Club nights sprung up in London to play these early '80s synthpop hits. But dancing to records wasn't enough and soon RoMo bands sprouted up; a few of the bigger names were:

Orlando

Sexus

By 1996 it had gone mainstream, with a piece about RoMo on Sunday TV in the UK:

By then the fleeting interest had dissipated. By 1997, RoMo was another footnote. All hype, no hits. Some thought that RoMo was just a precursor/think tank for the more successful Electroclash movement that bubbled up three-to-four years later. The Electroclash looks may have been more subtle, but the music was better.

MUSIC: The New Wave of New Wave of...this trend never happening.

Now that I'm on the subject of 20th musical anniversaries (see previous blog entry about Hole), I was one of about 15 Americans who cared about this new 1994 sub-genre: The New Wave of New Wave (TNWONW; yes, there was an acronym too).

During my most voracious period of music consumption (hell, my entire 20s/the '90s basically), I was attuned to all of these microgenres (I'll do a piece on RoMo next) and reading NME, The Face, Melody Maker, Select, Q, etc. constantly.

TNWONW consisted of British bands aping the sounds of late '70s NYC (Blondie, Talking Heads) and late '70s post-punk (Wire, The Stranglers) with a post-Grunge twist. Some of these bands were one-hit wonders (in the UK) but most were no-hit wonders.

I saw These Animal Men live at the 7th St. Entry in Minneapolis (1995); it was all about the Keith Richards moptops. This is better than I remember:

S*M*A*S*H (OK, you've got to admit that's a great band name) never came to the U.S. but I still bought their LP (did they have anything else?) Hmm, they were a bit too noisy for me after all. They never became the new Clash they so obviously wanted to be.

This microgenre ran out of steam before it started, but two of the artists escaped on lifeboats and sailed in to Britpop's safe and open arms. Both had a poppier edge and were female-fronted. Once again, women save another musical genre from oblivion:

Echobelly - A British woman of Indian heritage sounding like the lovechild of Debbie Harry and Morrissey

and the most famous refugee-turned-Britpop stars, Elastica. Their first single/video relishes in the bare-bones, punky minimalism of the white backdrop, but we know they wanted to be glossy stars. TNWONW was dead already.

MUSIC: Live Through Twenty

This month is the 20th anniversary of the release of Hole's Live Through This... and some singer's suicide.

I was too busy being excited about Madchester (1990), then Shoegaze (1991-2), then the early signs of Britpop (1992-3) to care about America's attempt at a '90s music genre. It all seemed like new heavy metal to me. I never cared about anything to do with Grunge...except this Hole record, Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and, tangentially, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me.

I guess it's all the women of Grunge (Courtney, PJ,..umm...D'Arcy Wretzky) and the fey men (Billy Corgan) that I found truly interesting and adventurous.

FILM/MUSIC: Tigre is Forever

Just stumbled upon the 2013 documentary 'The Punk Singer' on cable, about Bikini Kill/Le Tigre/Julie Ruin lead singer/frontwoman Kathleen Hanna.

Though definitely a DIY/make-it-up-as-you-go-along career, I have more respect now for Ms. Hanna, 25 years or so on from her origins. Her story has just more cultural weight and significance (Riot Grrrl, the Cobain connection, zine culture, pre-internet music making, etc.) as the '90s now seem like a cozy, but culturally-rich, nostalgic era.

MUSIC: Tame Jackson

Do guilty pleasures exist anymore? I feel like it's a "thing" for young hipsters to be ashamed of liking cheesy pop music. But as one gets older, I feel like it's safe to throw off those shackles of caring about what's cool or not anymore. I'm getting another year older next week.

Fact: I bought a CD copy of Michael Jackson's 'Blood on the Dancefloor' (new album/remix collection combo) at Amoeba in San Francisco in 1998...un-ironically. Yeah, I liked it. Sue me. I love that track 'Morphine'; so creepy. "Demerol...Oh God, he's taking Demerol." Michael had issues, clearly.

So great to hear that one of my fave new rock bands (trust me, I don't like a lot of them) Tame Impala has done a cover of the 'BOTDF' (in the know acronym) track 'Stranger in Moscow' and it's a shoegazey, shoegauzey treat. Effects on top of effects. It may be Tame Impala-by-numbers, but it's sweet.

They just missed the creepy ghostly scream at the end of the original track: a kid in an echo-y street screaming 'Michael!'

Tame Impala cover Michael Jackson