Come see, come see, remember me: The Top 40 of January 21, 1984

Everyone old is new again this week. Of course, not just this week, but throughout the 80s. The original rock and pop revolutionaries beat on against the newer currents, bringing us back ceaselessly to the past--and to extend this unnecessary Fitzgeralism further, they weren't gonna be the last tycoons to do this. What would change is that the music moved from airplay to the arena, though some also hung on to the lower rungs of the decade charts.

If April is the cruelest month (gotta use this English major somehow, come on now), then January is the longest. I like January because it's a new start and we're coming out of the darkness and obligations of autumn and winter solstice seasons, but my god does it drone on. At least it's broken up by deliberate events and adventures undertaken when the snow and cold relent; in '84 that would have been dances and speech tourneys, the school cafeteria a sweat lodge of fun and traveling to less-bumpkinish-than-you'd-think county high schools in a rattling, frigid school van (dubbed the "Magic Bus" endlessly by my friend Mikey Z.)

Yeah, I'm perpetually grateful for the chance to break through the snow for something new...or new/old.

40. "Uptown Girl" - Billy Joel. This second single from his monolithic throwback An Innocent Man chronicles the time when newly-divorced Billy finally assumed the dating-supermodels mantle of the Big Rock Star. This cat walking girl is on her way out of the top 40, having peaked in November and December at number three. Pure joy, this one--the sound of summer peeking through the bare tree branches.

36. "Nobody Told Me" - John Lennon. At first glance, it seems odd to see Lennon in the Top 40 four years after he passed. Then I remembered that Milk and Honey was the final Lennon/Ono album, released in late 1983. Though this was written for Ringo (can't you hear him cheerfully singing it?), it was completed by Yoko and became Lennon's last hit single. Imagine (sorry) hearing him return to the radio back then--with Julian to debut there months later in '84.

27. "Yah Mo B There" - James Ingram with Michael McDonald. Michael McDonald surfaces from his Doobies legacy, ultimately winning a Grammy for this one. Could I have had any clue that this and other hits on my radio and my dad's stereo would be ironically/not ironically celebrated and placed in a seaside/easy-listening firmament presided over by the trinity of McDonald, Dan, and holy Toto? This one falls on the latter and smooth R&B end of the era, produced by Quincy Jones and written by Q, McDonald, James, and Rod Temperton ("Thriller," "Boogie Nights). 

23. "All Night Long" - Lionel Richie. Now my friends, the time has come. This isn't about then; this song (from Richie's biggest and 1985 Grammy-winning album) is being present in now and future joy. It somehow hit me differently--late in the night at the bar at the turn of one of these past few banana-shit years, under the tent on the beach in banana-shit Panama City Beach. No matter what happens, life is good--wild and sweet. (Also: I want a wardrobe comprised of all the clothing in this video.)

10. "Say It Isn't So" - Daryl Hall & John Oates. At once haunting and poppy, this first and biggest single from their hits compilation Rock 'n Soul Part 1 offered not one but two videos, the first an out-of-the-box affair (literally) with John as tennis-anyone-outfitted other man, and the other, "official" video featuring a lot of shoes, shots of NYC and GE Smith doing some pre-SNL guitar mugging. The latter seems to be cut to the Jellybean Benitez et al extended dance mix--unusual for the time. Why? I got 5 pages into Google search results with no answer (except that the internet is now "optimized" for consumerism and looking at the Big Sites). The single version will climb--and stay--at number 2 in late December.

1. "Owner of a Lonely Heart" - Yes. Oh, you think you're getting pushing-40 dudes who are prog, but you're watching them on MTV, so you don't know they are prog (or what prog is), but then the drop happens at the end of the first chorus and then the video becomes a Lynchian nature fantasy which relaunches the song into one man's fate in a dystopic authoritarian state. This is the video that the parents should have been far more concerned about me seeing on cable than this. But since it predated my reading of Brave New World (and, for that matter, any F. Scott Fitzgerald) by four or so years, it was just downright creepy, an unlikely major player on MTV, much less the charts.

Take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life.

Happy New Yes.



Send an instant karma to me.

Random Play: Never thought I'd fall again so easily

Some schmaltz from 1980 arises as soon as I turn on the radio this morning--and its long-forgotten provenance that I must've osmosed as a child who turned on the radio some morning then.



THEN you play "Starship Troopers" for me, Zenith? Sister Bluebird, look what you've done to me.

Absolute elsewhere

Summer nighttime first listen surrender yes love flower.

Your Guilty Pleasure: Hello, Hello, Heaven

I realize this was five guys in a studio with a bunch of machines, but I like it.





Plus, without Yes' seminal comeback (oxymoron?) album 90125, the world never would have experienced The Art of Noise, which was comprised of most of 90125's producing team. That group, after the Yes album was on shelves and rising to mega-hit, was noodling around with leftover beats and blips from 90125, feeding them to a Fairlight CMI synthesizer to make something new--not unlike taking the party crudite tray and throwing it in the blender or stockpot for soup.  The Fairlight was hot shit at the time; let me just list what resulted from it for evidence: "Shock the Monkey," the theme from Miami Vice, Kate Bush's album Never for Ever, and entire compositions by famed French noodler Jean Michel Jarre, including 1981's Magnetic Fields (and so there you have that--but wait--actually, not really because they're named after a French book, not Jarre's album. Sigh. I guess the French like their champs when they are magnetique).

Anyway, armed with the Fairlight (two keyboards and a tv screen, in my definition), its sampler, and a couple of additional noodlers, the 90125 team became The Art of Noise, and, by 1983, was releasing some influential output. 90125's primary producer Trevor Horn had already experienced recognition out from behind the console as a member of The Buggles. Yep, him.
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Though better known later for the wistful, soundscapey "Moments in Love" (now a Smooth Jazz staple, but that's another story) TAON's "Beat Box," released in 1983, is an aural potage of vocal snips, beats, and blares that contains sounds that launched a thousand hip-hop tracks. Or a few dozen, according to this Whosampled site that is going to become the next big time-waster for me after I'm done with Procatinator.

One here at 1:43--a kind of orchestral blast--ended up in a Kurt Blow track almost immediately. You'll recognize it from, yeah, a thousand other tracks. Because what is any kind of music besides noodling and new use of old ingredients?



And that little BLAP! BLAP-BLAP! is how you get from prog rock to Marky Mark, kids. Through synthesizers.

Did We Really Count to One Hundred?