Second of two in a row from the Minutemen‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, a double album featuring forty-three mostly hard, mostly fast, mostly abrupt nuggets that manage to be unerringly smart, angry, political, and damned good. Themselves, at one-minute-eighteen seconds, doesn’t even feel rushed, just urgent, because all the men who work the land need to wake the f*** up and see beyond the rhetoric. True in 1984. True in 2016.
First of two in a row from the Minutemen‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, arguably the best double album of the 1980s. Because 1984 was supposed to be the year that we all finally found ourselves in George Orwell’s living hell, betrayers of love, loving only Big Brother. But if you were digging deep, steering clear of the sewage that was flooding the mainstream, you had punk-rock-hardcore-whatever-you-want-to-call-it getting ambitious (progressive even), swinging hard for the fences in all kinds of cool ways. And the Minutemen were leading that charge.
It’s been half a century since the Jimi Hendrix Experience dropped its debut album onto the world, but words still fail. Yet you gotta try anyway, so call Manic Depression pure truth in advertising. Even if it was sung in Gaelic, you’d know it was about the world just not being quick enough for the man’s psychedelic soul. Or perhaps the other way around.
“The special beauty underlying all the willful ugliness of the Butthole Surfers comes from the fact that they were the manifestation of everything any good, god fearing parent ever feared about rock and roll. They were impossibly loud, and ugly, and committed unspeakable crimes onstage and off. In other words, they were exactly what the mid-1980s needed. Moving To Florida gets the nod here because it’s the first song of theirs I ever heard. And I smiled.” (Philip Random)
The Undead (a fake movie band) tear things up with a little ditty about the construction of the perfect satanic rock star. From Phantom of the Paradise (the greatest rock and roll movie ever released in 1974) wherein the Faust legend gets mixed up with the Phantom of the Opera with a healthy dollop of glam rock sleaze thrown in for roughage. If you haven’t seen it, you’re incomplete, or you’re just not from Winnipeg.
A Bob Dylan discard from the already overloaded Blonde on Blonde sessions that eventually showed up on 1985’s Biograph box set (and any number of bootlegs). A straight up rocker with surrealism in its heart – what more could any culture want? How about a version to link to anywhere on the world wide web?
Randophonic 