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.
“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 Simple Minds (from before they decided the world needed yet another U2 and thus became officially uncool), 1981 being the year that they released two solid albums in Britain (jammed into one for North American consumers), then hit the road with one of the hottest live shows on earth. It would never really get any better, except for maybe that one night in Dortmund, 1984.
In which the Eurythmics, at the peak of their 1980s pop success, take a sideways step and deliver the soundtrack to 1984 (the movie), which was pretty good in a harrowing, all-too-faithful-to-the-book sort of way. But in the end, almost none of the Eurythmics music made it to the final cut. Not because it was bad. It just wasn’t what the director had in mind. Philip Random recalls Room 101 getting lots of play on his car stereo during the prophetic year in question, “A nifty little nugget about torture, propaganda, the malevolent destruction of human souls. What wasn’t to love?”
If you were there at the time (1984) and paying attention, Repo Man (the movie) was pretty much perfect, nailing all the right targets, scoring all the right points, and it all started with Iggy Pop cutting loose over the opening credits. Welcome to the so-called Winter of Hate, with Repo Man (and its punk-hardcore-whatever-you-want-to-call-it soundtrack) giving this long weird season (it lasted years) a fierce and virulent focus. Not that there wasn’t any love in the mid-80s. Of course there was. But you couldn’t really make sense of the times and your place in them (in North America anyway) until you owned your hate. Until you knew what to hate. Otherwise, you were just going to get eaten by hungry robots like everybody else. Or nuked. Whichever came first.
Randophonic 