Tag Archives: 1985

842. hang down your head

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“I stumbled onto Tom Waits through the movies (the songs he did for Francis Coppola’s One From the Heart mess, the beat hipster he played in Coppola’s Rumblefish, the idiot on the run in Down By Law) so I guess it makes sense that I think of him more as a showbiz guy than the essential musical force that some seem to. Yeah, he can lay down the gravely depths, but how much of that is just acting, pretending, NOT real blues, soul, whatever.  But then you hear something like Hang Down Your Head, which is the kind of song Bruce Springsteen only wishes he could write, and you realize you’re probably wrong.”

tomwaits-1985

971. sand

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“When Einsturzende Neubauten recorded Sand, the Berlin Wall was still dividing their home town, a fact of geo-political nature if there ever was one. So yeah, here was a raw slab of pure, impossible to ignore Cold War soul. Little did I realize it was a Lee Hazelwood cover until a certain backyard BBQ maybe a decade later. The Wall was gone by then and even eight thousand miles away you could feel the overall decompression. Or maybe it was all the marijuana and tequila. Anyway, I was lying in a hammock counting the clouds or whatever and suddenly there was Nancy Sinatra doing an Einsturzende cover. It made perfect sense.” (Philip Random)

Einsturzende-1985

1004. The Apocalypso

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“The Singing Fools were from Toronto, I think. But the whole world was doing the Apocalypso by the mid 1980s, what with the doomsday clock edging closer and closer to midnight, the ice caps officially melting, the ozone layer officially depleting, chemical spills wiping out entire towns, nuclear reactors melting down, and the President of the USA well on his way to dementia. What else were you going to do?” (Philip Random)

1016. Moving to Florida

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“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)

1048. never give up

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The so-called sound art project known as Nocturnal Emissions take a few bland self-help samples, lay down a simple groove and deliver an anthem of sorts on the theme of healing. Because by the time 1985 hit, everyone who had even half a brain knew we were all in serious shit as regards the long term survival of the species. And then there was that  big disease with a little name (as Prince put it). We all knew someone who had it, even if we didn’t actually know they had it yet. Such was the AIDS crisis of the mid-80s — a death sentence all the way. And yet we’re human, so we never give up. Some of us anyway.

nocturnalEMissions