When I arrived at my college radio station, in the fall of 1988, we still played records. There was a CD player there, shiny and new and forbidding. It was a relatively new technology (commercial stations that had moved their … Continue reading One for Friday: Big Audio Dynamite, “James Brown”
Operating with the mixed blessing of a highly distinctive voice — in every sense of that word — Thao Nguyen could presumably get along all right taking an easier, less deliberatively disruptive course. She could probably make a string of records laden with relatively straightforward, folk-tinged rock songs and keep herself and her band, the Get Down Stay Down, in regular music biz work for some time. Instead, she ties composition into tricky knots, constantly seeking the challenging dynamic, as if enough effort in that direction will finally create the song that can surprise her in midstream. As a listener, it’s … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: A Man Alive
There are many building blocks of the internet, but the cornerstones are think pieces, offhand lists, and other hollow provocations meant to stir arguments and, therefore, briefly redirect web traffic. Engaging such material is utterly pointless. Then again, it’s not like I have anything better to do. As I’m sure they secretly hoped, the outrage geysered up right away. The New York Times basically turned over the entirety of their most recent Sunday magazine to a feature entitled “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music is Going,” which was further billed as “A One-Time Spectacular.” Though positioned as an intricately considered … Continue reading Bait Taken: The New York Times Magazine’s “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music is Going”
226. 10,000 Maniacs, “Peace Train” Ahead of recording In My Tribe, 10,000 Maniacs was noticeably struggling to get a foothold on commercial success, enough so that guitarist Robert Buck reported it stirred somewhat unique worries among his family: “My uncle Charlie read somewhere that we were a cult band so he thought we were playing for the Moonies. He even confronted me with it; he said, ‘Are you giving your money to the Moonies? Is that why you don’t have any money?’” The band’s label, Elektra Records, wasn’t worried about that particular problem, but they were anxious enough to see their … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 226 – 224
Well, this was bound to happen. After having cause and capability to revisit a college radio chart from 1989 that I helped craft (it was probably from somewhere around my one-year anniversary at the station), my mind’s been awhirl with thoughts of all the more obscure records on it. There were plenty of albums included there that have received at least periodic revisits from me over the years, but I’m currently more intrigued by those that were used to fill the airwaves during that particular week only to see them later fade almost entirely from my attention. Casting back to … Continue reading One for Friday: Timbuk 3, “National Holiday”
These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Throughout this life of this feature, I’ve featured several acts that wound up with two separate singles that peaked at #40 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. As best I can tell, only one artist accomplished the strange feat more than twice. Fittingly, it’s the person dubbed “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” who did it, putting a total of four singles … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Bewildered,” “Get It Together, Part 1,” “Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn, Part 2” and “King Heroin”
229. Van Halen, “Jump” Eddie Van Halen wrote “Jump” on the synthesizer. Famously and even a bit notoriously, the song was a significant departure for the band the bore his name, a group that forged a fervent fan base largely through their vaunted lead guitarist’s six-string heroics. When “Jump” arrived as the lead single from Van Halen’s 1984, the divergence from the band’s typical sound was all anyone could talk about, a flurry of chatter which served the song well. Interest in the track was high, and it quickly became the most successful single the band ever released, cruising to the top … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 229 – 227
An old friend of mine has recently been moving heaven, earth, and government agencies to get his hands on as much material from the early years of the college radio trade journal CMJ as he can. Among his bounty is a batch of photocopies of a issue from September of 1989, collecting some of the first reports of stations after the start of the school year. The main album chart has Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Mother’s Milk at the top and includes such left of the dial luminaries as the Sugarcubes, the Cure, and the Pixies. Of greater immediate interest to … Continue reading From the Archive: 90FM’s Top 35, Early September 1989
By the time the late nineteen-eighties had rolled around, college radio largely had its own identity, one that almost entirely eschewed artists that got ample attention from stations in the commercial portions of the dial. That was a significant shift from a decade earlier, when an album by the Who, arguably at the peak of their broader popularity, could top the college charts, albeit charts that in their earliest stages. While some stations still afford these legacy artists at least a modicum of respect around 1989, the general rule was to strongly favor the acts that were starting to be … Continue reading One for Friday: Jackson Browne, “Chasing You Into the Light”
232. Gary Numan, “Cars” Officially, “Cars” is the debut single of Gary Numan. Born Gary Anthony James Webb, the musician took his stage name as the leader and chief creative force of the U.K. band Tubeway Army. According to Numan, he wanted to formally transition to a solo act fairly early on, but the label felt a band was more likely to crack the charts. Though bassist Paul Gardiner was also part of the Tubeway Army lineup through it’s entire existence, by the time they were making records in the late nineteen-seventies, it was realistically Numan under a different name. … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 232 – 230
Coffee for Two 