'Soul Mining' & 'Infected'

The The is basically Matt Johnson and a revolving door of special guests and musicians including The Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr and Jools Holland.

Outside of a relatively clever band name, this is not remarkably better or worse than most pop-electronic music from the 1980s. 

One note that is worth mentioning is that Matt's brother, Andrew, did some of the artwork for The The under the name of Andy Dog. This included the original cover for Infected, which featured a demon masturbating and apparently completing. The album was pulled and an edited version was released. You can see the unedited version here. 

I would love someone to interview the Johnson brothers and just ask them what exactly they were trying to do. I don't know if the controversy helped with album sales. It probably didn't hurt, but that seems like a pretty shallow reason for doing something. 

Furthermore, was the record label thinking the same thing assuming that repackaging would cost less than the free advertising they'd get for having a demon ejaculating on himself? 

'Shadowlands' & 'Ingénue'

Not to take away from the massive steps forward the United States has made in accepting of the homosexual community, but k.d. lang came out of the closet in 1992, during the very heart of her massively successful career. And no one seemed to care.

lang is sorta weird for several reasons, none of which include her sexual preference.

For one, she sings and plays pretty weird music. At the time, however, it was popular to like country-ish pop, easy-listenin’ rock. It’s why Bonnie Raitt sold about 10 billion albums and why Dwight Yoakum wound up so popular that he became a part-time actor.

k.d. lang got popular by playing this moody country adult contemporary that nobody that liked country listened to but everyone that was pretty lame loved. There is no way this should have been popular. The only explanation was that it happened in the 1990s and a lot of weird things happened in music during the 1990s.

What also is weird is that the United States fully embraced an openly gay celebrity. The same year she “came out of the closet,” lang’s album, Ingénue, went double platinum. Double platinum. It was mega-popular. Every one over the age of 30 bought this album. These are the same people that 20 years later are thumping their Bibles and bemoaning the rhetoric of same-sex marriage, basically condemning the country as a modern Sodom. In fact, they did more for normalizing homosexuality than anyone.

Plus, lang is Canadian.

k.d. lang is extremely popular and there’s no viable reason why she should be outside of the fact that Americans love lesbian Canada pseudo-country contemporary adult pop music. Go figure. 

'Faith' & 'Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1'

I've never understood why George Michael was such a polarizing guy. I guess in conservative America in the 1980s a blatantly homosexual singer could turn heads. Then again, he sold a gajillion records, so most people had little problem with his sexuality at this point.

But my memory of the late 1980s might not be as accurate as I perceive. I don't remember a time when George Michael was never a heterosexual. And I'm starting to question that memory only because I recollect a time when I thought Michael was pretty cool with that quaffed hair, the stubble, earrings, leather jackets and sunglasses perpetually perched on his nose.

Michael admits to bisexuality and (despite Wham! being incredibly gay) basically going through women like air during his heyday of the 1980s.

Reading more about the guy, the more I sorta respect him. If you take his quotes as gospel about how he really feels, sexuality had less to do with how they were attracted to a male or female form. It had to do with love. He thought he was a heterosexual in the 1980s because he was in love with a woman. It had less to do with who he wanted to have sex with (I only assume he had sex with whoever he was in love with). Then, he fell in love with some guys and he's not so much heterosexual anymore.

I also get the feeling that George Michael is in love with falling in love.

Later, when Michael's sexuality was pretty well known and he started to get into legal trouble he suddenly became an uninteresting lightning rod that occasionally released pop records.

He's just a man who loves his anonymous sex in roadside bathrooms. It was one time!

OK, it was two times. And he likes weed. No big deal.

The guy's been around for 30+ years now and if enjoying things enjoyed also by heterosexuals (weed, sex with strangers) is the guy's biggest pockmark, then I think that's OK.

'Q: Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!'

I can't get over that the guy on the album cover looks like NFL quarterback and three-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady.


There's not really a photo on the Internet of Tom Brady in that style of hat, at least without sunglasses. there are photos of Tom Brady crying and I don't know why he's crying. It's depressing that he'd be so sad about something.

Also, Brady's been on a lot of magazine covers and he's had lots of hairstyles. Yet, I don't know what he even sounds like. Is that weird?

Why am I talking about Tom Brady? What's happening!?

Oh, GOD, Gisele Bundchen!

Eh, he also looks like Benedict Cumberbatch.

'Scott Walker 2' & 'Scott Walker 4'

One of the few artists from the 1,001 list that doesn’t rank No. 1 in a Google search. The governor of Wisconsin trumps him. 

Walker’s a weird and I don’t quite get the admiration that he gets. The documentary about the guy – 30^th Century Man -- gets real disappointing when you realize that he didn’t overdose on drugs or kill himself. Just a guy that wants to make music that no one wants to fund. All documentaries about musicians should end in death.

Walker’s style is, if nothing else, out of the box for the time he was making music, the 1960s. It’s orchestral vocal music that’s too odd for old people to like it and too conventional for young people to really like. So artists and writers like it. Because they will always like what others really don’t.

In all honesty, it’s not bad and if you can ignore the hype and unnecessary accolades it’s a worthwhile listen.

'Colour of Spring'

What do I say about an album that is as boring as they come. The only redeeming quality is that it’s not a New Wave album, which is what I expected. I do imagine this was what my elder siblings listened to in the 1980s. Talk Talk, however, are responsible for one of the better singles of the past 30 years, “It’s My Life,” which is not on The Colour of Spring. Alas.

'Private Dancer'

Going to be real honest, I’m sure Tina Turner has a pretty strong audience base. No doubt you don’t sell the number of records as she’s done without having wide appeal. 

This is a pretty so-so pop record full of cliché 1980s including an abnormal number of guitar solos. 

That said, Turner is one of the few female musical artists that embraces her sex appeal along with an extremely strong personality that’s probably done more for the perception of females than any other artist outside of Lita Ford. Joking.

'Rip It Up' & 'A Walk Across The Rooftops'

I combine these two albums only because they were recorded by Scottish bands and they were released about two years apart in the early 1980s. 

Orange Juice’s Rip It Up was actually a pleasant surprise of 1980s New Wave, punk and ska. It’s a really neat album from a band that’s more notorious for spawning Edwyn Collins, who found solo success years later. And who also sorta looks like the lead singer from Fine Young Cannibals. Who are British.

The Blue Nile, as legend has it, were discovered after Linn Products, who manufactured hi-fi equipment commissioned a song to showcase their products. And The Blue Nile won that privilege and signed to a record label established by Linn.

The band, however, refutes this story saying they were already established and recording when Linn asked to use some of The Blue Nile’s music to test their equipment.

Why this matters is a motherfucking mystery.

'Hunting High and Low'

What sort of value is associated with being A-ha or in A-ha. Nobody I know could name one member from A-ha although almost everyone I know could name one A-ha song, no matter his or her age or having lived under a rock or in a cave for 30 years. 

A-ha is the biggest musical export in the history of Norway (thankfully, ABBA is from Sweden … and black metal is relatively unpopular) and that’s resulted in basically one significant album with two of their top 40 hits including “Take On Me” which is maybe one of the top 20 most popular songs in the history of recorded music.

Surely A-ha are pretty rich. They reformed for about a decade until calling it quits – for good, or so we think – in 2011. I guess it is all about the threshold of having to play “Take On Me” every night which determines how much longer you’d like to be a band. Right?

It’s interesting reading the band’s Wikipedia page and the author stating that A-ha is often perceived as a “one-hit wonder” despite two top 40 hits. Norwegians can have attitude.