120 Months – July 1988 – Living Colour, The Sugarcubes, Ramones

In July of 1988, 120 Minutes served up a couple of American rock bands with classic videos and one Icelandic pop song with a bit of a dark story hidden in the lyrics.

And welcome back to 120 months. I am here with Keith Porterfield, Scott Mobley. My name is Michael Millard, and we are rolling through 120 minutes, MTV’s 120 minutes, month by month, choosing songs and videos and bands to reminisce about, talk about, analyze, sometimes criticize, not often, but occasionally it comes up, and just like kind of revel in the in the greatness that was, at this point, late 80s kind of alternative MTV stuff.

We’re in July of 1988. Okay, so before we get started, we like to kind of set the table, look at the, the top, top 40 landscape, and that’s kind of, kind of what 120 minutes was not rebelling against, but meant to be, you know, let’s find these songs that you’re not going to hear on these charts, but it’s always kind of informative to see what was really big on the radio at the time. So starting from the bottom up.

Number 10, Jane Widelen from the Go-Go’s with Rush Hour. I vaguely remember her having like a solo career there. Number nine, Terrence Trent Darby sign your name. always, always good.

Pebbles, Mercedes Boy. Eric Carmen, make me lose control. That song was huge.

Breathe hands to heaven. I barely remember that one, but that one was big. Cheap Trick, the Flame, massive. like one of their last massive hits before they kind of, kind of dropped off the charts anyway.

Steve Winwood, roll with it. In excess still on the charts with new sensation. Also, Def Leppard, pour some sugar on me, still on the charts.

Those have been on for, I think the last 2 months that we’ve talked about. They were both massive. And then number one in July of 1988.

Richard Marks, hold on to the Knights. And against that back, a lot of those probably got in play airplay on MTV’s regular rotation. So against that backdrop.

We are going to look at what 120 minutes was doing in July of 1988. As Scott said right before we started recording, We have a solid, solid lineup of bangers in this one, and we will kick it off with Keith. So for this week, I chose…

Well, 1st off, let me just say that, we’ve had a lot of songs come up here in 120 minutes that I was surprised to see on a playlist for 120 minutes. It happened last episode. It’s happened several times.

And again, that probably goes back to 120 minutes just kind of trying to figure out exactly what it is that they are at this point. It’s still pretty early in their run. But this week, I was happy to find out or happy to see that Cult of Personality by Living Color was on the playlist.

So that was my choice for today. I’m a culture person. And a candidate, I’m a coastal personality, the coastal personality.

The cult of personality… And what’s kind of funny, buddy, is when we were texting back and forth about all this, I said I was going to take the song, but I was said, you know, I’m not, you know, real attached to it if one of you guys wants to do it, you know, it’s fine. And this is in our text messaging back and forth.

And I think it was Mike, he texted back and said, no, I want to hear your take on it. And I just texted back it rocks. And, you know, we kind of got a little bit of a laugh about it.

That’s actually my take on it. That is my take on it. This song rocks.

It rocks hard. It rocks relentlessly. It just rocks and sometimes that’s enough.

That’s all you need to have a great song. Really color was a New York band. They were formed in 1984.

They formed by the guitarist Vernon Reed. And he had a couple of incarnations of the band before what became kind of known as living color. He’s kind of an interesting character himself.

The stuff he was doing early. A lot of it, I guess, was apparently kind of like jazz fusion kind of stuff, and he’s kind of an avant-garde guitar player. In 1986, they came together with the lineup that would record their 1st couple of albums, and that was read on guitar.

Corey Glover on vocals, Will Calhoun on drums, and Muzz Skillings on bass. And then Skillings left the band in 92 and was replaced by a guy named Doug Wimbish. Those are the 4 guys that have large or 5 guys that have largely been this band throughout their history.

This song is off their 1st album. It was came out in 1988 called Vivid. The album did really well for these guys.

It actually went to number 6 on the Billboard 200. This song was incredibly successful for them, which again is part of the reason why I’m surprised that we’re seeing it on 120 minutes. But this song actually went to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.

So this was a monster song, massive song, and I’m sure most of our listeners have heard it. Um, it won awards. The song won a Grammy for the best hard rock performance in that year.

I guess probably was 89 was the year that they actually won the award. It also won a couple of MTV video music awards. So it was big at the time.

And if you happen to be a professional wrestling fan, it has had a 2nd life since about 2011, it has been the theme from CM Punk, who is a pro wrestler that’s worked in several different promotions. So there’s probably a whole subset of people out there that are familiar with a song that don’t even know who living color is, who just know it as the CM Punk song. So, um, so yeah, it’s it’s had a 2nd life uh, there.

So yeah, big song, really successful for them. Just a great one. The song itself.

Like I said, rocks hard. And it’s basically one of those, we kind of talked about some other songs like this before, killing joke, the killing joke song, 80s comes to mind. It’s basically built on one just really killer guitar riff, kind of repetitive guitar riff that runs through the entire song.

But, but man, it’s a, uh, it’s an all time classic riff. And then also the other thing that I wanted to point out for sure about this song is the, uh, the solo in it. Vernon Reed’s guitar solo.

Man, you want to talk about shredding. That guy just goes to work on that guitar solo. And I was looking, it actually got voted the number 87 guitar solo of all time in the top 100 list from Guitar World magazine.

So it’s not just me. Apparently people who actually know something about playing the guitar, I really like this solo too. So if for no other reason, check this song out just for Vernon Reed’s guitar work.

The main lick and the solo at the end are just phenomenal. And then you got the lyric, which is a, the song’s called cult personality, and it is about the phenomenon known as cult personality, which is basically kind of the, the charismatic leader that, you know, that everyone kind of gloms onto or, you know, a bunch of people, followers, glom onto, and, you know, who believe he can’t do any wrong, and the whole thing, the lyrics throughout. They’ve got uh, some quotes by uh, Malcolm X, JFK, and FDR, like actual recorded quotes that are dropped in.

The Malcolm X, quote, begins the song. The JFK quote is toward the end, and the FDR quote is at the very, very end of the song. And then it’s also got references to like Mussolini and Stalin and Gandhi.

And a lot of these people, historical figures that, that did have big followings that, you know, did have, what you might call the cult of personality build up around them. And I think one things that’s interesting about the lyrics is that they have said that, you know, when they were writing this and coming up with the examples and the people for the quotes and the, you know, references in the song itself. They said, you know, they don’t really weren’t concerned about whether it was good people or bad people.

It was really, they were just concerned with the idea of the charisma that sucked people in, you know, regardless of kind of what the message was, is that it was the personal, the person, the individual that that was able to suck those kind of followers in like that, you know, regardless of what the ideas they were espousing or whatever. So just like some of the other songs we’d come up with recently, ball of confusion from a few episodes ago comes to mind. It’s interesting, again, how a song that’s nearly 40 years old, how the lyrics of it are really relevant, you know, even today, especially now, vis a vis, a certain Cheeto hued grifter turned politician or perhaps politician slash grifter, that has managed to convince a huge segment of the population of the United States that he’s some kind of superhero, infallible superhero, you know, it’s, it’s really, really kind of disturbing to see it play out in real time like that, but that’s it’s, you know, a phenomenon that’s gone on through history and it’s going on today, even as we speak.

So once again, we come up with a song that’s, like I said, nearly 40 years old. that’s oddly relevant to modern times, you know, we keep finding these tropes that go through time, you know, throughout the last 40 years or so and probably even further back than that. So I thought that was really interesting thinking about this song in today’s context. Um, and then I’ll kind of jump off my, my, uh, high horse as far as that goes.

The video for the song is pretty cool, but it’s also pretty generic. It’s just them playing. There’s some other imagery spliced in.

Again, you get some images of some of the people we talked about, Malcolm X, Kennedy, Gandhi, so on and so forth. The one thing I will say about the video and the band in the video is that these guys could not dressed in any more of an 80s fashion. Like Corey Glover’s wearing like a bright yellow neon, like spandex bodysuit kind of thing.

It’s yeah, those outfits, none of them could have happened at any other time in history other than the 80s. So if you want to know what people were wearing in the 80s. This is a good chance to go check it out and you’ll see for sure.

But yeah, that’s that’s it. I don’t really have a whole lot more. Like I said, the main takeaway from this song is, it rocks.

And so I don’t think I’m going to get any pushback on that, but I will send it off to you guys just to see, just to see what you guys think about it. I am going to have to jump on that train. It indeed rocks.

I think it rocks now. I thought it rocked when it came out. This is we’re just I am just now dipping my toe into songs that I actually remember from the time when they came out.

So this one I was actually aware of. Although my guess is, so I got into, I think I mentioned this in last episode too. Like, I started…

I finally got access to MTV probably in like August of 1988. And living color and this song we’re starting to break on like dial MTV and the more mainstream rotation. So I think this is probably one of those, like we, like you kind of alluded to where it started on 120 minutes.

And then it was like, oh, no, this is actually gonna, this is, like, people are digging this. Like the heavy metalheads who maybe normally wouldn’t have watched 120 minutes. We’re still into the song or however, you know, it kind of broke containment because it feels like it was later in the year that it actually broke and this, you know, we’re in July.

Well, we’re in July. So, I mean, we’re pretty close to it, but it feels like it was later in 88 that it really started to hit. But 100% rocks.

These guys can play, Vernon, Reed is a… I mean, a guitarist that just, he’s kind of like Tom Morello, where it’s just a, he’s on a different planet with what he does with the guitar and you just got to like sit back and admire it and go for the ride. I’ll dive in the deep end a little bit and then I’ll get back in the shallow water with some more fun takes.

I have an opinion about the little girl’s acting who’s in this video that I’ll take on for here in a minute. But I will say that, like, it is in a better world. People would hear this song and they are exposed to it.

Now I know there’s kids that are reacting to it on YouTube or whatever. And something in the lyrics would inspire them to go and maybe find out what a culture personality is and maybe draw and connect the dots a little bit. Like that’s what art is great art, you know, is about beyond just just rocking and being enjoyable.

A song like ball of confusion, a song like killing jokes, 80s, where I think at some level those artists are hoping to reach people, at least a certain part of the audience, and go a little bit deeper and be like, hey, there’s, you know, if you want a little history lesson, or if you want to learn about this, this concept that maybe you weren’t familiar with, because as a, how old was I, 15, 16 around this time, I did not know what a culture personality was. And, you know, I didn’t have the luxury of just popping open Wikipedia and searching for it. Like I had to dig a little bit, but I did.

I was kind of inspired by this video to find out what it was because I didn’t quite understand. You can pick some of it up from the video and the lyrics about, about, you know, what he’s talking about, but like, uh, I wish more people now were inspired by this song if they heard it to go and do the same and draw some conclusions about it. It’s interesting that, you know, you noted that it isn’t all bad people.

He mentions JFK, not just using clips from JFK, but he mentions JFK and Gandhi and people that you kind of associate more with like positive politicians or at least, you know, not in the same breath with like Stalin and those people. And I don’t know that I ever would have considered JFK to be a cult of personality, but I wasn’t alive in the 60s, so I don’t know. Maybe, I mean, he really was an extremely popular president, so maybe he did have that kind of power, but that’s kind of an interesting view that I maybe wouldn’t have had otherwise.

But also just as a teenager hearing the song. It did encourage me to learn more and that it’s kind of, maybe, and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that is still happening.

I hope that it is, but let’s get back in the shallow water now. The outfits are super memorable, although I have to say, and I’ve seen this video at least a 1000 times. If you had asked me what he was wearing, I only would have mentioned the yellow body glove spandex suit, and not the like kind of tailored blazer thing that he’s actually wearing for the 1st half of the video, at least, it’s like kind of a waistcoat, I guess, kind of thing, and then it’s hand decorated, and he’s like rocking that over the body glove suit, which just really doesn’t work at all, but somehow he kind of pulls it off.

I… That makes it work, man. I don’t know what it is It’s, yeah.

I mean, he’s a cult of personality. Like, he’s got that, he’s got that charisma to pull it off, but I had forgotten completely about the blazer until I was trying to watch this with a very critical eye, you know, because we’re doing very serious work here, and that did pop up at me. The last thing.

At the very end of the video, there’s like a little girl that is kind of interspersed in this video and she’s watching ostensibly these clips that Keith mentioned of, you know, sometimes leaders, sometimes some of the things that these leaders are doing, like big groups of people that are in probably like concentration camps or stuff. They’re very quick clips, so it’s hard to get a lot of context, but you get the idea there in black and white, and she’s kind of sat in front of a TV and being, I guess, kind of bombarded by these images a little bit. And then at the very, very end, she reaches up and turns off the TV.

It’s just the most unconvincing turnoff move that I’ve ever seen. Like, they could they not have done another take of that? It’s not, it looks so fake.

Come on, little girl. do better. That’s the filmmaker in you talking, right? It is.

Like come on. 99 out of 100 people would never notice that problem. Come on. I’m gonna go back and watch it, though.

Are we to believe that this girl turned off this TV? Anyway, to wrap things up, this song indeed rocks. So, you know, you guys have touched on just about everything there is to touch on this on, so I won’t go into anything too much again, but I just wanted to say that, you know, I was looking at I wanted to look at like the timeline stuff like you were talking about, Keith, because I clearly remember this being a monster mainstream hit.

I would have never thought of this as alternative music other than the fact that, I mean, Liver Color did play on one of the Lala Paloozas, one of the early ones. But I never really considered them like an alternative act. Like this song was enormous.

I actually pulled this up because I wanted to say it. So to quote this, is from the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day off. Sportos, Motorheads, geeks, fluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, wickheads, dickheads.

They all adore him. They just think he’s a righteous dude. That’s was my high school’s reaction to living color when they came out.

I mean, there was nobody I knew that didn’t love this song. And I, you know, so I remember seeing it around this time and I just love this whole thing. Like, I loved their sound.

I loved the look. They were so cool and different. And it was just, I was immediately taken by this, not to mention, like you guys said, this song is an absolute banger.

Like it just gets no more rocking, really. The guitar riff is amazing. The vocals are killer.

It’s just a jam of the highest order. My favorite part is the breakdown at the end when it stops and you get the ass not what your country can do for you. banged and then the riff comes back in. incredible. That’s all I’ll add to that.

I think this is just an amazing song, great video. You know, you guys mentioned that it’s got a very 80s look to it and that is true. Even with all the neon colors and the ridiculous spandex suits and whatever else is going on there.

Somehow it works. I, I, it’s nothing I would ever put on myself, but, but these guys were cool then. I think they’re cool now.

I don’t know, just something about all of it works. So, um, the only thing I wanted to add was that I’ve always been a little disappointed, uh, by the fact that living colors star kind of burned out so quickly. I never really understood why because their 2nd album, the one after this called Time’s Up, is even better than this one.

I mean, this album has its moments. It has like 3 or 4 really great songs. Time’s up is great, cover to cover.

And it’s just a way more solid album. And then the album after that, I think it’s called Stain. That one is a little darker, maybe, and they were leaning into grunge, as everyone was to do in 1993, but it’s still a really good album.

So they kind of just disappeared after that, and I know they’ve done a couple albums since. I haven’t heard any of it. But I would definitely check out that 1st run of 3 albums if you’re interested in these guys.

If you like this song. Like it’s all good. And, you know, the things you mentioned, like Vernon Reed’s guitar playing, that doesn’t go away.

It just gets better as you keep listening, you know, and the vocals are great and everything. This is just a great band that I think never got as big as they probably should have gotten. You know, they have gotten back together.

They broke up, I think, after staying for a little while and got back together and have put a few more things out. I think some of that just based on some of the reading I did was based on some kind of creative tensions within the band. I guess they kind of wanted to go different directions, that kind of thing.

So, and then the other thing I wanted to, or that I was going to point out is that, you know, much like last episode with the Tracy Chapman song, I looked a little forward, passed this to see if we ever see this video on 120 minutes again, and I didn’t see it in the next, you know, 6 or 8 playlists moving forward after this. So this very well could have been the one time that this song played on 120 minutes before it really blew up. I think I think you’re right.

I think it blew up right after this, and they said, well, this is an 120 minute song, because it blew up fast. I remember seeing, well, like, the video during the day, and it wouldn’t have been dial MTV or anything like that, but, you know, something in the day where they announced it, where, you know, where they come on before it and go, this is a new thing that you need to check out and here it is. I don’t know exactly what that would have been, you know, world premiere or something like that.

But it couldn’t have been too far after this because I, you know, I remember the mania of this happening pretty fast around this time. So I, yeah, I think you’re right. I think when they played it once and then went, oh, this is not 120 minutes stuff, this is mainstream stuff and they let it go.

Yeah, I think that’s probably exactly what happened there. But thank God it came up that one time. It gave us a chance to listen to it again and watch the video.

Yeah, exactly. Like this one I’ve revisited a lot recently, actually, because I have, I think I mentioned, I watched YouTube reactors. I like watching these young kids kind of discover some of this music.

This is a big one to react to. A lot of young black kids. I think are really, like, excited to see, um, some really cool, like, black musicians making a different kind of music because that’s not as common.

I mean, you know, there’s it’s always been a little bit of a novelty to see, you know, black people in heavy metal or metal, like things that aren’t necessarily considered, you know, to be black music, but the bands that do break out, like fishbone or living color are always like so, so, so good. And to watch these kids, like kind of discover it and see, because a lot of times they’ll know the song and maybe not even realize that the band is black. Like, which is really, it’s really, like, you see this light going on in their eyes and it’s, it’s just been fun.

So I have revisited this a lot recently and it’s, but it was, it’s always like a joy to listen to this one. And tying that to the next song. This is when I hadn’t heard for a really long time.

This might be one of my favorite songs that we’ve that like got brought back into my memory because I forgot how amazing this one is. I wish I could say I chose it. It wasn’t my choice, but I’m glad you did choose it, but I’ll let Scott take it from here.

I’ve been excited about this one. This week, I chose birthday by the sugar cubes. Um, there is a lot to unpack here, so, um, I’m just gonna go kind of one thing at a time.

The sugar cubes are an Icelandic band. They form in 1986. There were six people in the original lineup of this band.

I am not going to insult them or anyone else by even attempting to pronounce their names. You are welcome to look it up. But the important part of this is that their lead singer was Bjork.

I think we all probably know who that is. They released their 1st album. It’s called Life’s too Good in 1988.

It was kind of a surprise sensation when it came out, like right out of the gate, and most of that is because of this song. This single, for this was released in 1987 in the original Icelandic language it was recorded in. And then shortly after that, again, in English and then in 1980, it was the 1st single for this album.

So I talked a little bit on the last episode about how this is about the time that I started figuring out that I liked music that was maybe a little off kilter, a little different from the mainstream. And most of the stuff I was finding was that, but it was close, at least, to the rock and metal that I was listening to at the time. You know, the, I mentioned this on the last episode when I talked about ministry.

And, you know, the, the, the bridge between ministry and metal is not that big. It is not a chasm, you know. Living color is a good example of that.

You know, that was considered alternative music at the time. And it’s really not that far from what I was listening to. And then there was this.

I did not hear this song 1st from the Sugar Cubes. The 1st thing I heard was Motor Crash, which was all over 120 minutes at this time. I saw it during the day on MTV.

So I think they were pushing it a little bit. That song is a little more mainstream than this one. Mainstream, maybe not be the right word, but it’s a little closer to that than this is.

I went and bought the album on the strength of that song, right after that song, on the album is this song, birthday. And this is one of those moments that I cite often as being sort of the pinnacle of my musical taste changing. I’m going to talk about the music 1st because once we get into the lyrics, I think that’s where things maybe get a little complicated, but what I love about this song is that it’s almost like it’s a bunch of things being done wrong that somehow sounds right.

I don’t know if you guys agree with that or not, we’ll get to it. But here’s what I mean by that. The baseline of this song is a pretty solid foundation.

Everything around it sounds just a little bit off. The guitar is kind of just noodling. The drummer is just a hair off the B, almost sounds like maybe he’s falling asleep.

Like, it’s very lackadaisical drumming. The horns kind of wail a rhythmically around everything. And then all over all of that, Bjork is both on key and off key at the same time.

She’s on the beat and off the beat at the same time. For what it’s worth, she is singing the hell out of this song. But, but it’s a mess.

And somehow it’s just remarkably beautiful to listen to, even though maybe all of it doesn’t sound right, but the sum of its parts is just amazing. Video is kind of delightfully weird. It’s got some potentially problematic imagery in it.

I guess we can get to that, but overall, I found it kind of quirky and cryptic, which I think are fair words to describe anything that Bjork is involved in. So not surprising, but it’s an interesting one. It was obviously pretty low budget.

It doesn’t seem to have much to do with the song. We’re about to get into the lyrics and the song is up for debate as far as to what it’s about. So maybe it’s the perfect video.

I don’t know. I think it, if it’s the vibe of the song pretty well. Okay, so the lyrics.

This song describes a relationship between what we are told is a five-year-old girl and her neighbor whose age we do not get. But we do hear that he has a beard, and they hang out and smoke cigars, and they bathe together, and some other stuff. The interpretations of this are wide and varied.

Everything from this is straight up pedophilia to the opposite, that it’s not real. Some people say that they’re both adults, and the girl just has the mind of a child or the opposite of that, which would be that they’re both children, and they imagine themselves as adults. So, Bjork was asked about this once.

Her description was that the song is about a young girl. who is infatuated with an older man, but nothing happens. She says that she was erotically attracted her words to older men when she was young. And the song is a fantasy about hanging out with an older man.

Okay, so she wrote it, we’ll go with that, but assuming that’s the interpretation we’re supposed to have, it’s still a song about an erotic relationship between a five-year-old girl and an older man. And even if it’s all in her head, it’s still, I just think, a little off putting. You know, you can take it however you want to.

And maybe you should ignore all that and just listen to this incredibly beautiful song. We can get into all of that. I do like how at the end of the song, Bjork sort of sings the baseline and like this sort of little girl skipping down the sidewalk kind of way that I think is reminding us for good or bad that this is a child that she’s singing about.

The song is a fairly big hit in the UK. Hit number one on the independent single chart there. It never charted in the US, at least not to anything that I looked at.

I thought it would at least be on like the college charts, but it wasn’t, according to their Wiki page. never charted. I mention all that because in the critical community, both at the time and now, this song is a monster. Rolling Stone and ME, Village Voice, Melody Maker, a whole bunch of other publications named it the Song of the Year in 88.

It is on the greatest songs of the 80s list for every publication imaginable. It is in the 2001 songs you need to hear before you die. and many, many, many others. I think it deserves to be.

It just kind of stands alone as something so unique and different. Yeah, very satisfying to listen to at the same time. I will say I’ve never been the biggest fan of Bjork as a solo artist.

I do think she has her moments. Her cover of Oh, It’s So Quiet is fantastic. As for the sugar cubes, I don’t think they ever did anything as good as their 1st album.

This song is just one of those things that I remember so distinctly being something that I heard, and I said this, that this is what I listen to now, you know? It’s one of those moments that are going to get more frequent as you move on here, but this was a big one for me. Last thing I wanted to mention was that, you know, I don’t have anything negative to say about this song.

But I did want to point out that one of the great things about the sugar cubes is that they have a 2nd vocalist. I’m going to try this guy’s name. It’s Einer Benedicton.

And he’s kind of like the Fred Schneider of this band, Bjork sings, and then he comes in and talks a little bit. And birthday is one of the only songs where he doesn’t appear on this album. He’s the one playing the trumpet.

But the songs where he chimes in, which is great. You know, the Sugar Cubes wrote their lyrics in Icelandic, and then had them translated into English word for word. So the translations are very rough.

That’s why nothing rhymes. Sometimes the songs don’t really make that much sense. But when he gets to ramble over the top of them, it’s pretty great.

So, um, if you want to hear that, I would check out MotorCrash and Trader is the other song of this album I really like. So that’s birthday. Let’s have it.

Man, I love this song. Easily, easily, my favorite Sugar Cube song. And, you know, I’m not a huge Sugar Cubes fan.

I don’t have any of the albums, but will surely not come as a surprise to you guys to find out that I do have the greatest hits collection from these guys. But even at that, I haven’t listened to it just a whole lot. Like, I, this song is by far my favorite, but I mean, you know, it’s got Deus, uh, and hit, uh, Regina and a few others.

It’s got a bunch of good stuff on it. But I’m not real, real, real familiar with these guys. This is, this is by far the, the song that I know the best, uh, by the sphere cubes.

And like I said, I love this song. You kind of mentioned the instrumentation of it. The phrase I like is beautiful noise.

And I use that a lot when I’m describing My Bloody Valentine, especially the album Loveless. This does not sound like Loveless at all, but I think it still falls into the category of beautiful noise. It’s a lot of kind of discordant parts that come together to be, you know, greater than or where the hole is greater than the sum of the parts.

But man, man, the bass part kind of dragging through there and with the horn stabs, weird kind of coming through in and out and all of that. Yeah, it just it just works. It’s funny about the lyrics.

I hadn’t really ever given that much thought to the lyrics. And I actually looked them up today to read them to make sure I knew what they were, what I was reading. And that was the 1st time I’d ever seen the deal about being 5 years old.

That was a surprise to me. And I don’t know that I had a take on that. I haven’t really processed it enough.

I have always just kind of thought of this as being a love song. Um, especially because I absolutely love the line. He knows how many freckles she’s got.

She scratches his beard, like the portrait of kind of, I hate to use the word intimacy, but that’s the word that comes to mind that is suggested by that. I have always thought was kind of beautiful, but is it? If we’re talking about a five-year-old girl, I’m not sure that it is.

So now I’ve got something to think about. That was a curveball for me on this song. But like I said, I love it.

I have always loved it. This is the 1st time I ever saw the video. I thought it was delightfully weird, pretty much exactly what I wanted out of a Sugar Cubes video.

I will mention that we once again got a dinner table in distress and giant bugs and eyeballs. I don’t know why all of these tropes keep coming up in these videos, but they do. And the giant bug at least has to go away.

I can’t, I can’t take any more giant bugs. No more giant bugs in 80s videos. I’m calling for it right now.

But yeah, I enjoyed the video. Like I said, it was pretty much exactly what I wanted just to kind of a weird video to go along with a weird song. And then the last thing I’ll say, I was just kind of thinking about this.

I think we’re going to have to create a new genre of music. We have talked before when we talked about OMD and some of the others about sophisticop. I think we need to create a genre for the sugar cubes called dementa pop, demented pop.

That’s what these guys are. They may be the only dementapop band out there, but I think that’s the perfect description of the sugar cubes. Nothing they do sounds like any other band.

Sounds normal. It’s clearly pop music, but it’s just way out there. So I’m coining it today.

The sugar cubes are the initial band in the category of Dementapop. What you’re describing is exactly right. And it’s like I said, it’s, if you heard any part of this in and of itself, it sounds like it’s, it’s just chaotic.

But it, somehow it, the switch goes on and it’s just beautiful. It’s a beautiful song. And nothing about it sounds like it should work, but it does.

I would tell anyone who’s disturbed by the lyrics to ignore them and just listen to what is what is a beautiful song. It is very possible to ignore them because I did unintentionally. This is all news to me.

I did not did not put any of this together. to be perfectly honest. And we are pretty good on this podcast, admitting our blind spots and admitting even humiliating black spots. And, uh, yeah, I So I will recalibrate my feelings for the song appropriately after I have time to actually read the lyrics and think through it.

So everything I’m going to say is from the context of this is what happens if you just ignore the lyrics and go with everything else. My 1st note on this song was, uh, is Angelo Battleamente involved in this in any way? Because it starts off with just a classic Angelo Battleamente riff.

He was not, by the way. But that was my for like that that low guitar riff that comes in as just classic Angela Benn. I was like, well maybe he produced it or something because he, you know, he dabbled in a lot of random stuff.

What the horns are doing sounds like him too. horn thing, yeah. Yeah, if he wasn’t, if they were inspired by him or he wasn’t inspired by this or something, I just would be surprised because, I mean, it’s, it’s not that people can’t independently come up with concepts like, like that. It’s relatively simple riff and sounds and stuff that we’re talking about, but it is, I mean, if if I told you guys, that was Angelo Battle Lamente, and you didn’t know who it was, I think you guys would not question that.

It certainly sounds like him. At least the 1st part of the riff. That was something that just stuck out at me.

I think you guys really have covered everything. So I’ll take the conversation in this direction. Scott, you alluded to this.

Bjork is just better when she’s constrained by a band, I think. I think she’s better in the sugar cube. Like, I, I really like, you know, the, it’s so quiet, was, or it’s so quiet, is, is great, hyperballad is great.

Army of Me is great. Human behavior. You know, she has a lot of great solo stuff.

But I think, and maybe it’s not about good and bad, and maybe it should never be about good and bad when you’re talking about music. The sugar cube stuff is more accessible. It’s more instantly something that you can kind of grab onto and I think like compared to a lot of her solo work is just more challenging is another word that you hear a lot with stuff like that.

Because I listened to a few other sugar cube songs and was just like, these are really, especially like hit. I mean, hit is a is a pop song, you know, that just happens to have… Motor Crash too, yeah.

Yeah, straight up rock and roll pop Tom. And she didn’t do a lot of that in her solo work, if ever. You know, the songs that she did in her solo stuff that did manage to get AirPlay, you know, particularly on college radio or sometimes on MTV, never really on mainstream radio, you know, I don’t think.

I don’t remember her having like a billboard hit, really. It’s just not that, it’s it’s just different. You know, it’s she’s always, which is, I mean, she’s always pushing boundaries.

She’s always like at the forefront of trends that are happening. All those things are great for an artist to do. And it’s no knock on her that I happen to like, her sugar keeps stuff better, just because, again, I just find it more accessible and more kind of like instantly likable and some of the other stuff has to grow on you, but that’s a personal thing.

If you like people who really push boundaries, then her solo stuff is probably by far the way you want to go. The other thing I really like about this song is that it walks this line of really showcasing the things that she can do with her voice without it going into some territory where it starts to get grading or annoying or just kind of too challenging or too much. Like within the confines of this really beautiful, really easily digestible song for the most part.

She’s up, she’s down, she’s growling, she’s got the throat thing going. She’s using all of those things that you’ll hear her use throughout her career that just blow you away when you listen to Bjork because there’s very, very, very few artists that can do what she does with her voice. Um, and sometimes it’s it’s a lot to take.

And in this case, it’s not. It’s the perfect amount. It’s exactly, you know, it’s again, it’s a perfect showcase for her, and I really like that about it because, like, it’s a shame that more people don’t kind of appreciate what she does because so much for stuff is maybe not pop friendly or whatever.

And if I were introducing someone to Bjork, I would probably choose this song because let’s like, just listen to what she’s doing, you know, listen to what she’s doing. listen to what’s going on. You’re right. It does showcase everything that she can do, but within the constraints of this song, it’s not a lot of her solo stuff sounds like they put her in a studio and had her whale for a few minutes and then they put a song around it.

This is her trying to stay within the fairly loose confines of this song. And but she’s doing what she does. Like you said, she is up and down and growling and, you know, doing all the things that she can do with her voice so well.

It just works for this song. Really, really, really well. It’s great Yeah, absolutely.

I would say, you know, I don’t think I came into her realm until she was already a solo artist. And so I don’t, I think the 1st things I heard by her were probably like human behavior and Army and me and some of that stuff, which is not bad, which those songs are great. But I do think that if you’re dipping your toe into Bjork, or if you’ve heard your solo stuff only and you’re not familiar with the sugar cubes, don’t be put off by the fact that Bjork is the lead singer because it’s different.

It’s in the confines of that band. She’s doing something different. Um, but yet you get to still kind of experience, get the Bjork experience as well.

If you’re like, ah, I’m not a I’m not a Bjork fan. Like, go listen to sugar cubes, and then, you know, it’s still okay to not be a Bjork fan, but if you haven’t heard the sugar cubes, it might put her in a little bit of a different light, I think it’s fair to say maybe. I will also say about Bjork, before we get completely off the subject that we have on a couple of other occasions, also touched on the, the topic of the, the quote, manic pixie Dream Girl, unquote, trope, that is Bjork.

Yeah, that go watch this video for birthday and you’ll see the very definition of the man at Pixie Dreamgirl. That’s what it means. York is a 1st ballot hall of Famer.

Yeah. Yeah exactly. Yeah, the original maybe. in a really delightful, like, authentic way.

Like, I don’t ever get the sense that she’s putting on any, like, this, I think is her, like, top to bottom. She is just a weird, the but delightfully weird. I actually was going to look up how old she was when this happened because, you know, Bjork is not aging.

I don’t know if any of you knows that. She looks right now like this, but I think she was fairly young when this video came out. All right, we are going to move on.

I have chosen a band that I am not in any way qualified to talk about because they’re as iconic as bands get, but it fell to me to discuss that there, you know, on this very podcast, there are people who are better informed about this band than I am. But because they’re such a big band, and because this is, I think that we can kind of narrow our focus a little bit. So we’re going to talk about the Ramones.

The song is I want to be sedated. Nothing to do, no way to go. I won’t be Just give it to your home me on a Hurry, hurry, hurry Before I go and stay.

And take it from my fingers, I take it from my friend… And I think that it’s pointless to even try to go back and rehash their own history, their importance. They are a foundational band in the history of American rock.

They’re a foundational band in the history of punk. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably already know that, there’s nothing I could tell you about that that’s really going to, you know, move the needle any. So I’m just going to leave it at that.

If you need to know more about the Ramones, there are far better sources and far better places to go than this particular podcast, at least this particular episode. I love this song. I really wanted to talk about this video in particular because I think it’s, I think it is the platonic ideal of a music video, and I’ll say wine a little bit, but let’s at least talk about how this song came to be.

So it was released on Road to Ruin. That was the 4th studio album by the Ramones in 1978. So we are definitely going back ways with the song itself.

It was actually released as the B side also to the She’s the one single in 78. And then in 1980. It was re-released as an A side single in the United States because it was on the soundtrack to a movie called Times Square.

So the song itself is actually 10 years older than the period that we’re talking about right now when it came on MTV. However, the video is not 10 years older than what we’re talking. The video was actually shot in 1988, and it was shot to promote the to promote Ramon’s mania, which is a great, it sets a compilation that probably half the people our age own or owned at some point, I’m guessing. if you didn’t already own.

If you don’t, you should have. As soon as I saw the cover, I was like, oh, yeah, I recognize that. Like, that’s that’s the one I had.

If you’ve never gone all the way into the Ramones and got all their albums, that’s a really, I mean, that’s as good a place to start as any. It’s got all the all the critical ones you want to hear. So this video was shot to promote that.

At the time, the lineup was Johnny, Joey, Marky, and DD, uh, in 1988, they’re the ones in the video. And that is, in fact, the lineup that recorded this song in 1978 because Marquis had replaced Tommy at late, I think late in 1977. So you are, even though Marky left for a period in the 80s, this lineup that you’re seeing in the video is, in fact, the lineup that did record the song 10 years later, so there’s a nice synchronicity to that.

So let’s dig into the video. And the reason the reason why I think this is top shelf, possibly one of the best music videos of all time, and should be the platonic ideal of a music videos, because it is infinitely rewatchable, which is what a music video should be. Music videos are meant to be watched over and over again.

And you could follow a different character in this video and get 100 different watches out of it, at least, because there’s something going on with everybody in that video is doing something. And I guess I should set up the premise. So if you haven’t watched the video and you’re going to do it after the podcast or you’re not, if you don’t remember, Johnny, Joey, Markey, and DD in that order are sitting around a table in a semicircle so you can kind of see all of them.

They’re just going about a mundane, it looks like a morning routine situation. Marquis eating cereal. DD’s reading what looks to be an X-Men comic, Johnny’s reading a magazine, and Joey’s singing the song.

In kind of a, in big empty room, like, looks kind of like a hallway, but it’s bigger than that. You don’t need another details of that, but it’s a pretty big room. They’re sitting in the foreground.

As the song gets going, more and more and more people join into this room and they’re just going about just going nuts doing all kinds of things. There’s, I mean, there’s people jumping rope, there’s people, you know, falling over drunk. There’s people probably shooting flames at some point. if that’s actually true, but it feels that way.

It’s like a circus, just of people coming in and out. And to really drive that point home, it’s shot at a very slow frame frame rate. So the band is actually all of their motions they did in slow motion, like literally they move themselves slowly as they’re eating cereal as they’re flipping through the magazine.

Joey is singing to a slowdown version of the song. Everybody else is moving at normal speed. So then when you play this back at the correct frames per second, everybody looks very frantic and the band looks like they’re in normal motion.

So it really brings home this idea of just absolute chaos going on around the band while the band is just kind of going through their motions, just doing their thing. I mean, DD, like, in particular, just looks like he could not be less bothered by everybody that’s going on. He just like in his comic book.

He barely even looks up from it. It’s really well done. It’s a really well shot, well done video.

Uh, and it really gets the point across of what I think, uh, I think Joey actually wrote the song to, that he was trying to say, which was that on tour, you know, it’s just, it’s just a madhouse and there’s times where you just feel like you, you know, you want to be sedated and just kind of chill with all this circus going on around you. And, I mean, they nailed that with the video. You absolutely get it.

I think you could watch this with the sound off and get an idea of what this song is about just by seeing them in, you know, not in slow motion, but in normal motion, just very deliberately going about their morning routine and then chaos all around him. A couple fun notes, Courtney Love is in this video. The bride character who is, and that’s what actually, uh, triggered me to watch just a single character throughout the entire video because I was following her to see like what she was doing.

And then I realized you could actually do that with everybody in that video and just get an entirely different experience because she’s like, she comes in and then she’s like kind of fallen over and she’s dancing with the dude that has the crazy mask on for a while and like they, you know, they had their own thing going on all throughout this video. And then right next to them is another person who also had their own completely separate thing going on. It’s really, really fun to start like picking out all the individual things that are happening.

You know, I think that’s that’s where I’m going to leave it. Like, I, the song itself is a classic. I don’t know that I need to stump for this track, but it’s the Ramones.

Like, you either love the Ramones or I guess you just probably wouldn’t like anything they did. I mean, you either like them or you don’t. I think, I don’t know that you really grade the songs that much, um, if you’re on the fence about the remones.

I think if you’re a big Ramones fan, then you might start ranking the songs as which one you like more. But I’m guessing you either really like, you know, 20 different Ramon songs or you don’t like any Ramon songs. I don’t know, but this is one of my favorite.

It’s it’s fantastic. I like the lyrics. I like the I love the keychange.

I love everything about it. I love everything about the video. My guess is you guys feel similarly, but now is your chance to sound off if you don’t.

Oh, you know I feel similar. I was a safe bet, but I mentioned before when I saw you took this one, I thought for a 2nd about rattling you for it, but anyone that knows me knows this is one of my all-time favorite bands. This is probably like a top 5 band for me.

The reason I didn’t invite you on it, and I think it’s because it, I would thought it would be interesting to hear somebody else’s take rather than me like blathering on about the Ramones forever. But yeah, this man is an all timer for me. So I think the reason I appreciate this band so much is because I really believe that their influence over the rock world is immeasurable.

And people forget, and younger people may not even know, that this band and this music stemmed out of the fact that rock music in the 1970s had gotten, you know, for lack of a better word, really ridiculous. Like the Prague thing was getting out of control. And here came 4 dudes with 2 and 3 chord songs, none of them over 2 minutes long, dumb fun lyrics.

You know, Joey Ramon famously wanted them to be a d-wop group. That was their intention. You know, if you if you look at them, like their their look.

They look like a gang from a 1960s film, like that, and that’s what they were always going for. It’s not what they ended up doing, but that’s kind of was always the root of what they wanted to do. You know, he was in love with like the Phil Spector sound of the 60s.

And that’s what the Ramones were supposed to be. And if you listen closely, you can hear that structure in all of their songs, I think it’s there in this one. Even though it might not sound like it on the surface.

There definitely is sort of a 60s do-wop foundation to what they do. If you want to hear it loud and clear. I will point you to 2 songs.

One of them is, do you remember rock and roll radio? And the other one is Bonzo Goes to Bittberg. If you’ve never heard those 2 Ramon songs, you will hear front and center, them trying to be a Phil Spector doo-wop group.

And I think Spector actually produced rock and roll radio, but I didn’t look that up. I meant to. Anyway, I had not seen this video before.

If I had, I didn’t remember it, but I really loved it. I’d love the increasing chaos going on around them as they’re just sitting there chilling. I loved Markie eating the cereal.

That’s just fantastic to me. But it’s all just great. It was, you know, it was obviously fairly easy to do.

It didn’t look terribly expensive. I think it really works and I liked it a lot. And I actually like that this video exists.

At the time that it does, because they had filmed it when this song was originally done, it would be a totally different video. Probably be them playing live at CPGB or something. It just wouldn’t work as well as this does.

I’m glad they got some popularity under them before they recorded this. I also wanted to add that you mentioned this video was filmed in 88 for the release of Ramon’s Mania. That is about as good as a greatest hits compilation as you’re ever going to hear.

It’s 30 songs, every song you know from the Ramones is on it. The only hit of theirs that you won’t find on it is Pet Cemetery, because it was done a couple years after that. I don’t think anyone’s favorite Ramon song, but it was a hit.

And it covers a lot of the early part of their career when they were really cranking out albums, and a lot of those albums are not covered to cover great. I think really their debut album is the only one that is. The rest of their albums have a lot of hits and a lot of misses.

So this is a really nice compilation of the hits of that era of the Ramones. I normally don’t point people to compilations for things like this, but this one I would. If you if you want to get familiar with the rones.

Mania is about as good as it gets. I could go on and on. I won’t.

But yeah, this is this is a lot of fun. If you haven’t seen this video, check it out. Well, here’s the part where I have to make my own embarrassing admission.

It’s happened to all of us on this podcast at one point or another. I’m not terribly familiar with Ramones. I have never really checked in on the Ramones.

You know, I know this song. I know Blitzkriedbach, a few others. I like everything I’ve ever heard by them.

I think they’re great. Um, but I’ve just never taken the time to really dig in on the Ramones. We all, I guess, have our blind spots of bands.

We probably shouldn’t have, but that’s one of mine. I did remember this video. I had seen this video before.

I think you’re right, Mike, this is a fantastic video, one of the best videos we’ve looked at over doing this, you know, now for all of 87 and halfway through 88 at this point. Also, as the resident comics geek among us, I can confirm that DD was, in fact, reading a stack of X-Men comics. So I like to think that DD is a mutant fan.

I am too. So way to go, DD. But yeah, man, I loved this.

I love the song. Like I said, I don’t know a whole lot of Ramon songs. I did know this one.

It’s a fantastic song, but you’re right. This video is the headline, as far as we’re concerned here. And I did the same thing.

I would stop and watch certain characters as they went about their thing. The one that I watched the most, I guess, was the one I was thinking of as being the naughty nurse that was surrounding the table and like apparently trying to hand each of them pills, which they weren’t taking and she was getting madder and like slamming them down on the table and all that. Um, and then I did also watch Courtney Love in the bride outfit.

Um, and then just some of the others, uh, the doctor. Yeah, just you could. You could watch this video over and over and over again and pick out a different character every time and just watch what they do.

And in the meantime, in front of it all are just the Ramones sitting around the table, having breakfast, doing some reading, you know, just going about their business while all this craziness happens. A really great concept that ended up working out really well. And so, yeah, this is one of my favorite videos of all the ones we have we have seen at this point.

Yeah, a great concept, like perfectly executed doing the slow motion trick was really smart. I kind of think of it. I was watching.

I was like, this is like the reverse Beastie Boys effect, because, you know, the Beastie Boys and almost all their videos do the opposite, where they recorded it like twice the speed, and then slow it down, so they look like they’re in slow motion the whole time rapid, and this is the opposite of that, where they got, you know, they have to move really slow, and then it looks like everybody’s moving fast. Excellent execution. I was going to say, A, I got to sign off on Bonzo goes to Bittberg as being one of my favorite, not just Ramon songs, but one of my favorite, just rock songs of all time.

That song is absolutely fantastic. And another one where the lyrics are unfortunately still very relevant to today, the Romans did have occasionally a political bent to them. If you’re interested in the doo-wop side, I would also add howling at the moon is another song that really shows off their doo-op side.

It’s an interesting, it’s such an interesting thing because you don’t think of punk and doo-wop as being as living in the, you know, in the same realms. They’re just so different, but they, you almost just have to listen to a couple songs, the ones that Scott mentioned in Howling at the Moon, and you’d be like, oh, you’re like, oh, okay, I get it. I get why this works, because they do, it works amazingly well to take some of the elements of 60s doo-wop and grafted on top of late 70s punk.

It’s brilliant. I think what it is, is that, you know, at the core, rock and roll music has a foundation, and that foundation is fairly simple. And so getting from doo-wop to what the Ramones are doing is not that far of a thing, although to your ears, it sounds like it, because you hear the Ramones, and you hear that they’re like the, you know, one of the 1st punk bands and you want to, you want to hear punk music and it is, but there’s, there’s a connection there to, to just basic rock and roll music.

And I think that’s what their influence really is, is that, you know, yes, they influenced a 1000000 punk bands. That’s true. But I think rock and roll music in general, moving forward from this point, or, you know, the late 70s when they started, is all influenced by this in one way or another, if nothing else, going back to something simpler, you know, than what was going on in the 70s.

Just that basic you know, let’s get back to the core of what this is. And that’s what do-op is, and that’s what this is. And I think that’s where the connection is.

But yeah, you can hear them do straight up do. songs if you want to, but at the end of it all, they’re all kind of just rooted in that simplicity that makes it what it is, you know, and I think, you know, you hear a lot of, listen to what, you know, listen to what Yes was doing in 1976 before the Ramones came along and then listen to the Ramones. It’s the 2 extremes of thought. It’s, you know, and a lot of bands came out of that. came out of, wait a minute, we don’t have to do 11 minute songs with everyone having a solo and blah, blah, blah.

We can just do 2 minutes and 2 chords and rock out. And that’s where that’s where the Ramones influence really lies, I think. It’s interesting because, you know, rock and roll was not really king anymore of the popular music, but it was for such a long time.

And you have to wonder with in the 70s as Prog Rock’s coming along and each band is kind of trying to one up the other on complexity and weird arrangements and weird instrumentation and all that. Yeah, concept albums, you have to wonder if that return to simplicity, you buy bands like the Ramones and just the punk movement in general in the late 70s kind of gave rock and roll a 2nd set of legs to let it stretch its dominance over pop music out, again, because it all pulled back to a more simple way of doing things, and then you had post-punk and new wave coming next, that kind of changed the landscape of what things guys, you know, people were doing with rock and roll. So you have to wonder if it’s not only just that it was because it was more simple, it was got to be popular and all that, if it actually kind of came back around and gave rock and roll that extra set of legs, you know, for another 10, 20 years that it might not have had, if it hadn’t been for the punk movement and bands like the Ramones.

I think that’s 100% correct. You know, and basically, you know, if you look at, if you Google, who are the most influential bands of all time? On all those lists, you’re going to see the same 2 bands in 1st and 2nd place.

Number one is going to be the Beatles. And then number 2 is going to be the Ramones. They’re the 2 most influential bands for very different reasons.

The Beatles introduced the concept of rock and roll being more complicated. You know, getting in the studio and tinkering around and doing concept albums and doing things like that. And then that went so far the other direction that it had to be rained back in, and that was the Ramones.

And so then now you have 2 extremes of thought kind of working together to give us another 30, 40 years of rock and roll music, you know? And I think I think those 2 things go hand in hand, really, even though they’re kind of the opposite concepts, they, the 2 things had to happen to get, you know, to keep moving forward. And if you doubt that the Ramones have that kind of influence.

I can, I can personally say that, I actually, I had this in my notes and I completely skipped over it. One of the reasons I chose the Ramones, was that when we were doing the interviews for 35,000 watts about college radio, we interviewed a lot of college radio bands, and one of the questions we asked was about influences. And so then, you know, when you get home, you get in the edit, you start looking for trends and patterns.

And so I’m looking at all the interviews and I’m pulling out, okay, who got talked about the most because they’ll get highlighted in the film. You can’t obviously, you know, put in every single bit, everything that everybody talked about. The Ramones, by far, were the most common. denominator.

Bands from, you know, Mark Mothersbow from Devo, all the way to someone like John Duffalo, who’s, you know, a much more recent artist. Mitch Easter mentioned Allison Wolf from Bratmobile and the riot girl scene, like all these disparate people all mentioned the Ramones 1st right out of the gate. It was the very 1st band that they mentioned as being like an influence.

And I think that that kind of speaks to what you’re saying is, God, is that that’s not just like a kind of an abstract concept. Like they really, really did have that kind of influence on just a wild number of bands. If you want to, like, read some interesting stuff.

Read interviews with the other CBGB bands from the time they launched. And the one that really interested me was talking heads, because talking heads you do not think of is this. Talking heads are complicated and intricate and all that stuff.

But they will all say that the Ramones brought them back down to Earth. They wanted to be this radical art band that was going to change everything and then, and then they would go to CBGB and watch the Ramones and go, or we could just do that. Like, we could just rock. you know?

And they found the middle ground between those 2 things and then you get the talking heads, you know? So yeah, I think as influence goes, this is an all timer. And you know, if you don’t like the Ramones, that’s fine.

But you have to at least appreciate that. Your favorite band was influenced by them. One of my favorite quotes was actually Mark Mothersbaugh saying, um, you know, Jerry came to me and with a tape and he’s like, like, these guys, these guys make songs that are like only 50 seconds long.

And, and I was like, wow, I can’t believe like, you can say everything. They said everything they wanted to say in like 50 seconds, you know, and that blew their minds, you know, because Devo is in that category, like talking heads, uh, at the same time period, same push and pull between we want to be an art band. We want to push the limits a little bit, but we also just want to make a 2 minute song that just rocks.

And Devo did exactly that. Like, you can see, you can see that that balance that they struck with that. And I think that may not have been the case had they not discovered Ramones. may have gone in a, you know, in a different direction that wouldn’t have been as effective.

We have talked about the Ramones enough. We could probably do like a two hour podcast on them. We will move on, but go watch this.

If you haven’t seen this video. I mean, I’d hate to think there’s anybody that hasn’t listened to Ramones, I’m sure there are people, and you should go fix that right now, but maybe you haven’t seen the video because you only have it, you know, like the CD or whatever. It’s a really fun video.

Check it out. I want to be sedated. All right, it is that time.

It is the point where we dig into a mystery artist, and we have had a lot of fun with this in the past. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with it today. This might be one of my favorite mystery artists, not from a, Wow, this is really weird, but from just a straight up, this band absolutely rocks standpoint.

So I’m very excited to talk about it. And this episode. It is Keith who is going to bring them to us.

We’ll take a step back. Since the dawn of time. Man has wondered, go about, what’s life all about?

What’s going on here? Why are we here? What’s happening?

A question that’s been pondered by philosophers and religious folks and people throughout the ages. Well, it turns out in 1988, a band from London cracked the code. They got it.

So today we’re going to be talking about the song birth, school, work, death by the Godfathers. Work………………………… You know what it’s all about now.

Yeah, these guys, like I said, they’re an English band. They were formed in 1985. There have been a ton of members in this band, but largely it’s a couple of brothers, Peter and Chris Coyne, Peter was on vocals.

Chris was the bassist Even Chris has left the band at this point. So Peter Coyne is the only original member in left in the band and they’re still going. They still have play shows and put stuff out.

So they’ve been around for a while. This song is off the 1988 album of the same name. Birth school, work death.

Um, and this was the kind of the the top moment for the Godfathers. This was the best charting song they ever had. It actually reached number 38 on the mainstream rock chart.

It’s a rocker. It’s a really good rocker. It’s got the vocal delivery by the front man. something that I really liked.

We were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, kind of a punk delivery, just kind of like little stabs of vocals as the music’s going on there. And the song, you know, the lyrics, I didn’t really dig real deep into the lyrics between the chorus. But the chorus is just those 4 words, birth, school, work, death kind of chanted over and over as they’re playing.

And then the song, I think, you know, is kind of just kind of some mundane things in between as it gets to those to the chorus and those things. The video was pretty good, pretty generic, kind of just a performance video. There are some other imagery kind of stuck in there.

Like every time he says, uh, school, you get generally like some images of like kids in the playground or at the water fountain or whatever, and then he’ll go to work and then it’ll cut to image of people like walking out of a big building, you know, like coming into rush hour traffic. And then death, the image for death is always a bunch of bullets falling down onto like a newspaper spread out on a table, like long rifle type bullets. And so those were the images for school work and death.

There really wasn’t much imagery as far as birth goes, except for at the very beginning of the song. You see an image of the sun rising and like a flower opening up. So I’m guessing that’s the birth imagery right there.

But largely it’s a performance video. It kind of, to me, had like a 60-ish vibe to it because the 2 there are 2 main ways in which they’re performing. One of them, they’re all kind of wearing suits and have got a sign on the back of the stage behind them that’s got their names.

It just kind of had a like an Ed Sullivan show kind of vibe to it. And then they cut to another scene of them playing and they’re all wearing kind of like the black turtleneck, black leather jacket kind of 60s mod type outfits. So to me anyway, as I was watching it.

The video to me had a really kind of a 60s vibe to it that I really liked. Um, and that’s really about it. I don’t have a whole lot more to add to this.

It was just a great song, a cool lyric. I think Mike, if you dug into the band a little further even than I did. So you might be able to fill in a little more there.

But if you haven’t heard this song and I certainly hadn’t before we did this, go check it out, man. This is a great rocker, a fun lyric, and just well done all the way around. I really enjoyed this video song, the whole thing.

I really liked. Yeah, totally agree. I think of all the mystery artists that we’ve talked about.

This is the band that I’m the most surprised didn’t get a little bigger. I think just because the quality of the music is just that good. Like, uh, and we we kind of touched on this a little bit before we started recording, but, and you mentioned it, his, his lyrics, at least on the, the singles that I listened to, I listened to probably 4 or 5 other tracks by them, are largely kind of spoken words shouted as more than saying, you know, he’s not really singing his lyrics.

And I think it works because the backing band or the band, the instrumentalists are so good. The guitars are almost always have at least like one melody going, sometimes 2 that are kind of playing off each other. Uh, they’re just a very tight bands.

Like it just, they just sound really good. And so it works. You don’t need a super badass lead singer, you know, just wailing over the top of it to make it work because it’s the band is really doing a lot of that work for you already.

Yeah, it’s just, it’s just really good. I, I’m, I’m kind of mystified by, by why I had not ever really, I don’t remember these guys and I hadn’t heard of them. I did look back and see if we played them at KTXT college radio and we did.

There was at least 6 of Godfather songs on the KTXT playlist that I have, which was kind of a time snap of 1992. So 4 years after this, we still had Godfather songs in rotation, my guess is they stayed in rotation maybe to this day. I don’t know.

Um, but they definitely were an invitation when we were there, but I don’t really remember playing them. This song is definitely one of their best. There’s another one called because I said so, that I think is off the same album that I think is even a slightly better than this one, but same vibe.

They have the look, they have a sound. They’re, again, they’re, they’re very, the guitarist is very, very good. So, like, it just surprises me that it didn’t all come together and break bigger for them.

Uh, you know, I don’t know. I didn’t dig into what happened to them or why they didn’t get bigger. and sometimes that there is no answer to that, as we’ve learned. Like I said, it’s one of the mystery bands that inspired me the most to go and seek out more of their music and kind of really just like, why are these guys not famous or, you know, at least somewhat infamous.

The one comp I had just the his vocals have a very… I mean, it differs song to song, but he’s got like a cadence to his voice that reminds me of some other punk bands from back in the day, but also Amyl and the Sniffers, which is a contemporary band. She’s an Australian vocalist who is singing or, you know, vocalizing over a punk band and often she is doing kind of what he’s doing, more of a shoutdy, half rappy spoken wordy kind of thing as opposed to like singing, but it works really well in the context of what she does with Ammo and the Sniffers.

They’re a lot more raw than this, like, this band is very tight and polished. And, and, and the stiffers are very much not, but it still works in the same way. I think, um, but yeah, they they’re, like, they had a really cool look.

They have an amazing sound. The songs are solid, and it’s that timeless question that we’ve come up against with many of these mystery bands and even some of the bands that we, you know, choose for our regular rotation is just, why did they not go from, you know, this tier to this tier? And I’m I’m visually raising my hands and those of you reading a podcast or not going to be able to give that book?

Yeah, why do they not, you know? Yeah, go from tier B to tier A or whatever tier, you know, how did they not make that leap? Who knows?

But I think they should have, and I think if you don’t know, if you’re not aware of them, you should go check them out. That’s my take. I only made a couple of notes during this.

I liked it a lot. And it’s got a good riff. It’s a good song.

I, you know, I think maybe the reason they they didn’t launch into superstardom is, and to me, it was kind of generic. I don’t know. I mean, it’s not that it’s bad.

It just kind of, there’s, there were a 1000000 bands that sounded like this at the time, but, but so here were a few of my thoughts, though. The lead singer of this man seems to be taking this way more seriously than the rest of them. He’s really angry about whatever’s going on.

And everybody else is kind of rocking out and having a good time. And he’s very focused and very angry. That kind of caught my eye.

I really liked the look of these guys, Keith, you mentioned it, but I, you know, the suits were cool. And then when it cut to them and like their street clothes with the leather jackets, that looked cool too. Like they just had a really good, like, look for this time.

But speaking of cuts, there is so much quick cutting in this video, you couldn’t focus on anything. Like I kept I kept trying to see the guys guitar because it looked like the guitar had like a broken glass thing going on it. like a shattered disco ball almost like. I couldn’t get enough frames of it to really tell that, but I liked that guitar.

And then this was the last thing. So these guys, the whole time I was listening to it, I was like, this reminds me of something. This reminds me that I could not put my finger on like what other band this sounded like.

So I decided to have a little fun and put that into an AI and see what it came up with. And this, folks, is why you should not use AI for anything. So this is what AI said.

Their music blends elements of rock and punk reminiscent of the clash. Okay, that’s fair enough. The Godfather’s gritty sound is also compared to the energy of the Rolling Stones.

They’re lyrical. This is my favorite. The lyrical style has similarities to the storytelling of Bob Dylan.

Nope. Sure. The band’s raw edge can be likened to the intensity of the Ramones.

Okay, maybe. Their anthemic choruses echo the vibe of you too. Nope.

And then here’s the last one. The Godfather’s fusion of rock and new wave draws parallels to bands like the cure. That was that was my 1st comp, but I was like, man, that guy really sounds like Robert Smith.

Thanks, AI. Anyway, these guys really reminded me of something I could put my finger on who it was, but I liked it. I really didn’t like it.

I kind of kind of sounded like I was slagging on a little bit. I’m not. It was it was fine.

I just, I think there were a lot of bands that sounded like this at the time and maybe that’s why they didn’t, you know, launch into a higher level of fame, but for what it’s worth is a good song. And I did not go any deeper than this. So I will probably do that because this era of the pop punk in England appeals to me.

So there’s probably some out there from these guys. For me, anyway, the big difference, you know, they do kind of sound like a lot of other stuff that was going on around that time as far as the guitar rock and like say the rock punk fusion, but it is his vocals. It’s the way those vocals are delivered, at least on this song.

And I guess from what from what Mike’s saying, that kind of carries over to other songs. But I really, really liked that kind of, like, just short stabs of vocals, like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and then leave, you know, lay out and let the guitar play a little bit and then come back in, da, da, da, da, da, da. It’s got a little of that German industrial kind of delivery.

The music’s not that. The music’s, music’s a new wave, almost, like, you know, 80s new wave, American new wave bands, but yeah, those vocals have like almost like that, uh, the Knights Areb, you know, like that, that sort of punchy, you know, stabby vocal chanting. You know, may it may have been kind of the difference for me anyway, that kind of set them apart from some of the other stuff that sounded a lot like this.

And if you’re wondering if his, like, his seriousness and his, like, kind of really intense, like, he almost, like, stares at the mic and, you know, he, and this song is, obviously, you know, being about what it’s about, it makes sense. But if you’re wondering if that carries on in his other songs, the answer is absolutely, yes, it does. I watched 5 videos.

He didn’t smile on any of them, and he basically did that same. Just, yeah, he just, he’s an intense dude. Uh, and it works.

I mean, it works for this. And also, you mentioned the editing, and I think this, we’re starting to get into the realm of, you know, late 80s where regular TV and TV shows were starting to mirror MTV. MTVV was starting to have an influence on the way that films and TV shows were edited.

And this is something that we’re so far past this now with like everybody just watching like 102nd TikToks that we forget that like, there was a time when films and for sure, and even TV shows like, could linger on a scene for a little bit and like scenes could breathe and play out and now if you watch some, you know, in old, like a 70s film or sometimes even like an 80s sitcom, you’re like, I was actually just, I watch mash a lot still and like, there was one scene where I was like, man, they are letting this play all the way out. Like the scene is like a 3 minute scene that they’re just letting this and like, that would have been 10 seconds these days, but this was the time when music videos were getting to be super quick cut and that became a thing. Yeah, and that became a thing that people were rebelling against almost. you know, MTV is ruining editing and ruining everything because of the quick, quick, quick, quick, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and like you see that in this video.

Like, this is right at the cusp of when that was, that became the language of television. This video is frantic, and it’s only frantic because of the editing. Like the, you know, the band isn’t doing anything, all that frantic or, you know, over kinetic, and they’re just kind of rocking out, but you feel like this tension in the video, and it’s because of that editing.

I think we’re already into that era at this point as far as MTV music videos we go, go, and then we’re beginning the era where you start to see its influence on all the other media that utilizes it. I think some of it is style. Obviously, like copying that style was a huge, huge deal for a lot of people.

Some of it is also just having the technological ability to make that mini fricking edits because good lord doing that, you know, and on film would have been a hallacious exercise to like edit film every, you know, half second, but now you’ve got offline editing and things that are starting to make that easier. You’re not quite into the realm of digital editing yet, but there are tools that make that easier. And I think that did also play into the fact that people started to utilize it more because not everybody wants to do that much work.

Well, like editing this on film would have been a nightmare. It would have been. I mean, it would have been nuts.

And then, you know, on the other side, you have the Ramones video, which is essentially one take. It may not have been, but it looks like it is. If it’s not, they did a great job.

And that’s, to me, a much more enjoyable video to watch than… Yeah, a well done video doesn’t need any cuts, you know, but how often can you pull that off? And I think that what videos lack in, um, an interest in terms of the setup or the band or the whatever concept they have can be made up for and editing it just really fast and slapping it together, like it it gives you the pacing you want, even if you don’t really have that kind of action happening.

For what it’s worth. Yeah, I really like the Godfathers. They really it really did inspire me to go deeper.

I would say if you want to dip your toes in. This song, and because I said so, are the 2 that you should check out, if you like those, keep going. If not, then you’re probably not really gonna dig a lot of else of what they do because they are all kind of in that pocket.

I didn’t listen to every album, though. So they may have an entirely other side to them that I’m not aware of. But as far as the singles go, this is what you’re going to get.

And if you like it, you’re probably gonna dig it. But yeah, because I said so, I feel like is actually the best of the 5 or 6 that I listen to, but this one is a close second. Very good song, and the lyrics are actually also really, I kind of like the vibe of the lyrics of just kind of rebelling against that.

Yeah, very cool. Excellent episode of just chock full of great songs. There’s not a bad song on here.

I mean, there’s usually not, but this is particularly good run of songs. All these are classics really for their own. I mean, the 3 main songs are all classics for different reasons.

And then the Godfathers is a, maybe a should have been classic, but it’s definitely a good, a good find that just, I have a feeling this might be one of those that a lot of people who are listening to this podcast actually haven’t heard. Uh, sure somebody on Facebook is going to tell me that I’m wrong about that. But, like, I mean, it passed all 3 of us by, and it’s such a, it’s so good that I just, I’m just, I’m shocked, but I hope we can turn some other people onto the Godfathers.

So thanks for listening, folks. We are going into August of 1988. Next time, so we hope you’ll join us.

Don’t forget about 35,000 watts, the story of college radio, a documentary film about college radio, and a lot of the bands that you are hearing us talk about on this very podcast, including the Ramones, and other folks get talked about in that film, and you will enjoy it. I think if you enjoy college radio, our alternative music, it’s available on YouTube, 2B, Google Play, and Amazon Prime. So go check it out.

We would appreciate it. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time on 120 months.