"Love Is the Drug" (Roxy Music)

I only started exploring Roxy Music's catalog a few years back.  I'd find myself reading some article about glam rock, and along with the inevitable David Bowie or Marc Bolan references, there would be Bryan Ferry's name, big as life.  Then one day it hit me: I'd never actually heard anything by Ferry or the band.  So I felt like I had some catching up to do.

I'll say this: it's music that's not exceptionally easy to warm to.  It's odd, fractured art rock, often delivered with Euro playboy/lounge lizard greasiness by Ferry.  But, then again, that's also what's compelling about it.  It's pop made by a bunch of guys who had no clue how to write pop music, which gives it a freshly-hatched kind of feel.  

Perhaps the most accessible song they ever recorded is "Love Is the Drug" from 1975's Siren.  It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek exploration of clubbing and wookin' pa nub in the 70s.  In short, Ferry boils down the big hunt to nothing more than a junkie rush.  Scoring a date or scoring pharmaceuticals, it's all the same to him.

Being a sucker for a good bassline, I can never get enough of bassist John Gustafson's funky rumble throughout this track.  It's as much a parody of disco as it an homage.

"Ashes to Ashes" (David Bowie)

Normally, I wouldn't go for something as gimmicky as a follow up song, where you find out the latest about a character whom you met 10 years earlier.  But, dammit, when Bowie does it, it's a work of art.
In "Ashes to Ashes" from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980), you get reacquainted with "Major Tom," the celebrity/space cadet/junkie from Bowie's very first hit song, "Space Oddity" (1969).  If you're unfamiliar with "Space Oddity," it uses the sci-fi premise of an astronaut being launched into outer space and then losing touch with ground control back on earth as an extended metaphor for a meteoric rise to celebrity and eventual fall because of overindulgence.
It's oddly prophetic, considering Bowie himself skyrocketed to fame only to nearly lose himself to a massive cocaine habit by the end of the 70s.
Anyway, in "Ashes to Ashes," we meet up with "Major Tom" again to find out that he's doing well, even though he admits he's still fighting his demons.  
Ultimately, by the time Bowie gets to the end of the track, he decides that it's time to clean up his own act and put "Major Tom" behind him: My momma said to get things done / You better not mess with 'Major Tom'.
As a narrative, the song is compelling enough.  But the track's fractured funk with its twisted beat, slapped bass, and spacey synths make it even more desirable to visit and revisit.

"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (Tears for Fears)

I was at the office recently for a quarterly planning meeting.  There were about 30 of us of varying ages, squeezed around a conference table, having lunch.  Somehow in the course of conversation, one of my colleagues started talking about 80s music, and this (very) young intern pipes up and says, "Wow, I wish, like, I was born, like, in the 80s.  It was, like, so much, like, fun and stuff!"
After I got done tossing her from the roof of the building*, I made my case that the 80s weren't so hot.  Honestly, they were pretty awful.  Everyone dressed like clowns escaped from a mental institution, and we had the hair to match.  Self-centeredness was status quo.  And the Russians were out to obliterate us, and vice versa.  Honestly, it was a decade of bad taste, greed, and fear that planted the seeds of our current decade of bad taste, greed, and fear.  (If you were alive in the 80s, I challenge you to name one fond memory that isn't somehow related to one of the following: a consumer product, a T.V. show, a song/album, or a film.  It's nearly impossible to do.)
I bring this up because I always found "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" from Songs from the Big Chair (1985) to be an astute commentary on the 80s.  (Quite a feat, I think, considering the decade was only half over when Tears for Fears wrote/released it!)
On the surface, it's an upbeat pop song with a danceable beat, memorable guitar solo, and singable chorus.  If you're not really paying much attention, you might think the refrain Everybody wants to rule the world is just some douchebag mantra that reiterates the 80s "I'm gonna get mine" mentality.  But if you listen a little more closely, you get that Curt Smith is delivering a warning about greed and powermongering.  In truth, the song is a lament.  It's about being full of hopes and dreams as young person in the modern world, but then coming to the stark realization that it all could be obliterated at the whim of one person tomorrow.
That was the reality of the 80s.  We were just trying to remain upbeat through the thick of it.

(*No 20-year-olds were harmed in the composition of this blog entry.)

"Eyes Without a Face" (Billy Idol)

Billy Idol is not one of my favorite performers.  Maybe this is an inaccurate characterization, but he always felt a little too manufactured to me: a sneering punk robot, programmed to appeal to the masses.  Even as a child, I could see that The Clash, The Ramones, etc. were a totally different species of rocker than Idol, despite his similar leather and studs look.  (All those hours of playing "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other" no doubt paid off.)
But damned if Idol's "Eyes Without a Face" from Rebel Yell (1983) isn't one of the better pop/rock songs of the early 80s.  That wistful, Gothic ballad portion with the haunting backing vocal from Idol's then-girlfriend Perri Lister, singing/sighing Les yeux sans visage ("eyes without a face"), lures me in, and then that screaming, slashing guitar portion by Steve Stevens just seals the deal.  
Incidentally, Idol borrowed the track's title from a 1960 French film called Les Yeux Sans Visage.  I saw a good bit of the film in college when I was doing research for a paper in a film criticism class.  (It actually was a much more challenging class than it might sound, by the way.)  Although it's generally labeled a horror flick, the movie is more of a Hitchcock/Serling-esque twisted thriller about a brilliant, but sickly obsessive, surgeon whose young daughter is disfigured in an accident.  To quell his guilt about the mishap, he sets about trying to find a new face to surgically graft onto his daughter's.  Ultimately, he and his assistant kidnap and kill countless, unsuspecting young women in an attempt to steal their faces.  In the meantime, the daughter is locked away in her dad's gigantic mansion, left to wander its halls with this plaster mask over her face with only her eyes showing.  It's an unsettling, artsy film with a moralistic message about the nature of obsession and obsession with physical beauty.
Anyway, Idol's song only relates to the film inasmuch as his protagonist feels that his girlfriend has become someone he no longer recognizes, i.e. "eyes without a face."
So there ya go.  It's a hydrogenated fat-filled cheeseburger of a song, and I savor every moment of it.

"Lovesong" (The Cure)

Unlike yesterday's entry, "Lovesong" from the 1989 album Disintegration is actually an affectionate song.  The Cure's resident tunesmith/frontman Robert Smith wrote it for his high school sweetheart and eventual wife, Mary Poole, to let her know that she was always in his heart, even when he and his band were playing the other side of the world.
It's a sentiment that he echoed again recently in an interview with The Guardian.  Discussing his marriage, Smith said, "I just struck lucky early on.  I really enjoy what I do, and who I'm with, and where I am."
When "Lovesong" was released in 1989, I remember it struck me how sincere it sounded.  It felt different from the typical, tepid "Ooh, baby, baby, I lurve you" ballads that were (still are) a dime-a-dozen.
But what I really loved was how bouncy, yet ethereal, the track was; it was one of those rare ballads that you could either fast or slow dance to.  Which was great for middle school dances.  The popular guys who were "going with" the popular girls would all be in one corner of the gymnasium, arms draped around each other, swaying languidly, while my pals and I would be on the other side of the gym, flailing around to that great bassline and those punchy drums, having a frigging blast in spite of ourselves.
I've always had this picture in my head of Smith going, "Hmm, I need to write something for the nerds and drama geeks who always feel left out when they play slow songs at junior high dances.  Ah!  How about this..."
On that note, I really do admire Smith's songwriting abilities.  His knack for combining fresh melodies with an air of Gothic romanticism always gave The Cure's music an odd Beatles-meets-Tim Burton kind of charm.  Furthermore, I never felt like Smith was trying to chase any trends.  That's why I can go back and listen to "Lovesong" and Disintegration, and neither feels particularly stuck in the moment.  They live and breathe in their own atmosphere.

"The One I Love" (R.E.M.)

"The One I Love" from Document (1987) was the moment I began paying attention to R.E.M.  And while there were many fine moments both before and after it, it still stands as my favorite track by the Athens, GA, band.  Frontman Michael Stipe intoning the word Fire! with bassist Mike Mills harmonizing She's comin' down on her own now gets me every time.  It's like some sort of Gregorian chant over one of the crunchiest, Byrds-esque riffs of the mid-80s.  It's angelic and ugly, all at once.
Which reminds of a conversation I once had with a wedding DJ.  He was venting about having to play "inappropriate music" at wedding receptions: U2's "One"; The Police's "Every Breath You Take"; and, of course, "The One I Love."
"Do people not listen to lyrics?" I remember him asking rhetorically.
Contrary to what some might think, "The One I Love" is not some romantic ballad about pining for love across the miles, as Mills told VH1 back in 2008.
"'The One I Love' is not a love song.  'The One I Love' is a very vicious breakup song.  It's very cold and cruel.  Which is, you know, I hate to break or burst anyone's bubble, but I always look out and see couples hugging and dancing to that song.  That's fine.  It doesn't matter.  Michael (Stipe) writes a song about whatever he thinks it's about, and then whatever you think it's about is what it's about...Whatever it means to us isn't nearly as important as what it means to you."

(Little bar trivia for you: Food Network personality Alton Brown of Good Eats fame served as director of photography on the video for "The One I Love.")

"Add It Up" (Violent Femmes)

I inherited a cassette tape of the Violent Femmes' compilation Add It Up (1981-1993) from my friend Kerri after high school.  I still have it in a crate of 90s curios that I browse through every so often.
We were hanging out at her house one afternoon not long after graduation, reminiscing about stuff—laughing at the good, cringing at the bad—when she had that moment I'm pretty sure every 18-year-old has (I know I did), where you look around your bedroom one day and go, "What the hell was I thinking the past 4 years?"  
I remember her picking up a pile of clothing that she'd just gotten from a mail-order catalog for grunge grrrrrls, and she shook her head.
"I can't even look at this stuff anymore.  Maybe I'll give these to my step-sister.  Think she'd wear this?"
She decided that a good, cathartic purge of her closet was in order.  We filled a couple of Hefty bags with clothing: one to donate, one to ditch.  And then there was the pile of tapes.  She told me to look through the small mountain of cassettes to see if anything caught my eye.  It didn't take long for me to realize that our collections were nearly identical.  After all, I'd pretty much bought all the music I owned while hanging out with her and vice versa, so it made sense.  (If either of us ever wondered, "How did I end up with a copy of 'Gypsy Woman' by Crystal Waters again?" one of us was able to fill in the details.)
But then I spotted something I didn't own in the "expunge" pile: Add It Up (1981-1993).
"You're getting rid of this?  I thought you loved Violent Femmes?"
The look on her face was all the explanation I needed.  It wasn't the Femmes that she wanted to get rid of; it was the emotional baggage that went with the album.  She couldn't even look at the album cover without wanting to take a blowtorch to it.  So I took it off her hands.
Strangely enough, as I listened to it afterward, the song sequencing actually brought to mind stuff she'd told me about her breakup (we told each other everything in our Clarissa and Sam friendship).  I'd find myself listening to the live version of "Add It Up" in my car, and I'd start feeling my temper rise.  
"That idiot really thought she would believe that he was just 'hanging out' with his ex-girlfriend?!"
After awhile, I couldn't take hearing those songs in that context either.  So I sought out the Femmes' self-titled debut from 1983.  (Funny, Violent Femmes contains many of the same songs as the Add It Up compilation, but it's amazing how different the scenery looks with the furniture rearranged.  I still love the entire Violent Femmes album; I still can't listen to the Add It Up compilation the whole way through.)
Anyway, the studio version of the song "Add It Up" is still one of my favorite tracks by the Milwaukee-based band.  It's such a perfect specimen of teenage frustration and nervous energy.  (Probably because frontman Gordon Gano wrote it when he was a frustrated, nervous teenager.)  
Every time I hear the song's anxious, unvarnished folk-punk and Gano's pleading warble, it instantly transports me back to my teen years, for better or worse.