Less Than Zero was a chronicle of our lives;
Bret Easton Ellis merely wrote it down (I didn’t have a pencil). Gen X was the
new wave, young enough to have escaped disco and punk - like starting over - as
if we were in an episode of Behind the Music. We were
cool like there had never been cool, fashioning a restless style, as if it had
to go to the bathroom. The Cult With No Name, post
punk, disaffected electronic crooners in outfits that channeled Bowie and Bolan
(Spandau Ballet, Ultravox, Steve Strange), morphed into vintage-clean-cut, L.A. kids shopping at Cowboys and Poodles for Permapress slacks and clip on bowties
(Haircut 100, Orange Juice, ABC); seconds later it was motorcycle chic (Depeche
Mode, Heaven 17) – all of it obsessively clean, photographable, pretty.
Quickly, there were too many girls/boys (“Which do you choose, a hard or soft
option?”)/strangers, too many drugs, too many intoxicated drives home at dawn;
calling out sick; that time you woke up in a phone booth by Danny’s Oki-Dog
(“How’d I get here?”); that kid who died at the Lhasa from too much amyl.
Some of us escaped the worst and blotted out that Oki-Dog thing
and finished college and somehow balanced it all (Clay Easton and Blair), and
some of us died trying (Julian Wells). Less than Zero was the fictional chronicle of our
lives, River Phoenix was our poster child – and whereas Robert Downey Jr. made
it through – River Phoenix, like Downey’s fictional character Julian, did not.
Music then, was more like soundtrack; it was incidental and in the background; it was a singles age (to be specific, it was the 12 in. singles age), and because of that, it is often, too often, critically overlooked and even dismissed. Yet there are many more 80s AM10s than in the 90s or naughts, so sit down and listen. The obvious:
Disintegration – The Cure (AM10)
After the scatter-shot glories of the too lengthy Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, the
Cure put forth their most cohesive work in Disintegration, an album of deep, introspective
moods and textures that roll the listener in a Persian rug of melancholy.
During these sessions, Robert Smith kept scraps of paper - on which he wrote
his thoughts - in a box. Out of that box, says Smith, came Disintegration. The first
half of which, from "Plainsong" to "Fascination Street,"
has a thematic and textural coherence, while Side Two is more individualistic
and episodic, yet overall the mood is dramatic and evocative with Hitchcock
pacing. This is a lush and moody album and signature Cure; one need
only hear the chimes and the two minute intros to feel something uniquely Curish. Disintegration,
alongside Blue and Revolver, Aja and After the Gold Rush, is a
desert island disk, one that hasn’t aged at all in 25 years.
Black Celebration – Depeche Mode (AM10)
Though Violator was Depeche Mode's greatest
commercial success, Black Celebration was the group's most cohesive
effort. A concept album that takes the listener on a journey through the
societal underbelly of sex, drugs, depression and betrayal, it is a dark affair
indeed. The title cut is a synth masterpiece, with eerie sounds building until
the song explodes, the protagonist wailing, "Your optimistic guise/looks
like paradise/to someone like/me..." - haunting. The album ebbs and flows
between soundscapes and tempos that serve only to make it more unsettling.
"Black Celebration" segues effortlessly into "Fly On The
Windscreen - Final," seething with a sense of urgency that is suddenly
scaled back by the sequencing of "A Question Of Lust,"
"Sometimes" and "It Doesn't Matter Two." The flip side
carries on with the sexual tension of "A Question Of Time" and
"Stripped" giving way to "Here Is the House," a beautiful
contemplation of what it means to be home; a song somewhat out of place amidst
these melancholy dirges and a sorrowful prequel to the deceptively upbeat
closer, "But Not Tonight." Here we find, not a house, but a song depicting those
magical nights when you realize that life is about you and the universe, that
the stars and the moon are billions of years old and all those societal
expectations, responsibilities and anxieties are tiny in the grand scheme
of things. You feel for a moment that a great weight has been lifted from your
shoulders and you are wiser than you were just 5 minutes ago… BULLSHIT. It's
not about that at all. “But Not Tonight” is the greatest of songs, of
poems (take that Bysshe-Shelley!) about regret and denial, the lyrics
diametrically opposed to Dave Gahan’s exceptional and heart-wrenching vocals. Black Celebration is an album of interpretation; one of
those dichotomies in which the meaning of each song is so clearly apparent
until you talk with someone else, and realize you were so very wrong. If it's
not, that should be the definition of poetry.
