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Yeah, so what's the deal with this site? What makes this page different from the front door? Here, I'll give you my musical history so you can take my site in it's proper culturo-historical perspective. I'll also explain somewhat the formatting of the various pages, and the reasons I select the things I do for inclusion.
The Reviews This may be the slowest growing section of the website, but it is the main feature of the page as well. The groups are selected by me, and I just do what I'm in the mood for reviewing. I started out with Depeche Mode because they were probably the most influential on my tastes as they developed. I concentrated early on some well known New Wave 80s bands, but gradually expanded to include some modern underground bands as well. Some people talk of reviews as if they are something that should be done "objectively." Since this is music, and musical tastes are inherently subjective, I think this is a load of crap, really. Therefore, I don't make any pretense of writing "objective" reviews; I simply write about the kind of music I like, and I talk about why I like (or don't like) it. The purpose of writing this way is twofold. First of all, I doubt I could write it any differently, since I'm inherently subjective about my musical tastes, and I take them too seriously to pretend otherwise. Secondly, if you read enough of my reviews, especially of music you are familiar with, then you can get a sense of my taste and what I like and don't like. This way, the reviews of music you don't know becomes much more valuable to you, because you know what frame of reference I'm coming from, and you can make a judgement based on my review.
80s Song of the Week As noted in my disclaimer earlier, I make no guarantee that this will actually be updated weekly. Rather, it is the 80s Song of an Indeterminate Time Period that will not be Less than a week, and hopefully won't be longer than a few weeks. And by 80s, I don't mean 80s per se. I think the style that is characterized by 80s lasted from the late 70s until the early 90s, so it's roughly 12 or 13 years, not a true decade. Songs that are selected may be New Wave, my genre of choice, or they may be simply pop songs that I happened to like and feel like like featuring. Actually, as you can see from the dates, this hasn't been updated in a long time. I'm officially stopping the song of the week, since it was too much trouble for me to think of something I wanted to spotlight every week. There's been some newer developments in my musical tastes, and I'm looking into a very underground continuation of 80s new wave that is still relatively healthy. From now on, rather than concentrating on the 80s, I'm going to gradually shift focus more and more towards this scene that has survived from the 80s.
Musical History First of all, I think it's important to those who think they may have musical tastes in common with me to know how old I am and what generation of musical tastes I have been exposed to. So I'll start from the beginning. I was born in the very early seventies, and graduated from High School in 1990. My most formative years (as far as musical tastes go) were the late 80s, but even then I was already looking up older material from groups that had been around, so I'm really completely an 80s musical product; not just one piece of the 80s. Besides, it would be erroneous to claim that my tastes weren't nascent before they became full bloom in the mid to late 80s. I remember, as a kid, hearing "Staying Alive" and ABBA, which my father actually owned. Like most kids, my musical tastes were dependant for a long time on the stuff that my family (namely my father since my mother wasn't interested in music and I'm the oldest of my siblings) listened to. He had a very broad range of tastes, although classic rock (late sixties, early to mid seventies and other groups that built upon this sound) were his main interests. He also was passably interested in classical music. Since I had to learn the piano from an early age, I was exposed to classical music as both a performer and a listener, and learned to really appreciate music as art, not merely as pop. As I was finishing my grade school years and approaching middle school, I started diverging from my father's musical taste, partly aided by the acquisition of a clock radio which let me at least select what I wanted to listen to. Now my home town isn't large enough to have afforded us all that much selection of radio stations, so I was top 40 at the very beginnings of the decade. However, even in these early days, my tastes as a future New Waver were starting to come out. For instance, Duran Duran was a particular favorite of mine, foreshadowing the new wave tastes that I was to develop later. I persisted in this rather sad state of musical indifference, listening only to what was on the radio, or MTV until I was halfway through my high school years. I was partly influenced by some friends of mine who also listened to music that wasn't exactly top 40 (the Cure's single collection and the Cult's Electric being big influences at this point). I started, to actually buy music; first, the little 7" singles (of which I developed quite a collection!) then tapes. I remember, the first tape I bought, I think, was U2's The Joshua Tree followed soon after by groups that were even more closely aligned to my emerging tastes as a new wave/synthpop fan: early work of Duran Duran and a-ha (Rio, Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Hunting High and Low, etc. While I was naturally gravitating towards what, in those years, had mistakenly been labeled New Wave (actually a term that descriped punk and early post punk, but the term stuck with me to mean later synthpop of the mid to late eighties, like New Order, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Alphaville, etc.) but the crystallizing moment came when I, after having heard "Never Let Me Down Again" once and "Strangelove" a few times, went out and bought my first Depeche Mode tape, Music for the Masses, which at that point was still fairly new (late 1987 or so). I thought (and still do, BTW) that this album was truly a wonderful piece of art, and my musical tastes as a waver were firmly fixed at that point. I quickly went out and bought most everything else that Depeche Mode had released up to that point (starting with Black Celebration, then working backwards, mostly) and then bought stuff by other groups. I was lucky enough, at that time, that New Wave was popular enough to get airplay on our podunck little radio station, so I was quickly exposed to other "New Wave" bands like Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, INXS, Information Society, etc. For the most part, I actually made enough money in high school to keep up with these groups as well as going back and getting lots of stuff that had already been released, even after making the fateful switch from tapes to cds. I started tuning in to a wonderful station in Houston whose format included lots of dance music, new wave and hip hop. While much of it was outside my musical range, it also exposed me to a lot of other bands that I simply would never have heard of at home. Reception from that far away was an iffy prospect at best, though, so that station probably only played a minor role in my tastes. I was also lucky enough to have made some friends, based primarily on our mutual musical tastes, that exposed me to a wealth of other material, some of it new, some of it stuff I had must missed over the years when I was in my musical doldrums. All in all, those were golden years, and I can't say that I've ever been happier musically. Then I left the country for two years, and for all practical purposes was completely unexposed to anything musical. This was early 1991-1993, and by the time I got back, something terrible had happened. I guess it all started with Nirvana, curse them, and their bloody "Seattle sound." Anyway, by the time I got back into music, there was practically nothing around anymore that I liked. Grunge was king, at the time, and it was replaced by the equally detestable neo-hippy folks, and the feminist/"wonder-if-they're-lesbian" groups, and the list goes on and on. Not only had the music gotten bad, but the very image they were trying to adopt was pitifully woeful. I'm sorry, but the neo-Brady Bunch look will never be attractive. Even bands I used to love, like Depeche Mode and New Order were putting stuff out that was disappointing, and which seemed to have sold out to some degree to the new style I experimented with trying to broaden my tastes a little bit. Some techno and a lot of industrial were pretty close to where I had been, and I went easily into that scene, for a little while, until I found that most of the stuff I liked hadn't been much more long-lived than the kind of synthpop I listened to. I even got into some Eurodisco for a while, like Real McCoy, until I realized that the lack of true content would never keep me satisfied. Anyway, following this disenchantment, I dropped completely out of the music scene; I nearly retched whenever the radio came on, or I had to see one of these clowns jumping around and moaning like someone engaged in major surgery without anaesthesia. Instead I concentrated on trying to bulk up my collection with stuff that I had never gotten around to buying in the 80s. Also, about this time, I moved out of the house (because I got married!) so I didn't have the major money that I could do anything in the world I wanted to with anymore. It seemed my hobby had nearly died, or at least gone into a severe coma. However, it soon became apparent that I wasn't the only one who thought that modern music was basically stupid and wished that we could just go back to the pre-generation X days and start over where we had left off. Tons of collections of 80s songs started hitting the stores, and for the most part, they seemed to be wildly successful. Some groups, leaving aside whatever musical fad happened to be going along started looking at the old 80s sound and integrating it into their music. All in all, I think the modern musical scene is the healthiest it's looked in years. In fact, I'm increasingly heartened to find that groups and artists that I thought were merely relics of the 80s had still been around, albeit underground, all along, and that others have come back to jump on the boom of 80s nostalgia.
This, of course, only set the stage for my musical Renaissance number 2, the direct sequel of my rebirth of the late 80s. Now, 10 years later, I have recently discovered a healthy "new wave" scene that still survives underground. The name has shifted to synthpop, but the music is still very similar, and it's obvious that this is the direct descendant of 80s new wave. In fact, it's better, in many ways, than the music I grew up with, since it has evolved and matured, but it's done so outside the mainstream. This page, which will cover a lot of new wave bands of the 80s, will gradually shift more and more into this scene of which I was previously ignorant, and hopefully I'll be able to update the pages as fast as I can update my music collection (which for a grad student finishing up his last year of supporting a family on financial aid isn't really very fast...)
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