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Tag: 80s music

  • MTV Makes Its Lack of Music Official

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    Although MTV’s “content” focus has been reality TV and other adjacent schlock for many years now, those who remember it as the place to go for new music and groundbreaking videos by artists who once invested the time, effort and money into making them have been saddened to learn of the official loss of the “M” in MTV (formerly Music Television, but now, one supposes, just “Television”). That is to say, the music has been booted in an authoritative capacity, with Paramount, MTV’s parent company (and itself presently “A Skydance Corporation”), opting to jettison five of MTV’s “offshoot” channels—the ones that actually play videos—in the UK: MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live. While this doesn’t include the “plain” version of the channel in the US, where MTV was birthed, it still signals a larger indication of just how far the channel has fallen from its proverbial heyday.

    When it hit the airwaves for the first time on August 1, 1981 (at 12:01 a.m.), the inaugural video was The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” A pointed statement to make as the world was on the brink of an entirely new kind of “modernism” when it came to pop culture. The music video was beyond radio, TV and film—mixing all of those elements to form an entirely new—and ultimately far more powerful and influential—entity. An entity that would shape the next few generations. Not just their style and taste, but the way in which they “absorbed” media. Because if parents thought attention spans of the youth were “short” then, they could never have imagined what was coming with the likes of TikTok, ultimate mind flayer. But before that total bastardization of what it would mean to “consume content,” MTV laid the groundwork. Seeing a void to be filled for a generation that was clearly hankering for something like this (but didn’t yet know how to put it into words), there were already one hundred and sixteen music videos to be broadcast in the first day of the channel’s airing.

    And that was just the beginning. Because two years later, in 1983, a veritable dam had opened, unleashing the music video prowess that seemed innate to both Madonna and Michael Jackson. For both 1958-born pop music icons (still billed, to this day, as the Queen and King of Pop) would have some dominating videos on MTV in ‘83. Of course, it was Jackson’s year for churning out the “blockbuster” videos of the Thriller album: “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and, the biggest of all, “Thriller.”

    Even so, Madonna’s output in ‘83 was not to be discounted, with “Everybody” (filmed in December of ‘82) and “Burning Up” in rotation frequently enough to dispel the average listener’s initial belief that Madonna was a Black artist. A misconception that was probably a compliment to her, but, at the same time, M was aware that being white would better serve her money-making/commercial possibilities. By 1984, Madonna’s self-titled debut, released the year prior, was really starting to gain traction thanks to the next duo of music videos from Madonna released that year: “Lucky Star” and “Borderline.”

    However, it was during the final months of 1984 that Madonna would truly become a household name thanks to the part MTV played in promoting the eponymous lead single from her sophomore record, Like A Virgin. Even before the video was out or the song was an official single release, Madonna decided to debut “Like A Virgin” in a big way during the First Annual MTV Video Music Awards. It was on that night of September 14, 1984 that the long-bubbling symbiosis between Madonna and MTV was crystallized. And forever etched into the public consciousness thanks to Madonna descending from the top of a giant, three-tiered wedding cake all dressed in white as she ironically sang about how she was made to feel “shiny and new” and “like a virgin, touched for the very first time” thanks to her new love. And her new love, ultimately, was MTV. Though it wasn’t always a love that cut both ways. Something Madonna addressed in honor of the network’s tenth anniversary in 1991, when she made a special tribute video during which she said the following (while dressed in her Greta Garbo-chic hair, makeup and attire and filmed in black and white), shot in a manner that makes abrupt cuts to her next “non sequitur” (but ultimately all related) train of thought:

    “I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about…us. And all that we’ve been through. I wanted to talk about me and you. I remember when we first met. You didn’t know who you were yet. I didn’t know who I was. We grew up together. So ten years, what’s the big deal, huh? I’m not one of those people that wears clothes just because somebody gave it to me for free. Although I do like this diamond. Are diamonds really a ten-year anniversary present? You think you can make me forget everything just by giving me this? You expect me to come running back to you every time you give me a present? When will you understand that I am a person and not a thing? That I deserve to be treated like a person and not a thing! I turn my back—for one minute—and you find somebody else. You’ve been hanging out with tramps with cheap clothes and bad songs to sing. I’ve got a tattoo on my behind too, you think you’re gonna see it? I know why you spend time with her: because she’s not threatening… She doesn’t make you laugh, she doesn’t make you cry… I won’t even go into the men you’ve been hanging around with… You’ve never had more fun with anyone else—and you know it.”

    That was and is still the truth when it comes to MTV and its most iconic moments. For even the Britney Spears ones are rooted in “Madonna-ness” (most especially the 2003 VMAs). But, more than that, the speech would touch on a number of apropos and foreshadowing points regarding the direction MTV had taken in its then still germinal period. It was like a harbinger of how the network would continue to mutate as the 90s went on. For, only a year after Madonna’s immortalized “love letter,” the network would premiere its first reality show (for some, arguably, the first “proper” reality show), The Real World, in 1992. Granted, before that, House of Style was one of MTV’s earliest deviations from focusing on music as it decided that taking to “the streets” to give the hoi polloi a snapshot of the latest fashion trends, as well as the lives of supermodels (still an ever-burgeoning concept that OG House of Style host Cindy Crawford helped solidify), was just as important as playing music videos.

    Of course, by the time the late 90s rolled around, the original “premise” of MTV was all but gone, with “content” taking over instead (though that isn’t to say some of said programming wasn’t actually brilliant [see: Daria]). Which is why Say What? started airing in 1998—because it was a show designed to do what MTV had originally been “all about”: playing music videos. The fact that the network had to make such a concerted effort to “block out time” (usually no more than an hour) to do what their unofficial mission statement had originally been was, well, not a good sign…to say the least. And then came a slew of other shows in the spirit of Say What?: 12 Angry Viewers, MTV Live, Artist’s Cut, and Total Request. It was the latter, in its Total Request Live format, that would signal the third phase of MTV and its influence on a new generation. To be sure, many tween and teenage millennials would spend their after-school hours watching TRL while “doing homework.” And yes, it was during this era when Britney Spears became the reigning queen of the network, serving as the twenty-first century edition of Madonna with her own indelible visuals, including “…Baby One More Time,” “Oops!…I Did It Again” and “Toxic.”

    Reality-type shows centered on the “hottest” musicians of the day also extended into programming like Punk’d and Making the Video (Britney was a staple on both). And even the VMAs continued to offer up a steady stream of “iconic” moments up to a certain year (the Taylor and Kanye incident of 2009 being of particular note)—but probably the last major “moment” was Beyoncé doing her baby bump reveal after singing “Love On Top” at the 2011 VMAs. The lack of “memorable MTV” instances wasn’t necessarily because the network stagnated. No, instead, it just kept getting worse. But, perhaps even more than that, it had lost its core audience. Generations that no longer cared about such things (e.g., music, style, what’s “relevant” in pop culture) as they once did, having grown into the very kind of person Avril Lavigne had warned about in “Sk8r Boi” (“She sits at home/Feeding the baby, she’s all alone”). More damaging still, those generations had joined the likes of Gen Z in getting their music and pop culture fix from other internet and app-centric outlets. Even for all of MTV’s best efforts to pivot itself toward being just as available via the internet, it didn’t have the same clout.

    Then came the first truly gut-punching portent of full-tilt doom: the deletion of the entire online archive of MTV News. That meant years and years of music journalism flushed into the proverbial abyss in the wake of layoffs and the shuttering of MTV News altogether. Ever since, the descent into total oblivion for MTV has been all but guaranteed. And sure, maybe it will keep the lights on, so to speak, with some of its “tentpole” offerings (like the VMAs and, in Britain, Geordie Shore), but there’s no denying that MTV will never again be the vibrant, cutting-edge network that molded culture and public taste as it once did. Yet that isn’t entirely its own fault. Indeed, perhaps it’s best to quote Madonna paraphrasing Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond when she said in the abovementioned speech, “I am big. It’s the videos that got small.” And oh, how they have—whittled down to barely thirty seconds of “content” on a petite smartphone (that oxymoron of a word).  

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • An Album for the Patrick Bateman Bros: Doja Cat Is An 80s Lady on Vie

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    After releasing the deliberately polarizing Scarlet in 2023 (followed by a reissue called Scarlet 2 Claude in 2024), Doja Cat seems to have done yet another swing back in the opposite direction. One that is aimed more toward the very genre she claimed she was running as far and fast away from as she could back in 2023, when she tweeted, “Planet Her and Hot Pink were cash-grabs and y’all fell for it.” Further describing the content on those records as “mediocre pop.” At the time, a great many fans were upset by the comment, while others insisted it was all somehow part of her Scarlet persona. And maybe it was, considering Doja would, as of this year, describe that album as a “massive fart” that just needed to be released. A way to express her anger and rage over a few things, including not being “taken seriously” as an artist. So it was that she explained in an interview with The New York Times, “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out—it was a massive fart for me. I thought fixing that would entail making music that was more visceral or more emotional or maybe more angry or more sad. And I enjoyed performing it onstage, but it didn’t get me all the way there. So I want to return back to what I know.”

    And return she has. Not just to the pure pop that Hot Pink and Planet Her embodied, but also even farther back than that, all the way to the 80s (though Doja herself was born in 1995). Because, sure, it’s been “a while” since someone wielded that shtick, with the most recent notable example being Dua Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia, drenched in the same 80s-centric stylings on Vie, which marks Doja Cat’s fifth record in seven years (with 2018’s Amala being her debut). But Doja takes it more than just a few steps further than Lipa in terms of centering the album’s entire universe in the 80s. Because it’s not just a sound, it’s a world, with Doja committed to staying in character while inhabiting that world. This, of course, extends to her visual accompaniments—whether it’s the music videos she’s released thus far (see: “Jealous Type” and “Gorgeous”)—or the album variants that feature her on the cover in various 80s getups (particularly the Quality Time vinyl edition). All of this proving the accuracy of what she told Michelle Miller of CBS Sunday Morning: “I’m always wanting to, like, create a character, like, create some sort of narrative and theme and world. World-building.”

    To establish that world immediately on Vie, Doja begins with “Cards,” which, for about the first fifteen seconds, sounds like it could be something from a Blood Orange album (it’s the saxophone). But then, with its production from Y2K, Gavin Bennett and Jack Antonoff (who worked on nine of the fifteen tracks, and who makes music that usually sounds 80s-esque anyway), the song bursts forth in some very Janet Jackson circa Control type of glory. This as Doja opens with the chorus, “A little more back and forth/A little more catch and throw, baby/The more we can clear this smoke/A little further I’ll go/Maybe in time, we’ll know/Maybe I’ll fall in love, baby/Maybe we’ll win some hearts/Gotta just play your cards.” The up-tempo pace of the track instantly establishes the exuberant tone that Doja is going for, in addition to ruminating on her love of romance—intermixed with sex, of course. This intoxicating combination evident in the lines, “If you play fair, stranger/It’s all you could eat while I lay there, stranger” (that word, stranger, also being the title of track six on Vie). At the same time, Doja exhibits the shyness of a girl looking for true love when she says, “I’m enough to wait for/Move too quick and you off the roster.”

    As the saxophone plays us out of “Cards,” Doja’s warning fittingly transitions into “Jealous Type.” For it’s apparent that once she (or her “character”) does open her heart to someone, she’s not liable to let them “muck about” with others so readily. Once again starting the song with the chorus (which will be a common occurrence on Vie), Doja soon asks the question, “Could be torn between two roads that I just can’t decide/Which one is leading me to hell or paradise?” This meaning that Doja can’t quite decide between remaining “dulcet” or going full AK-47 in terms of expressing her feelings of jealousy. Something she does manage to convey regardless in the second verse, rapping, “And if she really was a friend like you said she was/I would’ve been locked in, but I called your bluff/No girl enjoys trying to tough it out for a party boy/Everyone wants you and you love all the noise.” In a sense, it’s almost like she’s channeling Evelyn Richards in American Psycho (whose name is changed to Evelyn Williams [played by Reese Witherspoon] in the film version), who has some similar sentiments toward Patrick Bateman.

    And yes, needless to say, this is probably exactly the type of album that, had it actually been released in the 1980s, Bateman would have been sure to pontificate about in one of the chapters. Granted, Bateman couldn’t cover every piece of 80s pop culture, including Knight Rider, which is not one of the things he finds worthy of mentioning at any point in American Psycho. Doja Cat, however, seems to figure that, since Vie is an “80s album,” the Knight Rider theme is a natural fit for “AAAHH MEN!,” even though Busta Rhymes already locked down that sample in 1997 with “Turn It Up (Remix)/Fire It Up.” What’s more, it seems that Antonoff enjoys working on tracks wherein female singers make a play on words using “men” and “amen” (hear also: “Manchild”).

    Of course, Doja has more of a legitimate reason to wield the Knight Rider theme than Busta in that she raps, “And if had more common sense/Then I would grab my ride and dip.” She also adds to that sentiment, “And I have too much tolerance/You ugly and fine as shit.” That latter dichotomous line referring to how a man can be aesthetically foyn, but still repulsive “on the inside,” thanks to his “personality” (or lack thereof). Even so, Doja seems always willing to take a chance on romance. Even with the knowledge that romance so often gives way to reality, ergo a loss of the rose-colored glasses that can then lead to so much tension and fighting. Thus, a need for “Couples Therapy,” which happens to be track four on Vie.

    It’s this sweeping, lush song that particularly conjures Doja telling Jimmy Fallon, “I’m very inspired by Janet. I’m very inspired by Michael and Prince.” And yet, there’s even brief auditory glimpses of Aaliyah (specifically, “Rock the Boat”) as Doja narrates the problems of some other couple, rather than speaking about herself or her own relationship. This bringing to mind the distinction of her writing process that she made to Miller on CBS Sunday Morning, noting, “When I’m writing, I’m writing about situations in general. I’m not really, um, always pulling from my personal life” and “I love to talk about love. I love to talk about, um, you know, relationships and dynamics and things like that.” Carrie Bradshaw would tend to agree.

    Interestingly, “Couples Therapy” starts out with Doja talking about a relationship from the third person perspective before switching to the first: “She just wants him to be involved/He just wants her to finally notice/They just need one more push to cope/Can we both detangle our souls?/This argument’s been in the oven/We can’t always be in control.” This, in fact, channels Madonna’s 1989 “divorce track” from Like A Prayer, “Till Death Do Us Part,” on which she sings with the same perspective shift, “Our luck is running out of time/You’re not in love with me anymore/I wish that it would change but it won’t/‘Cause you don’t love me no more/He takes a drink, she goes inside/He starts to scream, the vases fly/He wishes that she wouldn’t cry/He’s not in love with her anymore.” Yes, maybe Madonna and Sean just needed couples therapy—though it wasn’t as “chic” in the 80s to seek that kind of help. Just ask The Roses.

    But, at least after becoming newly divorced and/or single again, a person can feel like their former “Gorgeous” self. This being the second single from Vie after “Jealous Type.” And yes, with this particular track, Doja is sure to cover a different kind of romance: the kind that somebody has with themselves a.k.a. self-love. So it is that Doja remarked of “Gorgeous”: “[It’s] not about being in a relationship with someone else, it’s about how you relate to yourself and how you feel about yourself. And that was something that I really wanted to kind of convey in this song.” Which she definitely does (“I mean I only got myself to appeal to [I do]),” along with the feeling that this should be playing during one of Gia Carangi’s photoshoots (the lyric, “She wanna be chic when it’s inspired by heroin” being especially resonant). Or during one of Bateman’s murder sprees. Either way, it’s among the most 80s songs of Vie, which really means something (this along with the fact that Charli XCX’s newly-minted husband, George Daniel, is one of the co-writers and co-producers). In fact, it’s almost like Doja took a page out of The Weeknd’s playbook for this entire record, for he’s been dipping into that 80s sound well for a while, especially since 2020’s After Hours.

    And it would track that Doja could have been inspired as much by The Weeknd as any pop artist from “back in the day,” for she’s no “Stranger” to collaborating with him, having done so on a remix of his 2020 song “In Your Eyes” and in 2021 for “You Right” from Planet Her. Who knows, maybe she even has him partially in mind when she opens “Stranger” with, “We could be strange/At least we’re not the same.” Later, she’ll add, “And I believe the weirdest ones survive.” This echoes one of Madonna’s recent aphorisms on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, during which she declared, “Not fitting in is what saves you.” Granted, Doja speaks on some pretty normie couple behavior when she says, “Call me over to watch some White Lotus.” This perhaps serving to remind listeners that she did make a song with one of season three’s cast members, LISA—namely, “Born Again,” which also features RAYE. Not to mention her fairly basique nod to Kill Bill for the “Stranger” video. But, in any case, it’s a sweet song, and one that relishes the joys of finding one’s fellow “weirdo” in life.

    With that in mind, Doja seems only too pleased to make her fellow weirdo “All Mine” on the following track, which features a prominent nod to Grace Jones, both in sound, tone and, well, the opening sample of dialogue. Dialogue that comes from Conan the Destroyer, with Princess Jehnna (Olivia d’Abo) asking Zula (Jones), “How do you attract a man? What I mean is, suppose you set your heart on somebody. What would you do to get him?” to which Zula instantly replies, with the same “savagery” as a man, “Grab him, and take him.” Or what a certain Orange Creature, especially during his 80s heyday, would rephrase as “grab ‘em by the dick.” That Conan the Destroyer was released in 1984 only intensifies Doja’s commitment to the “world building” of Vie, which exists solely in the 80s (complete with her public appearances in promotion of the album, during which she’s dressed in attire befitting said era). Save, of course, for the lyrical content itself.

    In the spirit of Zula’s advisement, Doja croons in tune with the mid-tempo track, “I ain’t waiting around, yeah/I’ll be taking him out, yeah/‘Cause I’m only about him/Wanting what we want/Claiming what we claim/Make you say my name/And I’m all yours/It can’t bе my fault/This street goes both ways/Let a giver takе/You’re all mine, boy.” In this sense, Doja channels a time when women were only really just coming into their own as independent people capable not only of being seen as a man’s “equal” (which really isn’t hard to do considering how subpar most men are), but being able to “claim” in the same way—or so one would have liked to believe—without incurring as much judgment as they would have in the past. And in the 80s, it was not so “past” at all, considering the fact that most women couldn’t even open their own bank accounts in the U.S. until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Considering that Doja is very much the type of woman who needs to have her own bag, the 80s are probably about as far back in time as she would be willing to go (not to mention the fact that a Black woman further back than the 80s didn’t have much in the way of rights either).

    To be sure, it wouldn’t have been half as easy for a woman to simply command, “Take Me Dancing,” as both Doja and SZA do on the song of the same name. Teaming up yet again after the stratospheric success of “Kiss Me More” (which even broke Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” record for the “longest-running all-female Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100”), SZA commences the track with the repetition of the demand, “Baby, take me dancing tonight.”

    Once she makes her desires known, Doja then comes in with the chorus, “You’re so raw, boy, and you’re so romantic/When you fuck me right and then you take me dancing/It gets lonely out here in this big old mansion/In these hills cooped up, boy, can you take me dancing?” Clearly speaking from the perspective of someone who lives in L.A. (with Doja herself being a native), it’s almost as if Doja is intending to channel Norma Desmond if she were living in the 80s instead of the 50s.

    While not as lyrically varied as “Kiss Me More,” “Take Me Dancing” is just as “boppable,” and surely worthy of a music video that finds Doja and SZA hitting the clubs of Los Angeles through an 80s lens (which must surely be less derivative than the very Britney concept they “came up with” for the “Kiss Me More” video). Maybe even one with a Maxxxine-inspired slant.

    On “Lipstain,” Doja actually says she doesn’t wanna dance. Well, that is, metaphorically speaking, beginning the song with the declaration, “I don’t wanna dance around it/Talkin’ ‘bout our love is easy.” So easy that it even makes her “speak in tongues”—a.k.a. French (e.g., “Tu es ma vie et mon tout/Et tout le monde le sait” and “Laisse-moi embrasser ton cou”). And why shouldn’t she? Considering that Vie is named in honor of the French word for “life,” of which Doja remarked to CBS Sunday Morning, “That means life and I feel like you can’t have life without love.” “Vie” not only means “life” in French, as in, “tu es ma vie,” but it also derives from the Roman numeral V, and Doja wanting to reference this being her fifth record. One that shows a side of her that perhaps wasn’t as noticeable before. The romantic side (after all, that doesn’t come across in such previous lyrics as, “If she ain’t got a butt/Nah, fuck it, get into it, yuh”). Which is why Doja was prompted to explain of the consistent theme, “This album is very much about love in a way that reflects how I want it to be in the future—my hope, my hopefulness. What I hope it could be. Because I remember there was a time when people were talking about wanting to be with each other, and it seems to have gotten a bit more vapid and just sort of like, not real… Not loving, not romantic.”

    But it is “romantic,” in its retro way, to want to “mark your man” (as Peggy Olson would call it) with a bit of lipstick on his collar…and elsewhere. Or, as Doja calls it, a “lipstain.” This said when she sings, “Kiss you on the neck on purpose/So they know my favorite lipstain.” The “they” being other women that might try to “holla.” A fear that prompts Doja to note, “We gotta mark our territory for them dogs, girl.” That’s certainly how Britney felt on “Perfume” when she used the eponymous beauty product to talk about marking her own territory via the lyrics, “And while I wait, I put on my perfume/Yeah, I want it all over you/I’m gonna mark my territory.” For Doja, though, lipstick will suffice.

    And, talking of Britney, Doja very much gives off 00s-era Britney energy on the lyrics for “Silly! Fun!” (a song that matches the playful exclamations in its title) when she sings (while oozing pure exuberance), “Wouldn’t it be fun if we went to a party?/Wouldn’t it be fun to fall deep for somebody?/I know it could be a blast to just pop out a baby/And we’re so very silly getting married in Vegas.” Spears did all of those things and then some in the 00s, but Doja wants to “make it 80s” with her musical spin on such a narrative (one that she calls her homage to lovebombing). And yes, “Silly! Fun!” definitely offers the kind of jubilance-inducement one would expect of such a title, practically begging its listeners to snort cocaine to this soundtrack. It also echoes the theme of “Stranger,” reiterating the idea that Doja has found someone to match her freak, so to speak (and to quote a Tinashe song rather than a Doja one)—and that she’s all the better/happier for it. As made further apparent when she gushes, “You’re my person, this my first time, I’m in love/Those men were practice in my past.”

    On “Acts of Service,” this talk of finding “my person” continues immediately, with Doja asking the question, “Would it mean that I found my person/When the language is acts of service?” The “language” she’s referring to obviously being “love language,” of which there are five categories: acts of service, words of affirmation, quality time, gifts and physical touch (all five have Vie vinyl variants named in their honor). And so, if Doja can find that “special someone” who speaks her language, in addition to embodying some of the other ones, then, “Please, this is an achievement.”

    The slow tempo and “boudoir-ready” sound, co-produced by Fallen, Stavros and Kurtis McKenzie, is yet another example of the Janet Jackson inspiration on the album. Though, of course, the rapped portions of the song are all strictly Doja, especially when she says, “Yeah, said I/I just deleted Raya/That must mean that I’m your provider/That just mean I’ma be your rider.” Something about this verse feeling like a nod to the Joseph Quinn drama that happened earlier this year, with some outlets reporting that Quinn was “caught” on the dating app for “posh” people (a.k.a. celebrities [or even just “influencers”]) while still “with” Doja (much like David Harbour when he was married to Lily Allen). Either way, it’s a pointed remark. Perhaps the kind that would later prompt Doja to “Make It Up” to her love with an apology. This song having the kind of sound that makes one think of Prince taking a bubble bath (or maybe even think of Vivian Ward [Julia Roberts] taking a bubble bath while listening to Prince).

    To that point, Doja asks her lover in the second verse, “Can I run your shower?/Can I fill the tub?” So it is that Doja obviously wants to keep the acts of service love language going. And, in a certain sense, “Make It Up” also has shades (no pun intended) of Ariana Grande’s “make up,” a song from thank u, next about, what else, make up sex as Grande urges, “And I love it when we make up/Go ‘head, ruin my makeup” (so yeah, it’s sort of like 50 Cent rhyming “nympho” with “nympho”). In a similar fashion, complete with using the repetition of the same word, Doja sings, “If we make love/Would I make it up to you?” In other words, would it make this person, er, come around “One More Time.”

    While Daft Punk might already have a signature song called this, Doja throws her own hat into the “One More Time” ring. Even though she, too, mostly just repeats that phrase for the chorus. Even so, the song explores the struggle of being vulnerable, especially as it pertains to allowing oneself to fall in love. Awash in the sound of “80s electric guitar,” Doja remarks, “It’s never easy/We’re willingly uncomfortable/I want you to teach me/We’re both feeling unlovable/We gotta learn to unlearn it/It’s gotta hurt if we’re burning/When we get closer, I curse it/Breaking the cycle, I know I deserve it.” In other words, she deserves to be “Happy.”

    The Marvin Gaye-esque opening of said song, the penultimate track on Vie, inevitably leads to Doja speaking more rudimentary French (as she did on “Lipstain”), incorporating the repetition of the command, “Brise/Mon coeur/Encore/Ce soir” (meaning, “Break/My heart/Again/Tonight”), in between asking, “Are you happy?/Who would get mad at you/Doing what you wanna do?” A query that sounds, in its way, like MARINA asking, “Are you satisfied/With an average life?” (on a side note: MARINA also has a song called “Happy” on Froot). But the answer to that question is, patently, Doja, who expresses being plenty mad when she says, “TLC, I saw, I creeped/She’s in our bed, I bought the sheets.” This pop culture reference not being 80s at all, but peak 90s. Alas, Doja can’t keep it entirely “of the time” she’s emulating, putting her own contemporary spin on the lyrics while borrowing mostly from the sound of the Decade of Excess. Which she, like many others, wants to “Come Back.”

    For this grand finale, Doja selected Antonoff as the sole producer of the song (the only other one on Vie that he produced on his own being “AAAHH Men!”). And for this big responsibility, Antonoff seemed to riff off Doja’s tone of voice to fully exude an all-out Wilson Phillips sound. To be sure, “Come Back” has a very inspirational sound in the spirit of said band (particularly their best-known hit, “Hold On”). But just because it sounds that way doesn’t mean Doja is saying things intended in that spirit. For when she sings the chorus, “Changin’ the way that you act to me/Can’t switch the tone while I’m ‘bout to leave/I worked it down till the atrophy/You missed the mark and her majesty/Beggin’ me, ‘Baby, come back to me,’” it’s evident that Doja has reached her threshold on giving love—or at least this particular love—a chance.

    In this regard, “Come Back” is like Doja’s version of “Goodbye”—the Sabrina Carpenter track that concludes Man’s Best Friend (and yes, Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced that song, too). For, like Carpenter, Doja is sending a big kiss-off message to the person who thought that she would always be around/come running at the drop of hat. In both songs, each woman emphasizes that this man’s sudden desire to “come back” to the relationship and (potentially) “be better” is a classic case of too little, too late. Which is exactly why Doja pronounces, “It turned you on when I told you off/I’m pleased I ain’t the bitch you was hopin’ for/If we keep this up, and you hold my doors/And you take my bag, and you hold me more/I don’t think that would make up for the hope I lost.”

    Much like the collective hope that was lost during the Decade of Excess itself, with Ronald Reagan ramping up the concept of neoliberalism (with his counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, also doing the same “across the pond”) through Reaganomics. A so-called philosophy/set of policies that served only to further dash the dreams and livelihood of the average American. Turning the U.S. into an even greater cultural wasteland that wouldn’t deign to fund the arts in general, let alone music education. Even so, compared to now, there’s no denying the 80s had a lot more luster. A far greater sense of hope and aspiration.

    To boot, in the spirit of songs from “that time,” Doja even dares to challenge her usual audience by making tracks that last well over three minutes in most cases. Which is a tall ask of a generation that’s grown accustomed to mostly only having the focus for a song that’s about two minutes, if that. So perhaps her goal really is to fully transport listeners back to that time, and remind them that while time travel might not be possible (as was “promised” in Back to the Future), the “DeLorean” that people will have to settle for in 2025 is Vie.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Trump Brings Back the Worst of the 80s

    Trump Brings Back the Worst of the 80s

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    Although some could argue that Ronald Reagan’s oppressive regime in the 1980s is part of what fueled better pop culture than the schlock of the moment, one thing that could never be improved was Donald Trump. A man who did become part of the pop cultural lexicon of that era despite being a New York-confined Patrick Bateman type. For whatever reason (apart from The Art of the Deal), he managed to infiltrate the mainstream consciousness—more than likely because, in those days, it was the height of “aspirational” to be rich. Not that it still isn’t, it’s just more “cloaked” behind “earnest,” “let’s save the planet” messaging.

    Trump, obviously, never gave a fuck about that. And still doesn’t. Nor did he ever care about reading, though he did feign being very taken with the “excellent” Tom Wolfe during both men’s heyday. “Excellent” was the word he used to describe the quintessential 80s author in a 1987 interview with Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden when asked what books he was reading. But, of course, 1) he wasn’t actually reading any and 2) Trump couldn’t resist the urge to ultimately say, “I’m reading my own book because I think it’s so fantastic, Tom.” That book was the blatantly ghostwritten The Art of the Deal, released, incidentally, in the month that followed The Bonfire of the Vanities landing on bookshelves everywhere. Indeed, that was the main reason Trump was on the show.

    Oddly, Trump’s book (an oxymoron, to be sure) was the thing that made him become a household name in America, as opposed to just being limited to the niche jurisdiction of New York City and certain parts of New Jersey. As for his abovementioned interview, some have speculated that Bret Easton Ellis used this bizarre moment for Bateman/American Psycho inspiration. For it does smack of Bateman saying whatever the fuck comes to his mind just to see if anyone’s actually paying attention (e.g., saying he’s into “murders and executions mostly” instead of “mergers and acquisitions”). A moment where, in one instant Trump is declaring he’s well-versed in all literature Wolfe but hasn’t yet read The Bonfire of the Vanities, and, in the next, claiming to be reading Wolfe’s “last book.” Which would have been, what else, The Bonfire of the Vanities. He certainly wasn’t talking about From Bauhaus to Our House. And yet, even when caught in a lie, Trump always counted on touting generalities with confidence as a means to deflect from his total lack of knowledgeability.

    So it is that he keeps repeating such generalities as, “He’s a great author, he’s done a beautiful job” and “The man has done a very, very good job.” Finally, realizing that there might be some people out there not falling for his bullshit, he relies on the excuse, “I really can’t hear with this earphone by the way.” (Or, as Mariah would put it, “I can’t read suddenly.”) Trump, in this and so many other ways, has brought back the “art” of the flagrant lie-con that was popularized by some of the 80s’ most notorious swindlers, like David Bloom and Jim Bakker. Everyone wanting to adhere to the “fake it till you make it” philosophy so beloved by the U.S., and which it was essentially founded upon. A “philosophy” that Trump has taken “to heart” his entire life. Except for the fact that, as Tony Schwartz, the true writer of The Art of the Deal, eventually said, Trump doesn’t actually have a heart. More specifically, “Trump is not only willing to lie, but he doesn’t get bothered by it, doesn’t feel guilty about it, isn’t preoccupied by it. There’s an emptiness inside Trump. There’s an absence of a soul. There’s an absence of a heart.”

    And it can be argued that this absence began to extend to the collective of America in a more noticeable way than ever during the Decade of Excess. Uncoincidentally, it was the decade when neoliberalism came back into fashion in a manner as never seen before, courtesy of the “laissez-faire” policies of Reagan and, in the UK, Margaret Thatcher. With such an emphasis on “me first” and “getting ahead at any cost,” it was no wonder that a man like Trump, emblematic of the Wall Street monstrosity that would come to be embodied by Gordon Gekko, was so “revered.” His “lifestyle” coveted. Of course, it was harder then to debunk myths, like the idea that anything about Trump was “self-made.”

    In the backdrop (or foreground, depending on who you ask) of Trump and Reagan representing the worst of the 80s, there were, needless to say, so many amazing things about that decade: the birth of MTV, and with it, a new generation of visual artists (including the 1958 Trinity, Madonna Prince and Michael Jackson), Square Pegs, Golden Girls, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, They Live, E.T., Dirty Dancing, Flashdance, Footloose (a whole rash of dancing movies, really), any John Hughes movie, the eradication of smallpox, the aerobics craze and Jane Fonda’s Workout, Pac-Man (and the rise of video games in general, culminating in the release of Game Boy in 1989), the early days of the internet and personal computers, the first female vice presidential candidate (Geraldine Ferraro), the fall of the Berlin Wall… So many great, memorable things that should outshine the ickier moments today—like the rampant homophobia in response to AIDS, the Challenger explosion, Irangate, the Chernobyl disaster, New Coke, the rise of the yuppie, the death of vinyl (though it would have the last laugh) and George H.W. Bush managing to win the 1988 election so as to take more “Reaganomics” policies into the 90s.

    And now, Trump wants to bring all the worst of the decade back. The homophobia, the religious overtones (complete with satanic panic), rampant misogyny, the worship of money, the rollback of environmental regulations and, maybe most affronting of all, Hulk Hogan. The latter, like Trump, experienced his own heyday in the 80s, when interest in pro wrestling and the WWE reached an all-time crescendo. And, also like Trump, Hogan has a reputation for, let’s say, embellishing (read: fabricating) his lore. Because he found his success by being an over-the-top wrestler, Hogan never seemed inclined to shed his performative persona. As a result, many will remain forever haunted by Hogan at the RNC a.k.a. Trump rally ripping his shirt off to reveal a Trump/Vance tank top as he screamed, “Let Trumpamania [unclear why he wouldn’t just say ‘Trump Mania,’ but anyway] run wild brother! Let Trumpamania rule again!”

    As many pointed out, it was like seeing the plot of Idiocracy fully realized. A trajectory that can now be rightfully pinned on the “ideals” of the 80s. For while it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times—and those are coming back with a vengeance if Trump manages to win the presidency yet again. On the plus side though, it seems that CDs are making a comeback to align with this potential return to the Decade of Greed.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Forget About Eyes Without A Face, It’s Time to Bow to the Girl With No Face (Not to be Confused With Madonna’s Character in Dick Tracy)

    Forget About Eyes Without A Face, It’s Time to Bow to the Girl With No Face (Not to be Confused With Madonna’s Character in Dick Tracy)

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    It’s been an entire presidential term since the last time Allie X released an album. The record in question, Cape God, came at an all too apropos moment in the culture: the era of lockdowns. As though intuiting the arrival of an “at-home glaze,” Allie X (real name: Alexandra Ashley Hughes) had taken inspiration from Steven Okazaki’s 2015 documentary Heroin: Cape Cod, USA for the Cape God universe. But if Cape God was all about the inevitable decay of one’s drug-induced malaise, Girl With No Face seems to capture the apex of a drug high before the crash. That moment just after a snort in the bathroom of some dark, debauched club. Alas, since clubs aren’t really all that dark and debauched anymore, Allie X has naturally seen fit to retreat into the past, during one of the inarguable best times for club culture: the 80s. 

    To set the mood of the record and bring her listener into this new sonic landscape she’s established, Allie X appropriately commences with “Weird World.” Unsurprisingly, X remarked that she began working on this song during the pandemic, a time for many people (especially white people) when the proverbial “mask” was peeled back on just about everything to reveal a very scary face of things indeed. As for the mask-centric cover art, which features Allie X’s exterior mask cracked down the center, it speaks to the chanteuse’s sentiment, “I feel like there was a sort of death that happened, like an erasure of maybe previous identities, and rather than emerging with a fully-formed new identity, I feel like I’m still in progress, I’m figuring it out. I like the idea that masks are flexible in that way. They’re a protection.” In addition to being a way to conceal—because, sometimes, concealment is protection. But there is often no protection from this world that is so weird, as Allie X describes it, opening the song with the verse, “Oh, the light shines through the linen/Der morgen beginnt singen/I don’t want to dream anymore/Oh, they tell me that I’m stubborn/Treffe meine wahl im zorn/I don’t want to dream anymore.” The German portion meaning, “The morning begins singing/Make my choice in anger.” Something that’s difficult not to do when we live in a world where the choice is between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet, Allie X commented on the freedom of ceasing to pretend the world is anything other than a totally fucked-up place, which is why, in turn, there are so many fucked-up people in it—mirror reflections of the system that upholds the globe (while simultaneously pushing it toward collapse). As Allie X put it, “The ‘weird world’ is this idea of seeing things as they actually are, and how that can actually be an empowering moment, even though it’s a sad moment.”

    And, because it’s a kind of sadness that many don’t want to experience, they prefer to remain in denial, insisting the world isn’t “weird” at all. So it is that Allie X sings in the chorus, “I know nobody wants to hear this, but/I live in a weird world/Yeah, it’s sad but it’s true/Maybe you can’t see it/But you live in one too/I used to be a dream girl/But the world interfered/At least now I know why/Now I know why/Now I know I’m weird.” And that’s because, that’s right, the world is. The uptempo, synth-drenched rhythms change tack slightly on the record’s namesake, “Girl With No Face,” which features a more OMD meets Kraftwerk tinge (there are definitely notes of OMD’s “Messages” as Allie X starts off with her “ooo-ooo-ooos”). With the album’s overall hints of early Madonna (we’re talking the self-titled debut), perhaps it’s only right that Allie X should unwittingly (?) make an esoteric reference to Madonna’s character in Dick Tracy: No Face a.k.a. “The Blank.” That is, when she wasn’t Breathless Mahoney. The song and album title also feel like a clear nod to Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without A Face,” that song title itself taken from the 1960 French horror movie of the same name. Allie X’s sonic tones on the record do mirror some of what’s in that particular Idol single, but “Girl With No Face” is more sonically erratic than that, with the synths becoming screeching and violent around the one-minute, fifty-three-second mark as Allie X sings, “She has no friends/Up on the catwalk/And she is sharp/So shut your talk-talk/If you behave you get to play/But don’t be greedy, she can spot a fake.” Which is probably easier for Allie X to do in her current home of Los Angeles. A town that, in many ways, seemed to embrace the post-punk and new wave movements in music and fashion with more gusto than its rival city of New York.

    But neither of these were the real muse behind the sound of Girl With No Face, as Allie X explained that the UK music scene during this period was one of the key influences on the record. She also added, “The movement I’m talking about, punk to post-punk, really did happen in the UK. Some would argue New York City, but that doesn’t interest me as much.” Thank fucking god someone has some sense about not being that interested in NYC. Because, as she said, she can spot the fakes—and there’s nothing faker than NYC new wave. It was all about that UK shit. Indeed, Allie X noted of getting in touch with her British roots again, “My dad is from the UK. He’s from Coventry. As a kid, I went there a lot and always felt this real connection to my uncles, aunts and cousins over there. I’ve always been the kid that would get made fun of for being weird, and going there, I felt like they all understood me and we had the same sense of humor and I really belonged… I’ve rekindled my love and connection for the UK as I’ve made this [record] and reconnected with a lot of my family whom I hadn’t seen in so long.” 

    Being that “Girl With No Face” is something like the “thesis” of the album, the true jumping-off point for the concept, it makes sense that Allie X would say of this “alter ego,” of sorts, “She’s my invisible muse—my cunty muse!” And cunty she is, if one is to go by the warning, “Torment the girl, she can ruin your world/Don’t get in her way.” The attitude of the girl with no face is perhaps so pronounced because one can project whatever they want onto her, and usually, expressionless women are presumed to be bitches anyway (perhaps why “bitchy” Madonna was cast as No Face…apart from having an “in” with the director). There’s even a dash of Edwyn Collins’ only signature, “A Girl Like You,” when Allie X declares, “Say, ‘I never met a girl like you,’” adding in the outro, “I never met a girl like you/Like you/I’m the girl with no face/And you never need a face.” Not when no one’s really looking at anybody anyway. And, as the next song indicates, nor do you really need any tits. 

    As the third single from the album, “Off With Her Tits” (a phrase one could easily envision a different kind of queen shouting in a fit of rage) brings with it a tempo that becomes more straightforwardly upbeat again. And one would have to be “upbeat” to sneak in the fear-inducing lyrics, “Off with her tits/I gotta fix/This one little bit/Or l’ll throw a fit/Now off with her tits.” Although Allie X preferred to keep it less direct with regard to what the song is about, it can easily serve a dual interpretation. On the one hand, it’s clearly about a woman’s tits getting in the way of her being “taken seriously,” instead appraised for her body rather than her wit (i.e., “Go take the piss/I’m flat with a wit/Not soft full of shit/Now off with her tits”). On the other (and considering Allie X’s fanbase), it feels like it can directly address some of the transgender dysphoria that can occur when one doesn’t identify with the body of a woman. The fact that even women weigh in on other women’s tits with a misogynistic viewpoint plays into the verse, “Then I called the doctor/Said, ‘Miss what can you do?’/She told me she’d cut them off/I said, ‘Sign me up for June’/I went to the teller/Took out 10K in cash/She said, ‘Bitch are you joking? I wish I had that rack.’” Not Allie X, who wants to be valued for her intellect before her body. Luckily for her, gay men can appreciate both.

    And speaking of gays, the following track is dedicated to a particular couple that came to see a show of hers at the Bowery Ballroom in 2018: “John and Jonathan.” Amused by the similarity of their names when they introduced themselves after the concert, Allie X remarked that she might write a song about them one day. Of course, John and Jonathan thought, “Yeah, right.” But, lo and behold, the inspiration did hit a few years later. And to the overt tune of  Kraftwerk’s 1978 single, “The Model.” Infused with just a touch more disco flair as Allie X paints the picture, “John and Jonathan are on the town/John and Jonathan, they go up, they go down/At the Bowery, in line they wait/They will stay all night then wake at eight.” Although it seems to initially be a frothy rumination on two “cosmopolitan” gay men, Allie X soon makes it an interior reflection about the weirdness of fame as she asks, “But how will I know if they care for me?/Do I believe what they say?/When I’m on stage they all cheer for me/I must soak up the praise/And save it for a rainy day/Dear John and Jonathan/Who am I to you?” That last line touching on the inherently parasocial nature between fan and star. Except that, in John and Jonathan’s case, at least Allie X actually does know who they are. 

    As for whether or not “Galina” still knows who Allie X is, well, that’s less apparent. And for those few who thought track five on Girl With No Face was a misspelling of the Italian word for “hen,” they might be either relieved or disappointed to learn that it’s actually about a Russian woman named Galina who worked at the naturopathic clinic in Toronto where Allie X would seek some alleviation for the eczema on her inner elbows. Per Allie X, Galina, for many years, “made this cream in her kitchen that worked better than steroids. She would always say, ‘It cost me more to make this than I’m charging you. I get this man in the Swiss Alps to gather these herbs and I make you this cream.’ She was pretty old, so I always worried: ‘What happens when Galina retires? It’s not like this is some patented product.’ So sure enough, in the summer of 2022, I returned to the clinic, and I was like, ‘Could I place an order for the cream from Galina?’ And the lady was like, ‘Oh, Galina has retired.’ And I was like, ‘What!?! Did she tell anyone the recipe?‘ And she was like, ‘No, she won’t tell. There’s nothing we can do—Galina has lost her memory.’” Thus, in the words of Joni Mitchell, “Don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” What’s more, something about that story smacks of how so many things get lost when one generation starts to die out. Of course, Allie X, being an L.A. Lady now, renders the deep message with a tinge more shallowness in the jaunty tune that goes, “Galina, wake up I’m running out of luck/And I get so ugly without you/Now, open your eyes/Help me make it through the night/Galina, wake up Galina, wake up/Know you don’t give a fuck/Fear, you’ll take the answers to your gravе/You could open your eyes/Hеlp me make it through the night/Galina, please, wake up.”

    Allie X’s urgent need for Galina back in her life not because she actually cares all that much about her as a person, but because she needs her “goods” to look her best acknowledges the generally transactional nature between human beings (which has only worsened in the years since the 1980s, the decade Allie X is communing with). Her concern for her own appearance rather than Galina’s well-being further manifests in the lines, “My hand’s turnin’ dry and red/She keeps sleepin’ in her bed/My face crackin’ in the light/Her lips part, the tiniest smile.”

    Reiterating the Kraftwerk influence on the record, the following track, “Hardware/Software,” correlates easily to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” (and the entire Computer World album). To boot, Allie X’s construction of the song is very akin to the Kraftwerk style in that it leans heavily on the music itself, with only two verses, the latter of which includes, “My hardware is getting too fast/I need to slow down, honey, wanna make it last/And my software is kicking me in the gut/It’s gonna get me soft like a pillow top/I wanna line my bed with a mountain of debt/I wanna earn my face on the internet/I wanna kill, kill, kill ‘til my world is dead/And I can’t stop thinking ‘bout all of that.” Needless to say, Allie X’s lyrics are slightly more sex- and violence-drenched. Ah, and talking of violence, the track that follows is the New Order-y (“Blue Monday,” of course) “Black Eye.” Though the opening gives a dash of Kilo’s “Cocaine” (recently sampled in Beyoncé’s “America Has A Problem”), it’s really all about the “Blue Monday” feels for the majority of the song, with Allie X addressing she’s a bit of a masochist when it comes to rolling with life’s punches, so to speak (hence, the black eye metaphor). Although some might initially be quick to accuse this of being some sort of anti-woke, “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” song, it is, instead, very much on-brand for the message of the album, which is to never let other people (and the hardships they can so often cause you) get in your way or stop you from achieving your dreams and goals. Thus, Allie X gives herself the pep talk, of sorts, “Oh, hit me, hit me with that super pain/‘Cause a hit feels like I’m dancin’ in the rain/Gimme that beat/There’s no need to cry, it’s just a black eye, yeah/Hit me, hit me with that super bass (Nicki Minaj would tend to agree)/‘Cause I want tonight to slap me in the face/Gimme that beat/There’s no need to cry, it’s just a black eye, yeah.”

    The accompanying video, directed by none other than Allie X (which is in keeping with the fact that she also produced the entire Girl With No Face album), offers the surreal, visceral visuals one would expect of such a song, without hitting the viewer over the head (violence pun intended) with the actual image of Allie X being punched in the eye. But for those who have never slept on Allie X’s brilliance, this is no surprise. For those who have, she brings listeners the tongue-in-cheek “You Slept On Me.” Sonically, it pays clear homage to Michael Sembello’s Flashdance staple, “Maniac.” But lyrically, the best way to describe it is: Sparks and Charli XCX birthed a song together and the result was, “I held my tonguе for about long enough/It’s about damn time that I spoke up/I’m an icon, honey, this isn’t a chore/And I need to make money so give me yours/You missed my debut then my renaissance/You missed my late romantic, my veridict au France/Now I’m a modern bitch and I’m getting tough/Better make it up, kids, enough’s enough/Oh, what a shame/It’s clear to see/You’ve been so dumb sleeping on me.” Allie X continues to unleash the “cunty muse” she was referring to vis-à-vis her Girl With No Face persona by concluding, “You’ve been eating Krispy Kreme/You’ve been praising Paula Deen/There’s no point trying to disagree/Just get in line, you tired queen/Yeah, yeah.” Ah, the dangerous risk Allie X took by “insulting” her primary fanbase. 

    Taking us out of the 80s for a moment to channel a Labrinth-esque vocal intro, Allie X then dips right back into the decade with the “goth pop” (her words) tone of “Saddest Smile.” And, of all the songs on Girl With No Face, this is the one that perhaps most closely encapsulates a key “mood board” she used as inspiration for the “feel” of the album: Uli Edel’s Christiane F. (side note: that means Madonna is even more roundaboutly embedded in this project via the fact that Edel also directed Body of Evidence). The languor and theme of the song exists almost as though in deliberate negation of what Ariana Grande and MARINA talk about on “fake smile” and “Highly Emotional People,” respectively, for Allie X instead insists that things are as they always were, and we must suppress our emotions in order to be even vaguely accepted in society. Ergo, “When I’m sad, I don’t cry/I put on my saddest smile” and “No one wants to see you soften/So we have to harden ’til we can turn to dust.” A bleak and honest thought, one put far more bluntly than Allie X euphemistically saying this world is fucked on the opening track, “Weird World.”

    The tempo picks up again on the defiant “Staying Power,” an anthem of divergence from the norm. It’s repetitive sound seems designed to highlight Allie X’s insistence, “I don’t sing for straight men ’cause they just ruin the world/Wanna be good daughter but I pushed my mom away/Wanna be good patient but my doctor makes me pay/Wanna save the baby but I threw away the bath/My body’s weak, my mind is bleak, there’s one thing that I have/Staying power, I’ve got the power/The world can hurt me, I don’t mind.” This, too, channels her sentiments on “Black Eye,” which is essentially Jennifer Love-Hewitt saying, “What are you waiting for? Huh?! What are you waiting for?!” in song form. It’s a taunt and a challenge to the world, the universe to throw its worst at Allie X because 1) she can take it and 2) she’s got, that’s right, staying power.

    This jubilant declaration of strength (however sardonic) persists on the album’s finale, “Truly Dreams.” And this song, too, is a blender of nods to 80s signatures, an explosion of pastiche. One that can best be characterized as: Siouxie Sioux’s “Hong Kong Garden” sound with a dash of the way Debbie Harry chants “Dreamin’” on Blondies’s song of the same name and, of course, a lilt that majorly channels Kate Bush. Whatever homage the listener can hear in it, the most important takeaway is her message in the chorus: “I keep dreaming/And if it’s not enough then/I’ll just keep my hopes and dreaming/With all my might, just listen/Truly dreams never die/They never die/(Never die, baby, can never die).” Because the real death in this life is when one gives up on their dreams. The body’s expiration after that is just incidental. And even if one feels as unseen, as invisible as the Girl With No Face, it doesn’t mean they can’t still serve cunt just like Allie X’s alter ego (and Breathless Mahoney as “The Blank”).

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Wham!—The Music Duo and the Documentary—Reminds That Pop Music Was Never Frivolous

    Wham!—The Music Duo and the Documentary—Reminds That Pop Music Was Never Frivolous

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    It’s easy to write Wham! off, even to this day, as another “embarrassing” 80s pop group. Their preppy, often neon attire, combined with Hair As Personality stylings also add to the present-day listener’s inability to take them seriously. And yet, even in their time and place—when they “made sense”—they were still regarded by critics as froth. Or, worse still, chaff. But that didn’t stop fans and casual radio listeners alike from turning up the volume whenever one of the duo’s songs came on. As they frequently did once the band finally “made it big.” And, compared to other British bands (The Beatles included), Wham! had a relatively “seamless” transition from high school boys to twenty-something megastars.

    Maybe part of what made it feel so “natural” was that George Michael—born Georgios Panayiotou—and Andrew Ridgeley were friends for such a long time and shared the same dream of becoming musicians for equally as long, that it became unfathomable to think that life could turn out any other way. Director Chris Smith (known for other standout documentaries including Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond and Fyre) homes in on that friendship throughout Wham!, and how there would never have been a Wham! without that boyhood bond. Indeed, Michael himself is featured in the documentary stating, “I genuinely believe that there’s something predestined about it. I mean, the path might have been totally different had I sat down next to someone else that day.” That day being when George, age eleven, met Andrew, age twelve at Bushey Meads School in 1975. It became quickly apparent that their bond would be forged by music, with the voice of Ridgeley (for Smith goes the Asif Kapadia route in opting for voices and archival footage in lieu of talking heads for the documentary) remarking, “Essentially, Yog [Ridgeley’s affectionate nickname for George] and I saw things exactly the same way. Musically, we were joined at the hip.” A hip-joining that led them to start a ska band called The Executive that eventually “imploded,” leaving George and Andrew in the ruins—thus, demarcating them as the only two who were genuinely serious about “doing music” “as a career.”

    By 1981, the formation of that career was taking shape in the form of going to Beat Route (get it?—a play on beetroot) in London’s West End. It was there that nightclub culture informed the sound and lyrical content of Wham!’s work. As Ridgeley notes, “The songwriting was dictated by our circumstances, the environment around us.” Not just one dominated by escaping onto the dance floor, but one dominated by recession, unemployment and the unshakeable onset of Thatcherism. So yes, even a band as “light” as Wham! was expressing the pain of life as a young man in Britain. A life that seemed to offer no future other than the factory line or the dole line. That, too, was the uniqueness of Wham!—it was so distinctly laddish. So geared toward ruffians and a “neo” kind of Teddy Boy. The very prototype that John Lennon imitated when he was first starting to navigate his musical identity. Like The Beatles, Wham!, for all its “male motifs” appeal, would end up attracting primarily women as fans. With Michael in particular becoming a “pinup,” despite his resistance toward such a label as it meant having to further bury his sexuality in the sand. This occurring early on in Wham!’s career, after Michael decided to come out to Shirlie Kemp (one of the “backup girls” in the band/Ridgeley’s girlfriend-turned-ex) and Ridgeley while staying a few extra days in Ibiza after shooting the video for “Club Tropicana.” Because of course Ibiza would facilitate that epiphany, that sense of freeness to finally admit to others who you are. Alas, Shirlie and Ridgeley advised Michael against coming out publicly because they were both more concerned about his oppressive father’s horrifying reaction than anyone or anything else. It was with that bum advice that Michael sealed off a key part of himself for decades to come.

    For those who might have thought “Careless Whisper” was accordingly about some secret, forbidden love gone wrong, Wham! clears it up as being, quite simply, one of the first songs the duo recorded as Wham! As a matter of fact, the mention of “Careless Whisper” is interwoven throughout Wham!, almost like a recurring talisman…the way it has been in so many people’s lives. It was one of those songs that, just as A. B. Quintanilla writing Selena’s “Como La Flor,” kept building up over years of thinking about it. Michael confirms as much in Wham!, recounting, “We put it together very slowly, at home or on the bus, just add a little day by day.” Nonetheless, it wasn’t “really ready” until 1984, though Michael was struck with inspiration for the lyrics at just seventeen years old, while riding the bus to his job as an usher at a movie theater (thus, the verse, “Something in your eyes/Calls to mind a silver screen/And all its sad goodbyes”). Again, he was only seventeen when he wrote it. A song of such power and maturity. A song that would make all saxophone solos after it pale in comparison. A song that would set Ridgeley up for life as a result of receiving half the royalties.

    But for all the flak Ridgeley gets about “riding coattails,” it has to be said that he was the main reason Wham! existed at all (or George Michael The Performer, for that matter). Were it not for his persistent harassment of a label cofounder for Innervision Records called Mark Dean, Wham! probably never would have gotten a record deal (even if it turned out to be a really shitty one, in terms of any sort of financial gain for the band’s success). Dean lived down the street from Ridgeley’s parents, and Ridgeley would phone Dean’s mom asking if her son had listened to the demo tape he put in their letterbox yet. When he finally did, Dean was impressed enough despite the lo-fi quality of it to sign the group to the label.

    It’s here that Ridgeley stating, “There was only one thing that I ever wanted to do: be in a band with Yog” comes to mind. Because perhaps that’s why, once Ridgeley’s dream was fulfilled, it was all downhill from there (for his music career, at least). Complete with his raucous, party animal reputation that resulted in the tabloid nicknames “Animal Andy” and Randy Andy.” But it was a tabloid frenzy that suited Michael well, for it meant no one could call attention to his own seemingly total lack of a sexual appetite…for women, that is. Even if the telltale clues were always there, plain as day. Just look at a double entendre-y lyric such as, “I choose to cruise.” Not to mention the entire contents of “Nothing Looks the Same in the Light,” a song Michael wrote about the first time he realized he wanted to stay in bed with a man for the night.

    Not being able to be honest about who he was caused an undeniable depression. It was likely for this reason that Michael retreated further into the protection of Wham!’s “effervescent” and “exuberant” aura. Fun and “escapism” being the core tenets of what Wham! was all about. It’s possible Michael was afraid to lose a protective shield like that (even though many probably thought Ridgeley needed Wham! more than Michael). For, unlike most bands that start out at a certain age, therefore represent/are forever associated with that certain age, Wham! knew from the outset that it was ultimately a finite project. That there was, inevitably, an expiration date on what they represented—fun, froth and frivolity—once they aged out of the very demographic they were appealing to. The same thing technically happened to The Beatles after 1965 (once Beatlemania had crested), but they chose to reanimate into a “Part Deux” of themselves, replete with psychedelia and Eastern-influenced lyrics and rhythms.

    Wham! was never going to bother with a Part Deux of themselves, which is why it was so important to them to “make it big” in their teens/early twenties. “Youth” was their brand. And, in contrast to The Beatles, they weren’t shy about their affinity for pop (The Beatles, instead, wanted to be categorically “rock n’ roll”). As both Michael and Ridgeley exhibited, pop was never froth, not fundamentally. In that sense, one might say they were doing “purposeful pop” long before Katy Perry decided to on Witness. Because, in defiance of most Brits, Michael and Ridgeley weren’t snobbish about the genre. Indeed, willfully chose it (they “chose life,” if you will) over something like the ska and punk genres that dominated their sound when they were in The Executive.

    A pop song could say so much more than any treatise or political speech. And “Wham Rap!” did just that, with an opening that goes, “Wham! bam!/I am! a man!/Job or no job,/You can’t tell me that I’m not./Do! you!/Enjoy what you do?/If not, just stop!/Don’t stay there and rot!” It was advice, in the end, that would apply to the dissolution of Wham! But that doesn’t come until the end of the documentary. In the meantime, the criticism they endure for shifting from “socially aware” content to something like “Club Tropicana”—which marked the true essence of the band—is addressed. Reviews from the British press were merciless, including assessments such as, “The work is futile, the thought is shallow…” Yet there was nothing futile, shallow or thoughtless about Michael and Ridgeley catering to what their own peers wanted. Knowing full well what would make hearts and pulses alike flutter. As Michael explained to one interviewer back in the day, “I think what’s happening in England is that there’s a large escapist element creeping back into music now. Three or four years ago with the punk thing, people were shouting. Now, they’re not ashamed of being young, unemployed. They’d rather just go to a disco or a club and forget about it.” Wham!, in that regard, was anything but frivolous, even if they were catering to those who wanted to be frivolous.

    Having a keen social awareness of their time and place, Wham! embodied the 80s not just for their vibrantly-colored sportswear and hairstyles that required a blow dryer, but because they knew beneath the so-called froth of it all was a dark, unpleasant reality—neoliberalism held up as a god, racism, AIDS, war, famine. So why not just escape for the four-minute length of a pop song? Why not just have a good time while you could, whenever you could grab it? Something only a pop song is capable of furnishing on a socialistic level. Nothing about that is frivolous, yet pop music continues to be lambasted for having no value when, in truth, it remains one of the few pure modern comforts we have in a world of cold, hard reality.

    To many, Wham! will never be a band “of substance.” Or, if it is, then only if the duo is being sardonically pontificated upon by yuppies like Patrick Bateman (indeed, how did Bret Easton Ellis choose not to include a discourse on Make It Big from Bateman at some point in American Psycho?). But to those who understand that the presence of pop music in our culture is the best way to check its pulse (and if it even still has one), Wham! was a symbol of one of the most vital times in music, reflecting the youth back to itself before it was forced into the kind of situation “Wham Rap!” and “Young Guns” warned about.

    With a run time of about one hour and thirty minutes, the Wham! documentary feels as short-lived as the band’s five-ish years of recording together. And likewise, it’s just as impactful despite its shortness.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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