Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

35-for-35

35-for-35: 1991 – “Vibeology” by Paula Abdul

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Oh, yes, we are going there. I have another Paula Adbul song on this list of all-time favorites from the same year Nirvana released Nevermind. Come ahead and fight me.

Spellbound is a much stronger LP than Forever Your Girl. It signaled this clearly on each of its first two singles – “Rush, Rush,” a ballad with Abdul’s finest recorded performance (crazy, since it’s reportedly an early scratch vocal) and the unpolished and new age-y “Promise of a New Day.” The third single was the marginal ballad “Blowing Kisses In the Wind.”

That meant that the core of this album had yet to be heard by the general listening public. It included a sexy, sultry, witty set of songs that paired well with Prince’s 1991 effort Diamonds and Pearls. Songs like “Spellbound” or “U” would have made terrific singles that could compete on the radio. (“U” was even written by Prince! How do you pass that up as a single?!)

So, of course, the fourth single was “Vibeology.”

This song… I really have no words. I love it so much. How can I possibly express my feelings to you other than through dance?

“Vibeology” sort of takes the position of, “What if Paula’s duet with MC Skat Kat was the best thing on that first record?” And, well, “Cold Hearted” aside … maybe it was? While Spellbound was pretty evenly split between ballads and more sultry numbers, paula-abdul-1991-spellbound-album-cover“Vibeology” alone stood in the center as the one batshit crazy dance-capade full of horns and also Paula Abdul screaming “horny horns!” to introduce said horns.

If you listen to it next to the Prince-penned “U” it seems to be imitating the New Jack Swing sound with dancehall flourishes. It’s just so damn manic it’s hard to take it as anything other than a novelty song. I mean, all the different voices, the lack of a discernible verse, the croaked slam poetry section, the “Go Paula!” chants, the horny horns.

Yet, there is something I unabashedly love about this song. It’s basically built from the same pieces as “Vogue” – check out the bounding low bassline and the clanging piano chords. If you stripped away some of the silliness here and moved the “you got the vibeology” rap further into the song, it would actually feel a lot like “Vogue.”

Only, you know, with horny horns.

Honestly, I think this song single-handedly killed Paula Abdul’s career – maybe specifically her low-rent “Express Yourself” video, sexy frumpy circus-with-feathers aesthetic, and subsequent pitchy MTV Music Video Awards performance. When she came back with an even sultrier follow-up in Head Over Heels it seemed like a desperate grab for attention in a post-pop, rock-oriented world – but, that’s only because it was never set up with the right singles from Spellbound.

Here’s that so bad it’s bad MTV VMA performance: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1991 – “Vibeology” by Paula Abdul

35-for-35: 1990 – “Pump Up The Jam” by Technotronic

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Yes, “Vogue” was released in 1990 and this post is not about Vogue. You’re on to me, I’m actively avoiding using this series to just gush over Madonna. I can do that any day.

“Vogue” was part of a trend – maybe its apex – of bringing elements of popular club music to the mainstream (in this case, House music). The popularity lasted only a brief period and had few popular antecedents before going underground again thanks to the radio takeover by alternative rock in the following years. You could hear it again on Cathy Dennis’s “C’Mon Move This,” Ce Ce Peniston’s “Finally,” and all over the next albums by Paula Abdul and Prince.

While those tracks are all glossy, radio-ready examples, a lot of the significant songs of the period weren’t so polished. Some of those fell into the sub-genre of “hip house,” a subgenre born in Chicago which fused hip hop break beats and bassline samples with house elements. One of the bigger crossover hits was “Pump Up The Jam,” by Technotronic – who I saw open Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour in 1990!

technotronic_-_pump_up_the_jam-_the_album“Pump Up The Jam” is really stripped down. Its drum machine sounds cheap and is almost all snares and hi-hat rides. It eschews the clanging piano of House completely and inserts only the most passing of synths to dress up its bass loops. The vocals from Ya Kid K are half spoken and half sung, tinged by the inflection of a hip hop MC (though she does not appear in the video – the singer there is model Felly Kilingi, who also graced the cover of the LP).

I played the hell out of this song on tape in 1990 and I cannot explain why. I liked all of those House singles I listed above, but I wasn’t remotely into hip hop or anything with the bracing starkness of this song. But, as Mother of Krisis would say, “Does it have a good beat? Can you dance to it?” Both answers were yes.

Thus, at sundown I would drag my boombox out to the edge of my grandmother’s postage-stamp urban front lawn, pull on my denim jacket, turn this song up to 10, and execute my choreography in the middle of the street for all to see.

(Seriously, was there any doubt that I was going to be on stage later in life? What the hell was everyone in my family waiting for.)

35-for-35: 1989 – “Deadbeat Club” by The B-52’s

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]b52s-cosmic-thingI was drawn to the B-52’s Cosmic Thing by the ubiquitous “Love Shack” and the magnificent “Roam,” the latter of which captured that Atlanta sound in a perfect female-lead analog to the increasingly popular R.E.M..

I didn’t like R.E.M. at the time, but I loved the B-52’s. They were whacky and whimsical. They wrote songs about aliens in the oval office and love shacks on the side of the road.

The thing I loved about them the most is that they were a real band – maybe the first rock band I really loved that wasn’t The Beatles. I was obsessed with reading liner notes at this stage in my life, constantly scanning the co-write credits and musicians.

Most of the artists I listened to were just singers, although by this point Madonna had wised up and garnered a co-write on every track of Like a Prayer.

The B-52’s were different. They wrote the songs and played the instruments. I pictured them in the studio, arguing over the sounds of their chiming guitars and high, sighing harmonies.

The leading edge of Gen-Xers were just graduating high school when Cosmic Thing was released, still several years away from the sorts of failures defined in Reality Bites. Yet, “Deadbeat Club” perfectly aligns to that misanthropic, listless future, constantly mocking the happenings “down in NormalTown.”

It’s a song full of atmosphere and images – dancing in torn sheets in the rain and heading down to the bar for their cheapest beer. None of these settings are pictured in the plain video for the song, but I can see them clearly to this day.

The B-52’s were also a band with caché. My family knew who they were and didn’t look down their noses at them the way they did my other 80s pop. I remember standing on the porch of my grandmother’s house, listening to my aunt and cousin talk about the B-52’s riotous earlier records.

“Ah, but it’s a shame about what happened with the guitarist,” one of them said.

“What happened?” I asked, wide-eyed. I hadn’t been aware that the guitarist in my liner notes wasn’t the original guitarist.

“Ricky Wilson, the blonde one’s brother. He was… you know. He died of AIDS.”

b52s-deadbeat-clubThis was still early in the AIDS epidemic, but I knew what it was and the implication of the words. He was gay and he died. I filed that information away. Maybe it’s part of what lead to the blowout with my tiny, conservative Christian school a few years later, where in a debate about AIDS in biology class was told by the teacher it was a plague sent to punish the immoral.

I didn’t have a club to call my own when I first heard the song. My only friends were classmates of whom I was only close to one. Yet, as I think back on the clubs I joined and that formed around me in life, this could have been the theme song to many of them.

In my mind, this was what it was like to feel one with your friends – a group that would otherwise be outcasts. Sitting around, stalking through town, and looking over our noses at the norms.

If we were the deadbeats and reject, who’d want to be normal?

35-for-35: 1988 – “Cold Hearted” by Paula Abdul

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug](Since Mondays were previously my #MusicMonday posting day, I’m giving you a double-dose of 35-for-35 to start the week and to fit all the songs into one month!)

Much of Paula Abdul’s debut Forever Your Girl is a cotton candy assemblage – whatever sugar they could spin around an inexperienced singer with an approximate relationship with singing in tune.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Forever Your Girl. I know every word on it. But, if you held it up to today it would be less Arianna Grande and more … I don’t know, who is a fake famous person who put out a record to maintain the illusion of their popularity? Julianne Hough? I’m not down with all the artists that kids like these days.

That’s besides the point. The point is that on this album filled with conventional spun sugar sounds (like title track “Forever Your Girl”) there are two singular, break-out moments that no one other than Paula Abdul managed to record.

One is the stark, funky “Straight Up.” The other is “Cold Hearted,” or as people more commonly know it, “Cold-Hearted Snake.”

Listen carefully to the sounds in the intro. It combines the same synth bass as “Straight Up,” the same 2s-and-4s snare hits, paired with with whining guitar bends not too different from the infamous wah on that song. What mades “Cold Hearted” stand out is the frantically sawing sampled string section that is subtly doubled by computerized blips.

When the intro chorus hits the song would be nearly identical to “Straight Up” if not for those strings, which stop their sawing to carry a counter-melody that makes Abdul’s clipped, staccato phrases form a single legato melody.

paula_abdul-cold_heartedThat’s it, really. Otherwise it’s just “Straight Up, Part 2: Faster and About Someone Else’s Lover.”

Were the strings alone enough to turn this into the massively memorable hit it became? Probably not. I tend to think it had a little something to do with the video – released almost a year after the LP originally dropped.

I was eight years old when that video hit. I wasn’t the kind of little boy who thought girls were gross – I was deeply in love with a girl in my class. I always wasn’t the kind of boy with prurient interest in scantily clad women – maybe because I was being raised by a cadre of women myself.

So please understand when I tell you that, even as an eight-year-old, I knew this video was heart-poundingly sexy.

Honestly, I think it kind of defined sexy for me. The moment that sticks in my mind is from the four-minute-mark, the image of the throbbing mass of limbs expanding and contracting around Abdul.

(Also, it was directed by David Fincher, who would go on to direct the video for “Vogue,” and later the films Se7en, The Game, Panic Room, Benjamin Button, and so on.)

Between the special alchemy of the song and the sexed up video, “Cold Hearted” was a memorable track that dominated my eight-year-old life. It seems like it’s slightly faded in the eyes of pop culture in favor of “Straight Up” and the whimsical “Opposites Attract,” but it remains among my favorite Paula Abdul songs.

35-for-35: 1987 – “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]On September 24th. I found myself on stage in front of thousands of people, guitar held aloft beside my head, thrashing The Edge’s signature two-bar riff from the chorus of “Where The Streets Have No Name” while silently screaming with happiness.

As impressive and stadium-filling as many of U2’s epic early anthems are, when you break them down at the musical level you find that there’s very little there. Like, practically nothing. This song is pretty much a eighth-note bassline entirely of roots and a handful of chiming mid-neck electric guitar notes with a delay. Bono and Larry Mullen, Jr. do all the heavy lifting, and it’s not even all that heavy.

That’s fascinating to me, because I think this song sounds nothing less than majestic.

I discovered the simple bones beneath this epic song this summer as we prepared to play the first day finish line of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s City to Shore bike ride. My cover band Smash Fantastic had been invited back to play after missing 2015 due to a hurricane that never really came.

where-the-streets-have-no-nameWe had one problem – our lead singer, Ashley, would be at the happiest place on Earth during the show. She had even though about our charity gig while booking her Disney vacation, but was working from the later date of the previous year’s race.

Playing for the MS even is a cause that’s meaningful to me on several levels, so I didn’t want to pass up the chance to play and had Ashley’s blessing to perform without her. Yet, we couldn’t do that without a rocking female lead singer.  Jake and I both sing lead on a significant portion of Smash Fantastic songs, they weren’t enough to fill a two hour gig – and, even if they were, they’d leave out tons of our most-popular tunes.

Enter by BFF and long-time collaborator, Gina. We had done covers on many occasions as Arcati Crisis, including once as a wedding band. Plus, Gina is a karaoke veteran who occasionally fronted a rock band for holiday dinners at her old job. While she wasn’t going to be tackling any Kelly Clarkson, the Smash classic rock rep is right up her alley.

With Gina’s came the assumption that we’d be learning a U2 song. There’s just something about Bono’s overdramatic delivery and not-quite tenor voice that maps perfectly onto Gina’s voice, but we never had the excuse to exploit that as Arcati Crisis. Gina, Jake, Zina, and I kicked around a few choices, and decided that this would be the most-appropriate to celebrate finishing between 25 and 90 miles of bike riding.

I wanna run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls
That hold me inside.
I wanna reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.

the-joshua-tree-u2There was much charting and mapping to get the song set for our first go at rehearsal. It was almost too simple for us to make work – so few notes create the overall tonality that one minor misstep sends the song spinning into something unfamiliar. Yet, once we got past counting issues, those simple pieces snapped together perfectly. Suddenly, we were creating that majestic sound.

We rehearsed it only three more times before the show; there was really nothing else to do other than count.

I wanna feel sunlight on my face.
I see the dust-cloud
Disappear without a trace.
I wanna take shelter
From the poison rain
Where the streets have no name

On stage on a gray, windswept September day we rolled out of the second chorus and into the refrain and I had my guitar held up high beside my head as I kept up the machine-gun strum of The Edge’s riff while mouthing the lyrics along with Gina as a way to choke back my tears.

The city’s a flood, and our love turns to rust.
We’re beaten and blown by the wind
Trampled in dust.
I’ll show you a place
High on a desert plain
Where the streets have no name

We’re still building and burning down love
Burning down love.
And when I go there I go there with you
(It’s all I can do)

For five minutes on September 24th, that majesty belonged to us.