Frenetic tumultuous chaotic confused ... it's been a bit hectic, is what I'm sayin'

This should have been a long post this week, but, due to some family matters and other things going on, I simply ran out of time.  I should be able to get back on schedule next week though.

I wanted to be with you alone ...

This week, we got both hail and snow in Southern California.  I’ve written about this whole climate change thing before ... about six years ago, now that I look back on it.  For my first ten years in California, it rained about twice a year—granted, it rained for a week solid every time, but still: pretty much twice in a given year, every year.  And, as near as I could tell, everyone else in SoCal considered this perfectly normal.  Then, about six years ago, the rain began coming more often and lasting longer.  And now suddenly L.A. county has gotten its first blizzard warning in 34 years.  Only for the mountains, true, but ... I mean, multiple co-workers posted pictures on our Slack this week of hail.  Hail!  When was the last time it hailed in L.A.?  Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw hail when I lived on the East Coast.

Typically, I use these types of opportunities to make fun of the climate change deniers.  But, honestly, I’m not even sure who’s still on that train: with more massive wildfires burning in increasingly unlikely places, so many hurricanes in a season that the National Weather Service now routinely has to start over at the beginning of the alphabet, so much flooding that it’s carrying away cars ... is there anyone who claims climate change is a hoax for anything other than performative reasons?  While I was marveling at the reports of snow and hail, one of my old friends from the East Coast was telling me that the temperature hit 80° for them: a new record for February.  I’m pretty sure everyone knows that it’s real at this point, primarily from personal experience.

The only question is, much like with the pandemic: are all these changes permanent? is this just the new normal now?  I don’t know ... I’d like to say I don’t believe it, or at the very least that I hope it’s not so.  But hope is a precious resource these days.  So I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Getting Chatty

I’m probably not the first person to tell you this, but there’s a new AI wunderkind taking the Internet by storm, and it’s called ChatGPT.  Everyone’s buzzing about it, and Microsoft is pumping money into it like crazy, and even boring old news outlets are starting to pick it up—heck, I just heard them mention it on this week’s episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  If you’re late to the party, perhaps I can give you some insight into what’s going on, and, if you’ve been hearing all about it but not really knowing what “it” is, then perhaps I can provide some insight.^*

AI has been undergoing a bit of a Renaissance here lately.  For a long time, AI development was focussed on “state machines,” which are like really fancy flow charts.  You’ve probably seen one of these on the Internet at some point: you know those web pages that try to guess what animal you’re thinking of (or whatever), and, if they can’t guess it, then they ask you to teach it a question that will distinguish your animal from the last animal it guessed, and then it adds that to its little database ... those amusing little things?  Well, those are very simple state machines.  If the answer is “yes,” it goes down one path, and if the answer is “no,” it goes down a different one, until it eventually hits a dead end.  State machines, as it turns out, are very useful in computer science ... but they don’t make good AI.  That’s just not the way humans think (unless you’re playing a game of 20 Questions, and even then a lot of people don’t approach it that logically).  So eventually computer scientists tried something else.

One way you can make a better AI than a state machine is doing something called “machine learning.” With this, you take a bunch of data, and you feed it into an algorithm.  The algorithm is designed to analyze the data’s inputs and outputs: that is, if humans started with thing A (the input), then they might conclude thing B (the output).  If you have a decent enough algorithm, you can make a program that will conclude basically the same things that a human will, most of the time.  Of course, not all humans will come up with the same outputs given the same inputs, so your algorithm better be able to handle contradictions.  And naturally the data you feed into it (its “training data”) will determine entirely how good it gets.  If you accidentally (or deliberately) give it data that’s skewed towards one way of thinking, your machine learning AI will be likewise skewed.  But these are surmountable issues.

Another thing you could do is to create a “language model.” This also uses training data, but instead of examining the data for inputs and outputs, the algorithm examines the words that comprise the data, looking for patterns and learning syntax.  Now, “chatbots” (or computer programs designed to simulate a person’s speech patterns) have been around a long time; Eliza, a faux therapist, is actually a bit older than I am (and, trust me: that’s old).  But the thing about Eliza is, it’s not very good.  It only takes about 5 or so exchanges before you start to butt up against its limitations; if you didn’t know it was an AI when you first started, you’d probably figure it out in under a minute.  Of course, many people would say that Eliza and similar chatbots aren’t even AIs at all.  There’s no actual “intelligence” there, they’d point out.  It’s just making a more-or-less convincing attempt at conversation.

Still, the ability to hold a conversation does require some intelligence, and it’s difficult to converse with a thing without mentally assessing it as either smart, or dumb, or somewhere in between.  Think of Siri and other similar “personal assistants”: they’re not really AI, because they don’t really “know” anything.  They’re just capable of analyzing what you said and turning it into a search that Apple or Google or Amazon can use to return some (hopefully) useful results.  But everyone who’s interacted with Siri or her peers will tell you how dumb she is.  Because she often misunderstands what you’re saying: sometimes because she doesn’t hear the correct words, and sometimes because her algorithm got the words right but failed to tease out a reasonable meaning from them.  So, no, not a “real” AI ... but still something that we can think of as either intelligent or not.

Language models are sort of a step up from Siri et al.  Many folks are still going to claim they’re not AI, but the ability they have to figure out what you meant from what you said and respond like an actual human certainly makes them sound smart.  And they’re typically built like machine learning models: you take a big ol’ set of training data, feed it in, and let it learn how to talk.

Of course the best AI of all would be a combination of both ...

And now we arrive at ChatGPT.  A company called OpenAI created a combined machine learning and language model program which they referred to a “generative pre-trained transfomer,” or GPT.  They’ve made 3 of these so far, so the newest one is called “GPT-3.” And then they glued a chatbot-style language model on top of that, and there you have ChatGPT.  GPT-3 is actually rather amazing at answering questions, if they’re specific enough.  What ChatGPT adds is primarily context: when you’re talking to GPT-3, if it gives you an answer that isn’t helpful or doesn’t really get at the meaning, you have to start over and type your whole question in again, tweaking it slightly to hopefully get a better shot at conveying your meaning.  But, with ChatGPT, you can just say something like “no, I didn’t mean X; please try again using Y.” And it’ll do that, because it keeps track of what the general topic is, and it knows which tangents you’ve drifted down, and it’s even pretty damn good at guess what “it” means in a given sentence if you start slinging pronouns at it.

Now, many news outlets have picked up on the fact that Microsoft is trying to integrate ChatGPT (or something based off of it) into their search engine Bing, and people are speculating that this could be the first serious contender to Google.  I think that’s both wrong and right: while I personally have started to use ChatGPT to answer questions that Google really sucks at answering, so I know it’s better in many situations, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft has the brains to be able to monetize it sufficiently to be a threat to Google’s near-monopoly.  If you want to watch a really good breakdown of this aspect of ChatGPT, there’s a really good YouTube video which will explain it in just over 8 minutes.

But, the thing is, whether or not Microsoft succesfully integrates a ChatGPT-adjacent AI into Bing, this level of useful AI is likely going to change the Internet as we know it.  ChatGPT is smarter than Eliza, or Siri, or Alexa, or “Hey Google.” It’s more friendly and polite, too.  It can not only regurgitate facts, but also offer opinions, advice, and it’s even got a little bit of creativity.  Don’t get me wrong: ChatGPT is not perfect by any means.  It will quite confidently tell you things that are completely wrong, and, when you point out its mistake, completely reverse direction and claim that it was wrong, it was always wrong, and it has no idea why it said that.  It will give you answers that aren’t wrong but are incomplete.  If asked, it will produce arguments that may sound convincing, but are based on faulty premises, or are supported by faulty evidence.  It’s not something you can rely on for 100% accuracy.

But, here’s the thing: if you’ve spent any time searching the Internet, you already know you can’t rely on everything you read.  Half of the shit is made up, and the other half may not mean what you think it means.  Finding information is a process, and you have to throw out as much as you keep, and at the end of it all you hope you got close to the truth ... if we can even really believe in “truth” any more at all.  So, having an assistant to help you out on that journey is not really a bad thing.  I find ChatGPT to be helpful when writing code, for instance: not to write code for me, but to suggest ideas and algorithms when I can then refine on my own.  Here’s the thing: ChatGPT is not a very good programmer, but it is a very knowledgeable one, and it might know a technique (or a whole language) that I never learned.  I would never use ChatGPT code as is ... but I sure do use it as a jumping-off point quite a bit.

And that’s just me being a programmer.  I’m also a D&D nerd, and ChatGPT can help me come up with character concepts or lay out what I need to do to build one.  If I can’t figure out how to do something on my Android phone, I just ask ChatGPT, and it (probably) knows how to do it.  Networking problem? ChatGPT.  Need to understand the difference between filtering water and distilling it? ChatGPT.  Need help choosing a brand of USB hub? ChatGPT.  Want to know what 1/112th the diameter of Mercury is? ChatGPT (it’s 43.39km, by the way, which is 26.97 miles).

But you needn’t take my word for it.  The Atlantic has already published an article called “The College Essay Is Dead” (because, you know, students in the future will just get an AI to write their essays for them).  A Stanford professor gave an interview about how it will “change the way we think and work.” YouTuber Tom Scott (normally quite a sober fellow) posted a video entitled “I tried using AI. It scared me.” The technical term for what these folks are describing is “inflection point.” Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the concept of sitting down of an evening with a book was unheard of.  Before Eli Whitney built a musket out of interchangeable parts, the concept of mass production was ludicrous.  Before Charles Birdseye figured out how to flash-freeze peas, supermarkets weren’t even possible.  And there is an inevitable series of points, from the invention of the telphone to the earliest implementation of ARPANET to the first smartphone, that fairly boggles the mind when you try to imagine life before it.  My youngest child will not be able to conceive of life without a phone in her pocket; my eldest can’t comprehend life before the Internet; and even I cannot really fancy a time when you couldn’t just pick up the phone and call a person, even if they might not be home at the time.  Will my children’s children not be able to envision life before chatty AIs?  Perhaps not.  I can’t say that all those friendly, helpful robots that we’re so familiar with from sci-fi books and shows are definitely in our future ... but I’m no longer willing to say they definitely won’t be, either.

The future will be ... interesting.

__________

* Note: This is not designed to be a fully, technically correct explanation, but rather a deliberate oversimplification for lay people.  Please bear that in mind before you submit corrections.

King Missile is cool ...

I have a friend in from out of town at the moment, so no blog post for you this week.  Still, all is not lost ... no, all is not lost: not yet.

By which I mean you’ll get another shot at it next week.  See ya then.

Blah blah blah

You know, at this point, even I’m bored of hearing me complain about my computer woes.  So let’s just say that today was a bit of a lost cause and leave it at that.

Next week, I sincerely hope that there will be something more exciting here.  I can hardly wait to find out!

80s My Way III

"On a Wavelength Far From Home (1982 Pt 2)"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the series introduction for general background; you may also want to check out the mix introduction for more detailed background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Last time we had arrived in 1982, and, despite enjoying nearly 78 minutes of classic 80s goodness, there was still more to cover.  So let’s finish that up, shall we?

As I noted, 1982 is the beginning of the end of the transitional years.  While there were still some tracks that tried to have it both ways—both straight-ahead rock and this new, “alternative” sound—trends like post-punk, new wave, and, most cruicially synthpop, were here to stay and truly starting to take over the scene.  And, most significantly, a lot of the non-quite-alt from last volume was, unlike volume I, from artists who were truly reinventing themselves.  The members of Asia certainly qualify, but the major success story from last time was Hall & Oates, who were perhaps the most successful at this feat.¹  But there are two other artists who were one thing in the 70s and an entirely different thing in the 80s, with both sides of that changeover still being pretty decent.  I’ve picked one of those to be our closer here:² it’s Golden Earring.  Now, if you’re a typical American, there are exactly two songs by this Dutch band that you’ve ever heard.  The first is “Radar Love,” which is in that 70s proto-hard-rock style epitomized by the Who and Led Zeppelin.  (Weirdly, Golden Earring actually originated in the 60s, where they sounded more like the Beatles or the Zombies.)  But, by the 80s, they were ready to remake themselves again, and so the second of their songs you’ve likely heard is “Twilight Zone,” which sounds nothing like “Radar Love” ... but still amazing: strong rock guitars, but a very complex bassline, overlapping vocals in very different styles, solid, scifi-adjacent synth work.  In 1982, I had a paper route, and I usually rode with headphones on and my Walkman cranking, playing mix tapes I’d made myself.³  “Twilight Zone” was definitely was of the songs on those tapes, as was “She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby.  Forget “injections” of synth: this song was almost nothing but synths, and samples, and weird, nonsensical vocals.  Everyone was rushing to put synths in their music, because it was new and hip and different.  Utterly unsurprsing from Dolby, whose stage name after all came from his “always messing around with keyboards and tapes.”⁴  But from reggae/dancehall virtuoso Eddy Grant?  “Electric Avenue” was something special, something most of us had never heard before ... primarily because it almost certainly never been done before.  The synths in this otherwise Caribbean-flavored track made it irresistable to butt up against Dolby’s classic.

There are a few other people here who started in the 70s and reinvented themselves for this exciting new time.  For instance, being (musically speaking, at any rate) a child of the 80s, Genesis was an entirely different band to me than it was for the afficianados of prog-rock.⁵  The transition in Genesis came when its lead singer, Peter Gabriel, left.  Now, Genesis is certainly an important part of my 80s, and “Abacab” and “No Reply at All” were likely on those Walkman paper-route mixes, but we’ll have to wait for 1984 to get a proper entry from them.  But Gabriel, on the other hand ... as part of Genesis, he was known for outrageous costumes set to meandering prog-rock:⁶ sort of like what you might get if you could have David Bowie fronting Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  But somehow, as a solo artist, his music morphed into a sort of alt-pop: strong hooks and interesting synth work made songs like “Sledgehammer” and “Games Without Frontiers” 80s staples, not to mention the all-time most iconic 80s ballad, “In Your Eyes.”  But the first Gabriel song I ever heard was “Shock the Monkey,” and that’s the one I’ve included here.  A screed against animal testing, there’s something primal about the song, with its electronic perscussion and dreamy synth washes which play against the power chords.

But the real story of the time were the new bands, and few were bigger or more emblematic of the new style than Duran Duran.  Formed in 1978 and named after a character in Barbarella, Duran Duran scored a hit in their native UK in 1981 with “Girls on Film,” but it was barely heard in the US.  But they burst into 1982 with Rio and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which played over and over and over on the radio stations of the time.  But somehow it wasn’t annoying: it just got better and better.  Spurred on by a great video on the then-nascent MTV and an appearance on SNL, “Hungry Like the Wolf” was #1 in Canada, #3 in the US, #4 in Finland and New Zealand, and #5 in the UK and Australia.  It sold over a million copies in the US alone; it’s been streamed in the UK over 40 million times; its video won the very first Grammy for best video.  VH1 says it was the third best song of the 80s, and Rolling Stone included it on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.  While “Rio” was a better song in many ways, and their material off Seven and the Ragged Tiger (such as “Union of the Snake”⁷) was more interesting, there can be no doubt that “Hungry” was fundamentally important: it shook up the scene, and showed that synthy, poppy alt rock could not only be sonically impressive, but cool and sexy and could make money.  I would love to believe that the explosion in alt rock was more about artistic integrity and exploring new musical fusions and all that, but let’s face it: the fact that Duran Duran became mega superstars (and presumably multimillionaires) certainly didn’t hurt.

And so the music starts to diverge more significantly.  Adam and the Ants had always been a bit out there,⁸ and for his first solo effort the former punk turned new wave actually moved just closer enough to mainstream that it would catch on.  Still, “Goody Two Shoes” was pretty distinct from most of the standard offerings.  And what were we to think of one-hit-wonders Men Without Hats and their “Safety Dance”?  My small town couldn’t get cable yet, so I had no MTV: I was reduced to watching Friday Night Videos on NBC.  And I distinctly remember the first time I saw the video for this song;⁹ the “what the fuck is this??” factor was pretty strong for this one.  This was new wave at its weirdest, and that’s saying something, considering new wave is the genre that gave us Devo.  And as for Wall of Voodoo, who were, according to lead singer Stan Ridgway, “on a wavelength far from home,”¹⁰ there was definitely nothing else like “Mexican Radio.”¹¹

This was also the time when I was regularly raiding my father’s reject box, which is primarily what I used to make those Walkman mix tapes.  That may have been where I found “She Blinded Me with Science” (certainly I can’t imagine why else my dad would have had the single); it was absolutely where I found “Reap the Wild Wind” by Ultravox, fronted by Midge Ure, who had formerly toured brifely with Thin Lizzy,¹² and would go on in future years to co-write the first of those charity supergroup songs, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”  “Reap” was #12 in the UK and #10 in Ireland, but peaked at a paltry #71 here in the US, so most of us yanks have never heard it; despite that, it’s a classic new wave tune that deserves wider recognition.

But the most fateful record I plucked out of the reject box was undoubtedly “The One Thing” by INXS.  It wasn’t their pinnacle—“Don’t Change” was more classic, and that album overall was just a prelude to the superb Listen Like Thieves, which would give us the nearly perfect “What You Need”—but “The One Thing” was the first time I heard the band that would go on to define a huge part of my 80s.  INXS is to me one of the four musical corners of the decade, in fact,¹³ and the first one to truly penetrate my consciousness.  From the plaintive wail of Hutchence’s voice to the even more plaintive wail of Pengilly’s sax, INXS is 80s perfection in some fundamental way that is difficult for me to describe.  It’s not really new age, and it’s certainly not synthpop, but it’s amazing, and different, and I’m not sure we ever heard its like again.

For proper Australian new wave, we need to look to Icehouse.  Their excellent Primitive Man was contemporaneous with INXS’ Shabooh Shoobah, but I don’t believe I was aware of them until a few years later, when I started getting serious about filling out my collection.  “Great Southern Land” most likely came to my attention in 1989 when the compilation album of the same name was realeased in the US.  With its individuated synth notes and echoey vocals, it’s a great example of the subgenre.  As is Missing Persons’ “Walking in L.A.”, with Dale Bozzio’s quirky vocals, like Martha Davis (of the Motels¹⁴) cranked up to 11 and twisted slightly out of true.  Of course, “Walking” is a much more jagged version of new wave than “Southern” or “Reap”; for an almost folksy contrast, we go to the Nails, known as one-hit wonders for their “88 Lines About 44 Women,” which, musically isn’t much more than a preprogrammed Casio rhythm track and some harmonized humming, but lyrically was quite adventurous: the “women” in question included Eloise, who “sang songs about whales and cocks,” and Tanya (Turkish), who “liked to fuck while wearing leather biker boots.”  And, if you want the Britpop version of new wave, there’s “Love Plus One,” by Haircut One Hundred.  I never really loved this song the way some did, but it was definitely an important milestone for the subgenre, and I have some fond memories of it.

But of course the ultimate new wave classic (for this volume, at any rate¹⁵) is “I Melt with You,” a song so insanely good that it transcends having the stupidest breakdown in musical history (seriously? a humming solo?).  “Melt” is an anthem about making love while the bomb is dropping, and it’s utterly wonderful.  I can’t quite consider Modern English one-hit wonders, even though it’s true that “Melt” was their only top 40 hit in the US (they did much better in their native UK), mainly because I think of a one-hit wonder as having one great song, period.  The rest of the album that that song comes from has to be mediocre at best, at least in my head: a band with even one really great album just doesn’t seem to hit the one-hit mold for me, despite technically fitting the definition.  But After the Snow is brilliant: opener “Someone’s Calling” is a solid offering; “Life in the Gladhouse” is dark and brooding; “Face of Wood” is pretty and melodic; the title track is martial and just slightly off.  But there’s no doubt that “I Melt with You” deserves its spot on just about everyone’s 80s retrospective.  Including mine.

80's My Way III
[ On a Wavelength Far From Home (1982 Pt 2) ]

“The One Thing” by INXS, off Shabooh Shoobah
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash, off Combat Rock
“Goody Two Shoes” by Adam Ant, off Friend or Foe
“Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran, off Rio
“She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby [Single]¹⁶
“Electric Avenue” by Eddy Grant [Single]¹⁷
“Shock the Monkey” by Peter Gabriel [Single]
“White Wedding, Part 1” by Billy Idol, off Billy Idol
“Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo [Single]
“Steppin' Out” by Joe Jackson, off Night and Day
“88 Lines about 44 Women” by the Nails [Single]
“Save It for Later” by the English Beat [Single]
“Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners [Single]
“The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, off Rhythm of Youth
“Reap the Wild Wind” by Ultravox [Single]
“Great Southern Land” by Icehouse, off Primitive Man
“Love Plus One” by Haircut One Hundred [Single]
“I Melt with You” by Modern English, off After the Snow
“Walking in L.A.” by Missing Persons, off Spring Session M
“Twilight Zone [single version]” by Golden Earring [Single]¹⁸

Total:  20 tracks,  82:09

There are two tracks which come close to straight-ahead rock (even more so than “Twilight Zone,” in my opinion): the first is “Shoud I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash, and the second is the crowning achievement of one William Idol, “White Wedding.”  The Clash were theoretically a post-punk band, but, honestly: they were still punk.  Especially for ‘82’s Combat Rock, which include both this classic and “Rock the Casbah.”  Mick Jones’ surly lyrics and Joe Strummer’s simple but powerful guitar licks make this a song to rival anything the Sex Pistols or the Ramones came out with.  And what can you say about Billy Idol’s magnum opus?  In many ways, I was more enamored of “Dancing with Myself” at the time, but, man does “White Wedding” really stand up all these years later.  Also coming out of the British punk scene, Idol and his guitarist Steve Stevens constructed a song that starts with a riff often described as “ominous,” breathy vocals, and background vocalizations, eventually building to that trademark Idol scream at just shy of the 2-minute mark.  Still capable of giving me the shivers decades later.

For further stretching the boundaries of what “alternative” can connote, the English Beat (of course known in Britain as simply “the Beat”) were one of the foremost purveyors of two-tone.  While Madness and the Specials were doing more or less straightforward ska, the Beat were doing songs like “Save It for Later” (which I’ve used here), and the earlier “Mirror in the Bathroom,” which infused some new wave sensibilities into the ska rhythms.  Turning instead to alternative jazz, Joe Jackson has had a tendency to reinvent himself on just about every album.  Whereas Look Sharp! was more poppy, and Jumpin’ Jive was swing and jump blues,¹⁹ his entry for 1982, Night and Day, was in many ways a modern inflection on old jazz standards (AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine compares it several times to Cole Porter).  “Steppin’ Out” is cool, breezy, jazzy, and, as the name implies, nocturnal.  There is a bit of new wave flair in it, but it’s a light touch.  I thought it was a nifty song at the time; it was only some years later, when I heard the entire album, that I truly began to appreciate Jackson’s genius.

And that only leaves us with what must surely be the most improbable success of the year, “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners.  Dexys struggled with finding its image and tone for several years before settling on the coveralls that became their trademark style.  Their instrumentation was all over the place: a strong contingent of Celtic/country (banjo, mandolin, accordian, and two or more fiddles) but also a touch of brass (saxophone, flute, and trombone).  The album that spawned “Eileen” credits 11 musicians, not even counting backing vocals.  Speaking as someone who owns the dubiously named Very Best of Dexys Midnight Runners, I can tell you that it contains 19 tracks, and two of them are great—the second being their cover of Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said”—and 17 of them are absolute shit.  How this eclectic mess managed to stumble into a #1 hit in 8 countries, best selling single of the year in the UK, declared later by VH1 as the third greatest one-hit wonder of all time, and the sixth favorite 1980s #1 hit by ITV poll ... how this band did all that is anyone’s guess.  It’s a complex song, with key changes and tempo changes, rapid-fire lyrics, blazing fast fiddling, brass fills, and piano glissandoes.  It’s both unlike all the other music extant at the time and quintessentially 80s.  Almost everyone who was alive at the time will sing along when it comes on, despite the fact that very few of us know more than a few words.  It’s just that catchy.  That was just the state of music in 1982.

Next time, we’ll return to dreamland.

⇐ 80s My Way II

80s My Way IV ⇒

__________

1 One might argue that Heart did it better.  But, as Heart blossomed more into stadium rock than the synth-infused alt-rock that Hall & Oates was so successful at, we won’t feature them on this mix.

2 The other will have to wait for us to reach 1985.

3 Remember, my father was a record collector, so making mix tapes was a skill I learned at a fairly young age.  They weren’t very good mix tapes, of course, but everyone has to start somewhere.

4 According to Wikipedia.

5 As was Fleetwood Mac, I suppose.

6 Here’s a typical example.

7 But not “The Reflex”; that song is just annoying.

8 In fact, I almost threw in “Stand and Deliver” as my choice for Ant.  But in the end I decided to wait for this one.

9 Which was, apparently, some time after it came out, since FNV didn’t start till ‘83.

10 Title drop.

11 Fun fact: I used to have a friend who fantasized about an imaginary 80s song which was a duet between Stan Ridgway and Fred Schneider of the B-52’s.  Try imagining “Mexican Radio” with Schneider interjecting “Mexican radio, baby!” in between lines of the chorus.  It’s fun.

12 And sang for Rich Kids, the band Glen Matlock formed after he left the Sex Pistols.  Ghosts of Princes in Towers is damnably hard to find, but well worth it in my opinion.  Its title track was a little too early to land on this mix, but it was defnitely an early harbinger.

13 We’ll see the other three corners when we get to 1984 and 1986.

14 Who we heard from last volume.

15 I’m going to make a strong case for Icicle Works’ “Whisper to a Scream” being the ultimatest new wave song of all time when we get to 1984.

16 The single is probably sufficient, though The Golden Age of Wireless is not a bad pick-up either.

17 Unlike Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” even the single of this song is not easy to find.  However, Killer on the Rampage is pretty nifty, if you’re willing to put in the extra effort (second best track: “I Don’t Wanna Dance”).  Or, as always, just go to YouTube.

18 Make sure to get the “single version” of this track.  The album version is nearly twice as long, and that’s not to its credit.

19 You may recall hearing a lot of the latter album on Salsatic Vibrato.

Character noodling

It’s been a busy weekend, and I did a long post last week, so I think I’ll leave you with little other than the promise of something more substantial next week.

But, just for fun, my youngest and I have been working on a new D&D character: he’s a young (~13 years old) dinosaur person related to the Jurassic-Park-style dilophosaurus.  We decided his name should be Oxý Sálio (Οξύ Σάλιο).  (You’ll have to use Google Translate to work out what that’s based on, but it’ll be obvious in retrospect.)  We’ve still got more work to do, but it seems like a cool basic concept.  We’ll see what develops.