Sharpie on CD is a very unforgiving medium, before you critique.
It’s the year George Orwell warned
us about (he really should have set the book in 2084 instead). Let's continue the Years in Music series and look at the year 1984.
1984 in Culture and News
From my VHS archives. I used to put those "property of" stickers on everything as a kid.
This was a really good year for
film, as the year brought us Ghostbusters, The NeverEnding Story, A
Nightmare on Elm Street, Gremlins, and The Terminator. I’ll be
throwing a couple songs from the Ghostbuster’s soundtrack on this mix. I kind
of regret not putting the NeverEnding Story theme on this mix now, in
light of just now realizing the movie came out this year. Eh, why don’t I put
it on the Spotify version? That’ll be a bonus track because so many of my picks
are missing on Spotify. Outside of film, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird began
their comic book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which would go on to
become a huge franchise, somewhat surprisingly if you think about it. This
would become one of my obsessions early in life.
News-wise, like in 1983, wars and
famines abound. Poor Ethiopia.
1984 in Music
For 1984, there’s plenty of songs I
like, but not too many entire albums. I suppose in which case, I’ll pick
Metallica’s Ride the Lightning as my favorite album of 1984, because I
was into it in my early teens. My Top 3 songs of the year are Ministry’s “Every
Day is Halloween”, Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon”, and Colour
Radio’s “Adrianna Dreams”. It’s hard to narrow it down to 3 though, as I like
all these songs on the mix.
I’ll have to warn you now, the
Spotify version of this mix is very sparse. But you can check the songs out on
YouTube. And if you find that you like any of the songs, it would always be a
nice thing to track down and buy the albums, supporting the artists.
Mick
Smiley – Magic
This song is off the Ghostbusters
Soundtrack. It’s the song that plays when the Environmental Protection Agency
forces the Ghostbusters to shut down their containment unit, causing all of the
ghosts they’ve captured to run rampant in New York City. Of course, the
Ghostbusters were the ones who decided to keep some supernatural nuclear
doomsday device in the middle of a highly-populated city. If they hadn’t been
forced to shut it down it could have failed at some point anyway, causing this
to happen. You know you’ve reached adulthood when you realize the guy from the
environmental agency, portrayed as villainous in the movie, actually had a
pretty valid point.
I
love this scene in the movie though, and it’s because of this song. The city is
erupting in chaos, and almost as a juxtaposition, they have this eerily calm
80’s synth song playing over the apocalyptic craziness. It’s somehow perfect. The
full song is a mixed bag for me though, as it has two very different-sounding
halves. The first half sounds like it’s trying to rip off Phil Collins. But at
the 2:20 mark, it suddenly switches to a completely different song. It’s really
strange. I only like the second half, which played in the movie. Luckily people have remixed the song to only include that section.
Laura
Branigan – Self Control
This song is a cover from an Italian
singer known as Raf, and the original was also released in 1984. I can’t think
of another time where a cover of a song was done less than a year later. The
lyrics appeal to me, which is why I chose it (“I live among the creatures of
the night”, sounds like a vampire anthem). It’s another of those I chose when I
was putting this mix together, going through a list of actual hits from the
year and seeing which ones I liked.
Scent Merci was a New Wave band
out of Italy. I really can’t dig up a whole lot about them, but they’re pretty
good. They were active from 1984 to 1986, from what I could find out. Italy
apparently had a pretty strong darkwave/New Wave scene around this time, as
this isn’t the only Italian band on the mix.
Speaking of which, here’s some
Italian darkwave I was able to find from 1984 as well. This track is less
ambiguously goth than the previous one. Very appropriate band name
unfortunately. It was pretty hard to find any information on this band.
Colour Radio was a New Wave
band out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And yet they still insisted on having a "u" in "colour" as if they were British. Again, I wasn’t able to find a whole lot
about them, but they do have a Tumblr page.
This
song is one of my favorites on the mix. It kind of reminds me of really early
The Cure.
A Drop in the Grey only released
one album, Certain Sculptures, which had this very passionate song on
it. It’s a really great song; too bad this is yet another one of those bands
that did one album and then split up. When digging for information on it I also
found a demo version of the song I hadn’t heard before. And as I’ve said a few
times before, whenever there’s a demo version of a song I usually end up liking
it better than the album version. In this case though, I think I do like the
album version a bit better, as its just more polished and has more energy to
it, but they’re both good.
Echo
& The Bunnymen – The Killing Moon
I wrote about this song after
including it on my Moon Mix, so you could go back to that article for my
thoughts on it. This one’s a classic.
Turquoise
Days – Grey Skies
This was another UK band, which formed in 1981 and
self-released several cassette albums throughout the 1980’s, one of them being
this track which was released as a single in 1984.
Ministry
– Everyday is Halloween
This song is a classic goth anthem, and it rings
true for me as well. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and a part of me carries
it throughout the entire year. The song is about being criticized by normies
for dressing like a goth or a punk, a retort to being told “it’s not
Halloween”. Halloween is the one time of the year where being dark and spooky
is normal. There are some though, who live it all year.
Depeche
Mode – People are People
This is a song that will probably be
relevant for as long as humans exist. It’s a way I’d like to look at the world.
People are people, regardless of their nationality, political beliefs, or
whatever else. But we’re taught to automatically hate people we don’t even know
because they’re different from us. It's something I try to remind myself of whenever I encounter nationalist Turks and Azeris; inevitable when you're an Armenian on the internet.
Rockwell
– Somebody’s Watching Me
This one-hit wonder could almost be
called a fluke. The singer apparently somewhat kidnapped Michael Jackson (a
friend of his) and took him to a music studio to sing his part, which may have
played a big part in this song’s success. But even without Jackson it’s still a
good song. A song for those of us who have had bouts of paranoia. I recommend a review by the Youtuber Todd in the Shadows, he went really in-depth about the
history of the song and about Rockwell’s failed attempt to follow it up with
something equally as successful.
Alessi
Bros. – Savin’ the Day
The second song in the mix off the Ghostbusters
Soundtrack. The beginning of the song briefly plays when the Ghostbusters are
getting ready to go to the tall apartment building where Zool is waiting for
them. I always kind of liked the music from that part so eventually I looked up the Ghostbusters soundtrack and found this song.
I know obscurity is a subjective
term, as I wrote in one of my recent blogs. But I think a good way to define
whether or not a song is obscure is if it’s missing from Spotify, a Google
search on the band turns up little to nothing, there are only one or two videos
of the song on YouTube, and one of the videos has a comment from someone at
least claiming to be a band member. This song hits all of those checkmarks, if
you check the comments on the video I linked to above. It’s a great song
though, very catchy.
Besides The Cure and Siouxsie and
the Banshees, not a whole lot of gothic rock (called death rock back then) made
the charts. This is a good example of the gothic rock out at the time. This is
yet another band out of the UK. With a name like “Lost Loved Ones” it has to be
nice and dark, perfect for my musical tastes.
Metallica
– Fade to Black
Metallica’s first power ballad, and probably their
best guitar work on a song as well. When I was about 15 back in 2001 I loved
this album, was obsessed with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” for a while before
moving onto this song. In retrospect I think this was probably the best song on
the album.
Conclusion
Maybe I was being too picky, but I
had to dig deep to fill up a CD with songs I liked of 1984. The results though
were well worth the effort, I discovered lots of great new-to-me music doing
this one. 1985 would prove to be equally as much of a challenge.
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