Counter-Currents
1,968 words 
This is the first installment of a new series, Music to My Ears. I will review albums and talk about music and musicians. I will say a lot about my own history with music and my listening experiences. There will also be a strong element of nostalgia.
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53 comments
I love this idea and will be looking forward to future installments!
Having moved a lot in life, I never collected anything, but see the allure of doing so with vinyl, for sure.
I always liked the super small writing on the thin side of albums, having to be careful with the initial needle drop, the mechanistic sounds of the arm returning to its perch upon completion of the played side (if your player was fancy enough to do that), etc.
Also, New Gold Dream is such a damn good album. I bought a copy at, of all places, a local Christian book store.
Simple Minds remains one of my favorite groups. They still record. I never saw them live, though.
Their first 5 albums are very dull, but New Gold Dream was extraordinary, in sound, songs, and packaging. The follow-up, Sparkle in the Rain, has great songs, but the production is gratingly loud and bright for some reason.
Their greatest song is “Don’t You Forget About Me,” which I have in an extended version on 12″ vinyl.
Once Upon a Time is another fantastic and consistently good album.
They have had some misses over the decades, but their most recent studio album Direction of the Heart is up there with their best.
Their live album Acoustic is a wonderful compilation of their best. I also love the recent live version they did of the whole New Gold Dream album.
Couldn’t agree more about “Don’t You Forget About Me”. John Hughes really could pick ’em. He had a reputation for good taste in music; his soundtrack for Some Kind of Wonderful is extraordinary.
Alive and Kicking is a better song than Don’t You Forget About Me and I will die on that hill.
I can respect that opinion.
Mark Fisher rated New Gold Dream very highly. 1982 was probably his favorite year for music. (Associates Sulk, Ultravox Passing Strangers, Japan Ghosts.) However, Fisher thought Simple Minds’ next several records had bloated production and an overly “big” sound that reflected the spirit of Thatcherism.
That takes the cake: Sparkle in the Rain and Once Upon a Time as “Thatcherite.” I am sure when you are a Marxist, you hear stuff like that all the time. To me, it sounds like schizophrenia: analogies and associations being mistaken for causality.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Trainspotting, there’s that part where Ewan McGregor meets a girl at a club, goes home with her, and then finds out the next day that she is underaged. In the book, while they are at the club, they have an argument over Simple Minds.
“Dianne informs Renton that she likes the Simple Minds and they have their first mild argument. Renton does not like the Simple Minds.
The Simple Minds huv been pure shite since they jumped on the committed, passion–rock bandwagon of U2. Ah’ve never trusted them since they left their pomp–rock roots and started aw this patently insincere political–wi–a–very–small–p stuff. Ah loved the early stuff, but ever since New Gold Dream thuv been garbage. Aw this Mandela stuff is embarrassing puke, he rants.
Dianne tells him that she believes that they are genuine in their support of Mandela and
the movement towards a multi–racial South Africa.
Renton shakes his head briskly, wanting to be cool, but hopelessly wound up by the
amphetamine and her contention.
– Ah’ve goat auld NME’s gaun back tae 1979, well ah did huv but ah flung thum oot a few years back, and ah can recall interviews when Kerr slags off the political commitment by other bands, n sais that the Minds are just intae the music, man.
– People can change, Dianne counters.
Renton is a little bit taken aback by the purity and simplicity of this statement. It makes
him admire her even more. He just shrugs his shoulders and concedes the point, although his mind is racing with the notion that Kerr has always been one step behind his guru, Peter Gabriel and that since Live Aid, it’s become fashionable for rock stars to want to be seen as nice guys.”
Yeah, the Street Fighting Years album, with its political posturing, was a comedown from Once Upon a Time, but the band recovered the with Real Life. Jim Kerr is a typical dumb liberal though.
What’s your take on Thompson Twins? I got heavily into them last year and I have no idea what took me so long.
I totally missed that boat.
Imagine Trainspotting without subtitles. Imagine these as the subtitles!
Due to the extreme vulgarity and violence present in ’90s and 2000’s pop music, nostalgia for the music of our childhoods is something well-adjusted Zoomers will never have. I have nostalgia for the things I listened to when I was a teenager, but it was my dad’s generation’s popular music, not mine. Loving childhood music that’s really mine is something I’ll never have.
That’s really sad. I remember hearing rather wholesome and melodic songs when I was a kid on the school bus. David Zsutty remembers hearing Snoop Dog on the school bus when he was a kid.
Hasn’t Apple Music made album collections obsolete?
Still I greatly look forward to this article series! The recs are already coming! Myself, I’ve never been so much of an audiophile that I quibbled over the differences of different media, always thinking it was a pretense created by elitists, similar to “wine tasters” who pretend that they can tell the difference among wines, but apparently some people can tell the difference. However, when I first listened to mp3 I thought it was noticeably bad, but I seem to have gotten used to it.
My favorite little classical thing is The Planets by Holst, and also Carmina burana by Orff.
I personally prefer to own the physical media, whether it’s vinyl, CD or even cassette for not only the superior sound(excluding cassette) but for the artwork, liner notes, lyrics and other hidden gems one finds. Also, I much rather prefer to listen to a complete album over greatest hits and playlists any day.
See, I prefer greatest hits collections and playlists. A great playlist is a work of art all its own.
I love your candor, DarkPlato. It reminds me of the Alan Partridge episode where he’s asked what his favorite Beatles album is and he says “Best of The Beatles.” Lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbMSUQE36us
Whenever someone asks who my favorite band is, I tell them I don’t have one. But, I definitely have favorite albums.
Name some.
In no particular order:
Santana – self-titled debut LP
Killing Joke – Night Time
Can – Tago Mago
Steeleye Span – Commoner’s Crown
Tangerine Dream – Rubycon
AC/DC – Powerage
Slayer – South of Heaven
While I generally like all of the bands, there’s something about these particular albums that resonate with me the most. It’s also fair to say I think some of their other work is mediocre at best.
Some background: My interest in music began when I raided my dad’s and uncle’s record collection back in the mid to late 70s. So, I ended up hearing the likes of Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, and maybe the occasional doo-wop or R&B record at a ridiculously young age. The first albums I purchased as a teenager were “Powerslave” by Iron Maiden and “British Steel” by Judas Priest.
You really can taste differences between wines.
And you really can hear differences between different performances of the same piece, or the same performance reproduced in different media.
The Planets and Carmina Burana are early and perennial favorites of mine.
It all tastes like wine to me. If you blind folded them they couldn’t tell.
On the other hand, im greatly affected by the performance of classical music, so much so that I don’t like Gilbert and Sullivan by most other performers, preferring the mackarras version. in particular certain singers in advanced cantatas, like Carmina Burana, or certain operas, can make or break it for me.
Looking forward to seeing more installments here. Vinyl has made a comeback. Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter have never sounded so good.
My mp3 library is now over 320GB, and favorites list is 25GB. Most of what I add to it now is electronic music like IDM, ambient, and downtempo glitch. I haven’t minded the sound quality of 320kbps, but I also haven’t tried modern vinyl. Intriguing, Greg.
I have been an avid collector of music since I was a child. My first cassette was a Christmas gift of Weird Al’s Greatest Hits, but I remember hoping it was Poison’s Open Up And Say Ahhh under the tree. The first tape I ever bought with my own money was DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper at the age of 8. I had access to(and still own many) of my parents’ albums along with an older brother’s collection so music was always big in the house. I remember trying to copy the scratching I saw on Herbie Hancock’s video of Rockit with a Smurf’s album and getting in trouble for dropping the needle. The artwork always fascinated me with the likes of Pink Floyd’s albums, Zappa’s 200 Motels and Overnite Sensation, Big Brother And The Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell being favorites of mine, not to mention when my brother and I discovered the amazing artwork of Iron Maiden.
Like I said, I have been collecting since I was a kid and have been working on cataloging my collection. I currently have about 1275 cd’s and probably double that on vinyl. I first started collecting vinyl when I was about 12 in 1993. If I only I had all of those albums I traded over the years. Some of the albums I bought for three or four bucks back then go for ten times that these days. Although a lot of people think that vinyl became obsolete in the ‘90’s, it really never went away with independent labels putting out punk and metal as well as hip-hop and dance music for DJ’s. There is nothing I enjoy more than the satisfaction of digging all day in a record shop and finding that one album you know made it all worth it. I have too many gems to count but each one has a story behind it that I treasure. I could ramble on all day so I will just say thanks to Greg for creating this new column or series that I will look forward to.
These are the first three records I bought:
1. Blondie, Parallel Lines
2. Blondie, Eat to the Beat
3. The B-52s
Other early albums included works by Styx, ABBA, Talking Heads, and The Clash.
The first jazz I got was Weather Report, Heavy Weather and Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, As Falls Wichita, so Falls Wichita Falls.
My tastes always lagged about 5-10 years behind my peers. In the 80s, I was listening to a lot of music from the 70s. I really loved Pink Floyd, Yes, Bowie, Boston, Queen, and the first three Van Halen albums. Part of this was the influence of my cousins, the youngest of whom was 8 years older than me.
I grew up with classical music, so the first classical albums I bought were when I went to college. My first purchase was a fantastic DG box of Karajan conducting Richard Strauss’ Tone Poems.
Have you ever heard My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne? I have a reissue of it on double vinyl with a bunch of outtakes that are incredible. I’m a huge fan of Talking Heads but had never heard of this album until only five or six years ago and it absolutely blew me away. A few years back I bought all of Eno’s early, non-ambient albums when they were reissued and they all sound amazing as well. Another worth checking out is David Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel. It was rereleased for Record Store Day a few years ago.
Yes, I got it when it first came out. I was a huge Talking Heads fan, and I also loved My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Catherine Wheel. I saw Talking Heads live once. I soured on them and especially David Byrne when I saw True Stories, which seethes with contempt for white people. There were warning signs from the beginning, of course. And frankly their fifth and sixth albums were just too black for my tastes. I still listen to their first four albums from time to time.
Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere is my nostalgic moment for the final scene in my second favorite movie, Little Monsters.
Greg, I didn’t know you liked Steely Dan. I’ve been a fan for decades much to the chagrin of most of my peers.
They really were a brilliant group. Almost all their albums are worth listening to in their entirety. My favorites are The Royal Scam and Aja. Fagan’s solo work was pretty good too.
You’re right, judging by Becker’s picture, he’s almost certainly not. I think I just assume by the name.
say, speaking of the Fagan solo project, have you guys ever heard the song True Companion by Fagan from the Heavy Metal soundtrack? It’s very good song, and I don’t think it appears anywhere else. That whole soundtrack is really good in it’s way, as is the movie of course.
Those two are great back to back, Aja and The Royal Scam. Scam sounds like 1970s TV. I wonder if the themes from Three’s Company and The Rockford Files weren’t secretly composed by Becker and Fagan, or maybe Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.
I submit that the song “Pretzel Logic” is about the Third Reich. The swastika resembles a pretzel. Touring the south land… the Sudetenland? And the narrator steps up to the platform, at the pearly gates, and the man St. Peter asks him… Why did you kill those Jews? (Platform shoes; clever word play.)
Anglin said steely Dan is his favorite group—he really has great taste in music—but I wonder if he realizes they are Jewish!
Fagan was Jewish. I don’t think Becker was.
The Chicago School economist Gary Becker was Jewish.
Becker was German, according to Fagan in an interview. Bavarian, he said, talking about Walter’s “Bavarian strength” in helping him overcome his heroin/cocaine addiction.
My favorites are as follows, but mind you I don’t think they have a bad album.
Countdown To Ecstasy
Aja
Pretzel Logic
Can’t Buy a Thrill
Katy Lied
The Royal Scam
Gaucho
My first three are a three way tie and any one of them is my favorite when I listen to it.
Yes, vinyl recordings do sound better when the music was recorded and mastered for the format. I’m thinking of the 1970s Rolling Stones. Sticky Fingers and Exile have always sounded terrible on CD.
Cassettes, commercially available, sounded bad because they were usually dubbed at high speed. The high-frequency EQ doesn’t translate well when slowed down. Dolby B is a compromise noise reduction meant to sound OK on or off. Dolby C and dbx are superior, for home recorded music.
On my school bus, the bus driver had an 8-track tape player mounted to the dashboard, with speakers in the front and back of the bus. This was 1978/79. I have great nostalgia for the rock/pop hits of that time.
I heard quite a lot of Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Bob Seger on long car trips as a child. My dad bought a slightly used car, and the dealer included a bunch of tapes that the previous owner had left behind.
Have you guys ever heard Solitary Men by moroder and Esposito(the guy who sang the karate kid song)? It’s a really great, little known synth record that I think you guys would like. The lyrics might be a little creaky, but have an enthusiasm that makes up for it. It’ll grow on you.
edit: I mean the entire album, not only the title track, which is probably the best song musically, albeit not uplifting lyrically.
Haven’t heard of it.
I would like your opinion. It might be a little meretricious compared with the stuff you usually like. I don’t know why it’s so obscure. It should be better known. I think it has to do with them being two guys from the movie industry, and so they weren’t promoted by music for some reason.
I enjoyed that article. My brother is an audiophile, and he occasionally opines on the superiority and ‘warmth’ of vinyl.
And a strong +1 for your choice of Simple Minds New Gold Dream – easily one of the best albums of the 80s.
My nostalgia is for music that predates the mainstreaming of the black ghetto sound and ethos (such as it is), and where the lyrics are clear and melodic. So many bands today have singers whose voices are mediocre at best when it is not what I call mumble rap, which is surely the nadir of music, if one can call it that.
I agree about rap. It is total trash. By the time it was being mainstreamed in the 1990s, I was not paying attention to popular music at all, certainly not to the radio. Aside from keeping up with the Zappa releases, I probably bought fewer than ten rock/pop CDs in the whole decade, mostly people I had liked from the 1980s: Marianne Faithfull’s A Secret Life was one. U2’s Achtung Baby and Pop were others. Bowie’s The Hours. Queen’s Innuendo. I discovered Rammstein and other developments from David Lynch’s Lost Highway. I liked Rammstein. I had never even heard of Nirvana until after Cobain was dead.
The first albums I bought, when I was around 13, were Steppenwolf Live and Abraxas by Santana. Later on, albums by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Wishbone Ash, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Mountain, Billy Joel, The Doors, to name a few. I loved the artwork, especially on Yes albums. I bought a multi-album set of Georg Solti’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven’s symphonies. I used to sift pot and roll joints on double album sets. I love CDs but get most of my tunes fron Spotify. I have a decent collection of Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, and others on CDs. I make up playlists on Spotify for water aerobics, drawing from 50’s – present. My early loves were The Zombies and Tommy James.
Check out this lesser known song by Tommy James called Candy Maker if you haven’t heard it before. It’s one of my favorites of his. Perfect for late night cruisin’.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk2h4Y6z-8A&pp=ygUXY2FuZHkgbWFrZXIgdG9tbXkgamFtZXM%3D
Yes and Pink Floyd always had great album art.
For some reason, I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan, but I heard them enough on FM radio, so it took me years to actually buy them on CD.
Split Enz, hoo boy, that’s a blast from the past. My New Zealand roommate in college used to listen to that.
An audio column at C-C sounds like an interesting idea.
If I remember correctly, Audio CDs first came out in 1983. I remember some of the guys in my Electronics Engineering Technology classes jumping at the bit for digital audio.
Then when it finally came out it was a bit disappointing. Not a lot was available besides Classical and the digital recording techniques for CDs were all wrong and literally had to be learned.
I am not a huge audiophile but in the day I used a turntable with a magnetic needle that was extremely good but too sensitive to vibration when people were running down the hallway in the dorm. We bought albums and then recorded them on better-quality cassettes which we then wore out.
I never bought factory-recorded cassette tapes; some of them were even worse than 8-Track car stereos.
What my audiophile friends in school used was either high-quality reel-to-reel tape, or if poor, they used a good stereo VCR and recorded onto the analog stereo audio channels at a higher speed, which was even better in specifications than vinyl.
Some of them were planning a school project to build a homemade Analog-to-Digital converter to record DAT onto the Video portion of a VHS tape with a VCR. I don’t remember how that project worked out. But CDs came out shortly thereafter.
DATs (Digital Audio Tape) became available for serious audiophiles around that time too, but there was a huge controversy with mostly-Japanese manufacturers and RCA, etc. because Digital-to-Digital copying involves copyright violations; however, Analog-to-Digital copying is too lossy to bootleg industrial copies, so the law was eventually changed to allow this for home use.
Then Digital copies on PCs came out and Napster sharing and whatnot. However, digital formats like MP3 are compressed in file size so much that media creators haven’t worried so much about pirating. Some podcasts sound horrible for this reason ─ that and using Earbuds or potatoes for microphones.
I’m not sure if I even own any Audio CDs any longer. I did not like that with the CDs you never really got the cool album art and the inserts. And it was tough to fill the same amount of run time on a CD as an album set. Some of them had some tracks deleted on the CD version, which sucked.
It seems to me that the practice of putting some of an artist’s crappier songs on the B-side to fill out the vinyl album was less pronounced after CDs, but it could be my imagination ─ or maybe related more just to evolving Album Rock radio trends than newer CD formats.
I like that with modern streaming services you can find and play what you like, and my ancient ears don’t notice much difference if played through a decent stereo amp and speakers. (Don’t forget your hearing protection at the range, kids.)
🙂
I like Styx more, the older I get. They’re lyrics are positive and they have a healthy masculine outlook. They’re way better for young men to listen to than, say, Nirvana; and they don’t get sleazy like Mick Jagger, whiny and self-absorbed like Neil Young, or overwhelmingly depressed and paranoid like Roger Waters. I love all those, by the way, just saying.
The last album I bought, I haven’t listened to yet: Robert de Bruce by Changes. I first heard of them from an interview here at counter-currents, the Keith Preston interview of Robert N. Taylor.
Styx’s Pieces of Eight was an early purchase. I still think “Renegade” and “Blue-Collar Man” are magnificent. Dennis De Young’s voice was always a bit too mannered. But their songs have beautiful melodies. I am just glad “Mr. Roboto” was not the first thing I heard by them.
I like Styx for the same reason I like Boston, Queen, and Journey: genuine melodic grandeur.
I remember being at a professional hockey game, and they played Queen’s “Play the Game” on an amazing sound system. I was completely sold. I am going to write something on their Innuendo album, which is an amazing swan song.
I collected vinyl for some 25 years, especially in the 90s when I leaned more to 12” dance records than rock. But I sold off my collection mid-covid era while moving to a saner (and whiter) part of the country.
If you want to blend old music with new discoveries, Spotify is the way to go. Build your own playlists, update periodically.
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