Month: October 2022

Trevor Horn had spent four years working as a producer for other bands making no money at all when he finally decided to just do it himself instead and formed The Buggles with Geoff Downes. It took them more than three months to record “Video Killed The Radio Star”, a song lamenting the impact of technology on the media arts over the last decades leading up to it’s 1979 release. As the song was quite successful in their native UK and they couldn’t make time for an appearance on “Top Of The Pops” they decided to create a video instead. Now, at the time most music videos were just a few shots of the band playing, so the fact that they hired Australian director Russell Mulcahy (who would later direct Highlander) and had an actual plot made it stand apart.

Then in 1980 both members of The Buggles replaced personnel in the hugely popular progressive rock band Yes, and when touring with them in the US Horn did not quite understand why the kids in the crowd appeared to recognize him, especially given that The Buggles were not known at all in the states. He found out only later that it was because MTV, who went on air on August 1st, 1981, had chosen their video to be the first one to be emitted and with it’s elaborate content it was on heavy rotation. The fact that sales of The Buggles in the US went through the roof quite prominently soon after proofed that MTV, initially only shown on a select few cable networks, was reaching audiences very quickly and successfully.

As Horn’s wife agreed with his assessment that he was looking rather dumb in the video she convinced him to change back to the production side of music – luckily for us, as he was so good at it that he ended up with the nickname “The Man Who Invented The Eighties”.

The 90ies were characterised by a wide variety of musical genres of which we’ve only touched a few so far. One of them that emerged right at the beginning of the decade in Bristol, 100 miles west of London, was Trip Hop, a wild mixture of genres incorporating Acid-Jazz, Soul, Dub and Funk but typically prominently characterized by slowed down break-beat drums with heavily accented bass frequencies and strong melancholic feelings. The perfect soundtrack to lose yourself in a stoned daze.

While the title of first band to bring the genre to the attention of a wider audience would probably go to Massive Attack, the broad popularisation happened when Portishead – named after a small town on the coast just outside Bristol – released their debut album “Dummy”. It received universal critical acclaim even though the band had a strong disliking to press coverage. To be honest, I found it hard to choose just the one song for this blog, as it’s a complete work of art – one of those albums that really should be listened to from beginning to end, like The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Manu Chao’s Clandestino. Also, the songs tend to flow into each other and it’s often not quite so clear where one ends and the next one begins.

The video to “Sour Times” is made up of footage from the short film “To Kill A Dead Man”, a spy movie the band made around the same time.

When you hear the name Bruce Mathers, you, as an employee of VSHN, of course know that we’re talking about our Chairman of the Board. There is, however, a second person sharing the name who is almost as famous.

During his childhood Marshall Bruce Mathers’s family rarely stayed in one place for more than a year and his early life was marked by poverty, violent beatings, and an absent father who rejected his regular letters marking them with “return to sender”. Although he was interested in storytelling and the English language, he never made his peace with the school-system and dropped out at the age of seventeen. However, he was able to express his talent in the form of Rap, going by the name of M&M, which developed into MC Double M and finally Eminem.

Mathers invented yet another character, “Slim Shady”, a brutal and vicious alter ego that allowed him to express his anger with the state of the world and his life. He recorded an EP with the same name that in the aftermath of the 1998 Rap Olympics found its way to Dr. Dre, who upon hearing it requested to meet Eminem immediately. Despite criticism of Dr. Dre for hiring a white rapper and the artist’s fear of being starstruck by the famous producer, the collaboration proved to be very fruitful, with the introduction of Slim Shady – My Name Is – to a wider audience leading to world-wide success.

Unfortunately by today the videos on all official sites – including the one below – have been replaced by a variant with more advertiser friendly lyrics, but with a bit of searching you can still find the original version.

Come next Monday Eminem will celebrate half a century on this planet.

The song features samples from the song I Got To… by British singer Labi Siffre and similar to Coolio’s case, Eminem was required to change some lyrics before being allowed to use the track, as Siffre, being a gay activist, was not okay with the line “My English teacher wanted to have sex in junior high. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy.”

The Hip-hop culture developed during the 1970s in the Bronx and as we already discussed consisted of four main pillars (we actually missed mentioning graffiti), one of which was of course rap. In the beginning, the Deejays were typically the stars of the show, but in time the Emcees became more and more important. Especially once their lyrics started to include political messages, as opposed to mostly praising their own skills and parties, as was the initial custom. In the early 80ies the subculture had started to become a thing outside the block-parties in poor neighbourhoods where it had all started, and songs were actually recorded and broadcast.

A driving force behind conscious Hip-hop were Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. The trio of rappers were the first group to call themselves MCs (Masters of Ceremony) and one of them, Cowboy, actually coined the term Hip-hop when he used the sounds to mimick the marching of soldiers in a scat routine for a friend that had just joined the army.

“The Message” was written by staff songwriter Ed Fletcher of Sugarhill Records as a response to the 1980 NY City transit strike, but generally describes the tensions that come along with poverty in the metropolis. It was slower than the typical rap song of the time and ingeniously incorporated elements of various musical styles – funk, disco, dub, electro – while still transporting a loud, strong and clear political, well, message. Originally the group didn’t really want to perform the song, as they were more into party lyrics, but label boss Sylvia Robinson was finally able to convince one of the rappers, Melle Mel. Although the rest of the gang in time would ask to perform as well, they only actually join in for the skit in the end.

The song built the foundation for much of what Hip-hop would become.