There are not many artists who may boast of being the suspect of academic disciplines, but as the official “Queen of Pop” (or at least the artist most commonly referred to by that moniker), Madonna can. She certainly is a polymath: Originally planning to pursue a career in modern dance she instead became a drummer before starting her solo career. Later she would also work as an actress, business woman, writer and director.
She was not always known as “Queen of Pop” though. When “Material Girl” was released as a single from her second studio album “Like A Virgin” it became a huge hit and as many misinterpreted the video (which is a retelling of Marilyn Monroe’s 1953 film “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and is supposed to explicitly show the “Material Girl” side to only be an act, while the actress really doesn’t care about worldly riches) the name stuck. It would take her many years to rewrite that image.
I only found out after scheduling this post that she turns 64 today. Happy Birthday!
I found out even later that it’s the 45th anniversary of Elvis’ death as well.
Alban Uzoma Nwapa was born and raised in Southeastern Nigeria and came to Sweden at the age of 23 to study dentistry. To help with the costs he took up a job as a DJ at a local Stockholm club where he often sang along to the tunes and soon became well-known, so he kept doing it as a lucrative side-job after finishing his studies and opening his own practice.
Fast-forward to 1992, when his second album “One Love” was released under the stage name Dr. Alban. It contained two Euro-dance songs, which became very popular all over Europe: the Gospel “Sing Hallelujah!” and “It’s My Life”, which was further popularised by featuring in the background of a Tampax commercial.
It’s time for another jaunt to Europe’s powerhouse of pop – Sweden. This time we’re taking a little red corvette and cruising down a U.S. highway, whistling (inspired by Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” and overdubbed twelve times, as whistling is hard) merrily along.
“Joyride” by Roxette took its title from an interview with Paul McCartney who described his relationship to John Lennon with the word, and its opening line from a note that lead singer Per Gessle’s girlfriend had left him on the piano. It was played so often on every channel back in 1991 that at some point it became a bit too much and I had to switch channels when it came up. But these days it’s okay to hear it again once per decade or so…
It’s been slightly over a month since NIST announced their winners of a six-year competition to find encryption algorithms that would withstand a quantum attack (and a few days since another one still in consideration got cracked with pre-quantum hardware). None of that work would have been possible without Jewish physicist Max Born, who fled to Great Britain with his family from the Nazi Regime in 1939. There his daughter Irene met an MI5 officer working on the Enigma project to decipher German top-secret messages (if you’re interested in the subject and would prefer an easy-to-read approach, Neal Stephenson’s book “Cryptonomicon” can not be recommended highly enough, but I digress). The couple emigrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1954 with their three children, the youngest of which was Olivia Newton-John, who started a musical career at the tender age of fourteen and soon became a regular on local TV. In 1974, she represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest, but lost to – you guessed it – Sweden.
Her career finally soared off four years later when she scored the lead role of Sandy in “Grease” alongside John Travolta. The movie became the biggest box-office hit of 1978 and yielded no less than three Top-5-Singles and to this day one of the best selling movie soundtracks. Personally I like her next movie, “Xanadu”, featuring a musical co-production with the Electric Light Orchestra even better, but then again I’m into all kinds of weird, so take that with a grain of salt.
By this time, just like Sandy, Newton-John had undergone a transformation from the least offensive woman in music to leather-clad vixen. Her biggest hit, “Physical” helped with the new image: the thinly veiled sexual references at the time were thought to be too provocative by Tina Turner, who had been offered the song before and turned it down (only to release the even more obvious “Private Dancer” three years later). The song would stay at number one of the Charts for an amazing 10 weeks, which by that time only Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” had achieved, and the video featuring fat men failing comically at what in 1981 was the newest gym fad – Aerobics – only to turn into fit gay couples the moment Newton-John left the room for a shower is simply hilarious.
Sadly, Newton-John has lost her fight with breast cancer two days ago. RIP.
We’ve already featured a country song that wasn’t exactly typical of the genre. Today’s exhibit might share that trait, but it’s certainly way better – not only as far as the quality of the music is concerned, but also the video, which was done in the way of the Porter Wagoner show, a popular television programme featuring country music in the US of the sixties and seventies. It’s worth watching for what must be the most bored drummer ever (beating even Palmer) alone.
Lily Allen wrote “Not Fair” about a lazy lover who appears to be the perfect boyfriend in every other way, but leaves her sexually frustrated on a regular basis. The guy in question must have been pretty oblivious, as she stated that “the person in question is far too arrogant to even consider that it might be about him”. Unfortunately for her the song sort of backfired, as after its release some potential lovers supposedly were too intimidated by the prospect of having a song written about their sexual prowess to tag along.
I can’t help thinking the fate of her brother Alfie’s character Theon Greyjoy must somehow be related to this song.
Fifty-Three years, two weeks and five days ago Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words as he first set foot onto Earth’s big satellite. Some people to this day are certain that it was all staged, using studio photos and computer generated graphics.
Thirty-five years and one week ago MTV Europe went on air, with Dire Strait’s “Money For Nothing” being the first video that flickered into European music lovers’ homesteads. It featured lines Mark Knopfler – who had work-experience as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post – had picked up from a guy standing next to him in an electronics store in New York City in front of a wall of TV’s (all playing MTV) and a guest performance by Sting (“I want my Em-Tee-Veeee….”). Most notably though it displayed breathtaking state-of-the-art CGI, depicting not one but two working-class men watching and commenting on music videos.
Knopfler was rather unimpressed, as he considered videos to be beneath his dignity, destroying the purity of the music. Luckily for us his girlfriend chimed in, finding the concept quite brilliant, and while Knopfler was supposedly not at all convinced he at least did not interfere with proceedings.
The video was supposed to have more details, like buttons on the shirts, which couldn’t be implemented as they ran out of budget. It still won the Video of the Year awards though.
But just think about what might have been possible, if only they had asked NASA, instead of having it directed by Steve Barron (whom we already know from A-Ha).
We’re going to stray a little bit from our “famous music videos” path today in order to go with just the right bit of music for the gorgeous weather we’re having these days.
Robert Nesta Marley, better known as “Bob Marley” grew up in tiny Nine Mile and later Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica. He formed a vocalist group with his childhood friends Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and was encouraged to learn the guitar by the local popular artist Joe Higgs. It would take another decade, a few name changes and a label change to Island Records before they would gain international success, but in the end they were fired as opening band for “Sly and the Family Stone” because they had become more popular than the main act. The international breakthrough came with the live version of “No Woman, No Cry” (which is Jamaican patois for “Woman, Don’t Cry”, not what many people think namely “There is no reason to cry when there’s no woman”) in 1975, their first big hit outside Jamaica.
There is a Zurich connection as well: It was after a Bob Marley concert at the Hallenstadion in the end of May 1980 when fans coming from the concert joined forces with young people protesting against the city’s decision to let the Opera house use the “Red Factory” during renovations. The youngsters had tried to secure a cultural space of their own there for a long time, and that night they clashed hard with police at the first of what is these days known as the “Opernhauskrawalle”.
Marley died a year later from cancer.
I wanted a video from back then, which is why you’re seeing a recording from the Rainbow Theatre, London – performed the day after the release of his probably most acclaimed album “Exodus” – instead of the better known breakthrough version that received a much newer video two years ago.
There are few videos with such distinguished dances that a whole World of Warcraft race will forever be following suit (well, half a race, as the dances are gender-specific). Los Del Río’s “Macarena” was one such, or Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”. The single most recognisable dance-move, however, clearly goes the male orc. Or, well, to “M.C. Hammer” and his unforgettable “U Can’t Touch This”.
Released in 1990 the song features a sample of “Super Freak” by Rick Jones. And it looks as if history is repeating itself somewhat with me trying to educate the younger generation of VSHNeers here, as many of Hammer’s young listeners at the time were too young to know Jones’ song even though it was only 9 years old. The sample is used so prominently that a law suit ensued, ending with Jones being cited as a co-author and earning millions of dollars in royalties.
Even though Hammer lost some credibility in the rap community for incorporating too many pop and dance music elements he would have been set for life with the success of the song – had he not burned through seventy million dollars over the span of five years…
Michael “Flea” Balzary and Anthony Kiedis formed their band “Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem” in 1983 when they were classmates at Fairfax High School. It would undergo a fair number of changes before becoming the group that is known these days as the “Red Hot Chilli Peppers”: to the name and personnel, but also to their musical style (with Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley playing on their second album) and quite noteably their lifestyles.
After their early modest success they had all been using heroin, but while most of the members somehow held together, the addiction took quite a toll on Kiedis. The band was already auditioning for a new singer when he managed to overcome the problem in rehab and rejoined them with new enthusiasm. As is often the case, he came down with bouts of depression, and when he drove home from a rehearsal session a few years later a poem came unto him, reminiscing about how he had been under the bridge he was just driving over a few years back, looking for drugs, and how he never wanted to get back to that low point in his life.
When producer Rick Rubin found the poem in Kiedis’ notebook he immediately saw potential, but the singer was reluctant. However, once he was persuaded to at least show it to his bandmates they immediately went to their respective instruments and started working on the song.
It kicked their career into high gear, out of the somewhat obscure Alternative Rock scene into mainstream. And when the video, directed by none other than Gus Van Sant entered heavy rotation on MTV they definitely had arrived in the olymp of pop music.
