The History Of Jop Part 9 aka Every other story is tellin you somebody died

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The Pazz and Jop poll for 1987, revisited. You get nine choices.


[Poll #832067]


1986: The Jip-Jop Wars (Poptimist Version)

1. West End Girls (38 votes)
2. Word Up (35)
3=. Walk This Way (33)
3=. Fight For Your Right To Party (33)
3=. Papa Don't Preach (33)
6=. Kiss (31)
6=. Walk Like An Egyptian (31)
8. Manic Monday (25)
9=. Rise (18)
9=. Nasty (18)
9=. Addicted To Love (18)

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This has been the hardest year for me to find stuff I loved. U2 and REM squarely to blame.

This is also the first time the Grateful Dead have been required on a Poptimists poll. A landmark of sorts I feel!

[koganbot]

Grateful Dead tune is not bad. (Though not as good as "The One I Love" and "With Or Without You."

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Almost all of this is pretty good, but I guess I agree about having a hard time "loving" most of it. More strong but fuzzy feelings about the artists than anything else.

The Reason "Bring the Noise" Did Not Win

[koganbot]

The reason "Bring the Noise" did not win is rather simple; most of the voters hadn't heard it. It hadn't got radio play, it was nothing but a 12-inch single by a group whose first album had gotten little notice and whose overwhelming second album was months away. In any event, I hadn't heard it. (Not that it was a guaranteed victor over "Sign O The Times," though I think it'd have won if enough people heard it. I don't know anybody who doesn't like it, though I suspect I'll run across a few today.)

Anyway, after several months of trustworthy hype, Public Enemy got big.

Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 1987

[koganbot]

1. Company B "Fascinated"
2. Spoonie Gee "Take It Off"
3. Spoonie Gee "The Godfather"
4. Vivien Vee "Heartbeat"
5. Eric B. & Rakim "I Know You Got Soul"
6. L.S. Fresh "You Can't Get No Pussy"
7. Exposé "Point of No Return"
8. Deborah Allen "Telepathy"
9. Roxanne Shanté "Have a Nice Day"
10. King Sun-D Moët "Hey Love"

Re: Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 1987

[koganbot]

An amazing year, considering that I started it off by declaring that music sucked. Missing from my albums list, and from pretty much everybody's but Chuck's: Appetite for Destruction, which hadn't yet scored a hit. Missing from most people's list including mine: any glammetal whatsoever ('cept it made my videos list, which I'll post if things get too quiet).

Re: Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 1987

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

How come "Point of No Return" did not make Pazz & Jop? It's one of the greatest singles of all time!

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I'm rather surprised that I still haven't warmed to the Joshua Tree singles, I'm all over thheir work from this period otherwise (including the rest of the album). With Or Without You always stood a little higher than the other two, though.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

the other way around for me. i like precious little u2, and this about covers it. not even typical of the songs i like generally, so quite odd.

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I shouldn't've ticked any U2 singles. My eye sorta passed over them like a speck of dust on my monitor. I've felt all sorts of things about them (the singles, I mean), but I ended up putting a vote for Alexander O'Neal (I bought the "Fake" 45 back in the day, I'm old skool) rather than suss out just if all my ambivalent feelings edge closer to love than like or dislike.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

What a rub year compared to 1986! I struggled to tick 8. UK charts on the other hand were full of gold - Mel&Kim, Rick Astley, SINITTA!!!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Also listening to at the time: Curiosity Killed The Cat.

At the time

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Graduated from Uni at end of '86, so 1987 was my first year of paid employment. Was particularly excited by the effect that turntablism and sampling was having on mainstream pop. My #1 album by a country mile was the JAMS withdrawn LP, 1987 - What the Fuck's Going On?. My copy is slightly scratched but must be worth $$$$$ by now. Hearing "Bring The Noise" towards the end of '87 was another momentous event. I'd put this at #1 now. But "Birthday" is arguably just as remarkable.

Top 15
1. "Pump Up The Volume"
2. "Bring The Noise"
3. "Sign 'o' The Times"
4. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - "All You Need Is Love"
5. The Sugarcubes - "Birthday"
6. "I Know You Got Soul"
7. Coldcut - "Beats + Pieces"/"That Greedy Beat"
8. The Fall - "Australians in Europe"
9. The Smiths - 2I started Something I Couldn't Finish"
10. U2 - "Where the Streets Have No Name"
11. Abigail Mead & Nigel Goulding - "Full Metal Jacket (I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)"
12. Public Enemy - "Rebel Without A Pause"
13. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - "The Queen & I"
14. Big Black - "Things To Do Today"/"I Can't Believe"
15. Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction - "Prime Mover"

Re: At the time

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I got 'What the fuck's going on?' off BitTorrent whilst searching for Monkees, because I'm a sucker for gratuitous obscenity and considered it pretty fucking genius, frankly. ^^

My name is Luka, I live on the second floor

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I heart Suzanne Vega! No one else has done librarian-pop quite as well.

Re: My name is Luka, I live on the second floor

[koganbot]

I ticked this too, but I do recall the schoolkids' retort (or should I say detournement), "My name is puka, I live on the bathroom floor."

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Cor, George is doing very well with Faith. It is a terrible video though, he has a habit of making himself look less attractive than he is.

[koganbot]

I remember when the "Father Figure" vid came out, my friend Klara said, "She's the father figure; he looks like a fucking cockroach."

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think most of this is pretty good, and I bet some of the stuff I haven't heard is good too!

I didn't hear GnR until spring of 1988 when they totally blew me away. I have a copy of the original UK release Welcome to the Jungle, but I think I bought it off some kid. Summer 1989 they were unavoidable, and I'd had a year off them to myself before they were all over radio 1 (although I see both the 1988 singles charted at 24; but 1989 they reached 6, starting with Paradise City...)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A couple of people have pegged "Sign O The Times" as most important, which intrigues me, as Prince was already huge, and he never really did much of the 'social commentary' style stuff again afterwards, so SOTT sounds more like an intriguing one-off than a milestone.

I can understand people naming it as best (I've come to prefer both the other ones here though).

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Matos's EXTREME dislike of SOTT (the song) amuses me but rankles. Yes, it's atypical Prince and I can allow for his need to compensate for the fact that ppl who didn't previously like Prince praised it to the skies. But come on.

Dean's Essay

[koganbot]

"Radio is a good, weird machine," Greil Marcus insisted last year, and this year the theme was reflected in the singles lists of many critics who've never met--for instance, Frank Kogan, Rob Tannenbaum, Chuck Eddy, and Ted Cox. All were Amerindie partisans five years ago, and to an extent they still are, with Cox and Tannenbaum in the Lobos-to-Hüskers tributary and Eddy and Kogan down with noise bands like White Zombie and Pussy Galore. But for singles they listen to the radio and get off on getting manipulated. Cox and Tannenbaum go for pop-to-schlock, Fleetwood Mac or Eddie Money, while Eddy and Kogan list a lot of street-rap. But all fell for diva/girl dance records that five years ago they almost certainly would have dismissed as, dare I say it, disco: Whitney Houston, Deborah Allen, Company B, Exposé.

(PRAISED as disco, more like.)

But if Eddie Money and Spoonie Gee are blips, they're blips that add up to something. Cox and Tannenbaum move from meaningful, sonically distinct Amerindie songcraft to pragmatic, factory-tooled songcraft to physically manipulative (but liberating) dance-pop; Eddy and Kogan move from desperate, sonically enraged Amerindie noise to streetwise, beatwise noise to physically liberating (if manipulative) dance-pop. All respond to rhythm as meaning--or at least as a component of rock and roll's musical vocabulary that the various unmistakable Amerindie sounds fail to account for. And all confront rock and roll's significance-deadening crisis of overproduction by moving beyond mere critical consensus to the pop consensus at its most democratic, anonymous, and perhaps even arbitrary. Being critics, they may well get into the lyrics of their favorite disco songs as well, although not as spontaneously as Brian Chin gets into "You Used To Hold Me." But it's fair to say that the elation they feel is the elation of escape--not just from their troubles, as Cox believes, but from a critical dead end.

As someone who's always believed the stupid pleasures of mass culture deserve more respect than they get from intellectuals of any political stripe, I'm very sympathetic to this tendency. I suspect it's prophetic, too, which doesn't necessarily mean it will ever be fully reflected in the Pazz & Jop consensus. But it does partake of a certain voluptuous beat-me beat-me passivity that I find suspicious as the reign of Reagan drags to its enervating close. And insofar as it represents a programmatic rejection of the quasi-literary song aesthetic (as it does for Eddy), I'm not ready to go along. Just in case it seems I've been saying there are no more good songs any more, let me emphasize: I've been saying there are more than we know what to do with. Maybe, just maybe, we can solve this cognitive problem, and we definitely shouldn't give up on it yet. I mean, every day I hear songs that not only mean something but get me off. That effect rarely endures the way it's supposed to, sometimes because the song (words and/or music) wears out, sometimes because it's rendered moot by the competence and worse of the LP where it appears. The thing is, why should it endure? As a peculiarity of a novelty-obsessed youth genre, the belief that rock and roll should get you off forever--that is, change your life on an approximately semiannual basis--has essential uses and attractions. But it's also a romantic delusion. As Randy Newman put it: "Everybody dies."

Re: Dean's Essay

[koganbot]

All right, this is one of those times where Xgau hovers near an idea without quite getting there. In other words, I don't altogether understand what he's saying. But among other things he's projecting an internal tension of his own onto me (at least) and onto rock criticism: That is, he, Xgau, thinks (thought) there was a tension between significance on the one hand and pleasure on the other, so he is working hard in his essay (and in his work in general) to overcome that tension. And one of his problems is that he hasn't thought through what he means by "significance," so he uses it as a stand-in for a vague constellation that can mean anything from "socially significant" to "poetically impressive."

(Whereas I was working from different maps altogether; not "pleasure" vs. "significance" but stuff like hallway vs. classroom [though I hadn't come up with that metaphor yet], and I wasn't buying into the classroom's right to define "significance" or the hallway's right to define "pleasure" - whereas I think Xgau fell whole hog into those def'ns, and then worked with difficulty to extricate himself.)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just cus this is the first Pazz and Jop which I was birthed for any of the year in relevance but I thought this was quite a fine collection and contains many songs I thoroughly enjoy although I am surprised by the amount of George Michael. I can see he's somehow important but I find his music a little... irrelevant, really. This is probably showing my age/attention span, though.

That said, 'Careless Whisper' is bloody genius still.

ps: Hurrah for X! I've been trying to tell people my age that they aren't some figment of my imagination for years.

Brooce and Stevie

[koganbot]

Interesting that Bruce and Stevie are receiving neither love nor hate here, and very few ticks. ("Tunnel" is rather nice, even if not in my top nine. "Brilliant"/"Lucky" he's back to being musclebound.)

Re: Brooce and Stevie

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hur hur hur, "tunnel of love", hur hur hur...

[koganbot]

Billboard Top 26 Pop Singles of 1987 - * Song went #1

*1... WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN, The Bangles (Columbia) (#1, Dec 1986)
*2... ALONE, Heart (Capitol) (#1, July)
*3... SHAKE YOU DOWN, Gregory Abbott (Columbia) (#1, Jan)
*4... I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY (Who Loves Me), Whitney Houston (Arista) (#1, June)
*5... NOTHING'S GONNA STOP US NOW, Starship (Grunt) (#1, April)
6... C'EST LA VIE, Robbie Nevil (EMI-Manhattan) (#2, Jan)
*7... HERE I GO AGAIN, Whitesnake (Geffen) (#1, Oct)
*8... THE WAY IT IS, Bruce Hornsby and the Range (RCA) (#1, Dec 1986)
*9... SHAKEDOWN, Bob Segar (MCA) (#1, Aug)
*10.. LIVIN' ON A PRAYER, .. Bon Jovi (Mercury) (#1, Feb)
*11.. LA BAMBA, Los Lobos (Slash) (#1, Aug)
12.. EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT, Wang Chung (Geffen) (#2, Dec 1986)
13.. DON'T DREAM IT'S OVER, Crowded House (Capitol) (#2, April)
*14.. ALWAYS, Atlantic Starr (Warner Brothers) (#1, June)
*15.. WITH OR WITHOUT YOU, U2 (Island) (#1, May)
16.. LOOKING FOR A NEW LOVE, Jody Wately (MCA) (#2, May)
*17.. HEAD TO TOE, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (Columbia) (#1, June)
*18.. I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW, Tiffany (MCA) (#1, Nov)
*19.. MONY MONY "LIVE", Billy Idol (Chrysalis) (#1, Nov)
*20.. AT THIS MOMENT, Billy Vera and the Beatlers (Rhino) (#1, Jan)
21.. THE LADY IN RED, Chris DeBurgh (A&M) (#3, May)
*22.. DIDN'T WE ALMOST HAVE IT ALL, Whitney Houston (Arista) (#1, Sept)
*23.. I STILL HAVEN'T FOUND WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR, U2 (Island) (#1, Aug)
24.. I WANT YOUR SEX, George Michael (Columbia) (#2, Aug)
25.. NOTORIOUS, Duran Duran (Capitol) (#2, Jan)
26.. ONLY IN MY DREAMS, Debbie Gibson (Atlantic) (#4, Sept)

P&J is looking relatively sad in comparison. I still love the juxtaposition of 18 and 19, and also the fact that one followed the other as #1 in November '87.

[koganbot]

Oops, forgot to bold Crowded House.

Don't Dream It's Over

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Not remotely on my radar in 1987. It's crept up on me over time. About five years it came on the radio again and I thought: "Wow, this is perfect".

Meanwhile In England

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

NME Top 60 Singles

Sign 'O' the times - Prince
Paid in full - Eric B & Rakim
Big decision - That petrol emotion
Rebel without a pause - Public enemy
Pump up the volume - M/A/R/R/S
I know you got soul - Eric B & Rakim
Hit the north - The Fall
Birthday - The sugercubes
True faith - New order
Females - Cookie crew
Girlfriend in a coma - The smiths
Hey love - King sun D moet
Rent - Pet shop boys
Fight for your right - Beastie boys
If I was your girlfriend - Prince
Get down - Derek B
Fairy tale of new York - The pogues
Boops(here to go) - Sly and robbie
Birth school work death - The godfathers
He's a whore/The model - Big black
The albums of jack - The bachelor pad
First we take Manhattan - Jennifer warnes
This brutal house - Nitro deluxe
April skies - The Jesus and Mary chain
You're gonna get yours - Public enemy
Someday - Ce ce Rogers
My favourite dress - The wedding present
Saturday night - Schoolly D
Never gonna give you up - Rick Astley
It's a sin - Pet shop boys
Alex Chilton - The Replacements
The godfather - Spoonie Gee
New mind - Swans
Downtown - Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
I am the law - Anthrax
Beaver patrol - Pop will eat itself
Letter from America - The Proclaimers
All you need is love - Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
There’s a ghost in my house - The Fall
It’s not heaven - Blind mice
Beats and pieces - Cold cut
Rock da house - Cookie Crew
What have I done to deserve this - Pet shop boys
There ain’t nothin’ like shaggin’ - The Tams
Chasin a dream - Tashan
Indians - Anthrax
Lolita - AR Kane
What’s my scene? - The hoodoo gurus
La isla Bonita - Madonna
The Kray twins - Renegade sound wave
Brilliant Disguise - Bruce Springsteen
Sho’ you right - Barry White
Jump start - Natalie Cole
Mary’s prayer - Danny Wilson
Shoplifters of the world unite - The Smiths
Who’s afraid of the big bad noise - Age of chance
Walk away - Surf drums
Build - The Housemartins
Touch of grey - The Grateful Dead
If you let me stay - Terence Trent D’Arby

The Melody Maker top 20 is:

Birthday - The Sugercubes
Lollita EP - AR Kane
Sign 'O' the times - Prince
This corrosion - The sisters of mercy
Catch - The cure
Pump up the volume - M|A|R|R|S
If I was your girlfriend - Prince
Chains chained EP - Throwing muses
April skies - Jesus and Mary chain
Who's that girl - Madonna
Forgotten town - The Christians
Rebel without a pause - Public enemy
Alex Chilton EP - The replacements
A town called walker - Tom Verlaine
Let happiness in - David Sylvian
When your sad/Haunted - AR Kane
Hope against hope - Band of Susan’s
I'm bad - LL Cool J
Happy when it rains - Jesus and Mary chain
Why can't I be you - The Cure

Re: Meanwhile In Britain

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I dug out my pile of UK music press cuttings from 86 and 87 last night. I was hoping to find some of the Xmas '87 issue of MM in there but that issue is either in storage or I have thrown it out :(

I do remember the individual MM writers' lists of 20 favourite tracks of 1987 being particularly inspiring. And obv far more wide ranging than the singles poll results would suggest - album and EP tracks by the likes of Arthur Russell, Jane Siberry and the new noiseniks like The Young Gods (who won the MM albums poll), AR Kane and Loop.

I did find plenty of interesting articles though: this was the year that Reynolds and Stubbs were allowed to write manifestos disguised as features on a fairly regular basis. There's a particularly striking one from the issue dated Nov 14th called "Schemers, Dreamers" having a go at what they called Pop Entryists and praising the return to remystification and the "intuitive rock" of e.g. the above-mentioned artists. I expect dubdobdee could find plenty to argue with in this piece.

Dead FYI

[koganbot]

1987: Touch of Grey.

1969: Dark Star is more than just a song, it´s like an entire feeling. The freedom, the expression and the support all add to its mysterious glory.

Re: Dead FYI

[giddyoldgoat.livejournal.com]

Touch of Grey is the last great Hunter/Garcia song - by the time the Dead recorded the studio version it had already been in their live set for a few years. The production - all those plinky keyboards, processed drums and midi whatnots - sounds pretty horrible now, but I think it's a strong enough song to survive that - you can hear why it was a hit, if only because of the sweet sentiment expressed in the refrain - "a touch of grey suits you anyway", amen. Nowadays I cld also get behind the unrecorded follow-up, 'A Spot of Bald'.

thank you poptimists!

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Since this thread I've played 'La Bamba' 20xtimes!

Re: thank you poptimists!

[giddyoldgoat.livejournal.com]

Dload 'Let Her Dance' by the Bobby Fuller Four, a 'La Bamba' knock-off which I sorta prefer to the orig