80s icon Madonna in a skit with Lady Gaga on Saturday Night Live last night.
I came across this video on the blog Music Is The Heart Of Our Soul
Posts Tagged ‘music’
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun… or do they?
September 13, 2009Miley Cyrus – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun off her new album Breakout.
An interesting footnote about the album: the title track was co-written by The Go-Go’s Gina Schock
…or do they? Melody Club – Girls Don’t Always Wanna Have Fun off their new album Goodbye to Romance.
another interesting take on the song by Emilie Autumn
and of course, here’s the original Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper off her album She’s So Unusual (1984)
Melody Club… synthpop/rock from Sweden takes you back to the future!
September 13, 2009Swedish synthpop band Melody Club takes a little more than a page from history, more like a whole chapter! Melody Club is sooo retro 80s that it’s not even funny, it’s actually cool! Each of their albums are full of very slick, well-crafted pop songs that get you movin’ to the beat and humming along. Everything about this band makes me feel like I’ve just taken a ride in a DeLorean equipped with a flux capaciter, set the time to 1984, we’re going back, to the future!
Check out Melody Club’s youtube channel for more videos, there are videos that are even more 80s than this, The Only Ones is from their new album Goodby to Romance.
the 80s rears it’s ugly head?
September 2, 2009
I’m always searching out new artists and new sounds. It seems that more and more over the past few years I find artists that sound like they could have hit the charts 20 years ago in the 80s. I have also noticed 80s fashion becoming more popular with some of the kids today. Why is this? When I was in high school, which was almost 20 yrs ago, the 60s/70s were super cool. My friends and I listened to a lot of 70s bands like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, The Ramones, and others. Why? This has been a topic of conversation many many times over the years and it seems the same thing always comes up. Each generation wants something to call their own. Yesterdays fashion is just that, old, done with, its history. So why then look even further into the past for inspiration? It seems that after a decade or so we are removed enough from the past that the ideas can sound fresh again. We always look to the past to see what has been done before so we can build upon it. So it seems that these things may go in cycles, the new kids look about 10-20 yrs back for inspiration (because they don’t want to sound like what was recently done and be a copy cat), and that sound seeps into the music of today. There has to be something new about it though. If an artist just copies what was done 15 yrs ago then they are retro and its nothing new. If an artist takes the sounds from 15 yrs ago and puts it into the context of today’s popular sounds and technical capabilities, then whamo! a new sound is born. It seems that the most obvious influence coming from the 80s is the use of synths and keyboards, something that I always thought the 90s were lacking.
A couple of artists that I have run across who seem to do this quite well are Shiny Toy Guns and No Doubt on their album Rock Steady which Rick Ocasek of The Cars helped produce. The song Don’t Let Me Down sounds alot like The Cars.
A little more about the Tom Dowd documentary
August 30, 2009I thought that I should give a little more info about the Tom Dowd documenatry from yesterdays post. Tom Dowd studied mathematics and physics at Columbia University, where, from the ages of 16 to 20 he worked on the Manhattan Project. He later was a sergeant in the Army Corps of Engineers working with radiation detection specialists at atomic bomb tests in Bikini Atoll. He then went on to work for Atlantic records where he did pioneering work with binaural stereo recording.
Tom Dowd and the Language of Music
Tom Dowd and the Language of Music
August 29, 2009I had never heard of Tom Dowd when I came across this documentary on Netflix.com This is a very inspiring and insightful look at a man who helped to modernize the recording industry and produced and engineered recordings with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Cream, Rod Stewart, Lynyrd Skynyrd and many others. I highly recommend this if you are into recording engineering and its history / evolution.
www.thelanguageofmusic.com
