Tag: Post-Punk

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Driven to Tears”

If people are familiar with The Police at all, it’s probably from a mega-hit like “Every Breath You Take,” or some other song off their classic concept album Synchronicity. That work marked both the apex of the band’s popularity as well as their demise. But most people don’t realize that, way back in the early 80s, The Police were primarly a reggae band. (Or were they a punk band? Or maybe jazz…?)

As far as I can tell, almost every great work of art is actually a synthesis of two or more styles that were previously opposed to each other. In “Driven to Tears,” we have those three disparate influences: reggae, punk, and jazz. More importantly, it is perhaps the band’s ultimate song in that is shows-off the talents of all three muscians so well. Andy Summers’s guitar is elegant yet soaring; Stewart Copeland’s drumming is at its frenetic, polyrythmic peak; and Sting’s singing and bass-playing are the core of the song.

And there’s the libretto, of course. “Too many cameras, not enough food.” It’s a line as heartbreakingly true today as it was in 1980. Maybe more so.

Rock on…!

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Mexican Radio”

If there is one song that can instantly evoke memories of the early 1980s, when me and friends stayed up all night watching MTV, it’s this one, “Mexican Radio.” It’s a very strange little song by a very strange little band, Wall of Voodoo, but it perfectly captures the “collapsed-time” vibe of the Reagan era. The suppressed but inescapable feeling that American culture had somehow degraded (“de-evolved,” as the band Devo put it) to a state where it was totally insane, vulgar, and incomprehensible. 

The same sort of black humor, satirical zeitgeist was immortalized in film two years later, in 1984, when Alex Cox’s Repo Man came out. That movie’s soundtrack included many fine punk and post-punk bands like Wall of Voodoo—but without Wall of Voodoo. Oh, well. The movie could have given the band some much-needed exposure. They never did get the respect they deserved. 

But for a while, they really did shine.

(Fun fact: I always thought the band’s name was a reference to a spell in Dungeons & Dragons, but I was wrong. It was, in fact, inspired by the brilliant madman Phil Spector and his famous Wall of Sound effect on the songs he produced in the 1960s. Go, figure.)

Rock on…