One Hit No More, No. 110: Why The Vapors Floated Away

Probably what you remember.

What was the most “’80s’ sound” of the 1980s? If it was new wave...

The Hit
David Fenton remembers the inspiration for his famous song – i.e., sitting in a flat in Guildford, UK, thinking about holding the photograph that’s all you have left in a relationship – and he recalled having the melody, but struggling with the lyrics. One night, he woke with the phrase “turning Japanese” in his head. He wrote down the words and, over the following days, pushed the song as close to final as he could before passing it off to his bandmates for polishing.

As it turns out, the phrase “turning Japanese” didn’t mean anything in particular. As Fenton put it in a recent interview with Songwriting, “It could have been anything! It could have ended up as Turning Portuguese.”

The Vapors’ famously frenetic 1980 hit, “Turning Japanese,” never meant anything, as it turns out. According to some annotated lyrics, the song kicks around themes of obsessive behavior and separation...which doesn't offer an obvious connectoin to becoming “Japanese” apparent, so I kept thinking. As I listened to the song several times over the past week, I thought the connection might follow from old ‘80s stereotypes about Japanese tourists – i.e., the joke went they took pictures of everything, a trope you can see in movies from the early to mid-1980s – but no one mentioned that, so I’m moving off that one, and with relief.

The other rumor swirled around the song’s lyrics, particularly here in the States, held that alluded to masturbation. From that same interview:

“It was weird when people started saying it was about masturbation. I can’t claim that one! That happened when we went to America – for some reason they thought it was an English phrase for masturbation. I thought that was quite interesting, and it made people talk about the song and created more interest, so it didn’t hurt I don’t think, but that wasn’t the intention.”

Crash Course, No. 39: DEVO, The Art School Project that Got Real Big

I was witnessing genius...

I had a very satisfying project called One Hit No More, and that’s what steered me to DEVO. At the same time, hitting DEVO put that project into the realm of bands I grew up with, aka, bands I know fairly well. And DEVO fits that better than most.

Having grown up on early (the earliest, in fact) MTV, I couldn’t wrap my head around DEVO as a “one-hit wonder.” Part of that followed from the fact that MTV playe a lot of DEVO; between “Through Being Cool,” “Beautiful World,” “Love Without Anger,” “Freedom of Choice,” and “Satisfaction,” it simply never occurred to me that “Whip It” was their only Top 40 hit.

And that was despite all the visibly weird shit/themes they presented and played with. I remember watching it, understanding it was different, but, young as I was - their prime years hit when I was 9-11 years old - all of it went over my head. So, let’s fill in some blanks.

Somewhat Briefly
“…here are the five basic components of the Devolutionary Oath:

1. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one
3. The littlest may survive & the unfit may live
4. Be like your ancestors or be different
5. We must repeat”

Even if I, like everyone from DEVO, came from Ohio, I had no hope of wrapping my head around that. Then again, they had quite the head start…

The main members of DEVO - Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale - met at Kent State, when Kent State was Kent State, i.e., Casale was present for the university’s most infamous moment, saw his friends die, and lived through the hyper-reactionary backlash. Suffice to say, it changed him:

“Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear.”

One Hit No More, No. 103: Gary Numan, The Machman

Point A.

I had an unbalanced loathing of most things with synthesizers growing up. But I made a quiet exception for this song - almost certainly because I liked it, but felt like I shouldn't. Related, a very young me found Gary Numan fascinating for reasons I had neither the experience nor vocabulary to express.

The Hit
I can think of no better way to start this than with this quote from a solid, very current (2021) interview in SongwriterUniverse.com:

“I did have a piano by then, but it’s difficult if you’re not a good keyboard player, to come up with good synth/bass lines on an upright piano. So I bought a Shergold Modulator bass guitar from the West End in London, and brought it home. I opened up the case, pulled out the guitar, and the first four notes that I played was, “Do-do-do-do,” (he sings the bass hook of “Cars”). And I thought…That sounds pretty good, I’ll keep that. And then I did something else—the next four notes became [the other hook]. It was really simple, like a child’s song. It took me 5 to 10 minutes to get the three parts of the song worked out, and figure out a structure. Then it took me another 20 minutes to do the lyric.”

I love that it was that simple. Moreover, it makes a lot of sense after you read just a little about Numan. That fuzzy, modulated bass/rhythm riff he stumbled on dominates the song in such a way that I can’t imagine anyone associating any other sound with it, but it's that mixed with lose long treble synthesizer bleeds (for they way they, for lack of a better word, descend) that made Numan’s signature sound. At least at his frenzied peak. And frenzied it was…

The Rest of the Story
“You know, his album Replicas never left my turntable in junior high school. There are people still trying to work out what a genius he was.”
- Prince. Wait for it…

Born Gary Anthony James Webb, somewhere in London in 1958, the man who later transformed into Gary Numan grew up (mostly) as an only child (there was the late addition of a cousin) in a stable, supportive family. His parents hardly had money to burn - his father moved luggage for British Airways - but they indulged his interests often enough that he didn’t seem to want for anything. While he gravitated to the same interests most boys do - e.g., Numan told GQ in a 2020 interview that he wanted to be a pilot until he found out that only 1 in 1,000 make the cut - he became obsessed with music at a fairly young age and set his sights on the opportunity-rich career path of paid musician. Possibly related, Webb was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age 14. Never mind. It’s related.

Crash Course, No. 36: Blondie, Definitely Important, but Also Better than I Thought

Not the inspiration, btw.

The format I used for the posts on Black Sabbath and Blitzen Trapper doesn’t feel like a good fit for this. It probably wasn’t a good fit for either of those, but there’s just…something about Blondie’s history that makes more sense of telling it all at once.

“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"

"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)

A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:

“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”

I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.

Crash-Course No. 11: UltraVoxyCars, From the '70s Into the '80s

Behind the scenes, Sirens.

Another week, more tweaks to the format; the benefits of having a tiny platform never stops giving, really. Moving past that tiny pile of rubble...

Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…

Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)

So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...

On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline: