A Timeless Wavelength

Devo – Speed Racer

With my interest in computer-generated synth music newly rekindled, it was natural that I’d revisit the godfathers of ’80s New Wave synth-pop:  DEVO.

There’s been a recent spike in the popularity of a genre known as “nerdcore,” which combines elements of rap, metal, and punk with lyrics about Star Wars and programming the Commodore 64.  I guess it started as an ironic joke:  let’s take a bunch of musical styles that are normally associated with aggressive posturing, and turn them into the voice of the guys who were always getting shoved into lockers in high school.  It’s a variant on the old “isn’t it funny when lame white guys try to rap?” trope.

Devo weren’t like that.  To paraphrase the fictionalized Lester Bangs from Almost Famous:  they were pasty nerds who had the courage to be pasty nerds, which made them poetic.  With the opening track on their album New Traditionalists, they declared that they were “through being cool,” and they showed that nerds didn’t have to pretend to be tough.  They wore thick glasses and ridiculous hats they called “energy domes”.  They reveled in (and helped define) the ’80s synthesizer sound,  reveling in the simple sequencer rhythms that earlier artists would have derided for “lacking soul”.  They were members of, and evangelists for, the Church of the SubGenius,  a religion based around the age-old nerd fantasy of getting revenge on all the cool people and “normals”.  And they guest-starred on ’80s nerd sitcom Square Pegs.

This track, from their 1982 album Oh, No!  It’s DEVO!, is a beautifully surreal example of the band’s style.  Each verse introduces some character with a different funny voice (“I’m Speed Racer and I drive real fast,” “I’m a big pirate and I like to steal”), and I can’t help but think the idea for this song came from watching little kids play with mismatched toys.  You can just picture the little tykes, sitting on the floor in their miniature energy dome hats, with a Speed Racer action figure, a LEGO pirate, a barbie doll, and a game of Operation!, doing silly voices for this diverse cast of characters.  This track also shows, incidentally, that DEVO were in on the very nerdy “Talk like a pirate” meme a good twenty years before everyone else.

Commodore Amiga featuring Aegis Sonix – Jay’s Song

Sorry for the weeks-long blog hiatus.  I could quite legitimately claim to have been busy, it being the end of the semester and all.  But in reality, I just haven’t quite felt like blogging.  I had no idea when I started this thing just how tedious it could get, going through one’s music collection every day and finding something meaningful to say about a song.  I’ve even given thought to diversifying this blog, giving myself something to talk about besides just songs.  Good idea?  Or should I just stick with the present format?

That being said, it’s not like I could ever really run out of songs to talk about.  One of the non-blog activities that’s been occupying me the past couple of weeks has been playing around with an Amiga emulator.  As I’ve mentioned before, back in the late ’80s I had an Amiga 2000 and a copy of Aegis Sonix, which gave me my first exposure to creating computer music.  The software wasn’t all that feature-laden, but to this day I haven’t found a program that matches it for ease of use.  The built-in sound had the unavoidably tinny quality of 8-bit audio, but the Amiga managed to get as much performance as possible out of those 8 bits.  With the addition of a MIDI interface and a good tone generator (such as my trusty Yamaha TG-55), you could make professional-quality music with a pretty simple setup.

Sadly, my original Amiga was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina,  and I haven’t yet managed to get MIDI output working with the emulator.  But I can still get the original 8-bit-tastic sounds!  This is “Jay’s Song”, the demo song that came with Sonix, which was often used to showcase the Amiga’s then-extraordinary sound capabilities.

(As much as I liked my Amiga, I was always kind of jealous of Atari ST owners.  Said machine had built-in MIDI, and a better selection of music software.  The ST version of Cubase is prized by many even today over the bloated, feature-rich Cubase VST.  There’s a pretty good ST emulator out there, with MIDI capability… I’ll have to see if I can get it to cooperate with some external controllers and synthesizers.)

Queensrÿche – Synchronicity II

One of the standout tracks from the Police’s farewell album Synchronicity is the side one closer, “Synchronicity II”.  It tells a tale of suburban alienation from the standpoint of Jungian analysis, and throws in a bit about the Loch Ness Monster for good measure.  It stands out as well because it’s a marked departure from most of the Police’s other works.  Unlike the reggae verse/ rock chorus dynamic of their early works, or the pure guitar pop of “Every Breath You Take,” this track is epic in scope.  Its screaming intro and beefy guitar riffs seem more like something you would hear on a period heavy metal album, albeit the presence of Sting takes the metal credibility down several pegs.  It might make you wonder what the song would sound like if an actual metal band covered it.

Well, fear not, it’s Queensrÿche to the rescue!  In 2007, Seattle’s favorite umlaut-clad warriors released Take Cover, a (what else?) cover album in which they lend their talents to tracks from the likes of Pink Floyd, Queen, CSNY, and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. Most of these songs work surprisingly well as Queensrÿche songs, and sound as if they were made for Geoff Tate’s vocal style.  But this cover of “Synchronicity II” is enough to make you stop and wonder how different the world would be if Sting had taken his post-Police career in a far less Adult Contemporary direction.