I do have a soft spot (heh) for industrial music. I don’t listen to it all that often, but I’ve loved it since I first heard those dance beats, clanky percussion and crunchy guitars in the late 80s with bands like DAF and Front 242 and Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Which means I was into it well before all those sci-fi action films of the 90s used this genre for all those martial arts fight scenes! [Looking at you, Mortal Kombat and Matrix movies!]
I used to see KMFDM at the indie record stores all the time, which is a surprise considering Wax Trax! releases (the label they’d been on for years) weren’t always easy to find. They’ve been around since the early 80s themselves, starting out in Germany and eventually emigrating to the States. I’m pretty sure I’d heard one or two of their songs on WAMH back in 1988-89, as there was an industrial/techno/EBM show that would play stuff like this.
I owned only a few of their CDs back in the day, but I’d throw them on now and again when I needed the boost for something that would fit the Mendaihu Universe’s more tense moments that I was writing at the time. [Interestingly enough, this is the kind of music Alec Poe would listen to, which goes quite against the laid back aura he puts out through most of the trilogy. It’s all under the skin and hidden away with him.]
They’re still around these days, having dropped an original album (Let Go) early last year and a revisit of an older album this year (Hau Ruck 2025). They may not get a lot of airplay, but they’re definitely an interesting band to check out.
This song is one of many that pops up at the Day Job — no, it hasn’t changed the playlists since I started working there almost three years ago — but I’m not complaining because I’m always happy when an ELO song gets stuck in my head. 🙂
I’ll freely admit that I’m firmly on the Gen-Xer side of ‘remembering MTV back when it played music videos’. We’re talking the early 80s here, back when my family signed up for cable TV via Warner Amex. I’d heard about the channel via its mention in music magazines like Rolling Stone and its occasional “I want my MTV” commercial showing up here and there. The first videos I remember seeing on the channel was .38 Special’s “Hold On Loosely” and The Police’s “Spirits in the Material World”. It was sometime in 1982, and I was already well entrenched in rock radio and American Top 40, even at eleven years old. I was completely hooked.
I think what appealed to me, even as a preteen, was the fact that the channel tried so hard to be at the forefront of music culture, yet also felt like one of those low-budget community access channels where the production teams and the on-air hosts really didn’t know what the hell they were doing half the time. That was part of its charm! They knew enough to replay all the music videos that got a positive reaction from its viewers, but they weren’t afraid to insert weird things like Blotto’s “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” or Yello’s “The Evening’s Young” to keep us on our toes. Hell, I even loved those one or two minute bumper fillers that were basically public domain films set to nameless instrumentals.
I bring this up following the recent news that the channel has chosen to shut down all of its UK channels by the end of the year, with the possibility of more channels in other countries going the way of the buffalo as well. Not that anyone is surprised these days, considering that the original channel plays reality shows and the tertiary smaller channels are mostly available via cable TV packages.
Most music videos show up on YouTube and TikTok these days, and that might be a good thing when you want to watch the new Taylor Swift video now instead of waiting for it to show up at some point in the next hour or so. But what we miss, just like streaming versus terrestrial radio, is two-fold: we miss out on the slow anticipation that our favorite band or singer will show up like some kind of mini-event, and we miss out on the potential discovery of music we might otherwise not have noticed on the way there.
I don’t necessarily miss those MTV days of yore. I’ve got a lot of great memories, and I’m glad I was there to witness the world premieres and the unscripted moments and the holiday countdowns. I’m thrilled that I was part of the era that got to see all those amazing bands and singers grow and evolve into world-dominating celebrities. I’m especially thankful that it played an extremely influential part in my life when I discovered 120 Minutes.
It was a specific point in time, just slightly ahead of the curve and unafraid to take chances. It was an era of two completely different iterations of pop music — the US and the UK — crashing into each other, influencing each side of the Atlantic and reaching out into the cosmos with something new and fascinating. It influenced the sound of rock and pop for decades to come, allowing it to evolve in unexpected directions.
Now that we have instant gratification at our internet fingertips, having that kind of cable channel doesn’t quite have the power and the reach that it once did. Sure, had they the budget and the creativity and less of the stakeholder influence, MTV itself could have evolved into something unique. Instead, it slowly faded away into yet another benchwarmer channel playing innocuous reality shows and viral videos of people doing stupid things.
That’s the one thing I wish had been different about the channel as it got older and less influential: it could have gone out on a high note rather than limping along well past its lifespan.
Shocking revelation: I haven’t made a mixtape since the year-end collection back in December.
To be honest, part of it was due to prepping and packing and moving and unpacking and banking and settling in and everything else that goes along with buying a home while still juggling the Day Job. I put my mixtapes (and in effect, this blog) aside for a little bit while I got my life back in order once more.
I’d been tempted multiple times, but I just didn’t have the time or the inclination. Similar to my putting aside the journaling and the word counting and the whiteboard schedule, I felt it was time to properly step away for a bit to recharge. Aside from the book-centric mixes I’d been creating for my writing, I hadn’t been listening to the ones I’d made over the last couple of years, and that started to annoy me. They’re good mixes, they’re just not getting played, and that’s because I needed the brainspace.
We’ve been living here for at least three months now, and that itch to make mixtapes is returning. Sometimes I think about where and when I’d actually listen to them, considering I can’t really do that at my Day Job, and my commute is a seven-minute, sixteen-block drive. Days off and during writing sessions, then. And it occurs to me — that kind of thinking is exactly what’s turning me away from it instead of towards it. Mixtape listening isn’t about setting aside a specific time to put in that latest volume of Walk in Silence or Untitled or Re:Defined. One of the main reasons I chose to disconnect from mixtape-making was the same reason I’d stopped the whiteboard schedule: I was making myself too regimented, and that was taking all the fun and the spontaneity out of it.
As expected, the time away has given me time to connect (or reconnect) a bit closer to my music library, especially now that I’ve managed to back away from the mad frenzy of discography completism and obsessive listening to KEXP (which I still do, just to a lesser degree). I’m relearning how to just enjoy the music I hear, and I’m glad about that. I’m feeling a lot more connected in the right ways once again.
Interestingly, the outcome of this is that making any mixtapes now feels a bit like when I started making them in earnest back in May-June of 1988. I’d made a ton of mixes before that of course — what I refer to as my ‘radio tapes’ era for obvious reasons — but I hadn’t made any personal sourced-from-records/tapes mixes before, at least none made with any seriousness, up until that point. Those original first mixtapes were not about making seasonal mixes at all — they were about collecting my favorite songs at the time, songs I didn’t have in my collection that I could borrow from others, and most of all, they were mixes I could enjoy at any time.
And I think I’m finally getting to that point once again, for the first time in years.
So there have been a few things (memes, engagement bait, the usual) going around on Threads about GenX and music lately that got me thinking. One in particular commented on how my generation was one of the last to really immerse ourselves in our favorite music to an obsessive degree, and how the extreme prevalence of social media kind of took away the ability to slow down and connect with our favorite things for more than a few minutes at a time.
I suppose I agree to this to some level, given that the internets have dulled my sense of glomming onto an amazing album that I listen to over and over, something I would frequently do with gusto in the 80s and 90s and maybe into the early 00s. While I don’t think social media was the sole direct reason for this, I could conceivably say that it did rewire my brain a bit to cause it indirectly. Over the last several years, I became more obsessed with the tsundoku of collecting new releases and full discographies, given how easy it is to do so these days in digital format. And in the process, I forgot to latch onto those few albums that truly change me, whether personally, emotionally or creatively. [This is something I’ve been working to correct over the last several months.]
Those Threads posts did, however, get me thinking about those years in the late 80s when my music obsessions first started peaking. And in the spirit of the “we’re the last generation to experience this” theme, I started thinking: In a way I get this, especially when I think about 120 Minutes. When I was in high school, specifically my junior and senior years, the number of kids I knew who loved music as much as I do, let alone what kind of music I listened to, I could probably count on two hands.
I wasn’t just a weirdo nerd who obsessed over dorky things like radio and records, I was also one of the VERY few kids who wore those Cure and Smiths tee-shirts to school. That was why those two years were so formative and memorable: that brief stretch from late 1986 to late 1988 were the only moments in time in my youth when I’d been able to surround myself with people of similar mindsets and musical tastes. Again, this was well before social media where I can now easily find and follow a music nerd of equal obsessiveness in about ten seconds.
Watching 120 Minutes, then, was that little bit of extra excitement and hope for me. It wasn’t just about listening to this different style of music, this ‘college rock’ or ‘modern rock’ as it may have been called, that I loved so much. I was also about connecting with an alternative lifestyle that I knew existed somewhere outside of my tiny life in the small town I lived in. For those brief two years this was something I could share with a dozen or so other kids, and they understood just as I did how fleeting this kind of thing was, back before social media permanently and constantly connected us all together. I couldn’t help but feel that bit of lingering hope that somewhere out there, well beyond the unending forests of small town central New England, were more kids like myself.
In a way, it’s like tsundoku in a social setting: knowing there are others out there, just waiting to be met, even if we never do. And that was just enough to make me feel a little less alone.
As for the title I used above, the choice of the last generation: this was a tagline at the end of one of the ten-second buffers for the show. It’s a very GenX phrase at that: one, it riffs ironically on Pepsi’s then popular culture-grab tag (“the choice of a new generation”), but also on the back end of the Cold War, when we still weren’t sure if the Soviets were going to bomb us into oblivion. Added to the fact that the visuals for the buffer were pulled from two music videos with dire themes: Laibach’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (torch-bearing soldiers marching slo-mo through semi-darkness towards a village bonfire) and Killing Joke’s “A New Day” (the slow rise of the morning sun behind a ragged and bare mountain), that tagline fading in at the final moment like a stark reminder of our potential mortality at the hands of others. Heady stuff to see at 1am on a Sunday night when you’re overtired and not looking forward to another week of dealing with jocks at school and grim news in real life.
But at the same time, as a GenXer, we embraced that grim reminder because we dared to. Because there was that slim chance that it would all get better. Because it was easier to embrace the darkness than to curse the one candle that someone else inevitably controlled. Because darkness was where the more interesting, the more creative, the more alternative things hide. We knew there were alternatives out there, beyond what was being fed to us.
Sometimes I think about that, and sometimes I remind myself that this was how GenX survived the jocks and the bulllies, how they survived the Reagan and Thatcher years, how they survived the Cold War, and how they taught themselves to see life in different ways.
And these days, sometimes I hope that newer generations learn how to do this as well.
Interestingly, whenever I think of the 80s golden era of MTV’s 120 Minutes, I think of this song. It was one of the first videos I remember seeing when I started taping it on Sunday nights so I could watch it after school on Monday. It’s one of the first alternative rock songs I can think of that got more than light rotation on the channel outside of that show. If I recall, this video wasn’t actually on the first episode I’d taped but the last video just before the show started. Somehow it just hit me the right way just then and I was hooked. I remember picking up the single at the local department store on the edge of town one rainy afternoon just before I had to get myself fitted for a suit for some formal thing I’ve since forgotten.
I’d been a Split Enz fan earlier, of course. I owned their 1982 album Time and Tide (the one with “Dirty Creature”, “Never Ceases to Amaze Me” and “Six Months in a Leaky Boat”, all of which got play in the early days of the channel). So when the younger Finn brother Neil chose to go it alone after their 1984 split, I was curious. Would they be as quirky and catchy, or would they go in a different direction? By 1986, it would seem he’d take the latter route, taking his songwriting much more seriously, his style becoming more Beatles-inspired. [He’d eventually come full circle with 2024’s CH album Gravity Stairs, which has a very Revolver influence to it, especially its album cover.] This track would be a surprise worldwide hit, even here in the States where it made it all the way to the Billboard’s top ten.
I think the other thing that appealed to me was the guitar work on this song. In a decade of squealy solos and beefy barre chords, this was a song with gorgeous semi-acoustic resonance and curious augmentation. The lyrics told of a life in temporary limbo with an uncertain hope that things would eventually get better. The video manages to capture that perfectly, with Neil walking through room after dusty room, with his bandmates doing all sorts of mundane things like ironing, having breakfast, rehearsing their music. The payoff at the end isn’t success, but escape: Neil finally exits the seemingly endless house, puts on his coat, and walks away into the brightness of the landscape, that emotional weight no longer on his shoulders.
I still hear this song now and again, often while at work. I still air-guitar that opening bass riff. It’s a fun song to play on my guitar as well. And the rest of their discography definitely gets its fair share of play here, as A is quite the fan!
Kinda like a cloud I was up way up in the sky And I was feeling some feelings you wouldn’t believe Sometimes I don’t believe them myself And I decided I was never coming down Just then a tiny little dot caught my eye It was just about too small to see But I watched it way too long It was pulling me down
I knew where Trent Reznor was going with these lyrics, but my interpretation in the autumn of 1989 when I first heard it was personal: it was a parallel to the past two years of my life, when I’d finally found my own close circle of friends, only to have them leave upon graduation. See, back then there were two things I had to deal with as a teenager: one, the lack of any kind of social media or easy (and inexpensive) way to remain in contact with them…and two, undiagnosed ADHD that had me hyperfocusing on all the wrong things. “Down In It” encapsulated what I felt at the time: having lost what had been a really great thing followed by the triple-punch of maintaining a long-distance relationship, the inability to find my place at college, and my inability to properly focus on schoolwork. Most of that first year in college was spent in a slow but constant spiral.
I mean, I was also drawn to the band’s unique sound, a mix between the grooving EBM beats of Front 242, the heavy anger of Ministry’s distorted industrial metal, the sterile synthetics of mid-80s Depeche Mode, the clinical experimentation of Severed Heads, the atmospherics of 4AD, and the goth doom of Skinny Puppy. [Reznor admits this song was definitely a riff on their single “Dig It” from 1986.] It was an album that bridged the sounds and lyrics of 80s and 90s electronic music, taking the listener towards a kind of darkness they might not be prepared for. It was the perfect soundtrack to what was going on in my head at the time.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of the second single and album opener “Head Like a Hole” — I felt it didn’t quite capture the tense desperation of “Down In It” — but it certainly worked as a big fuck you to my roommate, who I should not have been roommates with. But the second track, “Terrible Lie”…
…that was an even bigger and more violent fuck you to the world in general. I was not a happy person then, obviously.
Side-closer “Something I Can Never Have” was part of that. I’d been put through so many emotional wringers over the last several months and saddled with so many stressful situations I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared for that this song was the closest to how I felt at the time: exhausted, lost, and numb. I knew I had to deal with these spirals, not to mention having to figure out workarounds that would help me academically, but I wasn’t entirely sure if I had the strength to keep it up. I kept feeling like I was heading in a direction I didn’t want to go in.
Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be.
I’ve said plenty of times that I used to listen to my copy of this on my Walkman on train rides home for the weekend during those first few college years. Friday nights on the Leominster-Fitchburg line, having escaped the stress of school and looking forward to a few all-too-quick hours with my girlfriend T. A day or so to recharge before I headed back into Boston on Sunday afternoon, ready for another go. Pretty Hate Machine was a reminder of where I was at that point in time, a way of prepping myself for the inevitable facing of another day in a situation I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in.
Which is why I loved that “Kinda I Want To” opened side two. It was a complete change of direction: you know what? Fuck it. Let’s do this. Let’s see where this all goes, good or bad. As much as I thought I needed emotional and mental stability at the time, I also knew I needed to BREAK THE CYCLE.
Nothing quite like the feel of something new…
“The Only Time” was part of that as well. After the chaos of the track (and third single) “Sin” and the pain of “That’s What I Get”, we’re finally at the point where I want to say enough is fucking ENOUGH already. In my head I had to break so many cycles: my Catholic upbringing, my small-town mindset, my pleasing others often to the detriment of my own happiness. I had to cut ties somehow. Or at least ride it all out until I could escape.
Ending the album with “Ringfinger” may not have helped matters, because to me it was a reminder that change could not and would not happen overnight, and not without my needing to take the necessary steps first. Some of those steps would be immediate, others would take a few more years. But I had to make that move. Emotionally exhausted or not, there was no other direction I could move at that point.
*
This album popped into my Threads feed the other day, as it had celebrated its 35th anniversary on Sunday. “Down In It” had also popped up on KEXP the morning I’d had to drive A down to SFO for one of her business trips, and it got me thinking about just how close I’d gotten to this album back in 1989 and into 1990. My cassette copy of the album had been played so often that most of the lettering had worn off it. It got a major amount of play throughout the years (except for a few where The Downward Spiral took its place in the mid-90s) and resurfaced again during the Belfry years. I still equate it to that time in my life where I felt like I was on a precipice. Decades have passed and I’ve figured out mental workarounds and achieved emotional stability. I never thought of that time as “just being a fucked-up kid”, to be honest, because I was trying not to be. I just had a lot of growing up to do and had to do it with little to no guidance, and I had to do it without help or influence, one way or another.
I’ve remained a Nine Inch Nails fan, though I don’t think I’ve ever resonated so deeply with an album as I did with Pretty Hate Machine. It’s an album that came out at a specific point in time, provided a life soundtrack, and kept me balanced in its own unique way.
For completely random reasons, I was thinking the other day about those super extended Duran Duran videos of the day. You know the ones, where Simon would do some completely random quoting of Shakespeare, extras would be acting out some weird interpretive dance, not-quite hints of softcore porn, or something like that. So very 80s. So very Russell Mulcahy.
The seventeen-plus minute version of “New Moon on Monday” is great in that it’s just like French New Wave cinema: full of attitude, and itself. Not entirely sure what it’s about other than some vague Cold War-ish anti-authoritarian protesting? I think? It’s a bit sluggish in places but it’s definitely an experience.
“Night Boat” on the other hand contains Simon’s quoting of Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet…while the band members slowly turn into zombies? Sure, why not?
Then there’s the wonderfully bonkers “Wild Boys” that makes absolutely no sense at all other than its slight nod towards Mad Max and Barbarella.
And oh yes! I’d completely forgotten there was an extended version of “Election Day” (their Arcadia side project, of course). Oh dear lord THE HAIR.
See, this is what happens when you’re a Gen-Xer and a first-gen MTV viewer, you remember all the fever-dream stuff like this.
…it’s been far too long since I’ve sat down and let myself get lost in this stuff. I mean, considering I’ve been working on reviving the Walk in Silence book, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of these albums were a huge influence on my high school years, and would fit nicely with the current iteration of this project.
I always call this era of the label’s output autumnal, because a lot of it, at least for me, evokes the feeling of an impending change of seasons near the end of the year. The air growing colder, the sounds of nature growing quieter, the sky greyer. Many of these albums — most of which I had on cassette and played incessantly at night as I went to sleep — might not always invoke a darkness, but more of a sense of desolation and breakdown, and even abandonment at times. You can hear the dust being kicked up as you walk through the wide emptiness of this music.
That, now that I understand music a lot more, was the key to 4AD’s signature sound then. A clever mix of heavy reverberation with sparse instrumentation gives it that same sound that Cowboy Junkies achieved with The Trinity Session when they recorded inside an empty church. Listening to these albums with my Walkman, volume set high and bedroom darkened, I entered another world, sometimes an escape but often times a safe place. I could let my mind and creativity get lost within the music, letting it take me on a metaphysical trip somewhere.
The collection Lonely Is an Eyesore is a great place to start. I listened to this one just a few days ago. Several of its accompanying grainy 8mm and 16mm videos were shown on MTV’s 120 Minutes, which in turn inspired me later on during my college years for my film production classes.
This Mortal Coil was a huge favorite of mine, especially after hearing a few tracks from their second album Filigree & Shadow on college radio in late 1986. That particular album was one of my top favorites in 1987-88 and inspired a lot of story ideas.
Dead Can Dance was a band I’d heard of in passing but it was 1987’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun that became my all-time favorite of theirs. Not quite chamber music, not quite alternative rock, not quite current orchestral music, this album wasn’t just one that I’d lose myself in at night, it helped me find a Zen calm right when I was at my most anxious.
Cocteau Twins was of course a major influence on my bass playing, thanks to the Blue Bell Knoll album. By late 1988 I had a good portion of their discography on cassette (and a few on vinyl) and I was constantly listening to it. The twin 1985 EPs, Tiny Dynamine and Echoes in a Shallow Bay, remain in heavy rotation after all these years alongside their project with Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies.
And of course, let’s not forget the surprise hit by MARRS, a one-off project between 4AD label mates Colourbox and AR Kane. While this one goes against the grain of the typical autumnal sound of the label, it’s so damn catchy and inventive that you can’t help but love it.
Oof. Sorry I don’t have much to say here today, as my day job schedule is kind of heavy on the back end. In the meantime, I’ve been revisiting my U2 collection lately and remembering how much I still enjoy them. I’ve always liked them from the beginning (I actually remember seeing the “I Will Follow” and “Gloria” videos on early MTV), but I didn’t really get into them until the 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire, specifically the title song, which remains one of my favorite early tracks of theirs.
Walk In Silence 