Tears For Fears - Songs From the Big Chair
I never before realized how much Tears for Fears was like a songful version of the Art of Noise. Check out these B-sides or bonus tracks or whatever they are.
Pop is always just the visible part of a massive culture machine. I often think of the progression from cutting edge to mainstream. Some bands, like REM, start as weird, become alternative, and then are mainstream - whether it’s their content or context which changed is irrelevant to me at the moment. In other cases, you have someone like Jim O’Rourke, who was simultaneously responsible for grating cacophonies and fairly straightforward albums like Smog’s Knock Knock and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
But hearing these oddities, which Tears For Fears made while one of the biggest bands of the 80’s, makes me wonder if all or most of popular musicians have piles of scary odd experimentation. Like, Cher is sitting on a huge stack of free jazz things which she holds back because people would stop buying her regular albums. She actually plays alto saxophone and sarod, and once played the piano part in Terry Riley’s In C.
That would be something.
11 months ago
