The lost late eighties college rock interzone

plus, you know, you could totally do the flesh for lulu/john hughes thing in a GOOD way too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2QlGVVvXo&feature=related

i mean basically a little new order/information society/ultravox in a blender and you are good to go. it ain't rocket science.

no ice house! only uh the first album. i think i liked that one.

bronski beat and joe jackson also made the top 20 of 1986, sayeth some wiki scribe

I can buy Joe Jackson as CMJ scion in 1986

I love these kinds of bands: Dumptruck, Love Tractor, Guadalcanal Diary, Slovenly, Angst, etc. etc. . . .

I found a copy of this album on vinyl recently and was really excited about it.

Every era has its second tier or "also ran" bands that are definitely worthwhile if you like that sound.

i'm totally willing to thank grunge for saving us from this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNAELH8WuXI

aw, i like dramarama, but they really made it hard for themselves aesthetically and sartorially

if you watch this its like the band had taken a time machine from 1992 all the way back to 1988! its uncanny! they were true pioneers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0K4L-6znJU&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL1189AFCDB7162981

wait that video just changed. you have to see tosd the wet sprocket 80's style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0K4L-6znJU

basically, i think we're saying that a dude in big pants, big glasses and big hair going to see Wild At Heart with Blue Sky Mining playing in the car has yet to be slotted into the pop culture narrative

i'm pretty sure this was me, let me check my photo album

i keep picturing the singer from harvey danger.

Hang the DJ: Modern Rock 1987 (Rhino)
1. It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - R.E.M.
2. World Shut Your Mouth - Julian Cope
3. Hazy Shade Of Winter - Bangles
4. April Skies - The Jesus & Mary Chain
5. Ask - The Smiths
6. Peace Train - 10,000 Maniacs
7. No New Tale To Tell - Love And Rockets
8. True Faith - New Order
9. Birthday - The Sugarcubes
10. Heartbreak Beat - Psychedelic Furs
11. Fight Like A Brave - The Red Hot Chili Peppers
12. 4th Of July - x
13. Still In Hollywood - Concrete Blonde
14. Litany (Life Goes On) - Guadalcanal Diary
15. What's My Scene - Hoodoo Gurus
16. Seattle - Public Image Limited
17. I Heard A Rumour - Bananarama
18. Understanding Jane - The Icicle Works

It's authentically kind of freaking me out how much this coincides with my actual 1987, down to the presence of songs I think of as weirdo obscuros that no one except me in my school liked but that I was obsessed with ("What's My Scene," "World Shut Your Mouth")

lol @ Bananarama's S-A-W triumph is "modern rock"

pee stain by the maniacs definitely worst thing on there. but only cuz i have no idea what the chili peppers and icicle works songs sound like.

a beautiful sight
we're happy tonight
walkin' in an indie interzone

One thing from this period of college rock that hasn't been mentioned is the groups that had a fun/comedy angle that were pretty popular in that period.

Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper
Dead Milkmen
They Might Be Giants (although they kept on truckin' along and made some $$$ doing tunes for TV etc.)

camper van beethoven

Never heard of 'em.

80s TMBG a downtown performance act, not a comedy act! Replace with King Missile.

Not that they were a straight comedy act, but TMG was definitely 'fun'.

Kimg Missle was fun for that matter too.

yeah they were part of that post-new wave strain of ramping up the levity or 'quirkiness' of things, not necessarily in a conceptual uniform-wearing way like Devo or the B-52s but definitely more overtly wacky and silly

Contenderizer, why are you trying to needlessly complicate a thread concept that it took everyone else 2 seconds to understand?

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 27, 2012 5:40 PM (2 hours ago)

dunno how my posting indie thoughts so interferes with the parade of 120 minutes memories

OK I'll give you "fun."

Yeah, definitely. Camper was really of their time and fit in with everything from late-'80s R.E.M. to the weird records that were coming out on SST and other indie labels at the time. College rock changed A LOT in the early '90s and the whole tenor of that time was lost. I don't see that it's come back at all.

― timellison, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:29 AM (18 minutes ago)

like i said, i was responding to tim's observations rather than ned's redirect. and sure, that's OT, so all apologies.

i do think, though, that there have been a few bands & artists in recent years who've played a kind of interzone retro: the gun outfit, milk music, some of those "shitgaze" bands from a few years back.

yeah, i agree. i'm just trying to map the interzone (or an interzone) as a product and part of american culture. in that, i'm particularly focused on "college rock", what became "indie rock" and a specifically american sort of postpunk.

― contenderizer, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 4:52 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's swell, but you can still find all that shit in SPIN best-of lists, which defeats the whole purpose of pondering what's "lost"

― da croupier, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 4:55 PM (4 hours ago)

I think I originally used the term "lost" and I was talking about the loss of particular aesthetics through time and not whether some bands were forgotten.

I own two different A Way 12"s by the Bolshoi. Guaranteed floor filler anytime i played it when I dj'd in college. All the way through 93, never failed.

thank god for rap music

hey guys remember the volcano suns

has big dipper been mentioned yet?

has/have

House of Freaks! (rip Bryan Harvey)

this seems like a college rock ZONE

it's a shame college rock doesn't exist anymore, truly a lost era

That's either missing the point or it's a parody of nothing at all.

a little from column a, a little from column b

80s TMBG a downtown performance act, not a comedy act! Replace with King Missile.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 28 June 2012 02:57 (6 hours ago) Permalink

Not that they were a straight comedy act, but TMG was definitely 'fun'.

Kimg Missle was fun for that matter too.

― earlnash, Thursday, 28 June 2012 03:06 (6 hours ago) Permalink

yeah they were part of that post-new wave strain of ramping up the levity or 'quirkiness' of things, not necessarily in a conceptual uniform-wearing way like Devo or the B-52s but definitely more overtly wacky and silly

― goonrise zingdom (some dude), Thursday, 28 June 2012 03:07 (6 hours ago) Permalink

yeah tmbg represented a turning point as far as the new york scene goes, from postpunk to college rock. compare their sensibility to sonic youth's.

another illustration of the postpunk VS college rock distinction - the "crazy rhythms" feelies VS the re-emerged feelies. it's all about the rhythms. or take a truly lost/under-appreciated band, love tractor. until about 1985 they played largely instrumental rock that was eccentric and completely original. as time wore on they added vocals and more conventional song structures and began to sound like a hundred other REM-inspired southern bands. one more example: the neats, a boston band who played vaguely 60s-ish rock with a little droney atmospere. by the late 80s they were doing bland - or blander - roots rock. the late 80s college rock interzone seems (to me) to be defined by this move toward conventionality/tradition. retromania!

by the late 80s most college or indie rockers sounded like FOLKIES whether or not they played acoustic guitars.

it's not just college rock that entered an interzone in the late eighties; I was thinking of Living Colour, who seem largely forgotten now, b/c their style of play seems very out of the times. but I wouldn't call Living Colour college rock.

Yeah, there was also that pre-grunge "intelligent hard rock" boomlet of bands that got played on some college stations as well as on rock radio. Definitely Living Colour, and also King's X, The Cult, Jane's Addiction, Danzig.

Faith No More too.

That stuff, along with RHCP and Primus, was so damn popular with the hip kids at my schools that when grunge hit it didn't feel like any real change.

yeah, "intelligent hard rock" is a pretty good label; & its interface with college rock was significant, though the scenes were different. like Rush was the patron god-band of the IHR crowd, & Rush was not an indie thing at the time.

if IHR emerged from the interzone it was through the more "intelligent" side of grunge, i.e. Sunny Day Real Estate; which points right to emo so I guess that empire never ended. but Living Colour was coming from a different place than SDRE, b/c not as self-obsessed. Faith No More is def a good touchstone for Living Colour though.

I don't see it as being that big a leap between Living Colour and someone like Soundgarden. What did get lost in, err, college rock metal though was the shredding.

i love those early instrumental love tractor records! and i only heard them three years ago or so. had no idea. i always assumed that they were bland jangle stuff. meanwhile those albums are like american durutti column records or something. i'm glad i heard them. so many bands took any edges off in their quest for beer money.

this is seriously one of my favorite songs of the 80's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibnPPT_sVD4

This was the point (well, maybe 1987 rather than 1986) at which it became an exception for me to find a current rock band (of any sort) I liked, something that's continued into the present. In the first half of the 80s, that was no problem for me.

I heard this song during the intermission of an all ages hardcore show (or something like that) at JC Dobbs (for the other Philadelphiaish posters). I liked it a lot at the time, but find it mostly meh now (particularly thanks to the vocals):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-YCriyEMo

They Might Be Giants (although they kept on truckin' along and made some $$$ doing tunes for TV etc.)

I often wonder how rich they are now because of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

ilxor yeti mike made me buy a game theory album via his old chemical imbalance zine and i did not care for it at all.

I kind of remember trying to like that jangly sound, but I could never really get into it, overall.

scott, I ended up buying the Game Theory album and I think I liked it for about a year, but on repeated listens it just sort of crumbled and there was less and less to like about it.