Yakety Yak CD Single (Complete CD Download)

Pop music is transient and fleeting. For every timeless supersmash that stands the test of time forever, there are dozens or even hundreds of other songs that completely vanish from the face of the earth.

But the pop music of 1991 seemed to be exceptionally fleeting. While the number one song of 1991, Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do, I Do It For You” has stuck around, and it will stick around for as long as adult contemporary playlists and radio stations exist (and sadly they still do exist), many others fell into the abyss.

Just look at the number two song of 1991: Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up.’ Color Me Badd were nominated for two Grammys that year! And that album sold 3 million copies, which is half as much as Taylor Swift’s latest album! But five years later they were forgotten. Their lasting contribution to society is serving as a major inspiration for “Dick In A Box” and I’m sure they’re all really proud of that.

Sadly, that’s a success story compared to a lot of other artists from 1991. Does anyone out there remember Timmy T? He had the fifth most popular song of the year. How about the hilariously similarly named Stevie B? His hit clocked it at number 12. Karyn White. Natural Selection. Tara Kemp. Tracie Spencer. Who the hell are these people? Where the hell did they go?

One particular oddity to me is  Voices That Care, the charity single that was released to boost morale during Operation Desert Storm and raise money for the Red Cross. It wasn’t a major hit, it didn’t make the year end Top 100, but it did crack the Top 40 charts for a bit. There were some huge names on that one too; Michael Bolton. Will Smith. Celine Dion, Little Richard, and Garth Brooks are all there. But Voices That Care did not become the 90s version of “We Are The World.” Nobody cares about Voices That Care anymore.

But even that charity single fared better than the song I’m sharing tonight: “Yakety Yak (Take It Back).” A rework of “Yakety Yak” that focuses on recycling. It didn’t chart, and from what I can tell it aired a handful of times on TV before it (ironically) was thrown in the trash bin.

The song was sponsored by the Take It Back Foundation (which was the brainchild of Quincy Jones’ daughter Julie Jones) and although it was created to raise awareness, and not money, I assume any modicum of money made from sales of the single went to the charity or other non-profit organizations.

The celebrity line-up on the track is impressive to an extent, but also screams “this is the best we could do in 1991.” Ozzy is here, and I suppose that’s a “get” as he was still a big name at the time (and maybe this song helped him fulfill some legally mandated community service requirements). Another pretty big name for the time is Bette Midler. This was released around the same time as “From A Distance,” so she was never bigger. Although Midler was a prominent environmentalist at the time, so I assume it was easy to finagle her into this. This was also the same year that she played Mother Earth in the Earth Day TV Special.

MC Skat Kat is here as well, because it’s 1991 and the world was still thinking “we need hip-hop’s answer to Roger Rabbit!”

As for the rest of the line-up, it’s a lot of legends past their prime (B. B. King, Stevie Wonder, Barry White), and former pop stars who are just on the cusp of irrelevance (Pat Benatar, Lita Ford, Kenny Loggins).

The song is terrible, by the way. Did I mention that? Like a lot of all-star charity singles, there are too many cooks in the kitchen. No one has any room to breathe. It’s flat and lifeless. To use some parlance of the time, the song has the personality and energy of Al Gore on quaaludes. It also doesn’t help that the original “Yakety Yak” is a terrible song. And it’s a terrible song about a shithead kid not wanting to do his chores. It’s an ode to apathy. Rewriting it to be a song about pro-active environmentalism is a stretch.

So why the hell am I sharing the entire CD single if the song is so bad?

Well firstly, it’s out-of-print and not even on Spotify. It’s truly rare. It’s getting really hard to find obscure songs these days! Finding something that fell through the cracks in the digital streaming era kind of felt special, even if it is really stupid.

Secondly, I think the single is an interesting object. This was a commercial product. It was sold in stores for regular people to buy and listen to. But it feels more like a promotional item for radio stations. It starts like a normal CD single. Track one is the radio version, while track two is a seven-minute(!!!) extended remix. But then there are four different versions that are just 30 second snippets, almost like commercial bumper music. And those are followed by literal commercials, 19 audio PSAs featuring the celebrities from the song, telling you to do things like write to your local city hall to help start a city recycling program, or to take your old newspapers to recycling centers. And each one ends with B.B. King saying “buy stuff that’s recycled, recycle the stuff that you buy, take it back!” And that little audio snippet sounds familiar, maybe it was used for TV PSAs too?

So there’s that. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Ozzy Osbourne talk about how much energy you save by recycling newspapers, I got you covered.

But I also wanted to write about this because it’s oddly connected to how I’ve been feeling lately. Which is bad, by the way. I’ve been feeling bad. Do you have to ask why? If you have to ask why, maybe turn on the news?

When I discovered the music video for this on YouTube, I shared it on a Discord channel that I’m a member of. I thought it would get a laugh, MC Skat Kat is there after all. But one of the first comments was along the lines of “ah yes, from before we knew recycling was a scam.”

Now, that’s not entirely true. Glass, paper, and aluminum recycling programs work. Be sure to separate those when you take out your trash. Recycling those things not only cuts down on pollution, but it reduces energy consumption and carbon emissions (ever so slightly).

But plastic recycling? Yeah, that’s a complete and total scam. Most of the plastic you that goes to recycling bins just ends up in landfills, or in the ocean. And more to the point, the entire idea that individual people have any power at all to impact the environment in any positive way at all? That’s was just a fucking lie.

And it was rammed down our collective throats in the early 90s, too! “You can make a difference! If we all work together, we can save the planet!” was the hot shit social cause for a bit. I mean, there wasn’t a lot else going on, I guess  – and America wasn’t ready to talk about homophobia or racism in any real way, so we all just felt more comfortable talking about six pack rings killing fish. But it was a cause that went nowhere, because the reality is that there’s nothing that individuals can do that can “save” the environment. The amount of pollution created by individual people pales in comparison to the ways that corporations work to destroy the planet.

All the environmentalist entertainment of the 90s was a joke. Thanks for telling me how much energy I save by recycling my newspapers, Ozzy, but it didn’t matter. I know you meant well, Captain Planet, by telling me to cut up six packs rings before I threw them away, but it didn’t do a heck of a lot of good; the oceanic ecosystem is still on the verge of a complete and irreversible collapse. Bette, I really liked your performance as Mother Earth in the 1990s Earth Day Special, but I don’t think anyone learned anything from it that resulted in the air being cleaner. Ferngully, you weren’t only a box office failure, but you failed to stop the deforestation of the rain forest as well.

While celebrities and cartoon characters were trying to get suburban moms to take their plastic water bottles to the recycling center, the plastic industry was spending millions to lie about the effectiveness of recycling so they wouldn’t have to spend the billions that was needed to actually recycle said plastic water bottles. So now the oceans are full of plastic, our air is toxic, and the earth is warming up at an incredibly rapid rate. There’s not a goddamn thing any single person can do about it, either, because as long as *gesticulates wildly at everything wrong with the world and politics* is happening, the people who are truly responsible for the destruction of our planet are going to continue destroying it, because it helps their bottom line.

I just wish someone could be held accountable for any of this. I bet that he Warner Bros. executive who signed off on this disaster of a charity single suffered more consequences for that than any oil executive has ever suffered for destroying the planet. The people who created MC Skat Kat faced bigger repercussions for that than anyone did for pushing the lie of plastic recycling. And, yeah, MC Skat Kat sucks, but that’s really fucked up.

And it’s been the same shit ever since. No accountability for the Iraq War(s). No accountability for the subprime mortgage crisis. No accountability for AI frauds, crypto scams, racist fearmongering, police brutality, sexual assault, literal murder, the list goes on and on.

Sigh.

And yes, this was where my mind went when listening to this shitty cover of “Yakety Yak.”

No, I’m not doing very good at the moment.

Yes, I am in therapy.

No, I still won’t forgive the creators of MC Skat Kat for what they did. Just because oil companies haven’t been held accountable for their evils, doesn’t mean that those motherfuckers get a pass.

Howdy, been a while.

No music in this post, although I do promise to share some pretty interesting stuff that I’ve found by the year’s end. Today I wanted to give an update on some projects I’ve been working on, and put out a call for help.

My Websites

This website, and my even more neglected other website, Mostly-Retro, are INCREDIBLY BROKEN.

A reminder, this website is old. Really old. It’s Web 2.0 old. I started this website in 2006. On Blogger. And then when it became clear that Blogger was cracking down on MP3 blogs, very hastily converted to WordPress and moved it to its own domain, with the MP3 files hosted on a separate domain.

(There was a reason for that at the time, but I forgot what it was).

The only update I have made to this website’s design in the past 18 years is changing the background of the text sections from black to white. That’s it. In this time, WordPress has changed a lot. Parts of the website are just broken now. I’m sure they are fixable, but my HTML knowledge stopped with WYSIWYG editors in 2007. I can’t fix it. Comments on this site became so overwhelmed with spam that I had to disable them outright. Comments on Mostly-Retro just don’t work anymore. I don’t know why. People can leave comments (I still get an angry Doug TenNaple fanboy comment about six times a year) but they don’t show up on the site proper.

I want to keep this site going, but it needs a complete and total overhaul.

I want to make LostTurnable more of a general blog/website where I can write whatever. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with other platforms like Medium and Ko-Fi to get my writing out there. I think they’re really good (especially Ko-Fi) but they’re just not for me. I like having my own site, my own playground, my own little corner of the internet. More specifically, I like having a place that is deliberately not social media. I don’t want my work to be part of “feed”. I like it being its own thing.

As for Mostly-Retro, I’m going to shut that site down in the near future. But don’t worry, nearly everything on there will be migrated over here. Then I might finally finish that Madonna Remix guide and update the Tokyo Record Store guide.

But I don’t know how to do any of the things I need to do to make this a viable website. I need help.

I’m looking for someone with web design experience to help me rebuild this site. It doesn’t have to be anything complex, just your basic blog with some categories. I will pay a fair rate for this work. I don’t accept handouts and I don’t pay in “exposure.” Repeat: I will pay for this work. If you want to make money working on my website, hit me up on Twitter or Blue Sky.

YouTube

I want to get back into videos at some point. But I probably won’t be doing any more record store videos. I definitely won’t be doing any more Hard-Off videos. They’re both a ton of work, and would be even more difficult with my current health problems (mobility issues related to fibromyalgia, nothing life-threatening).

I’m thinking about doing videos about my record collection and maybe some “what I bought this week” type stuff. The type of things that don’t require much editing or narration. Hopefully I can get started on those before the year is out.

Cinema Oblivia

I’m thinking of winding Cinema Oblivia down as well. It’s been a blast doing it, but I’m going to be honest with you: when I created that podcast, I was really hoping that it would be popular. I put a lot of effort into it, went after guests who I thought would help me get exposure, and tried to make it more than just yet another “me and my friends bullshit about movies” podcast.

I really enjoy doing it, but it’s not at a place where I’m happy with it, both in terms of popularity and quality. And I’m nearly 100 episodes in now. Podcasts like mine don’t suddenly become popular years into their run. I missed the boat.

But that’s okay! Because I have another idea for a movie podcast! This one is a bit more focused than “weird old movies.” I think I found a gimmick that will make it stand out at least a little bit. At some point, I’ll probably stop with Cinema Oblivia and launch this new one. My goal is to do that by the end of the winter. If that takes off with any modicum of success I’ll probably revive Cinema Oblivia as a “sometimes” thing where I can go off about weird movies that I really want to talk about, with people I really want to talk to.

So yeah, big plans for the future, assuming the world is still here in 12 months. I guess that’s a big assumption considering the state of things. Sigh.

Anyways, in the meantime, if you like my writing I’m gong to focus on posting things at Ko-Fi for the moment. That’s really just a place for me to let loose and write whatever the heck I feel like. And I write reviews for every movie I watch over on Letterboxd, so be sure to follow me there.

To the few people who will read this, thanks for sticking with me for all these years. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve what few loyal fans I have left. You’re cool.

Sorry I’ve been missing in action for a while, I was embroiled in a legal battle with Warner Brothers Entertainment.

That’s not an exaggeration. Remember how I got banned from YouTube for uploading that 4K upscale of Urgh!?

Yeah? Remember how I said getting banned didn’t really bother me that much?

Yo, I lied.

It’s a whole thing. I created a Medium account specifically to write about it. I suggest you go read that for the details. I posted it on Medium because I figured more people would read it if I linked to a service like that instead of my own blog, and I’m pretty sure I was right. That’ll probably be the most read thing I write all year, by a longshot.

Here’s the thing; no one reads this site anymore. When this site was in its prime, I would say from 2006 to 2010, I was averaging literally thousands of visitors a day. I think I broke 10,000 in one day when I got Fark’d (ah, I miss Web 2.0 websites).

I’m lucky if I break 100 a day now.

I don’t think that Lost Turntable is going to be around much longer in its current state. I’m sorry.

I’m simply finding it harder and harder to make the time to do this. I still love writing about music, it’s just that it’s hard to find music that is I both like and is out-of-print. And I typically don’t feel like putting forth the time and effort needed to give those releases their just due, simply because no one is going to read whatever I write about them! And that’s not a slam on my writing or whatever, it’s just a fact that not many people care about weird French prog or avant-garde Japanese electronic music. I mean, duh.

Also, this shit with Warner Bros. scared me. They could have sued me hadn’t they also released Urgh! illegally (seriously, read that Medium post). Every time I post something here I theoretically run that risk. I sure as hell am never posting anything by a major artist ever again, it’s too risky.

Finally, and on a completely other topic, I just feel like I should be doing something else with my time. This feeling has been nagging at me for a while now, but it really went into overdrive after my dad passed away earlier this year. When I was at his memorial service, so many people came up to me and told me how much he meant to them, how he changed their lives, and how they felt he helped so many people around him. My dad was a businessman, I am very much not a businessman. That’s not my place in the world. But, when my time comes I really don’t want my legacy to be “hey, he was that dude who posted that Hulk Hogan album.” I would like to contribute something with a bit more substance than ironic copyright infringement.

So now what?

Yeah, that’s a good question.

Well, for the immediate future, probably at least until the end of the year, I’ll continue to update this blog on occasion, definitely at least once a month if not more. I got some genuinely obscure stuff that i want to share. And it’s all so far out there that I feel safe doing it. After that, I think I’ll finally redesign this sucker, merge it with Mostly-Retro, and turn it more into a general blog/website where I can share a wider variety of writing. And I might still share the occasional out-of-print song, if it’s obscure and weird enough, you never know. Even I don’t, I couldn’t stop writing about music if my life depended on it, so I’ll still be doing that in some capacity on this site no matter what. If that fails to find an audience, so be it, but at least I’ll be doing something I like to do.

Concurrently, however, I do plan on posting actual original content on my YouTube page. That’s one of the reasons that I fought so hard to get it back. I want to post videos about rare records, Japanese record stores, and more. I think that’ll be more interesting to more people than an old blog with music from some Italian disco no one has ever heard of.

And of course, there’s my podcast, Cinema Oblivia. That is still going strong! I’ve had to cut it back to a bi-weekly schedule for time being, but I genuinely enjoy doing that. It hasn’t exactly found an audience as of yet, but I’m not giving up on it anytime soon, it’s way too fun.

Honestly though, it would be great if one of those things got popular enough for me to monetize it in some way, just enough to qualify as a part time job, nothing major. It would mean so much for my mental well-being. On thing the pandemic has taught me is that businesses don’t give A FUCK about their workers. And I’m sick and tired of being treated as expendable as the crew of the Nostromo. If I could create something that would give me a bit more freedom it would be great.

If you’re a longtime fan of my blog and you want to help me out, share my videos and podcasts when I put them up. Spread the word. Hey, I love the 75-125 of your who visit my site every few days, but I need more than yinz to get by these days.

In the meantime, here’s some Italian disco no one has ever heard of.

Giants
Backdoor Man
Hollywood Queen
I very rarely buy albums because of the cover these days, but damn, that cover. Luckily, the record is really good too. Well, maybe “really good” isn’t the right phrase. “Really damn weird” and “a little fucked up” are probably more accurate ways to describe the magic and the mystery of Giants, who only released two album in the late-70s and early-80s before taking off the helmets and shoulder pads.

They certainly have an image, the football player from hell is a look, that’s for sure. If the Italian Wikipedia page is right, they named themselves after the American football team of the same name, and the look followed. Whatever the reason may be, I dig the hell out of it. They’re like Daft Punk’s evil fratboy cousins, but cool.

Giants was mostly the work of two dudes, Daniele Baima Besquet and Ronnie Jackson. I think the project was his baby. He’s the producer and the co-writer for every song, while Jackson just serves as the album’s other writer. Bequet seemed to have a decent career behind the scenes through the 70s and 80s. He worked with Libra, the prog rock act that was on Motown Records (okay then) and also worked with Nikka Costa on her first album. And I mean her actual first album, she was nine when it came out. Ronnie Jackson mostly worked as a writer, working with Besquet on that early Costa album and for a few Italian singers as well.

Synth pioneer Michael Boddicker is also a couple of tracks on this album, but he’s relegated to “guest” credit. I’m sure he doesn’t mind. He has a Grammy after all.

And all this is fine and good but whatever, I’m not posting these tracks because of who worked on them, or because of the album’s absolutely insane cover. I’m posting them because “Hollywood Queen” is a pretty good song, and because “Backdoor Man” is one of the craziest pop songs I’ve ever heard.

If you think you’ve guessed what “Backdoor Man” is by the title, congrats you’re right! But never has a double entendre been less of a double entendre than “Backdoor Man.” It makes ZZ Top’s “Pearl Necklace” Ovid by comparison. Once your song about an illicit sex act references lubrication, it’s no longer a metaphor, it’s just about the thing. And trust me, the line about lube is not the most depraved or bizarre in this song. I’m not going to write what those are, my mom still reads this blog, you’ll just have to download and listen to the track yourself.

I SIMPLY CANNOT BELIEVE THE CHORUS OF THIS SONG. IT’S SO DIRTY I DON’T WANT TO TYPE IT. BUT I LOVE IT. I ALMOST SANG IT ALOUD AT WORK HELP ME.

As for “Hollywood Queen,” it’s much more tame lyrically, even with its clear references to whiskey and cocaine. It’s just a great tune. It has the sequences and synths of “I Feel Love” but with a clear hard rock sound over top it. It’s like Giorgrio Moroder meets Van Halen. It reminds me of Macho’s cover of “I’m a Man.” Only slightly less gay. Slightly.

Look, I don’t care who that back-up singers in “Backdoor Man” are women. I don’t care that he explicitly mentions women in the opening verse. I do not believe for one second that the door in question belongs to a woman’s, ahem, home.

Thanks for the support everyone. Stay tuned for more news about the future of this site, and more weird old music from Europe.

 

 

 

Tonight, a stupid post about nothing with a song of no substance whatsoever. Writing is hard at the moment but I’m trying. Everyone take care out there. Donate to Black Lives Matter if you can. I’m sorry I’m not up for making a more detailed or impassioned statement in regards to the matter, but y’all know how I feel about this stuff already I would hope.

Take care of yourselves.

The Tong
Data
You ever hear middling 80s rock and think, “boy these guys sure sound like…” but you can’t finish the sentence because the act is so bland, so boring, and so forgettable that you can’t even place who they sound like?

Yeah, that’s The Tong. If you’re like me and dig through crates forgotten new wave groups, you’ve heard a billion acts like The Tong, but good luck trying to remember the names of any of them. They all sound the same, Mr. Mister divided by The Cutting Crew. New Wave minus the New. They sound like a bad version of The Tubes (someone from this group was also in The Tubes, so I guess that checks out).

To be honest, this group sounds like every third-rate Canadian new wave band my Canadian friend tries to get me into, but somehow worse and less reminiscent of Corey Hart.

So why the hell am I posting any music by them? Well, while The Tong were not a good band, and their sole album, Dangerous Games, is not a good album, but they managed to put out one very good track on it. It’s a very good track because it sounds nothing like anything else on the album. “Data” is a purely instrumental space disco number built entirely on keyboards and sequencers. It’s fantastic, the kind of instrumental electronic music I always want to hear but can never find enough of. I wonder how the hell that happened.

Mingo Lewis wrote/performed this. He was the member of the group who was in The Tubes. He was also in Santana. So, dude knew his stuff. Too bad he didn’t do more electronic music, if this track was any indication he certainly has a knack for it.

BONUS TRACK
Sheena And The Rokkets – Radio Junk
This song makes me happy. It was written by Yukihiro Takahashi of YMO and features additional members of YMO performing alongside Sheena and her wonderful Rokkets. It’s my goto good time jam for bad times and I hope you dig it.

Took a week off. Too angry.

Still too angry, but oh well.

Fuck all racists. Black Lives Matter.

Body Count – Cop Killer
I’ll post this whenever pigs kill someone and think they can get away with it. You know me. I always like the classics. Too bad Ice-T sold out and became a TV cop on copaganda bullshit TV.

By the way, if you want to contact me on Twitter for the next 12 hours don’t bother.

I was mean to a racist posting anti-black nonsense and got suspended.

The white nationalist who threatened to kill me still hasn’t been suspended by the way.

Fuck all racists. Black Lives Matter.

PS: racists who want to reply to this, don’t bother. This is my site motherfucker.

This post is rather short so I thought I’d take some time to give an update as to the situation here in Tokyo.

So, we’ve been under what some people have been calling a “soft” state of emergency for a few weeks now. This was in response to a surge of cases that happened (surprise) less than two weeks after a lot of restrictions were lifted that led to large groups of people gathering together.

Funny how that works.

Anyways, people have been calling this a “soft” state of emergency because it didn’t change much from a legal perspective. It made it easier for the government to start assistance programs and disaster prep/response, but not much else. There are no laws in Japan that can regulate people’s behavior in a way that could be called a “lockdown.” Everyone keeps saying that it’s impossible to pass such laws in Japan, but I just think that they’re lazy and don’t want to bother trying.

The soft state of emergency was implemented with the goal of reducing traffic by 80%. That goal was not hit, especially in the first week or so. But people have been getting the hint as of late. While too many office jobs haven’t seemed to close down, most retail and restaurants have shut or severely cut back their hours. Major shopping areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya are relative ghost towns now. Local shopping streets seem to vary neighborhood-to-neighborhood.

Cases do seem to have slowed down a bit as a result, but it’s very hard to tell because the government isn’t testing enough. About the only measurable metric we have to judge how well things are going is by how busy the hospitals are. They are all busy, but none have been pushed to the breaking point yet. So things are relatively under control, I guess.

The state of emergency was supposed to end this week, but thankfully the government has learned from their mistakes, it was extended all the way to May 31st.

That’s super-great awesome news and a rare example of a government actually LISTENING TO THE FUCKING SCIENTISTS and shutting things down as much as possible, for as long as possible. I feel that after this month, Japan will be able to open up more, at least to the point where retail stores and schools can have limited hours again.

While this, like I said, really good news from a prevention standpoint, I AM GOING INSANE. I’ve already gone two months without working, and a little over a month in isolation. I’m staring down another month of this shit and it’s giving me tremors. I am desperate to get out of my apartment, see my friends, drink at my favorite bar, and BUY SOME DAMN RECORDS.

While my boyfriend is here with me and he’s the best, it is getting rough. I’ve nearly run out of productive things to do. I’ve organized and sorted all I can. I’m trying to study Japanese but that gives stress and anxiety on good days, so I can’t do it all that much. I’ve been playing a few games. A lot of Animal Crossing. Talk about the right game at the right time. The boyfriend and I are also using this time to watch as many movies as possible. We’re currently knee-deep in 70s disaster films and 80s legal thrillers. Would love to hear some recommendations of lesser-known films from those eras.

Would also love recommendations for mental health tips.

And whiskey cocktails – which can be the same as mental health tips.

Anyways, here’s a really stupid song.

 

Monsieur Goraguer
Sexy Dracula
Sexy Dracula (Instrumental)

This song is about Dracula having an orgrasm.

Sorry to be overly crass and kind of gross. But there’s really no way around it. In terms of subtly, the lyrics of “Sexy Dracula” are about as understated as Donna Summer’s moaning in “I Feel Love.” A woman tells Dracula that she wants him to come. Then he laughs. Then she again tells Dracula that she wants him to come. Then Dracula (repeatedly) says that he is about to come. Then the woman (again) tells Dracula that she wants him to come. Then Dracula says, “I’m there, move it little girl, oh yeah.” Then Dracula laughs some more. The song ends.

Needless to say, the instrumental version of this one is better than the vocal one. With the overly detailed lyrics stripped away, the melody gets a chance to stand on its own – and the melody is really good! It has a good creepy vibe to it. And the bassline is just killer. It’s a good combination of lush, instrumental disco, old-school funk, and a touch of electronic music. Musically speaking, the song is just fantastic. Maybe they knew that and decided to throw the instrumental version on partially to vindicate themselves?

Whose responsible for this? Well, Monsieur Goraguer is a pseudonym. This track was actually composed by Alain Goraguer, a French composer who worked with Serge Gainsburg and composed the score for Savage Planet. I have no idea if this was him slumming it, him having a goof, or him trying to capitalize on disco for a paycheck. Whatever the reason, the song didn’t seem to get a wide release. I think it only came out on a seven inch single in Japan and that was it. It’s the only credited released under this pseudonym.

As good as the instrumental is, that’s probably for the best.

Also, for a song called “Sexy Dracula” the Dracula on the cover is decidedly unsexy, unless “sad daddy” is your type.

 

Four posts in a row of marital that one might deem commercial, I’ve earned myself a prog freakout.

 

Gong
Flying Teapot – Live ’72
Blues For Findlay – Live ’72

Continental Circus is a strange album, and not the way that most other Gong albums are strange. It’s strange because it’s really hard to track down. The album is a soundtrack to a forgotten film of the same name. It was first released in 1971. It wasn’t re-issued on CD until 1994, and that re-issue was only available officially in France. Ditto for the album’s 2010 vinyl re-issue, another France exclusive.

And, of course, if countless knock-off Kraftwerk and Neu! bootlegs have taught me anything, if a label refuses to release an album by a cult act, then the fans will end up doing it for them. Lots of bootleg releases of Continental Circus are out there. Discogs lists at least three different versions. Like a lot of other bootleg editions of out-of-print albums, many of the counterfeit CD pressings of Continental Circus also feature various bonus tracks, also taken from hard-to-find or out-of-print sources.

One version includes several tracks taken from various French TV performances of the early 70s. The version I have, released by the one-off Giacomo Records label in 1994, includes two live tracks, which are what I’m sharing tonight. These live tracks were recorded in Lyons back in 1972, and were only released officially a decade later on the Live A Lyons Part Two album. That was a cassette-only release. I did not know that there were tape-only Gong-related releases. Turns out there are quite a few of them. Thank god most of them are not for sale on Discogs. My Gong habit is bad enough, I don’t need to be the asshole who digitizes out-of-print Gong concerts from tape.

(Let’s be honest with each other, I’m eventually going to be that asshole.)

Thankfully, the asshole who duped these two live tracks were from a tape did a good job with it. It’s a bit muddled, but it’s hard to say that if that’s because it was taken from a tape or if the source material itself was less than ideal. Sounds good enough for my old man ears.

Both these songs are bangers, especially the live version of “Flying Teapot,” which cracks it at nearly 30 damn minutes. I don’t smoke weed. And in the past I’ve said that I’ve never felt the inclination to smoke weed. But if I lived in a country where legal weed was readily available, I’d light up to this motherfucker in no time. They didn’t call themselves the pot-head pixies for nothing.

Last week I covered half of the 1988 Japanese alt-rock compilation The Brain Solution by focusing on the songs from the album by the groups Joy and Bardo Thodol. While not pop acts by any stretch of the imagination, both of them had a sound that was at least partially rooted in the commercial. Joy’s tracks had a groovy psychedelic bent that would’ve fit in totally fine in the British 60s-revival scene of the time, or possibly in the Paisley Underground. And Bardo Thodol was just doing a damn good Cocteau Twins impersonation, and the Cocteau Twins are good so there you go.

These groups are decidedly less commercial in every sense of the word. While I’m bummed that Joy and Bardo Thodol never broke through into any mainstream success or got enough exposure to even warrant a full-length album release, I can get why these bands didn’t make it big. They sound odd, noncommercial and jarring now. I can only imagine how they came across in 1988.

Also, one of them has the worst band name I’ve ever heard, but I’ll get that in a minute.

Gakidou
Voice Of Psychoprogram
(G.K.D.) 0023
I don’t know what to call this type of music. As out-of-my-element that I was when talking about Bardo Thodol, I’m doubly so here. I’m going to go with industrial/goth. These dudes dug Skinny Puppy no doubt.

This is electronic rock music, focusing primarily on loops, drum machines and scary noises. “Voice Of Psychoprogram” has a groove to it. I could imagine myself dancing to that at a club’s goth night. But the second track is just a slog of a slog. The vocalizations literally sound like someone vomiting repeatedly. I don’t know what they were going for. But hey, it’s unique so I’ll give them that much.

According to Discogs, this group has released several independent albums, but I don’t know if I trust that page entirely. It says all their albums came out in 2014 and 2015, nearly 30 years after their first single release. I suspect that this might be a case of there being two bands with the same name accidentally getting lumped into one page. That, or the band never broke up and discovered the joys of independent distribution 30+ years into their career. Stranger things have happened.

Regardless, it’s kind of hard for me to dig into more information into this band, thanks to their incredibly generic name. (Gakidou is a Japanese word for a type of supernatural being.)

Katsurei
電話の悪魔 (Phone Devil)
Gakidou’s name is generic (especially for a goth band) but at least they didn’t go Katsurei’s route.

Katsurei is Japanese for “circumcision.”

Why the fuck would you name your band “circumcision?” Imagine the horrible sentences that band name generated:

“Hey, you guys wanna go see Circumcision tonight?”
“Yo, you should really check out Circumcision!”
“That Circumcision show was amazing!”

And would you want to buy a t-shirt that had “CIRCUMCISION” in a bold typeface?

Shockingly enough, out of all the bands on The Brain Solution, they’re the ones who have seemingly found the greatest success. They released five albums throughout the later half of the 80s and into the 90s. They’re 2010 reunion LP was released by the relatively big Japanese album P-Vine. They apparently are continuing to tour and make new music to this day. Say what you will about Circumcision, they certainly have staying power.

They’re actually not bad (kind of acoustic college rock), but unfortunately I am never going to hear any of their other songs ever. Because there’s no way in hell I’m walking into my local record store and asking for “Circumcision.”

People here already think I’m weird, I don’t need that.

 

Not much Japanese music has made an impact overseas, a fact that I will forever lament. The international obscurity of Japanese music makes researching it hard sometimes. Sure, if I want to read up on Towa Tei, YMO, or X Japan, there’s no problem. But dig just a little deeper and it becomes nigh-impossible. It’s really hard to find great English-language information on acts that were relatively big here, and finding info on cult or underground acts is just a freaking nightmare.

Which is where I am with the music I’m sharing tonight. All these tracks were taken from The Brain Solution, a compilation put out by indie label Transrecords in 1988.

Reliable, in-depth English information on these bands simply does not exist. If it does, it’s damn hard to find (the rather generic band names from the acts I’m featuring tonight sure doesn’t help things).  Heck, I’m having a hard time finding information on some of these acts in Japanese. Turns out this record isn’t just obscure overseas, no one heard of these acts in Japan either.

Japanese alt-rock is a hidden mine waiting to be plunged. As the hipsters, Soundcloud DJs and other culture vultures pick clean the dregs of the vastly overrated 80s “city pop” scene (seriously, what’s up with that), they’re missing out on a lot of amazing work from other genres and decades.

There were four bands on this release, tonight I’m featuring two. I hope to get the other stuff later this week or early next.

Bardo Thödol
Master Of Blue
Drowning In The Snow
Yo, do you like The Cocteau Twins because if you like Cocteau Twins I got a band for you. They sound a lot like Cocteau Twins.

That probably sounds like I’m being facetious but I mean that as praise. Sure, this band is entirely lacking in originality, but they chose a great band to rip-off, one that not many have even attempted to rip off. That’s something. Also, they do it damn well. If you told me that these were Cocteau Twins tracks with a guest vocalist, I’d believe you. This is amazing and ethereal in all the ways great Cocteau Twins tracks are. Music from another planet.

Like every other band on this record, Bardo Thödol didn’t do much. If Discogs is to be believed, they released just two singles and appeared on a few compilations, never putting out an album proper. I can find next to nothing about them online. Their name is a reference to the Book of the Dead, so that makes research a bit tricky. I did find one single MP3 blog that shared some of their music over a decade ago, but that writer didn’t know much about the group either.

Shit like this is why I need to study more Japanese dammit.

Joy
Arnold Layne
Pluto Metal Snow
Even more obscure than the previous act, Joy just managed to put out a lone 12″ single during their existence. Aside from that, they just have a smattering of tracks spread across four compilations to their name.

I bought this album because of their contributions to it, one of which being a cover of the Pink Floyd classic “Arnold Layne.” Joy’s sound is a bit hard for me to pin down, I’m a little out of my element here. I can definitely hear the psychedelic influence, but they also kind of have a goth/noise thing going on. I think? Like I said, this ain’t my scene. If someone could give these two tracks a spin and then give me a CMY style RIYL list that’d be really rad, thanks.

Same for anyone who can literally find out anything at all about this group. There are dozens of bands named Joy, including at least one other Japanese group. This is beyond my Googling skills.