Archives for November 2019

Certain Songs #1673: Public Enemy – “Rebel Without a Pause”

November 4, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Year: 1987

. . .

The first single from the monumental It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back came out only a few months after their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush The Show!, but it was already light years ahead, an early example of the production technique of The Bomb Squad, who along with Sonic Youth on the rock tip, completely changed music in 1988.

Or at least changed me. I was never the same after those two records, neither of which I actually fully heard until they finished 1-2 in the 1988 Pazz & Jop critics poll, and so in early 1989, I knew that I had to give them a shot or ignore the critical conversation for the rest of my life.

Certain Songs #1672: The Psychedelic Furs – “All That Money Wants”

November 1, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: All of This And Nothing
Year: 1988

After the major disappointment of Mirror Moves and the misbegotten re-recording of “Pretty in Pink,” I didn’t even bother with 1987’s Midnight to Midnight, especially after I heard the single, “Heartbreak Beat,” a synth-drenched wannabe anthem that proved to be their highest-charting single here in the U.S., which means that some of you might remember it fondly. I do not.

I had completely disconnected myself from the music The Psychedelic Furs made in the mid-1980s, and in my own youthful arrogance, I figured that was that.