The recent realization that Cherry Pop has been remastering and expanding the Kim Wilde catalogue to considerable reaction (enough to warrant two waves of reissues, at least), it makes you wonder what other female pop acts might get the same treatment someday. If you're an '80s fan and you're wondering the same thing, there's little doubt that Martika is probably near the top of your list of must-haves. To many, Martika is at best a footnote in pop history. Her simple yet powerful "Toy
Lots of coverage on The Second Disc deals with music that has stayed part of the collective consciousness for decades. But it's been stated before that fans and labels should always look into the recent past to find classics worth reissuing. Toxicity, the second LP by Armenian-American metal band System of a Down, is one of those records. Of all the five LPs SoaD released in their brief tenure before embarking on an indefinite hiatus, Toxicity hits the hardest. It's one of those
The latest issue of Rolling Stone had a cover feature about the "State of Rock: 40 Reasons to Get Excited About Music" (a cover which featured terrible pop-rap group The Black Eyed Peas, so the list was slightly less than 40). As debatable as the list might be, one item on the list was actually somewhat intriguing - up and coming band I Blame Coco, led by Coco Sumner, daughter of the irrepressible Sting. Coco is not the first Sting spawn with musical tendencies - his oldest son, Joe, fronts the
Behind every devoted catalogue fan is a long-suffering but good-natured band of friends who smile politely and listen to us jaw on about liner notes, bonus tracks and the like. Those readers with partners or spouses are probably grinning right now, and so am I. Today is the birthday of a special someone (in a hat tip to MusicTAP, I'll call her Miss Disc) and in a show of geeky affection I have put together a Reissue Theory for one of her favorite records, which is thankfully one that could
Long before he read about a frog who dreamed of being a king – and then became one – Neil Diamond was an up-and-coming songwriter in the waning days of the Brill Building. After a few unsuccessful stabs at recording in the early part of the decade, Diamond was taken under the wing of Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Bert Berns. In January 1966, the hits started coming: first “Sunday and Me” for Jay and the Americans, then “I’m A Believer” and “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” both for the
Musical inspiration can come from anyone, anywhere - even if you're not a musician. Consider the notion of talking with friends about evolving musical tastes. The conversation shifts to music enjoyed during early adolescence - when suddenly, you discover a revelation: a friend secretly spent their early middle school years enamored of the swingin' sounds of The Brian Setzer Orchestra. You laugh and joke about it - because what pre-teen in the past decade could possibly jazzed by Setzer's swing
The fearful question reissue enthusiasts have to ask - particularly those who might have a hand in putting them out for public consumption - is: when is the reissue wave going to crash? I don't pose the question in terms of when people will stop paying money for physical media, because I don't think that's a particularly relevant problem right now. As long as fans keep buying enough reissued CDs now and future generations take a moment to ponder the merits of sound quality, this isn't an issue.
The recent passing of music impresario Malcolm McLaren has led to a lot of emotions. Some hate McLaren for his self-aggrandizing ways and mismanagement of The Sex Pistols' supernova career. Others laud him for his contribution to music history as not only a tastemaker and agent provocateur, but as a semi-successful musician as well. There's something to be said about some of that music, too. McLaren's debut LP, 1983's Duck Rock, has been championed - thanks to both the quality of the music and
One of the books devoured by this author over the Easter break was The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life by Simon Goddard. If you're a fan of The Smiths, are thinking about being a fan of The Smiths or just like '80s alt-rock in general, you would do well to add this to your bookshelf. It provides an in-depth account of every song released or recorded by the band in their too-brief career and covers Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce through prose that's both artistic and
We music fans live for that moment when a song comes from nowhere - through a radio, perhaps, or more likely through your computer speakers nowadays - grabs us and doesn't let go. That was undoubtedly the case with "Fast Car," the first single by singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. The song - for the ten or so of you who might have missed it over the better part of 20 years - is an achingly bittersweet, first-person ballad about a woman planning to escape her impoverished, broken family only to
The Ending on a High Note Tour, the farewell trek by synthpop legends a-ha, has been in full swing for some time now. In about a month, the band takes their show to the U.S.A., a country that knows them for that first great hit "Take on Me," but little else. Readers of The Second Disc, however, likely know that the band continued to succeed (particularly in Europe and South America) through the mid-1990s and again in 2000, when comeback album Minor Earth, Major Sky earned them a new generation
It's almost the weekend, which hopefully means for you, the reader, a few days of fun and frolic. To that end, let's get the fun started early with a few particularly goofy Reissue Theory novelties. One is a one-hit wonder who managed to combine New Wave and a slightly older generation of music, and the other is an inexplicably house-oriented companion piece to a popular video game. Bet you won't find that combination anywhere else on the Internet today! Hit the jump to see which red-letter
The Second Disc is a day late (but no less enthusiastic) in wishing Chaka Khan, The Queen of Funk Soul, a happy birthday. Chaka has had, to say the least, an illustrious career, first as a member of Rufus then as a wildly successful solo artist in the late '70s and '80s. What is the secret to Khan's ongoing popularity? Chalk it up to three things. First, there's that powerhouse voice - at once sensuous and celebratory. There's also the great sounds she surrounds her vocals with, whether it's
There may not be enough positive words to write about Nile Rodgers. The sole surviving member of The CHIC Organization (which included bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson), Rodgers helped shape the sound of late '70s and early '80s pop and R&B, either as a performer with CHIC, a producer - often alongside Edwards - for Diana Ross, Sister Sledge, Madonna and others or even as a sampled artist (see The Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" and "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=IT&hl=it&v=ZZEGHnAxEpo] Predicting the future is a tough game. While the above video - a possibly-not-entirely-live performance by Howard Jones, Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby and Stevie Wonder at the 1985 Grammys - probably looked like the future of music some 25 years ago, it seems a little, shall we say, overdone in hindsight. But nobody will ever stop predicting the future - certainly not here at The Second Disc, where (ideally) every day
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Fear of a Black Planet, the third album by hip-hop legends Public Enemy. Billboard did a great write-up about the album's impact after two decades, which dovetails rather interestingly into a highly-recommended recent documentary I had the pleasure to see last week. The film, Copyright Criminals, is a thought-provoking look into the rise of sampling in music and the ongoing legal challenges faced by samplers. Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, as well as
It has been encouraging to see, in light of Genesis' impending induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a number of commenters showing their respect for the Phil Collins-led, pop-savvy incarnation of the band. The group's output was always listenable - one could argue the 1990s was largely an exception - but it always seemed popular opinion was against them around the Invisible Touch era. This is ironic, since the same year Invisible Touch was released, former Genesis frontman Peter
Two days of nice weather in a row - especially after the kind of winter the northeast U.S. has had - will make you think of warmer climates really quickly. Music always seems to go well with higher temperatures (i.e.: barbecues, school dances, anything The Beach Boys sang about) - and one of the best pop cultural examples of this idea would be Miami Vice. The genesis behind the 1980s police show is the stuff of legend; NBC exec Brandon Tartikoff allegedly penned a memo that simply said "MTV
It's no secret that I'm a huge Duran Duran fan (these upcoming reissues are seriously a thing of beauty). But I also credit them with opening me up to a whole lot of other acts. Had I not started listening to them in middle school, I would not have been drawn to other synth/New Wave bands, CHIC, Madonna, David Bowie or Robert Palmer. Palmer in particular was quite the performer. His Duran connections were smallish - he was the lead vocalist for DD side-project The Power Station - but he was a
Tuesday was the 20th - count it! - anniversary of I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, the polarizing breakthrough LP by Sinead O'Connor. There's a fascinating write-up about the record and its aftermath over at Popdose that really shows off what an intriguing figure O'Connor was at the time. It certainly says something that an album with one Top 40 hit (her only one) sold over 7 million copies in its day. Clearly something was up here. I completely forgot that the record was given a double-disc
The Art of Noise usually gets lumped into that U.K. '80s esoterica category that a lot of their early labelmates on ZTT (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 808 State, The Buggles and so on) seem to be in. Their sound was hip, catchy and weird, they say, and maybe a bit too much so for their own good. This is kind of funny, particularly because it's kind of wrong. The Art of Noise were indeed hip, catchy and weird. Their early work on ZTT, like the sample-heavy "Close (To the Edit)" and "Beat Box," set
One of the potential hazards of being a music collector is that sometimes, if you're feeling adventurous, you spring for an all-too-dangerous impulse buy. I'm guilty of this all the time, especially when the music in question is cheap. Put me within 25 yards of a garage sale or a cutout bin at a supermarket and I'm probably going to walk away having bought at least one disc. Sometimes this strategy works out in my favor: a random purchase of Squeeze's Singles 45 and Under from my local ShopRite
I've got to be the only twentysomething I know that's this excited over Pick of the Litter 1980-2010, the new compilation by pop-funk band Was (Not Was). Quirky aficionados may know them for left-field, late-'80s hits like "Walk the Dinosaur" and "Spy in the House of Love." Others may know them as the band that put producers Don Was and David Was on the map (they would, either separately or together, work on such albums as Cosmic Thing by The B-52's, Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan's
On this day 42 years ago, Decca Records released a single, "Silent Sun," by a new band, Genesis. It was the first single off From Genesis to Revelation, an album that would not be released until nearly a year later. Neither the single nor any material from that first album would resemble anything near the forms of Genesis we know and love today. The sound was less prog and more psychedelia, and the teenaged band members - lead vocalist Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, guitarist Anthony
The other night, my radio happened upon "Manic Monday," one of the best pop songs of the 1980s. I'm sure you're all aware that the tune was written by Prince (under the pseudonym "Christopher," an effect from his Under the Cherry Moon days) and given to Susanna Hoffs and company after Apollonia 6 recorded a version that was never released. You may also know that the song itself hit No. 2 on the charts, kept from the top by none other than Prince and The Revolution's "Kiss." You might not know
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