Johnny Hates Jazz "Shattered Dreams" C/D

Crap band name, though.

Johnny Hates Jazz is sort of seen as the archetypical bad 80s act, which is very unfair. To me, they are among the better new acts of the second half of the 80s. Great melodies, great lyrics, and great Alex Sadkin-influenced production.

I thought about this song yesterday. Still lojve the bongos. And the two-note bass line played beneath the keyb hook that comes after the chorus.

I *heart* Johnny Hates Jazz and don't care what anyone thinks about that. I'm a huge fan of their kind of "sophisti-pop" and think it fits in well with everything that was great about the second half of the '80s. This implies that there was a not-so-great side to that half-decade, but I'm not going into that at the moment.

Swing Out Sister - "Breakout" C/D

This song is not only ubiquitous -it is ALWAYS being played on the radio somewhere and has been since it was released- but also almost completely anonymous in its way. If you walk into a store/restaurant/office and its playing, you won't even register its sounds as music. It is simply a part of the environment, like the trees and furniture and sidewalk. You will very rarely find yourself even making note of the fact that it is a song entitled "Shattered Dreams" and that it was a big hit in the late 80's. You will never ever find yourself singing along to it or asking someone to "turn this one up!" And yet it is always around. Like a cloud or wallpaper or your grandma. It has assimilated and insinuated itself so thoroughly into the fabric of daily life that it almost ceases to exist. For almost 20 years it has worked its strange inoffensive magic on our sleeping brains. What has it done to us? When a song is both there and not there, who pays the price for forgetting? The cocktail waitress? The line-cook? The temp worker in payroll? The drywall man? When will we all remember the common dream that we all share? Who will rub our eyes and make us notice, for perhaps the first time, the bluejay and the oriole outside our window? And their georgous flight from the trees to the sky above.

-- scott seward (skotro...), May 22nd, 2006. (scott seward) (tracklink)

Before I do that, though, I'd like to dispute the claims that this song is in any way "anonymous". If I heard it played in a restaurant or department store, I'd definitely be able to pick it out, and even will sing along with it, regardless of how much adverse attention that might bring.

Okay, now I'm going off to view this video.

this one's a forgotten classic too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-xU_ghmVg&search=breathe%20hands%20to%20heaven

check the overwrought power ballad hand moves, climaxing at the last 'gooooodbyyeeee'. by the final chorus, the director's told him to put his hands in his pockets and keep 'em there.

"Turn Back the Clock" is a precious, perfect vision.

I mean, I think it's a good album.

still better than, say, Rob Thomas and/or Antigone Rising

damned, by the faintest of faint praise.

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/bluffer/sophisti-pop.htm

I'm a fan of this song. It hadn't occured to me that this might be a good album, but I might give it a shot .. I associate this with Howard Jones & the late-80s equivalent of adult-alternative.. not exactly "cool" music but certainly a guilty pleasure.

Reading that article reminded me of Curiosity Killed The Cat's Misfit which sounds similar to Hipsway's Honeythief. I prefer Honeythief.

This song was on the radio the other day and I didn't realize what a great song this is. The song itself is good, it just got saddled with a unremarkable vocal performance, a band with a bad image and slick 80's production.

If the same exact song was recorded in 1975 with a good black singer and band it would be an undisputed classic. The songwriting is great, the song just had the misfortune of being recorded in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I love the production, especially that strange bass riff before the "You said you'd die for me" bit.

My copy has a mix of "Heart of Gold" (J. Mendelsohn Mix) that is super smooth & flangey at the same time. Awesome!

the falsetto rules in this tune

Everything rules about this tune. This is what I want most from these straitjacketed eighties sophisti-pop productions.

Another one that really delivers on this level (imo) is Level 42's "Something About You," which also has a goofy/touching video.

lol holy fuck I was just thinking of that song.

CUZ THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT YOUUUUUUU, BABY, SO RIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT

I will let you guys champion this stuff, aside from Sade and a couple of Simply Red singles, most of this stuff is irredeemable.

I do like that Level 42 single tho...

smug dismissiveness is a fun trait

Are you sure you are able to accurately judge a person's mood via a single sentence on the interwebs?

Can't judge a person's mood, no, but what you wrote above implied "Well, I'll let YOU GUYS discuss this crap, personally I myself know it is garbage".

but anyway back 2 the song, has anybody ever covered this? like high profile not 'ironically' or at a concert or something

i think this song is just okay. when the chorus begins, i keep expecting it to soar, but it just meanders.

Enjoyed reading Alfred's passionate write-ups of this stuff because, at the risk of being smugly dismissive, this is possibly my most hated sub-genre ever - Smooth Criminal and Break Out are the only songs on that Stylus list I can tolerate. It's such an easy target that it's interesting to read some affectionate analysis. Even when I bought Now 10 (late 1987), which introduced me to Rent, the first song I ever obsessed over, and thus triggered my real love affair with pop music, I remember thinking a lot of this was ghastly.

Ah, I've been getting into this very song and was toying with starting a thread in praise of it ... and of course the thread already exists. I love you ILM.

since it's been mentioned here, i love "something about you" so hard i could break it

I could listen to sad, overly-groomed men sing in falsetto all day long. I liked every song on that Stylus list.

Mike and the Mechanics Silent Runnin' is also a fav

If anyone's interested, sc0tt w00ds and I discuss Bryan Ferry and sophisti-pop in some detail here.

nice try, s0t0!

The URL you tried to load:
http://rockcriticsarchives.com/audiovisual/soto-woods-roxy-ferry-013.mp3
Phishing Site Blocked
Phishing is a fraudulent attempt to get you to provide personal information under false pretenses.

I've got Black's 'Wonderful Life' on IJ right now

gah! Wonderful Life! Now i've got to make a playlist of this shit.

nice try, s0t0!

The URL you tried to load:

Huh. I tried it again and it worked fine.

alfred thank you for that article. all of this stuff is so good, and awaiting its moment of reappraisal. i have been trying to get people into "digging your scene" for a while now.

thanks! actually, that one I never warmed to.

Forbidden Fruit is much better than Digging Your Scene.

'Digging Your Scene' is excellent. I've also been enjoying 'Labour Of Love' by Hue & Cry

Damn! I've just remembered one day when I was ten or eleven, and I was out riding my bike. 'Labour of Love' was in the charts and locked on heavy rotation in my brain. I was riding down a path near my house with this song banging round my head, and just as I was coming up to pass a neighbour who was out walking I could keep it in no longer and "AIN'T GONNA WORK FOR YOU NO MORE" practically shouted itself out of my mouth.

She stopped and was all "What? WHAT DID YOU SAY?". I was mortified and was going to start to explain but realised there was no way to make any sense of it, so I just had to pedal harder and kept going. I think I managed a 'I wasn't talking to youuu' as I disappeared into the distance.

Turn Back the Clock is a sad song

Listening to this now. FYI.

Write it in your journals, guys.

By now you should have finished.

<3 this song

SO MUCH FOR YOUR PROMISES

this is real pop FUCK YOU GAGA FUCK YOU BIBIER

I think we need a sophisti-pop OPX

go!

that little falsettoed "ohhh" at the end. this was one of my first favorite songs as a little kid. that and "Take on Me", which I kept calling "Take on knee" as a 5 year old

I think we need a sophisti-pop OPX

― If Assholes Could Fly This Place Would Be An Airport, Sunday, October 14, 2012 11:01 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seconded

so much for your promises

this was one of my first favorite singles as a child. I like the echo of "so much for your promises" at the end. the instrumentation as well.

good melodramatic 80s pop

man "shattered dreams chorus" reminds me a lot of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve3vqMg8xhk

"Me and My Foolish Heart" is perfection. I pitch it to friends as one of my fav 'lost' 80s pop songs.

I was thinking the other day that if Clark Datchler came onto the scene now, he’d be considered a great singer, which is in many ways an indictment of how little we expect from contemporary male pop singers

(To be clear, I love this song)

I keep meaning to hear his first solo album. Mostly because it has Dave Gregory on it.

I think of songs like this as "supermarket pop;" i.e. it wasn't written for this purpose and doesn't blend in the background like muzak but its the optimal music to hear at the grocery or drug store. Other examples would include "King of Wishful Thinking" and "Roam."

and "Breakout."

Also, it's not music for annoyingly dancing in the aisle or anything, it's more like a mood stabilizer. "Need You Tonight" might be the "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" of this subgenre. "Everybody dies, yeah, that's ok."

Like a quasi-sequel to their “Friday Night Video Fights” from earlier in the decade, you may remember MTV pitting clips against one another in 1987-88. One of these events featured the afore-mentioned “Honeythief” battling The Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died In Your Arms”.

Looking back, it’s wild that they placed such exemplars of Sophistipop and Moody Midtempo AOR into the Thunderdome. While I much prefer “Honeythief”, I recall the vote not being remotely close, as the Crew sent their opposition on its (Hips)way fairly easily.

Everybody dies, yeah, that's ok

You made me question whether I knew the lyric, but you're off by an important vowel

Lol I honestly always thought that was the line.