Ah, my favorite kind of Random Weekend — one that falls on the birthday of a loved one. This allows me to dedicate the song to the person — in this case my sister — sight unseen and then see what fate serves up.
So here we go… Happy Birthday, Amy! This mystery song is for you!
I have nothing meaningful to say about today’s Random Weekend selection so instead I will present, unedited, a YouTube comment about this song by one Keiosha Alieon:
“There’s a guy in my life that I feel is everything I’ve ever wanted in a man. He’s caring and protective, sensitive but masculine, he’s funny and compassionate & I have so much love to give but he doesn’t want a commitment & I’m almost 100% sure his feelings for me are nowhere near those I have for him. And I want to leave to spare my self some heart ache but at the same time I want to stay on the off chances that he changes. He says he wants to take things slow but I feel that’s just a trap to keep me here but who knows. Only time will tell. ‘But, I been there and I done that & I promised never to get hurt again.'”
The Cure is one of those quintessential 80s bands that helped define the New Wave era, particularly in the mid to late part of the decade. They started their career in the late 70s in a gloomy goth mode that persisted — at least in the band’s appearance — even after they were writing far poppier material.
I’m familiar only with a few of The Cure’s hits, and I like those a lot. Whether that appreciation would carry over to a whole album is anybody’s guess.
The #1 album on Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll for 1981 was The Clash’s Sandinista!, the triple-album follow-up to their heralded London Calling. The album was released in December of 1980, just missing the cut for that year’s poll.
Interestingly, it was London Calling — released in January 1980 in the States — that topped the 1980 poll. Critics were apparently in a Clash state of mind at the turn of the decade.
Most of the retrospectives that followed Prince’s death earlier this year singled out 1980’s Dirty Mind as his first great album and one of his very best, peiod.
This sexually explicit funk-pop classic was Prince’s third album, and the first on which he played pretty much every instrument. The five-star AllMusic review trumpets its influence on the decade to come, saying “its fusion of synthesizers, rock rhythms, and funk set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early ’80s.”
Meet Me In Montauk 