Random Thought - Moving

The world moves very slowly, and then suddenly everything becomes very fast.

I am moving.

Not on the internet, in the off-line world.

The redhead and I had wanted to move, but we had a specific area and a specific type of place we wanted to move to, so we waited for something that fit those criteria to become available. We waited for a while.

Last week a condo that fit all of our criteria became available. We looked at it the Monday before last. We made an offer that night. We had a contract by the end of the next day.

And now we are going to move in less than three weeks. This means that over the next couple of weeks I will be doing a lot of planning, packing, and all of the other things one has to do to get ready to purchase property and move into it.

The corollary to this is that I will be spending less time than usual reading and writing. I'm hoping to be able to put up some posts over the next month, but I expect that I will be able to do less than even the modest amount that I've been producing in the last few months.

I don't know if this is a warning, an apology, and explanation, or some combination of all three, but basically I'm saying that for the next month my blog posts are likely to be minimal in number, probably limited in content, and possibly not on the schedule that I would like to keep.

Random Thoughts     Home

Musical Monday - Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: August 23, 1980 through August 30, 1980.

With the release of Ashes to Ashes, David Bowie entered a new phase of his career by hearkening back to the very beginning of his career. After he released Space Oddity, Bowie went on to first become first Ziggy Stardust and then the Thin White Duke, but in 1980 he had moved on from those in favor of a kind of demented harlequin persona singing about the titular character of his first big hit. Somehow Bowie managed to take a song about an astronaut marooned in space who steps out of his capsule to what could only be certain death and come up with a reimagining of the story that is even more nihilistic.

This was the first David Bowie song that I heard that I consciously knew was a David Bowie song. I had probably heard songs like Space Oddity, Fame, Suffragette City, and Changes on the radio before, but I had not specifically connected them to Bowie. This song was presented to me via the music video as a Bowie song, and so my first impression of Bowie was, well this, and my preteen brain was just not ready for it. Now I can see the artistry in the song, but when you've been raised on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doobie Brothers, and the Eagles, this version of Bowie is so out there that it was, at the time, somewhat off-putting. As a result, I didn't listen to any other Bowie until 1983 when he released Let's Dance, Modern Love, and China Girl. Those were the wedge that got me to listen to Bowie's music, and led me back to songs like this one.

Previous Musical Monday: Take Your Time (Do It Right) by the S.O.S. Band

Subsequent Musical Monday: Sailing by Christopher Cross

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: The Winner Takes It All by ABBA

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Start! by the Jam

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

David Bowie     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop Halloween Edition! - October 26th - November 1st: Pyrrhus Intervened in a Conflict Between Carthage and Syracuse in 278 B.C. and Ended Up the King of Syracuse

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Recommend one horror novel for non-horror readers.

This is kind of difficult for me, because I don't really read that many horror novels and most of the ones I have are ones that I probably wouldn't recommend to someone. I read Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys, for example, but I'm not really sure if I would recommend it to someone. Its not a bad book, but it isn't all that good either and it is filled with Card's idiosyncratic asides concerning Mormonism that kind of weigh the book down.

There are some books that I have read that I am not entirely sure are horror. As an example, is Passage by Connie Willis a horror novel? It is about a person researching near death experiences and there is a murder, but it doesn't really seem to be "horror".

The only true horror novel that I have read that I could really recommend is Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Alien, although I do so with some caveats. The novel scared the bejesus out of me when I read it, but there are some qualifiers that need to be made. First, I read the novel when I was thirteen, and haven't read it again since. Second, when I read the novel, I was away from home and recovering from surgery on my hand, so I may not have been feeling all that safe and secure to begin with, and that probably affected my perception of the story.

That said, I'll still go with Alien as my horror novel recommendation.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: 277 Is a Super-Prime

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Conquest of Wu by Jin That Resulted in the Reunification of China Began in 279 A.D.

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Musical Monday - Take Your Time (Do It Right) by the S.O.S. Band

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The week of August 23, 1980.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

It is an oft repeated mantra that disco died in the late 1970s. I've repeated it here a couple of times. The trouble is that this is not entirely accurate. Disco didn't so much die as it evolved enough that people could still enjoy the music without the negative association with the disco era. Take Your Time (Do It Right) by the S.O.S. Band is part of that evolution. Some of it sounds like a track that could have been released in 1977, but it is not quite a disco song. The fingerprints are there - you can hear the influence of disco-era hits like Le Freak by Chic and Car Wash by Rose Royce. Going the other direction, one can hear elements from this song that inspired later 1980s dance hits such as Shannon's Let the Music Play and even Madonna's Get Into the Groove.

One moderately interesting thing about this song is its length - at nearly seven and a half minutes, it is clear that this track was intended for use in dance clubs and not for airplay. There was a shorter version that was released as a single that is only about three and a half minutes long and was intended to be used on the radio, but it seems to have all but vanished without a trace.

Previous Musical Monday: The Winner Takes It All by ABBA

Subsequent Musical Monday: Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Magic by Olivia Newton-John

Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Sailing by Christopher Cross

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

S.O.S. Band     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop Halloween Edition! - October 19th - October 25th: 277 Is a Super-Prime

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: If you were to dress up as a literary figure {author or character} for Halloween, who would it be?

This question poses something of a conundrum for me, as several of the roles I would want to dress up as are ones for which I simply no longer have the figure to pull off. For example, I would love to cosplay Éomer or Faramir, but I'm not really quite dashing enough to realistically portray either of them any more. This problem is further compounded by the fact that unless someone was very familiar with the source material, any costume emulating them would kind of look like a generic knight, which would result in the dress up losing its intended effect. I could possibly pose as an older character - the older Ged from The Farthest Shore, for example - but given that he's pretty much just an old wizard that would probably come off as kind of generic as well.

The kind of generic nature of most of the potential costumes is a persistent problem, mostly because many of the characters that I would want to dress up as are kind of nondescript. For example, I love Andre Norton's books, so a protagonist from one of those might be an option, but most of them are guys like Murdoc Jern or ordinary looking people dressed in pretty ordinary clothes. I suppose I could paint myself green and carry a sword like Naill Renfro from Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus, or possibly dress like the alien wolf-like creature krip Vorland is transformed into in Moon of 3 Rings, but those references seem like they will be lost on most people. The same holds true for characters from Ursula K. le Guin's stories - I doubt anyone would recognize a costume intended to be Shevek or Genly Ai.

I suppose that I could dress up as Paul Atredies - a stillsuit costume would be pretty distinctive, although getting the blue on blue eyes might be difficult. Dressing up as Leto II Atredies would probably be more dramatic (and distinctive), but I don't know where one would get a giant sandworm costume.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: The Longest Boxing Match in History Lasted for 276 Rounds

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Pyrrhus Intervened in a Conflict Between Carthage and Syracuse in 278 B.C. and Ended Up the King of Syracuse

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Random Thought - Unexpected Lives

The following is a mostly faithful recreation of the speech I gave at my parents' 50^th Wedding Anniversary celebration on October 13^th, 2018:

Fifty years ago, they were a small town boy from Indiana and a small town girl from Illinois.

I don't think they expected to be getting married at eighteen.

I don't think they expected to be parents at nineteen.

When they got married, I think they expected that my father would become a history professor and they would live in some sleepy college town where he would wear tweed jackets with patches on the elbows and smoked a pipe while grading papers. That plan didn't work out.

I don't think my mother expected that her studies would be disrupted the way they were. I can still remember being taken with her to classes at Parkland Community College as she tried to keep pursuing her education.

I don't think they expected to move to Washington D.C., packing their two children and everything they owned into an orange Datsun station wagon to move to the crappiest, roach-infested apartment in Arlington.

I don't think they ever expected to move overseas, or find themselves living in Africa.

I'm pretty certain they never expected to be changing the tire of a van as a pride of lions looked on.

I don't think they ever saw themselves stopping to help some members of the Chinese Peace Corps when their car had broken down, and because my father spoke no Chinese and the Peace Corps volunteers spoke no English, they communicated entirely in Swahili, which was their only common language.

I don't think my mother ever expected to be the Queen of Aerobics in Kinshasa.

I don't think they ever expected to send one of their children to a boarding school on a different continent from the one they were on.

I don't think they ever expected to be driving away while I stood on the steps of the school and waved.

But if they had not been willing to embrace the unexpected, if they had not been willing to accept what came they would have missed so much.

They would have missed seeing a cheetah in the wild.

They would have missed climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

They would have missed swimming in the Indian Ocean at Bahari Beach.

My mother would have missed going shopping with Jackie Hassan when Jackie forgot which stores her family owned.

They would have missed seeing castles on the Rhine.

They would have missed the tall ships festival in Amsterdam and eating ice cream in the cold, because ice cream is hard to come by in Africa and we wanted some despite the freezing temperatures.

They would have missed seeing David in Florence.

They would have missed going to the Acropolis. They also would have missed losing all my Lego on that same trip. I'm still a little bitter about that.

At every turn my parents embraced the unexpected. They took the curveballs life threw at them in stride. They didn't get the life they expected. In the end, the life they did get was so much better than that.

Random Thoughts     Home

Musical Monday - The Winner Takes It All by ABBA

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: August 9, 1980 through August 16, 1980.

The Winner Takes It All was written by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. The lead vocal was sung by Agnetha Fältskog. The song is about the aftermath of a divorce, with the singer ruefully commenting upon how her relationship broke down and wallowing in the bittersweet memories of the past. Despite the fact that Ulvaeus and Fältskog divorced in 1980, they both maintain that this song is not actually about their divorce, but is entirely fictional. Needless to say, there are many people who simply do not believe them. It doesn't really matter, as this song remains a masterful piece of work about the disintegration of a relationship whether it is based upon a real divorce or not.

The melancholy tone of the song also reflects the waning of ABBA as a group. They would continue as a going concern until 1982, when they would make their final performance as a group, but by 1980 their glory days were mostly behind them. Sure, they reached number one in the U.K. with this song, and would do so once more later in 1980 with Super Trouper, but their halcyon era was coming to a close. Though they might not have been in the twilight of the band, they were definitely in the late afternoon.

Previous Musical Monday: Magic by Olivia Newton-John

Subsequent Musical Monday: Take Your Time (Do It Right) by the S.O.S. Band

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Use It Up and Wear It Out by Odyssey

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

ABBA     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop Halloween Edition! - October 12th - October 18th: The Longest Boxing Match in History Lasted for 276 Rounds

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: You are suddenly transported into a future time in which (horrors!) books are unknown. How would you explain books, and how wonderful they are, to the people of that time?

Is writing still known? Because if writing is still known, I think that books would be relatively easy to explain - something containing a lot of writing that usually has either a story or stories in it or contains explanations of factual information. This definition relies upon other concepts like "stories", "writing", and "information", and if those concepts have also been lost, then we will have to back up further and start with those. On the other hand, if humanity has lost the concept of what a "story" is, then they may be so far removed from what we regard as "human" that books would end up being impossible to explain. Anything short of that sort of disconnect would probably be possible to overcome.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: Hamilcar Barca Was Born in 275 B.C.

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: 277 Is a Super-Prime

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Musical Monday - Magic by Olivia Newton John

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: August 2, 1980 through August 23, 1980.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: August 2, 1980 through August 16, 1980.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

Magic was the second chart-topping single from the Xanadu soundtrack, although this one topped the two U.S.-based charts and the other one - the title track to the movie - only topped the charts in the U.K. This is also the second time that Olivia Newton John has appeared on the 1980s Project, although it will not be the last.

Looking back, it seems like the 1980s were defined by artists like Michael Jackson, U2, and Madonna, but in the first couple of years, Olivia Newton John was a dominant force in pop music. To a certain extent, her persona projected here, with the white fringed romper and cowboy boots coupled with her nigh-ethereal floating hair, is what Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were reacting against. One can make the argument that Olivia Newton John reacted against this persona herself later.

But in 1980, this was Olivia Newton John in all her glory, and her star power was such that she was able to take a fairly mediocre song from the soundtrack of a terrible movie and drive it all the way to the top of the U.S. pop charts and keep it there for three weeks.

Previous Musical Monday: Use It Up and Wear It Out by Odyssey

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Winner Takes It All by ABBA

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Its Still Rock and Roll to Me by Billy Joel

Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Sailing by Christopher Cross

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Its Still Rock and Roll to Me by Billy Joel

Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Take Your Time (Do It Right) by the S.O.S. Band

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Olivia Newton-John     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop Halloween Edition! October 5th - October 11th: Hamilcar Barca Was Born in 275 B.C.

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: It's getting close to Halloween. If you HAD to read one of these two genres, which would you prefer -- urban fantasy, or horror, and why?

I don't really read much of either genre, but I've probably read more urban fantasy than horror, so I guess I'll go with that.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: Mani, the Founder of Manichaeism, Died in 274 A.D.

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Longest Boxing Match in History Lasted for 276 Rounds

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Review - Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon by Matt Fraction, David Aja, and Javier Pulido

Short review: Clint Barton is Hawkeye, and his life seems to mostly consist of trying to help people out with their problems and getting terribly injured as a result.

Haiku
Okay, this looks bad
But its just a normal day
In over my head

Full review: My Life as a Weapon is the first volume in Matt Fraction’s series about Clint Barton, also known as Hawkeye, a non-super powered super-hero who spends most of his time with the Avengers. The stories presented in this series are about what Hawkeye does when he is not working alongside Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, and it turns out that the answer is mostly “gets in way over his head and gets injured”.

The interesting thing about Barton is that he’s pretty much simply an ordinary person with an extraordinary talent for archery. He isn’t super strong, he isn’t super durable, and he doesn’t have any high-tech equipment to help him out: He is, as is pointed out in the first pages of this volume, just a guy fighting crime with a weapon that dates to the Paleolithic era. The fact that he often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with medically enhanced super soldiers and literal gods while fighting cosmically powerful threats that could destroy all of humanity and doesn’t die in the process is probably the most remarkable aspect of Hawkeye’s existence.

Fraction begins each of the first three parts of this volume with Barton saying to the reader, in what amounts to a voice over narration, “Okay, this looks bad”. Each time Barton follows this up with an admission that the situation doesn’t just look bad, it actually is bad. Each time Barton proceeds to get the crap beat out of him, in some cases almost immediately thereafter, in others he can stave off the inevitable for a bit, but he winds up unconscious at least once in every sections of the story, and twice in two of them. In one incident, Barton ends up severely injured and hospitalized for an extended period of time. The running theme that underlies everything else in this volume is that the human body is simply too fragile for the life that Barton is leading. Despite his somewhat half-hearted protestations otherwise, Barton often gets himself into trouble because he thinks more like Captain America than he would care to admit. Though he often tries to adopt the pose of being indifferent, Barton always gives in to the pleas for help aired by those he comes into contact with, or, as in the case of Pizza Dog, acts to help those who happen to be near him when they are in need. His aid is often accompanied by his complaints, and is always well-meaning, but another theme that runs through this volume is that Barton is just not very good at solving problems. Fortunately, for the most part, the villains in the book aren't really all that much better at planning schemes. Much of the volume involves Barton essentially bumbling his way into foiling schemes formulated by criminals who are, at best, marginally competent themselves.

In the first section, Barton first winds up in the hospital as a result of literally falling off of a building, and upon being released he almost immediately walks into a local mob boss and his "tracksuit Mafia" evicting Barton's neighbors from their apartments when they can't pay the rent he recently tripled. Hawkeye's solution to the problem turns out to be to march down to the illegal gambling den that the mafia boss haunts and try to pay the rent for everyone in the building, and when that fails, try to fight his way through all of the boss's henchmen (which goes about as well as one would expect). This story is intercut with scenes of Barton demanding that a veterinarian treat Pizza Dog after the dog had been hurt very badly by being hit by a car, all the while insisting that Pizza Dog is not his dog. There is a rather obvious parallel drawn in the way the story is framed between Pizza Dog, who is thrown out into traffic by the tracksuit Mafia after it comes to Barton's aid, and Barton himself, and Barton's need to have Pizza Dog survive suggests that Barton knows this. In the end, Barton forces the mafia boss to sell him the building for a rather generous price (although one does have to wonder why Barton has $12.7 million in cash on hand), while the mafia boss protests that he did nothing illegal. In fact, the only person who has done something overtly illegal in this part of the story is actually Barton, but the reader is clearly supposed to side with him, as his illegal acts are in support of a noble cause, while the tracksuit Mafia's perfectly legal actions were intended to make people homeless.

The next section features Kate Bishop, who had once held the title of Hawkeye, as Barton tries to figure out what the warning signs in carney code that have been cropping up across town might mean. Barton figures out who the villains are when he and Bishop attend a gala performance of "Cirque du Nuit", and the story starts to resemble a traditional super-hero story except that Barton leads off by getting knocked out, captured, and then jumping out of a window into a swimming pool. It is up to Bishop to save his bacon, and while Clint rallies late to defeat the ringleader of the band of thieves, this is almost an anti climatic moment following Kate's heroics. Further, Barton manages to screw even this victory up, as he makes some rather powerful enemies in the process. This section further cements the pattern that Fraction's stories about Hawkeye will follow for the most part: Barton stumbles into a sticky situation, maneuvers his way through it by the skin of his teeth, and manages to somehow screw up the win.

The third section follows pretty much this established pattern, with Barton finding himself in a high-speed car chase through the streets of New York after he went out to get some tape and picked up a woman for a quick afternoon fling instead. She, of course, turns out to be on the run, and Barton manages to get knocked out, has to call upon Bishop for assistance, and winds up running through pretty much his entire inventory of gimmick arrows fending off their pursuers. True to form, Barton manages to get knocked out and captured again, and true to form, Kate saves the day. This section features two interesting twists - first, Barton never finds out what his paramour did, why she is on the run, or who exactly is pursuing her, and consequently neither does the reader. This further reinforces the almost bumbling nature of Barton's non-Avengers heroics. Second, Barton manages to unknowingly throw a wrench into his relationship with Bishop, and as usual, his screw-up is the result of his good intentions.

The final section of the main story is a two part piece that is probably the most "super-heroish" of anything in the volume. Barton is whisked away from a rooftop party by S.H.I.E.L.D. and sent to Madripoor with the organizations Amex Black and instructions to recover a videotape in which Barton was filmed committing a political assassination. This story is convoluted, full of twists and turns, with a veritable gallery of nefarious villains cropping up, as well as some unexpected allies. As I noted earlier, this story line adheres most closely to the the traditional "super-hero" style, and yet it is also the least satisfying section of the book. The plot is overly convoluted, and even though the situation ends up more or less where the good guys want it to be, the way they got there is so byzantine and depends on a couple of unexpected and entirely unpredictable developments that one is left wondering what the actual plan was. On the one hand, having no discernable plan seems entirely in character for Barton, but on the other, it seems entirely out of character for S.H.I.E.L.D., especially when one considers just how critically important Agent Hill insists that the mission is to everyone involved all the way up to the President of the United States. leaving this oddness aside, the real flaw in this story line is that Fraction simply doesn't play fair with the reader. The "big reveal" that comes at the end of the story makes several key scenes and conversations that happened earlier into nonsense. In short, Fraction was only able to preserve his surprise by not merely hiding information from the reader, but by having characters have discussions with one another that simply make no sense for them to have.

The final pages of this volume are dedicated to an installment of Young Avengers in which Barton, in his Ronin persona, tests Bishop as she is set to take over the mantle of Hawkeye. For her part, Bishop is dealing with some complicated romantic feelings for fellow Young Avengers Patriot and Speed, and is somewhat distracted throughout the story. To be blunt, this portion of the book is simply not as good as the rest, and even the artwork, which is fairly standard for comic books, feels jarring and out of place after an entire book of Aja and Pulido's almost impressionistic artwork in the main portion of the book. Putting an unrelated story at the end of a graphic novel collecting several issues seems to be a pattern for Marvel, and in my experience the added story always seems to fall short of the main work, and this book is no exception to that rule.

Hawkeye, as a non-super-powered super-hero, is somewhat unique among the Avengers, and this volume is somewhat unique among super-hero stories. Fraction, Aja, and Pulido have taken what could have been a bland and uninteresting character and breathed life into him by emphasizing his very mundane nature, and in the process highlighting what an exceptional individual he is as a result. Fraction is one of the few writers working in comics today whose work I will buy simply based upon his involvement in a project, and this volume is an example of the reason why that is so.

Subsequent book in the series: Hawkeye: Little Hits by Matt Fraction, David Aja, Francesco Francavilla, Steve Lieber, and Jesse Hamm

Matt Fraction     David Aja     Javier Pulido     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Use It Up and Wear It Out by Odyssey

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: July 26, 1980 through August 2, 1980.

As I have noted before, by 1980, disco was dying - at least in the United States. In fact, in the U.S., one might argue that disco was already a corpse by 1980 and everyone was getting ready to start putting the nails in its coffin.

In Europe, and by extension, the U.K., on the other hand, disco would thrive for some time in 1980 and beyond. This is somewhat interesting given that Britain was the home to a couple of music scenes that were fairly extreme reactions to disco, the most prominent of which was punk. Even so, disco lasted far longer as a musical force in the U.K. than it did in the U.S.

That said, this song seems to me to be a pretty good example of both why disco became popular in the first place, and why it had such a relatively short shelf life. Use It Up and Wear It Out is an incredibly danceable song, with a good beat and a driving bass line. It is peppy, happy, and everything anyone would want on the dance floor. It is also incredibly forgettable. There is simply nothing to hold on to when the song is finished. The lyrics are insipid, the beat and bass line are great, but there's nothing else to the song in a musical sense. Almost everything that might have made this song memorable has been stripped away in favor of making for a better groove.

As they were so often wont to say on American Bandstand "Its got a good beat and I can dance to it", but in this case, that's pretty much all there is to the song.

Previous Musical Monday: Xanadu by Olivia Newton-John and the Electric Light Orchestra

Subsequent Musical Monday: Magic by Olivia Newton-John

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Xanadu by Olivia Newton-John and the Electric Light Orchestra

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: The Winner Takes It All by ABBA

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Odyssey     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home