Music News Misinformation

The band And Ballsweat was asssassinated by Spanish agents in 1974, during a concert/shootout in Le Havre. Their first album "The Future is Fucked" is a collector's album, and because of its limited run of 500 copies is a coveted collector's item. Copies of the LP, with its distinctive cover art, have been known to sell for more than a thousand dollars.

Despite their relative obscurity, the band is credited with inspiring the genres of electroclash, post-hardcore, and white funk. The last single released before the band's untimely death was a protest song entitled "Winners and Losers", highly critical of the current regime there, although it was written as a parable about the history of the Canary islands. Nevertheless, despite the band's relative craftiness and cryptic lyrics, their brief popularity in Europe made them the targets of nationalist forces

It didn't help that they advocated revolutionary behaviour, which is naive but offensive to most people. Their high-energy shows were legendary, and led to several fires, brawls, and a mild riot in a Frankfurt sidestreet. Their concern with Spain, despite its results, is still considered to have been a superficial one.

In these soft decades it is easy to imagine that protest music is all American, hippy stuff about nature, or middle-class comfortable angst songs about the evil of large corporations, unjust wars, or economies of scale. Some of the best of this class of music is obscure and unknown and inaccessible and the subject of convoluted music scholarism or hipster cred display.

So You Want to Listen to Some 80s Pop?

Pop music in the nineteen-eighties is like pop music in general: a minefield. You no doubt know this, but you see that what with half your friends buying turntables in the last eighteen months, and other half still listening to niche genres you don't fully understand, and the third half has an habit of listening to unbearable racket and weak shit. In other words you are burdened by the fact that you enjoy music snobbishness and general one-upmanship. That kind of skullduggery is going to get you pwned, and the secret weapon, despite recent and nauseating 80s worship, is 80s pop. In an excruciating write-up, I will suggest some 80s pop cards you can hide up your album sleeves.

It is a double-edged sword of course. If you are looking for musical weapons, you're already clearly a music bastard. People no doubt gather just to whisper in awed tones about your musical unorthodoxies and iconoclastic statements. I like to imagine that I am impartial. There was a diseased time when I cared a little too much about what I listened to, and felt sharply any criticism of my musical taste. Then I realized it was all a consumerist defense reflex and let it go. Mostly. You never come all the way back from musical snobbery.