Waiting, waiting, suffering, suffering
Special 1985 Mix
In addition to going through Spotify’s New Music Friday lists each week, I sometimes also carve out time to do a similar process with lists of Discogs releases for specific years, often to choose nominations for Tom Ewing’s People’s Pop polls on Twitter (soon to be on their own site). I wrote about the discovery process when I did a deep dive into 1998.
I recently did a much quicker scan of 1985, the year for the upcoming tournament. I found a few dozen candidates, focusing mostly on the “folk, world, and country” tag of Discogs’ exhaustive list of 1985 albums and singles. This is the mix I put together from those finds.
(Note: not all of them are on Spotify, so you’ll need to use YouTube links or the YouTube playlist to hear a few of these songs.)
The 1985 mix, minus YouTube-only tracks, is on Spotify here.
1985 MIX: WAITING, WAITING, SUFFERING, SUFFERING
1. Amina: Shehérazade
(YouTube only)
This was my main nomination for the ‘85 poll, by Amina Annabi, a French-Tunisian actress and singer who is better known for a lot of her film and music work she did after what appears to be her debut single.
I’m tempted to buy an old vinyl copy of the song just to do a little more investigative work. Online what I can glean is that Amina won a song competition in 1983 rapping over a Grandmaster Flash song, but as far as I can tell this song, if it is in fact a recording of the ‘83 song, is neither a rap nor is it using an existing rap song to sing over (though maybe someone reading this will know more). Color me skeptical: on Wikipedia, someone seems to have found, but not credited, a source that makes the dubious claim that “Shehérazade” was a “CD single” in 1983. So for now I’ll go with Discogs.
“Shehérazade” is both incandescent and indulgent, fitting for its source material; it meanders and stalls and goofs around. Amina sings the lyrics twice, in English then French, before the ramshackle solos descend. Then Amina comes back in with the call-and-response -- “Non, non! Oui, oui!” -- whose echo of “Le Freak” makes me wonder if the original used “Rapper’s Delight” rather than Grandmaster Flash. She takes us out with a moaning lament from the poor princess, maybe at the start of another of her thousand-and-one diversions. (Fittingly, Annabi was later commissioned to sing the theme song for the French cartoon Princess Shehérazade.)
2. Fun Fun: Living in Japan
Not sure I knew the Italodisco group Fun Fun before the People’s Pop 1987 tournament, where Chuck Eddy’s 150 albums of 1987 list led me to Double Fun. This one’s a hoot.
3. Mai Tai: History
Global R&B hit that I was surprised was Dutch, and a much bigger hit than I assumed. It’s one of those songs like S’Express’s “Theme from S’Express” that was absolutely everywhere except the US, unless you paid attention to the dance charts. S’Express went to #1 on the dance charts in the US in '88 but barely cracked the Hot 100. Mai Tai’s “History” went to #3 on the dance charts and peaked at #109 on the Hot 100.
4. Café Türk: Haydi Yallah
Turkish funk from a band whose music never found traction in Turkey during a prolonged military coup, so they built an audience in Germany. Nice write-up of their history on Bandcamp as Café Türk started uploading their albums and other music from old masters to the site in 2020.
5. Jasper van’t Hof’s Pili Pili: Kiba
I discovered Jasper van’t Hof’s Pili Pili in the Title Is the Artist People's Pop tournament. That song, “Pili Pili,” won the esteemed Golden Beat award for the favorite song voters hadn’t heard before, and it’s a marvel, 16 minutes of hazy, balearic bliss.
“Kiba” is a little more typical of Van’t Hof’s work, a world music melange of drum machines, live instruments and percussion, and vocals, performed by Van’t Hof, a jazz pianist, and various African singers and musicians. For a jazz guy, he's not too precious about ditching jazz signifiers altogether for the sake of the groove -- on “Kiba,” a trumpet gilds the rhythms in an extended freeform solo, but the horns mostly attend to getting the melodic hook across, and as far as I can tell Van’t Hof himself only comes in on keyboards (if that’s him playing them) in the final minute.
6. Segun Adewale: Atewo-Lara Ka Tepa Mo ‘Se
1985 is the year of The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, but as far as I can tell I didn’t pick up on anything from South Africa in my Discogs wanderings. I was more drawn to funk and disco, like this Nigerian artist, whose version of funk (which Adewale called Yo-pop) seems like what would happen if you brought a teaspoon of Fela Kuti’s dominating lockstep to King Sunny Adé’s warm jùjú.
7. Sangazuza: Paulina
Afropop from São Tomé E Príncipe. I know nothing about the music of São Tomé E Príncipe, but I liked the group call and response and vaguely tropical feel on this song, almost like calypso. Bandcamp once again does yeoman’s service for dilettantes while highlighting a great compilation, Levé Levé, and a popular band from this period, África Negra:
“One of the characteristics is the way bands use background vocals, with one leader and four or five voices harmonizing in the back,” explains French DJ and crate digger Thomas Bignon, aka DJ Tom B., a prolific collector of Brazilian and Angolan music. In recent years, he’s spent much of his time digging through thousands of tapes in São Tomé’s national RNSTP radio archive. “Another characteristic is the fusion between Angolan semba, soukous, coladeira from Cape Verde, cadence from the West Indies, and compas from Haiti, afoxê from Brazil, and even a bit of Kenyan benga guitar in the early guitars, until probably the mid-’70s,” says Bignon.
8. Winston Tong: Big Brother
Chinese-American artist Tong, whose exiled Chinese parents raised him in California, is a dead ringer for David Byrne, which has the interesting effect of fixing Byrne’s paranoid narrator on a more dramatic target—instead of a guy living a routine life of drudgery and ennui until he snaps, he’s...well, he’s in danger of being exiled.
9. Magika: I Know Magica
More Italodisco, seems to be a one-off project by a couple of prolific Italodisco producers. The vocals are great, though, and apparently (uncredited) by one of those producers, Gino Caria.
10. Alcione: Forró do Xenhenhem
The Brazilian samba star Alcione sure sounds like a star. A lot of world music categorized stuff from 1985 put me in touch with divas and superstars, most in their 40s or 50s, that struck me as coming from an older era of fame, the idea that you can be totally commanding across an endless repository of standards and other material.
11. Tuula Amberla: Pienet sanat
By contrast, Finnish singer Tuula Amberla is old-fashioned in a different way, evoking the effervescent French pop of the 60s (though with a light swing that I associate more with Sweden, like something Agnetha Fältskog from ABBA might have sung solo in the late 60s). I wonder if this would have sounded dated in 1985; it wouldn’t be in vogue again—in the US, at least—until pop went all in on ironic lounge and bachelor pad music at the end of the 90s.
12. Ichiko Hashimoto: Naja Naja
(YouTube only)
Stumbled on a fantastic album, Beauty, by the Japanese jazz pianist Ichiko Hashimoto, and this song is maybe the least like the others, which tend more toward jazz-rock fusion. This sounds like it could have been on Yoko Ono’s half of Double Fantasy.
13. Melanie: Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed
With a sample size of two, I can say with some confidence that there are no bad songs that quote the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to describe an infidelity. The other one is “Somebody’s Been Sleeping in My Bed” by 100 Proof Aged Soul, included on the Buddah Records box set immediately after a track by...Melanie! What are the odds!
14. Jean-Claude Naimro with Kassav’: Avèou Doudou
French jazz-rocker spins this song like a little toy gyroscope and away it goes. Any hint of an edge has been smoothed out, especially from the vocal harmonies, and there’s a grab bag of sounds I associate with 80s rock that I hate—pan flutes, dorky synths, 808 hand claps, slap bass—but they all ride on the song’s inertia.
15. May East: Maraka
From the solo album of a Brazilian new waver who performed with Gang 90 & As Absurdettes, said to be Brazil’s answer to the B-52s. I like her solo stuff better.
16. Toti Soler: Epigrama
(YouTube only)
Earnest jazz-influenced singer-songwriter stuff that I am a sucker for because I feel like it’s exactly the kind of music I would make if I bothered to make more music. The chintzy synths throughout are a must, though -- newer recordings of this song (like the one from 2000 available on Spotify) erase every hint of 1985 to their detriment. I am positive I could actually play that piano solo, too, I should have written this!!
17. The Bellamy Brothers: Old Hippie
Country music was in the search term for my Discogs trawl but I didn’t wind up finding a ton of it that way. The stuff I did find came from unexpected places—also check out Alabama, of all people, writing an earnest song about an honest day’s blue collar work (“Forty Hour Week (For a Livin’)”), or Ray Stevens telling a shaggy dog tale about not being so shaggy (“The Haircut Song”), which I’m sure must have been on Dr. Demento at some point.
But the best one was “Old Hippie,” which captures the cultural turn from hippie to yuppie that Frank Zappa was obsessed with and had been codified in The Big Chill a few years prior. The Bellamy Brothers are a little cutting but also seem to have a lot of genuine sympathy for their old hippie as he remembers Vietnam and mourns John Lennon.
They update the song every ten years or so like it’s the Up documentary series—at 45, their hippie is staunchly anti-yuppie and doesn’t trust Bill Clinton; at 55, the hippie’s been saved, but there's no indication that his Clinton skepticism curdled into something more troubling. He's going to be 75 in two years—no word how things are going yet.