i was cruising the music site looking for backfill songs i might buy, and was rudely reminded of the state of music criticism in the 80s (to be fair, this was from a zine, but was put in front of me by qobuz, so it had some staying power).
this hatchet job on the blink-and-you-missed-it "don't you (forget about me)" by some scottish dudes called simple minds, for the soundtrack of a very niche and forgotten film, reminds me of everything i escaped. it's probably from "the big takeover" issue #17 from 1984.
i closed the tab. no sale.
For six years this was a creative and interesting Scottish band that used synths in artistic ways to go with Jim Kerr's Roxy Music-like yearning, poetic vocals to forge lovely, danceable, moody soundscapes full of promise, enchantment, and sinewy shadows. So now they get to do a hit song for a bad movie, and they suddenly turn into every cliché you've ever heard, complete with Kerr doing what he said only last year he never would: singing the word "baby" in a pop song (repeatedly at that!). They didn't write this song, but it's their name on it and they recorded it, and sure enough this awful garbage is heard everywhere after no one in the U.S. ever played one of the band's great songs outside of nightclubs. Sorry Jim, this is obviously the most forgettable thing you've done so far. Hopefully the next LP will make this look as asinine as it is, a bad one-off, but experience tells us that once you open Pandora's box, you can't close it again, especially if it yields sales instead of ridicule.
© Jack Rabid, The Big Takeover /TiVo
n.b. all good pop songs have "baby" in them. repeatedly. sorry, jack
