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      Can HBO’s ‘The Idol’ Revive 1980s Erotic Thriller Sleaze?

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      Over-the-top locations and characters bathed in red light recall an all but dead genre that was once a staple of late-night cable: the erotic thriller.A slick executive drives a cherry red convertible.A nightclub owner carries a coke spoon and wears his hair in a rat tail.A troubled pop star masturbates while choking herself.Those images might have come from an erotic thriller made by Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne, directors who were prominent in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to movies like “Body Double” (Mr. De Palma), “Basic Instinct” (Mr. Verhoeven) and “9 ½ Weeks” (Mr. Lyne).But those scenes were actually part of “The Idol,” the HBO series that made its debut on Sunday with the apparent intention of reviving an all but dead genre.Filled with close-up shots of luxury goods and body parts, “The Idol” also recalled the works of lesser filmmakers whose R-rated creations populated the late-night lineups of HBO and its rivals long before the advent of prestige television.It was a style that died out over the years — the death blow might have been Mr. Verhoeven’s infamous “Showgirls,” an expensive 1995 flop — and seemed highly unlikely to make a return to the cultural stage amid the #MeToo movement.As Karina Longworth, the creator of the film-history podcast “You Must Remember This,” recently observed, today’s films are so devoid of steamy sex scenes that they “would pass the sexual standard set by the strict censorship of the Production Code of the 1930s.”Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley, who is in the cast of “The Idol,” in the much-maligned 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsSharon Stone in “Basic Instinct,” a film referred to in “The Idol.”Rialto PicturesThe old aesthetic was on full display in the first moments of “The Idol,” a series created by Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (known as the Weeknd) and Reza Fahim, three men who came of age when flipping through cable channels late at night was a frequent pastime for adolescent boys.The first episode begins with the pop star Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, baring her breasts during a photo shoot as a team of handlers, crew members and an ineffectual intimacy coordinator look on.Later, Ms. Depp’s character smokes in a sauna, rides in the back of a Rolls-Royce convertible and rubs up against a man she has just met (a club owner portrayed by Mr. Tesfaye) on a dance floor bathed in smoky red light. There will be no flannel PJs for Joss; a pair of wake-up scenes make it clear to viewers that she sleeps in a thong.It isn’t only the show’s gratuitous nudity that harks back to Mr. Lyne and company, but the overall look and mood, which recall a louche glamour from the time of boxy Armani suits and cocaine nights. A main setting is a $70 million mansion in Bel Air that looks like something out of Mr. De Palma’s “Scarface” but is in fact Mr. Tesfaye’s real-life home.A number of young viewers have said they find sex scenes embarrassing, but Mr. Levinson, who created the HBO drama “Euphoria,” and his fellow producers have made no secret of their desire to pay homage to the heyday of Cinemax (when it had the nickname Skinemax).A wink to viewers comes when Joss, in the darkness of her private screening room, watches “Basic Instinct.” And then there is the pulsating score, which seems to conjure Tangerine Dream, the German electronic group who scored the sex scene on a train in “Risky Business.” In another nod to the show’s influences, the cast includes Elizabeth Berkley, the star of “Showgirls.”While it may seem like an outlier, “The Idol” has seemingly tapped into a cultural moment that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago: Ms. Longworth recently devoted a season of her film-history podcast to the “Erotic ’80s”; no less a tastemaker than the Criterion Channel has recently presented a series on erotic thrillers from the same time period; and last month in Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque held a screening of “Basic Instinct.”“The Idol” also has a close competitor in the world of streaming: “Fatal Attraction,” a 1987 hit for Mr. Lyne, has been rebooted as a series on Paramount+.Mr. Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp in a scene from the first episode of “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOStephanie Zacharek, the film critic for Time, suggested that the return of such fare may have arisen from the yearslong glut of comic book movies, along with the lack of a certain kind of R-rated film that was once all the rage for adult viewers.“In the ’80s, that’s almost all there was in the multiplex,” Ms. Zacharek said. “Grown-ups went to see those movies. Now we don’t even have that many movies for grown-ups, period.”Ms. Zacharek slammed “The Idol” in her review and in a phone interview — “It feels like it was made by someone who has never had sex,” she said — but she said she was a fan of “Body Double” (and even “Showgirls”) and laments the disappearance of that kind of thing.“I always enjoyed those films, even when I thought they were sexist or ridiculous,” Ms. Zacharek said. “They do have a certain element of glamour to them.”It is a distinct possibility that the idea of reviving this particular genre may appeal more to Mr. Levinson and his colleagues than audiences and critics.After a two-decade absence from big-budget productions, Mr. Lyne attempted a comeback last year with “Deep Water,” an erotic thriller starring Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck. Mr. Levinson was one of the film’s writers.“Deep Water,” which streamed on Hulu upon its release, was never shown in theaters. It drew a 36 percent approval score from critics and a 24 percent audience score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.“The Idol” has fared both better and worse: A mere 24 percent of critics have given it a thumbs-up, and 63 percent of audience members have weighed in favorably. More

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      How MTV Broke News for a Generation

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      MTV News bridged a gap between news and pop culture without talking down to its young audience. As it prepares to shut down, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway Calloway and others reflect on its legacy.A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.Boxers or briefs?“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”SuChin Pak, left, an MTV News correspondent, with Fergie, of the rap group the Black Eyed Peas, and Snoop Dogg. Ms. Pak said of MTV News, “We were the kids elbowing in.”Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter that is preparing to file for bankruptcy, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.MTV was able to corner a young audience who could name the entire catalog of the band Flock of Seagulls but also had a curiosity about current events, he said.The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.” But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Mr. Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Mr. Thompson said.“It was live TV at its best, I suppose, for an awful event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “elevate the conversation” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do so with credibility.“MTV News took news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure that we kept integrity in what we did.”Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio program on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level when he was sitting in the Blue Room of the White House with President Barack Obama.“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would take it this far?’ I never thought that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we would be able to have a discussion through hip-hop culture that resonates on a global basis,” Mr. Calloway said. “That’s because of MTV News.”From its inception, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that first hand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” get-out-the-vote campaign, and in the White House.“People were very earnest and sincere in wanting young people to be educated voters, not just willy-nilly, get anybody to the ballot box,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were informed.”For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, being able to connect with a younger audience was made easier because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the intifada and going to Bosnia to follow American troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity most of the time lined up with what the audience wanted to hear about.”During a town hall-style forum on MTV in 1994, President Bill Clinton was famously asked about his preference in underwear.Diana Walker/Getty ImagesThat rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.“A lot of people were getting their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms. Pak said. “For all of us it was, OK, what is the audience, what’s our way in here that feels true? You do that by sitting down with them versus standing over them.” More

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      The Buggles’ Song Launched MTV. After 45 Years, They’re Going on Tour.

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      Trevor Horn, half of the group behind “Video Killed the Radio Star” and a producer who helped engineer the sound of the ’80s, will be the opening act for Seal.In the late 1970s, when Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes were trying to get a record deal as the Buggles, a lot of people in the music business were confused. What kind of band has only a singing bassist and a keyboard player?“We were like, ‘We don’t want a guitar player, and we use a drum machine,’” Horn recalled recently during a video interview from his Los Angeles home. “There was a lot of suspicion about that. We were a bit ahead of our time.”Horn, 73, was being a bit modest; he’s routinely described as “the man who invented the ’80s.” The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was a global hit and ushered in a new era of opulent electronic pop. The video was the first ever played on MTV when it launched in 1981, and featured Horn and Downes in outrageous silver suits and deadpan looks.By then, they’d already moved on from the Buggles by joining Yes, briefly. Downes went on to play with the pomp-rock group Asia, and Horn entombed himself in a recording studio, waging war on boring music.As a producer and head of his own record label, ZTT, Horn worked on some of the most audacious albums of an over-excited decade: ABC’s “The Lexicon of Love,” Malcolm McLaren’s “Duck Rock,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome.” If you hate the ’80s, he’s your villain.A Trevor Horn production has clever lyrics, fortified hooks, an episodic structure and a dramatic fire-walling of frequencies that makes the music pop out of speakers. He also worked with Spandau Ballet, Grace Jones (“Slave to the Rhythm”), Seal (“Crazy”), the Pet Shop Boys, t.A.T.u., John Legend, Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart.The Buggles never toured, apart from a 2010 reunion gig for charity, but they’re the opening act on the British singer Seal’s upcoming tour, which starts April 25 in Phoenix. Horn will be playing without Downes, whose obligations to Yes got in the way.“My daughter, who is a music business lawyer, keeps saying, ‘You’ve got to change the name, because there’s only one of you. It should be called the Buggle,’” Horn explained with a laugh. His daughter also insisted Horn wear a certain iconic garment. “She said, ‘If I was a paying customer and the Buggle didn’t have his silver jacket on, I’d want my money back.’”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Geoff Downes, left, and Horn. “Video Killed the Radio Star” was a global hit and ushered in a new era of opulent electronic pop. Fin Costello/Redferns, via Getty ImagesYou worked as a producer for five years before you had your first hit, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” After such a long wait, why did you walk away from pop stardom?My first experience of being a pop star was pretty grim. I was miming to “Video Killed the Radio Star” on every TV show known to man. When you’ve made a living as a musician, miming is the most boring thing you could possibly do. I knew that in order to come from nowhere and have a hit record, we’d need to have a pretty catchy track. But that doesn’t necessarily make for a career.“Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t just catchy, it’s annoyingly, almost obnoxiously catchy. Was that part of the plan?[Laughs] I know what you’re referring to. Bruce Woolley [who helped write the song] and Tina Charles, a well-known singer in England, were singing the chorus, and it sounded bland. I said, “Why don’t you sing it in American and exaggerate it?” That was effective. I was aware that it might be a bit annoying, but I thought it was the kind of thing you wouldn’t forget.One of your early jobs was a progress chaser in a plastic bag factory. What does a progress chaser do?People would call and say, “This is the British Sugar Corporation. We ordered 20,000 plastic bags that were meant to arrive last week. Could you tell us where they are?” I’d go down to the factory to see the head of production, and ask where the bags were. And he would say, “[Expletive] off!” Then I’d go back to the British Sugar Corporation and say, “I’m assured the bags will be there on Wednesday.”Did that job influence your idea that we were living in “The Age of Plastic,” which is the name of the Buggles’ 1980 album?To some degree, but that was mostly me being irritated by people saying, “Eh, your music sounds a bit plastic.” After a while, I thought, “[Expletive] them! It’s the plastic age!”When a couple of my friends heard “Video Killed the Radio Star,” they said, “It’s got absolutely no integrity.” I suppose I was thumbing my nose a bit at the ’70s idea of integrity.Aside from the musical and technical aspects of being a producer, how important is the psychological aspect — knowing when to cajole or when to flatter?All of that is very important. Even though you think you can say whatever you want, because you’re in charge, you can’t. The only way that works is patience and kindness. Most people that are successful have well-developed instincts for what suits them, and if you’re going to take them out of their comfort zone, you’ve got to be careful.Paul McCartney certainly has well-developed instincts. Did you find him amenable to your suggestions when you worked with him on “Figure of Eight” in 1989?Paul is very charming. The first time I met him, I was playing Space Invaders and he came up behind me and said, “Do you want me to show you how to cheat the machine, Trev?” You think, “Jeez, Paul McCartney knows my name!” Even I got a bit excited by that. But when it comes down to it, he’s still only a songwriter and a bass player. It’s not like he’s the dictator of a country and he can get you locked up.When you started working with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, they said they wanted to sound like a cross between Kiss and Donna Summer. How important is it to get direction from the artist?Oh, it’s vital. ABC wanted to be like Chic, a big dance act, but with better lyrics. With Frankie Goes to Hollywood, I was intrigued by the idea of a rock-dance record. I was playing bass for a living in 1977 when Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” came out, so I heard it every night. It was the first mechanical record that I heard, and I was fascinated by it.And when I heard Kraftwerk’s “Man-Machine,” it was a revelation — the idea that you could make a record without having a group there, with all their problems. I felt like that was the way forward. You could make music all by yourself, because of the new technology.Downes (left) and Horn (at microphone) performing with Yes in 1980. Michael Putland/Getty Images“Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Yes’s big hit off “90125,” was its first No. 1 pop hit. How did you get the band to record a song it hated?I had to go down on my knees and beg. I said, “I’m a really hot producer at the moment, probably the hottest producer in the world, and if you don’t do this song, you’ll make me a failure. You promised me you’d do this song, so you’ve got to do it.” I was being funny, but not funny, if you know what I mean. I was desperate.Some people who’ve worked with you describe you as “obsessive.” Was it obsessive to spend three months working on Seal’s hit “Crazy”?It was obsessive. I’d never heard a song quite like “Crazy” before, so it took a while to figure out how to do it properly. I’m not trying to get a record perfect, I just want it to have an emotional impact. That’s what takes time.You didn’t have a hit until you were 30 years old, which is unusual. Were you thinking for years that any day now, you’d be a star?People would tell me, “You think that’s going to happen? Look at you! You’re not even that great-looking!” My parents kept trying to get me to go to teacher’s training college. It didn’t look very promising, put it that way.I remember a girl saying to me, “You’re 28. You’re driving around in a beaten-up old car, living hand-to-mouth. What are you doing with your life?” And I said, “I’m pulling the handle of a big slot machine, and I’m going to keep pulling it, because it’s going to pay the jackpot out soon. That’s why I’ve got a rubbish car.” More

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      Punk Producer Glen ‘Spot’ Lockett’s 10 Essential Recordings

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      As the house producer for SST Records, Lockett shaped the sound of hardcore from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. He died last week at 72.Between 1979 and 1985, Glen Lockett, the producer and engineer credited as Spot, captured the first generation of American hardcore punk bands — Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendents, Saccharine Trust and more — as they came screaming and flailing from South Bay beach cities outside Los Angeles. The house producer for the standard-bearing independent punk label SST Records, Lockett sculpted hardcore’s hyper-fast and caustic sound with a documentarian’s ear. He died on March 4 at age 72.A Spot recording was brittle, intimate and — crucially — affordable. Lockett preferred that a band play in the studio all at once instead of overdubbing, giving SST Records a feeling of immediacy. It was a visceral alternative in an era when major labels were investing in ostentatious filigrees like gated reverb and prohibitively expensive synthesizers. Spot’s no-frills production not only gave shape to these bands’ spittle and blurs, but served as an abrasive metaphor for an entire movement that was rethinking, and self-managing, everything from album art to record distribution to touring.By the mid-80s, the SST founder Greg Ginn and his roster of uncompromising artists had grown creatively restless, putting Lockett at the bleeding edge of emerging subgenres and microscenes like sludge metal, stoner metal and cowpunk, as well as at the controls for Hüsker Dü’s double-LP masterpiece “Zen Arcade.” He decamped for Austin in 1986, leaving a legacy of recordings that would serve as a crucial inspiration to the alternative and DIY rock booms of the 1990s and beyond.Here are 10 essential tracks from Lockett’s scene-defining tenure at both SST and New Alliance, the label helmed by the Minutemen.Minutemen, ‘Fanatics’ (1981)The bassist Mike Watt called recording the first Minutemen album, “The Punch Line” from 1981, “a gig in front of microphones,” most likely a nod to Lockett’s light touch on the controls. Lockett told Red Bull Music Academy that when recording the Minutemen, he “just set them up the way I thought that they should be set up, turned on the tape and let them go.” On the raucous, 31-second “Fanatics,” you can hear the drummer George Hurley’s sticks accidentally collide. “The songs were so short, that finding them on the tape was really hard,” Lockett told the makers of the Minutemen documentary “We Jam Econo,” adding an expletive. “I had to make so many cuts to put 18 songs on this damn thing.”Saccharine Trust, ‘A Human Certainty’ (1981)Emboldened by the energy of Los Angeles hardcore but artistically powered by Captain Beefheart, the Fall and Charlie Parker, Saccharine Trust made poetic, jagged art-punk that never garnered the attention of its peers. The band’s debut album, recorded in one session and titled “Paganicons,” was a favorite of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. On the album closer, “A Human Certainty,” Spot captures an expressive mix of pleas and groans from the vocalist Jack Brewer, somewhere between punk venting and goth agony.Black Flag, ‘Damaged I’ (1981)After four EPs with three different singers, Black Flag settled into its classic lineup on its 1981 full-length tantrum, “Damaged,” on which the 20-year-old former ice-cream-scooper Henry Rollins launched a series of emotional Molotovs. His most feral moment was the closer, “Damaged I”: Rollins improvised the lyrics and Spot had him do only two takes — the first one was the keeper, Spot said. The band’s drummer “Robo always wore these bracelets on his left wrist and the drum mics would pick them up,” Rollins wrote about the sessions. “It became part of the sound. You can hear it on the record.”Descendents, ‘Suburban Home’ (1982)Remembered by Spot as the first time he got to properly record vocals, the debut Descendents album, “Milo Goes to College,” showcases the singer Milo Aukerman’s adenoidal whine and sugary harmonies, essentially writing the blueprint for decades of American pop-punk bands like Green Day and Blink-182.The Dicks, ‘Rich Daddy’ (1983)Spot told the site Punktastic that, of his productions, the debut LP from the riotous Austin, Texas, band the Dicks, “Kill From the Heart,” was his absolute favorite: “Absolutely nothing phony or [expletive] about either the band or the recording.” The group’s openly gay frontman, Gary Floyd, snarled and crooned lyrics about anti-capitalism, the police state and homophobia, making righteous protest music feel like a party. Spot flew to Austin and recorded the band’s debut in 48 hours. On songs like the Creedence Clearwater Revival-tinged “Rich Daddy,” the band made the move from hard-edge barkers to uniquely grooving blues-punk dynamo. “Everything got recorded way, way, way too hot and it was distorted as hell,” Spot told Jim Ruland, the author of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.” “Somehow I figured out a way to make it sound good.”Minutemen, ‘I Felt Like a Gringo’ (1983)The Minutemen were expanding their vision to include longer songs and heavier grooves, soon to reach apotheosis on the 1984 college radio juggernaut “Double Nickels on the Dime.” But for six songs on the “Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat” EP, Spot had one more “econo” trick up his sleeve. “I said, Hey, let’s forget about this multitrack stuff,” he recalled in the Minutemen documentary. “Let’s just set it up and do it live to two-track. One take. Bam, it’s done. You mix it while you’re playing it and be done with it. And that’s what we did.”Saint Vitus, ‘Saint Vitus’ (1984)Spot produced the 1984 debut from the doom-metal pioneers Saint Vitus, who recorded every song on it in one take. “Nobody wanted to do something on a record that you couldn’t reproduce live,” Saint Vitus’ guitarist, Dave Chandler, told Red Bull Music Academy. “All of us had seen too many bands, like Led Zeppelin for instance, where there are all these fancy nine guitars on one song, and then you go to the live show, and the song sucks because they can’t play it like that.” The resulting album — Black Sabbath metallurgy rendered as something much darker and heavier — helped popularize “doom metal,” a substrain eventually taken up by bands like Sleep and Electric Wizard.Black Flag, ‘My War’ (1984)On the title track from the second Black Flag album, Henry Rollins vomits out arguably the greatest vocal performance in the history of hardcore — nearly four minutes of accusations, screams, diatribes, squeals and assorted throat shreds. On the album, produced by Spot with Ginn and the drummer Bill Stevenson, you can hear Rollins moving through the space like he’s scratching to escape a prison of his own making. The second side of the “My War” album would feature the band moving into long, molasses-slow dirges that would absolutely enrage audiences in 1984 but ultimately prove a formative precursor to the sludge metal of bands like Melvins, Boris and Mastodon.Meat Puppets, ‘Oh, Me’ (1984)From their 1982 debut to their 1984 follow-up, Meat Puppets evolved from an acid-fried hardcore mush into shambolic, vulnerable and Grateful Dead-tweaked country-punkers. Spot recorded both. “He made it really easy to get exactly what I wanted,” Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood told The Austin Chronicle. “He had no opinion. He really liked the live stuff and he was so into the punk rock thing from recording all those other bands. He had such a great ear.”Hüsker Dü, ‘Something I Learned Today’ (1984)Hüsker Dü’s second LP, “Zen Arcade,” stretched the very concept of hardcore in sound, ambition and duration. A 70-minute concept album on four sides of vinyl, “Zen Arcade” teamed one of the fastest bands in the land with paisley-printed hooks, acoustic strumming and the shimmering sounds of psychedelia. Though its heady concept and catchy songs might sound like AOR excess, it was still undoubtedly a hardcore album: Twenty-three of its 25 tracks were first takes, recorded in the span of about 45 hours. “With Spot, he was a real purist,” the guitarist and vocalist Bob Mould told Tape Op. “His background was jazz, so his theory was, get the right mic on the finely tuned instrument and go with it.” More

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      Terry Hall, a Face of Britain’s Ska Revival, Is Dead at 63

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      The son of Coventry factory workers, he overcame a traumatic childhood to find fame in the Thatcher years as the frontman of the Specials.Terry Hall, the frontman of the Specials, the British ska band that blended pub-fight energy with socially conscious lyrics that explored the political and racial tensions of Britain in the late 1970s and early ’80s, died on Dec. 18. He was 63.The cause was pancreatic cancer, his former bandmate Horace Panter announced on Facebook. The announcement did not say where he died.After enduring a traumatic childhood, Mr. Hall went on to enjoy a chart-topping music career.He forged his most lasting legacy as a face of the revival of ska — the pop genre that emerged in Jamaica in the 1960s, blending Caribbean styles like calypso with rhythm and blues — that shook the British music scene during the early, convulsive Margaret Thatcher years.The Specials were key figures in the movement, along with Madness, the Selecter, Bad Manners and the Beat (or the English Beat, as they were known in the United States to distinguish them from the American band of the same name).Clad in the fashions of Jamaica’s slickly attired rude boys — often with tapered suits, skinny ties and porkpie hats — the Specials sounded off about racial injustice, soaring unemployment and ultra-right-wing violence over a rave-up party sound that left sweaty audiences in a frenzy.Hollow-eyed and phlegmatic, Mr. Hall channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.The band released its debut album, produced by Elvis Costello, in 1979, two years before racial unrest rocked cities throughout Britain. With five white members and two Black ones, the Specials “were a celebration of how British culture was invigorated by Caribbean immigration,” Billy Bragg, the British singer-songwriter known for his leftist politics, wrote in a social media post after Mr. Hall’s death.“But the onstage demeanor of their lead singer was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s,” Mr. Bragg added.Mr. Hall performing with the Specials in London in 1980. He channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Hall believed that England needed a band to vocalize the country’s unease at the time. “What I didn’t realize,” he said in a 2020 interview with the music writer Pete Paphides, “was that it might be us.”The Specials scored seven straight Top 10 singles on the British pop charts, starting in July 1979 with “Gangsters,” which reached No. 6, and concluding in June 1981 with the No. 1 hit “Ghost Town,” a mournful rumination about a lack of opportunity for British youth in a sinking economy against a backdrop of perceived government apathy. Their other hits included “A Message to You Rudy” (No. 10) and “Too Much Too Young” (No. 1).The Specials in Los Angeles in 1980. From left: Horace Panter, Mr. Hall, John Bradbury and Neville Staple.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesEven when topping the charts, Mr. Hall and the band showed little interest in becoming part of the London entertainment machine.Proudly based in Coventry, a rough-and-tumble industrial city in the West Midlands known for its automobile factories and its sizable West Indian population, the Specials scarcely paid lip service to the frothy trends bubbling up from the banks of the Thames.“We’ve got everything we want here,” Mr. Hall said in a television interview in 1980, when he was at the peak of his fame but still living with his parents. “There’s a studio here, there’s a train station, that’s all we need.”As for London, he said: “There’s nothing for me, or for any of us; there’s no point in hanging around trendy London clubs until 4 in the morning. I’d rather stay in and watch telly.”In addition to his star turn with the Specials, Mr. Hall scored four Top 10 hits in Britain with Fun Boy Three, a deadpan and oddly experimental new wave group he formed in 1981 with the Specials’ other vocalists, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. In 1983, the band hit No. 7 with its cover of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” a 1981 hit for the Go-Go’s that Mr. Hall wrote with that band’s Jane Wiedlin, whom he briefly dated.Terence Edward Hall was born in Coventry on March 19, 1959. His father, Terry Hall, Sr., worked at a Rolls-Royce aeronautics plant, and his mother, Joan, worked at a Chrysler factory.Growing up, Mr. Hall was a standout student and soccer player, but he spent his youth fighting inner demons. In 2019, he revealed a childhood trauma that he said sent him into a spiral of depression and substance abuse that lasted years.In an interview with the British magazine The Spectator, Mr. Hall said that “Well Fancy That!” — a 1983 song by Fun Boy Three about a harrowing sexual encounter — was about the time he was kidnapped and abused by a teacher.“It was about an episode where I was abducted, taken to France and sexually abused for four days,” he said. “And then punched in the face and left on the roadside. At 12, that’s life-changing. I still have that illness today and I will still have it in 10 years’ time, and it’s important for me to talk about that.”Prescribed Valium to deal with the emotional fallout, he soon became addicted. “Which meant I didn’t go to school, I didn’t do anything,” he recalled. “I just sat on my bed rocking for eight months.”Music was an escape. In the late 1970s, Mr. Hall joined a Coventry punk band called Squad, which brought him to the attention of Jerry Dammers, a songwriter and keyboardist who was in a band called the Automatics. That band would evolve into the Specials, with Mr. Hall taking lead vocals.“We didn’t even know who was going to play what,” he later said. “We passed around all the instruments until we found what we were comfortable with. I wasn’t comfortable with any of them, so I became the singer.”The Specials, an unstable collection of members with different backgrounds and agendas, unraveled after “Ghost Town.” The remaining members regrouped without Mr. Hall as the Special AKA and scored a Top 10 hit in 1984 with the up-tempo protest song “Nelson Mandela.”But Mr. Hall’s career was far from over. After Fun Boy Three disbanded, he helped form Colourfield, a pop band based in Manchester, in 1984. The Colourfield’s sunny love song “Thinking of You” hit No. 12 in Britain the next year.In 1990 he formed another band, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, which released one album, “Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes.” He later formed a band called Vegas, with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, and also collaborated with the Lightning Seeds, Gorillaz and other acts.Mr. Hall eventually drifted back to his roots with a new incarnation of the Specials, including Mr. Golding and Mr. Panter, that released an album, “Encore,” in 2019, that dealt with contemporary racial issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement. The pandemic interrupted plans for a reggae follow-up in 2020.In 2021, the band detoured from its ska roots with an album of covers called “Protest Songs: 1924-2012,” which included a honky-tonk cover of the Staple Singers’ 1965 civil rights ode “Freedom Highway” and a country-inflected version of Malvina Reynolds’s “I Don’t Mind Failing in This World.”By that year, the band was set to proceed with its delayed reggae album. But in October, The Guardian reported, Steve Blackwell, the band’s manager, disclosed that Mr. Hall had pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. Treatment failed to stem the disease.Mr. Hall is survived by his second wife, Lindy Heymann; their son, Orson; and two sons, Theo and Felix, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.By the end of his life Mr. Hall had not entirely escaped his demons, but he had made a certain peace with himself, and with his role as half-willing pop star.When asked by The Spectator if he derived any pleasure from performing, he responded: “Absolutely none. That’s why I do it.”He quickly amended that. “I actually do enjoy that thing onstage where I turn round and I’ve got Horace and Lynval, who I’ve known most of my life, and we’re sharing something. That’s my night out. Don’t get out much.” More

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      Hamish Kilgour, Whose New Zealand Cult Band Had Reach, Dies at 65

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      He was a powerful drummer and, most notably, a founding member of the Clean, which inspired indie bands like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk.Hamish Kilgour, a founding member of the New Zealand band the Clean, who was celebrated among fans of underground music for his propulsive drumming and his countercultural approach to life, has died. He was 65.He was found dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday, 10 days after being reported missing, the police there said. His death was referred to the coroner’s office.A central figure in the crop of freewheeling New Zealand musicians on the independent label Flying Nun that came to be called the “Dunedin sound,” Mr. Kilgour spent four decades as a musician, singing and playing percussion and later the guitar.He eventually played with more than 100 bands, including the Great Unwashed, the Sundae Painters and Monsterland, and lived for almost 30 years in New York, where he formed the band the Mad Scene.He also had a secondary passion for painting: He produced hundreds if not thousands of frank, idiosyncratic pictures, many of which were repurposed as album cover art.A deceptively powerful drummer, Mr. Kilgour might start a song in ramshackle fashion, then build to a thunderous conclusion. He had early on been inspired by Moe Tucker’s single snare on live recordings by the Velvet Underground. “I thought, that’s kind of magical and that’s possible — I could do that,” he said in 2012. Ms. Tucker’s minimalist, driving style and her enthusiasm for the power of the tambourine, later colored his own playing.Not every drummer, however talented, is immediately recognizable, said Mac McCaughan, the owner of the label Merge Records, which last year reissued the Clean’s first two releases. “But with Hamish — he had a voice on the drums,” he said in an interview. “He had his own style and his own character.”In 1981, Roger Shepherd, a local record store manager who was in the process of founding Flying Nun Records, saw the Clean perform at the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. “They were pretty obviously the best band in the world,” Mr. Shepherd recalled.Almost before the set had finished, he asked them to record with him. The first recording session produced “Tally Ho!,” a frenetic, surf-rock-adjacent single — made for 50 New Zealand dollars — that scraped into the Top 20 in New Zealand, buoyed by its popularity on student radio stations.Flying Nun’s fortunes had been transformed. The subsequent EP “Boodle Boodle Boodle,” recorded that year on a similar budget, spent 26 weeks on the New Zealand charts. American indie bands, including Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk, would cite it as an inspiration.For listeners outside New Zealand, the musicians on the Flying Nun label had a kind of legendary status, said the American filmmaker Michael Galinsky, who became a friend of Mr. Kilgour’s.“It just opened up all these worlds,” he said of “Tuatara,” a 1988 Flying Nun compilation on which Mr. Kilgour appeared. “It’s so far away — you don’t see pictures of these people, there’s no writing about them, there’s no internet. So they’re mythic, and incredible.”Inspired by the Enemy, a punk group started by friends of theirs, members of the Clean had begun rehearsing together in 1978 — Mr. Kilgour taught himself the drums, while his brother, David, played guitar and Peter Gutteridge played bass. (Mr. Gutteridge was later replaced by Robert Scott.)After its first flash of success, the members of the band made an early decision to split up just four years into their career. But as the Clean’s influence on do-it-yourself underground rock became more apparent, they reunited in 1988. Over the next 30 years, interrupted by long spells apart, the Clean continued to perform in the United States and elsewhere around the world, releasing several albums.As a member of the Mad Scene, Mr. Kilgour recorded multiple albums and EPs, as well as two solo albums, “All of It and Nothing” and “Finkelstein,” and made myriad other guest appearances on other artists’ records.Hamish Robert Kilgour was born in Christchurch on March 17, 1957, the older of two sons of MacGregor and Helen Stewart (Auld) Kilgour. He was reared mostly in Cheviot and Ranfurly, small communities in New Zealand’s rural South Island. In 1972, the family moved to the coastal city of Dunedin, also in the South Island, where Mr. Kilgour’s father took a job as a pub manager while his mother ran the establishment’s kitchen. Hamish received a bachelor’s degree in English and history from the University of Otago in Dunedin in 1977.After his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1982, his mother worked as a nurse to support the family. She later supported her sons’ band, helping to fund both a van and a P.A. system as they performed around the country with the Clean.Mr. Kilgour moved to New York in the late 1980s after the breakup of his first marriage, to Jenny Halliday. There he met Lisa Siegel, who would become his second wife and a bandmate when they formed the Mad Scene. The couple had a son, Taran.But life in New York, where he worked as an art handler, house painter and carpenter in between music gigs, was at times precarious, especially after he and Ms. Siegel broke up in 2013.He moved back to New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic and played music there whenever he could, while eking out an existence that strained his mental and physical health, people close to him said.He is survived by his brother and bandmate, David, and his son.For his contemporaries in New Zealand, Mr. Kilgour was a testament to the notion that being from a far-off country of a few million people with no established rock tradition did not preclude people from making great music.“Just because it comes from here, and not London or New York, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valid,” said Mr. Shepherd of Flying Nun. “That was a startling thing that we kind of knew was true anyway, but that hadn’t been articulated for us.”Richard Langston, a music journalist and longtime friend, said Mr. Kilgour had “changed the way you could record indie rock.”“He was that important,” he added, “and he lived a crazy, brave, solo life.” More

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      Irene Cara, ‘Fame’ and ‘Flashdance’ Singer, Dies at 63

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      Ms. Cara was a child star from the Bronx who gained international fame as the singer of major pop anthems from movies of the 1980s.Irene Cara, the Academy Award-winning singer who performed the electric title tracks in two aspirational self-expression movies of the 1980s, “Flashdance” and “Fame,” has died. She was 63.Her death at her Florida home was confirmed by her publicist, Judith A. Moose, on Twitter on Saturday. Ms. Moose, who did not specify when Ms. Cara died, said her cause of death was “currently unknown and will be released when information is available.”Ms. Cara, a child actor, dancer and singer, was the voice behind two of the biggest movie theme songs of the 1980s. She performed the title track from the movie “Fame” (1980), which followed a group of artsy high school students as they move through their first auditions to graduation.In 1984, she won the Oscar for best original song as one of the writers of “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” the title song from “Flashdance,” which she also sang. The buoyant song also earned Ms. Cara a Grammy Award in 1984 for best pop vocal performance, female, and a Golden Globe for best original song. The movie, like “Fame,” chronicled the aspirations of a young person seeking to express themselves through art, in this case, dance.Ms. Cara was born Irene Escalera on March 18, 1959, in the Bronx. She repeatedly disputed reports about her birth year, at times describing it as in 1964. Her official Twitter account says she was born in 1962. Her mother told The New York Times in 1970 that a young Ms. Cara, already a busy performer, was 11 years old.Her mother, Louise Escalera, was a cashier and her father, Gaspar Escalera, was a musician and worked at a steel factory. Details on Ms. Cara’s survivors were not immediately available.Ms. Cara grew up in New York City and attended music, acting and dance classes as a child and was said to be able to play the piano by ear at age five. She attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, a school for child performers and children studying the arts.As a child, she sang and danced on Spanish-language television. At 13, she was a regular on “The Electric Company,” a children’s show from the 1970s. She was also a member of its band, the Short Circus.She stayed busy, taking roles in theater, television and film, including the title role in “Sparkle,” a 1976 film about a family of female singers in the 1960s that was remade in 2012.Her breakout role was in the movie musical “Fame,” where she played Coco Hernandez, a student at a school modeled after the high school now known as Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. On the film’s soundtrack, Ms. Cara sang the title track, “Fame,” and another single, the ballad “Out Here on My Own.”Both songs were nominated for an Oscar in 1981. The film was nominated for several awards and “Fame” won for both best original song and score.She continued to act and make music into the 1990s, when she was embroiled in a legal battle with her record company over her earnings. She was awarded $1.5 million by a California jury in 1993 but Ms. Cara said she was “virtually blacklisted” by the music industry because of the dispute, People magazine reported in 2001.In recent years, she shared songs from her catalog, including some that had not been released, on her podcast, “The Back Story.”In an episode from July 2019, she spoke about her ballad “As Long as it Lasts,” and said it had similar qualities to “Out Here on My Own,” and explained why she connected to both songs.“Very naked, just vocal and piano and a great lyric and a great story within the lyric, those are the kinds of songs I relate to as a songwriter,” Ms. Cara said. More