Dinner Music 106: The weekly lineup
synth-wave new wave, groovy sophistication, sleazy glam
This week we’re listening to danceable, moody sounds, inspired by different facets of the eighties. I don’t know much about astrology, but people are telling me there is something going on with retrogrades right now — we’re out of the normal flow of the planets. I believe it. To counteract this strangeness, we’re on to sounds that are upbeat, cosmically funky, a little industrial. Lots of synth. Lots of oooh oooohs. We’re looking to the “more is more” decade to give us a little more, now.
We begin in a hot, Brazilian discotheque. Warm bass. Effortlessly smooth rhythm. Robson Jorge e Lincoln Olivetti has a particular electricity to it, the album nods to música popular brasileira, while still pulling beyond Brazil for its sound — and remaining a distinctly Brazilian album (and a coveted one). There are a lot of albums with massive singles that I’ve missed and Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is one of them. You can almost hear it, pulsing out of a the dark shadows of a neon-lit doorway. This is a great album for transcendence, trust me. It will transcend you with its sultry darkness, the raw edge of Marc Almond’s voice, the distinct glamour of grunge. Tainted Love will also never, never feel overplayed. We move into Romeo Void’s classically eighties album Warm, In Your Coat. In my opinion, Never Say Never is one of the best tracks to come out of the riot grrrl era and it’s fun as hell. “I might like you better if we slept together,” what a line, especially in ‘81. Next, we have Playtime by Robert Görl, which has the feel of some kind of industrial playtime, computerized beats, big-mouthed eighties synth, theatrical vocals, like a Memphis Milano-style funhouse. We end with an album both darker and lighter than everything that’s come before. On Division St. is their most popular song for a reason.
Enjoy.
Monday
Robson Jorge e Lincoln Olivetti - Robson Jorge, Lincoln Olivetti (1982)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret - Soft Cell (1981)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Warm, In Your Coat - Romeo Void (1981)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
Playtime - Robert Görl (1984)
Spotify / Apple Music / Other streaming services
Friday
Introduction, Presence - Language of Nation (2020)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with
Soy-sesame crispy rice salad. There’s absolutely nothing eighties about this recipe, but it’s very delicious and easy (though the rice takes a bit of a time). Very good for a weeknight thing.
Dirty Shirley. This, however, feels very eighties (why? there’s something about cherry that is just eighties).
This article from a few years ago on genre disappearing. “What we mean by “pop” or “jazz” or “country” changes regularly; genre is not a static, immovable idea but a reflection of an audience’s assumptions and wants at a certain point in time.”1
’s great essay on “brat and the ugly-chic green revival. “so the [Prada 1996] collection became known as ugly chic, and that descriptor would dominate the public perception of the brand for decades to come.”
Thank you, thank you.
Have a great week.
Continued, because its so good: “The scholar Carolyn R. Miller defines genre as being marked by some “typified rhetorical action”—a repeating feature that handily satisfies our expectations or desires. That rhetorical action might be musical (a proper twelve-bar blues, for example, is played on a guitar and built around a 1-4-5 chord progression), but it’s just as likely to be rooted in aesthetics (country singers wear cowboy hats and boots) or attitude (punk bands consist of miscreant anarchists). “Genre is always a blending of both formal structure and cultural context,” Ehren Pflugfelder, a professor of writing at Oregon State University, told me recently. “This may be the most frustrating thing about genre for those who want it to be stable over time. What makes something country music is often just as much about what the audience for that genre expects it to be as it is the chord progression, instruments, time signature, or lyrical content.”