Search - ABC :: The Lexicon Of Love

Excellent

Bill Your 'Free Form FM Handi Cyber | Mahwah, NJ USA | 11/19/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Can I tell you a high school story? A 1980s story? A music story?



Forty year olds like me, who like 60s music and got trashed in high school, have a real bias aginst 1980s bands. I have Cerebal Palsy.

I remember hearing Loverboy, Debbie Gibson and the Thriller circus freak himself, Then I remember all the football boys and cheerleaders who used to terrorize me. Can you blame me for getting hives when i hear the phrase "80s music?"



I only later found out the 1980s were also host to the Cucteau Twins, Prefab Sprout, Husker Du--all kinds of interesting sounds that never made it to MTV, or more to the point, boom boxes in school lunch rooms. Communications were so localized and small in those days, it was much harder to find out about these types of bands.



Now that we have all grown up Duran Duran, Wham and Culture Club are- like boom boxes, Ronald Reagan and The Cosby show-part of another lifetime; was that ME?



But the music we bypassed is still here, and I can't think of better band than ABC.



Lexicon of Love is 100% 1980s. Those drums and shining keybords and synthsized bass are frozen in time. But this music is funky, with operatic chord changes, and lyrics that deal with amore with an adult sophisitcation. This is not the music of jocks but that of spiky haired painters. Listening, you hear shades of Scott Walker, Bacharach, Roxy Music, and all the 1960s romatics, just updated with what was then current irony.



All this passed through the ears of angry Beatle boys like me, but now, with lifetimes passed and lifetimes of musical educations I have been privlaged enough to obtain, I hear all the richness and brillance of this music, and realize, this stuff was progressive and royal all along. It was retro idiots like me who did not get it.



Hey, it was a long, long time ago.



Plus, it helps that when I go into Starbucks, I am the older quirky guy. The 2009 cheerleaders think I am cute little dude, kind of a harmless funny uncle, and are REALLY nice to me."