Trouser Press, May 1982
The Buggles
Fade Away/On TV
There are one-hit wonders, and then there are one-hit wonders...
The Buggles are of course best known for Video Killed the Radio Star.
I've always thought of fellow one-hit wonder Pop Muzik by M as an aural twin of Video Killed the Radio Star.
Both songs burble along with bleeps, bloops, bubbles, and highly processed vocals.
They are crisp, cool New Wave Lite in colorful aluminum cans.
But where Pop Muzik is a reverie, Video Killed the Radio Star is a lament. It is Helen Twelvetrees cursing the dawn of the talkies...
Another key point of divergence for the two songs is their performance on the 1979 US charts. Pop Muzik made it all the way to number 1, while Video Killed the Radio Star just scraped into the top 40.
But two years later, the iconic status of the latter song would be sealed when it became the first video played on MTV. (And somewhat shockingly, Pop Muzik was not even among the first 200 videos aired by the station.)
This clear flexi contains two songs by the Buggles that are not Video Killed the Radio Star: Fade Away and On TV. Both tracks play like the intersection of synth-pop and prog that they are-- kind of like Heaven 17, if Heaven 17 were unconcerned with making you shake your groove thang...
4 comments:
Not a great song, but it ushered in a new era of images over sound alone. I can't think of an equivalent war cry for analog to digital. Vinyl just quietly disappeared (lament, lament).
I guess the introduction of video had a more profound effect on the artists themselves than did the change in the delivery system from analog to digital. But really, the former was just an alteration-- the latter is a transformation...
Yeah, videos added a new dimension but the move to digital really changed the way we (me, at least) listen to music, i.e. social aspects. People didn't get together to listen to music as much and it narrowed exposure to new stuff. I think Spotify may have a 21c answer.
I was telling my kids the other day that I used to sit on the phone with friends for hours listening to the radio-- they were dumbfounded. But Spotify really scratches that same itch...
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