30 Songs, 30 Days, Day Fourteen: Temptation by Heaven 17 and La Roux

This is a peculiar one...an old new wave standard redone by the original act in collaboration with an act that can be considered its inheritor for BBC 6's Live early this year.

And it's...shrug. I do think there is something here about a passing of the torch--BBC 6 has apparently done a number of these old/new pairings, like when they threw Gary Numan together with Little Boots, and Paul Weller with Adele...but there's not much that makes this rendition anything other than a 'recreation', like a comic book cover redone by its original artist. If anything, it says more about the increasingly collapsing window of the original becoming a participant in its own cannibalization in the name of nostalgia. Heaven 17, much like INXS is doing with its upcoming album of 'reworkings' (mentioned here), seems to feel it can stave off the obscurity of the nostalgia circuit by being at the forefront of this wave of people who are emulating them now. Lord knows when this collaboration surfaced in January of this year, it was the buzz of the net's various music blogs...for a few weeks before this band melted back into the shadows of playing to their old fans on their website and festival dates. Martyn Ware and Glenn Gregory, judging from their website, do seem to be doing a successful 30th Anniversary tour...but it seems to be primarily confined to the UK. And they seem to want to move into the future, promising an upcoming podcast--which seems at turns bizarre and quaint given the very 80's design of the site.

When all is said and done, this is prolly going to end up being a curiousity--something that plays to the fans of electropop, and not something that shocked the world into awareness of a new genre like the Run DMC collaboration with Aerosmith...and if Martyn and Glenn are thinking otherwise, they're fooling themselves. Here's a recording of the performance that started it all...

30 Songs, 30 Days, Day Eleven: Original Sin by INXS

I know, I know...I have been falling down on the job. I promise I will make it up to you. There might be cake involved.

But at least, after that disappearing act I pulled, my mp3 player managed to drag out a good one. This is a fairly popular single from what was a fairly popular band at the time, Australia's INXS.

Oddly enough, an earlier INXS song was discussed in the final 30Ss30Ds of last year, a song that prompted me to go off on a screed about how INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence is defined by the scandal of how he died, whereas other pop singers have their scandals washed away by their deaths (If you're interested in visiting that previous discussion of "Keep On Walking," just go here.).

This single addresses interracial romance--something was in the alt-rock water back in 1984, because a lot of other musical acts started telling us that interracial relationships were Not As Evil As We Thought--and it's pretty blatant in hammering its agenda home. Hell, the whole song equates how some people think of races mixing as the original sin! But, unlike other songs in this issue-music sub-genre, the ultimate outlook of the song is hopeful. Hutchence, in between all the yelping and vocal gyrating that were a signature of the band's later albums, tells us of his dream where the 'black boy, white girl' dreaming of a brand new day will get it...and guess what? His dream was right--to the point where it's been speculated that the biracial portion of the world's population may be the dominant portion in a couple of generations.

Not surprisingly, the band got death threats for expressing this sentiment. Andrew Farris talks of a fan throwing a gun up onstage at one show, telling them they might need it.

Comparing this song, done as the band was reaching the pinnacle of its creativity (its next two albums, Listen Like Theives and Kick, would contain a number of Top 40 hits, plus a couple of songs like "New Sensation" that are still rock radio standards), to the earlier "Keep On Walking" shows a marked improvement in their musicianship. Granted, they still don't hook up with the man who'll be their production magician, Chris Thomas until next album, but they're experimenting with different styles and textures to their benefit. Hell, this song is produced by Nile Rodgers, which explains the multilayered sound, the undeniable funky rhythm guitar and bass lines and the way the choruses seem to soar in from the rafters (incidentally, that's Darryl Hall doing background vocals). And I think the band benefits from the fuller arrangements of these later albums--although even I will admit that they go overboard with the orchestration once the 90's hit. The wildly overproduced Welcome To Wherever You Are should probably have been the last album, and is pretty the last time the band did anything listenable with Hutchence at the helm. And sadly, the Farriss Brothers and company have embarrassed themselves time and again since Hutchence's death in 1997, from naming Jon Stevens their new lead singer just months before he left for a solo career in 2002 to allowing a reality show to find its lead singer, J.D. Fortune in 2004 only to fire him after the release of that incarnation's one and only album, Switch, to getting into a public war of words with Fortune in 2009. And this year, they're prepping that last resort of a band that has become the musical equivalent of the walking dead, an album of 'reworkings' of their greatest hits with big name celebrity singers.

It's sad when people won't acknowledge that a missing member cannot be replaced....

Here's the very....ummmm....peculiar video, which makes it look like the boys were auditioning for a teen version of the ludicrous Michael Douglas movie Black Rain. The video is credited to Yasuhiko Yamamoto, a Tokyo advertising director. According to Kirk Pengilly on the official site, it was intentionally meant to be very, very Japanese.