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New Wave for the New Week #56

February 22 saw the release of "Retro Rockets," the brand new single from The Stranglers, taken from their forthcoming Decades Apart album, which will be their 17th (!) album since their 1977 debut, Rattus Norvegicus. But The Stranglers have actually been going for longer than that...

The band started off in the early 1970s as The Guilford Stranglers, and made their initial mark on the British Pub Rock scene. As early as 1974, the band was shocking audiences with their ragged-edged gutter-level songs focusing on the uglier side of life. Hugh Cornwell's gutteral growl was murky and animalistic, and their misogynistic lyrics and sometimes violent themes set them apart from their contemporaries. When The Ramones made their first highly influential first tour of England in 1976, it was The Stranglers (with their newly cropped name) who opened for them. Resultantly, The Stranglers found themselves shunned by the fading Pub Rock scene and lumped in with the swiftly growing Punk Rock crowd. While that tag may have helped them find their true audience, it was at best an ill-fitting label. Many of the UK kids following The Sex Pistols and The Damned and The Clash around saw The Stranglers as a bunch of old geezers trying to jump on the punk rock bandwagon. They played keyboards like The Doors for heaven sake!

Over 17 albums, The Stranglers' music has evolved from the early gritty, ugly, vulgar world of "Peasant in the Big Shitty," "Bring On the Nubiles," and "Down in the Sewer" to a more refined, in fact beautiful, pop sound (see "Skin Deep," "Always the Sun," etc.) The pop sensibilities were always there, though, audible from the first single, "(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)," whose burbling keyboards and sing-along chorus helped The Stranglers begin a long string of British chart hits.

As their sound evolved, so did their popularity. 1984's Aural Sculpture helped them become a commercial success throughout the rest of Europe, and charted well in Australia; in the US it saw considerable airplay on college stations but could not cross over to mainstream appeal. By 1990, they were clearly aiming for the US charts by covering The Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night," but they remained a cult band here. At that point, founding member and co-lead-singer Cornwell left the band.

The other singer and co-founder of the band, Jean-Jacques Burnel, soldiered on under The Stranglers moniker through some lean years, until the band returned to the British Top 40 in 2004 with "Big Thing Coming." In the ensuing years, the band has enjoyed something of a resurgence. The early records have been discovered by a new generation of fans, and though most of the band is pushing 60, they are still churning out some great music. The new album is highly anticipated; "Retro Rockets" sounds as good as any of the finest Stranglers tunes.

For this week's NW4NW, we look back to one of my favorite Stranglers singles, 1977's "Straighten Out." In many ways, it is the epitome of The Stranglers' sound: harsh yet melodic, ugly yet catchy, with clear ties to punk, pop, new wave...and even those Doors-like keyboards.



Over the course of this week, additional Stranglers clips will be posted on That's What I Was Going Say's Facebook page...become a fan today so you don't miss out!

A "WTF?" Explained

Those of you who are among my Facebook friends and/or Twitter followers know that earlier in the week I posted this wonderfully odd clip, challenging anyone to watch it without finding that same goofy grin as the singer has plastered upon his face plastered upon their own:



Those who found the words with which to comment after seeing this responded with the same mixture of horror, joy, and just general WTF?-ness that I did when I stumbled upon the clip in the first place. I declared that it would henceforth be my personal theme song, played whenever I enter I room, which I would do with glazed grin and mannequin-like wave as our singer does here, if not always clad in a similarly outdated brown suit as his; this declaration prompted at least one friend to state that I would be shot should I walk pass his porch one day singing the song! (No worries - no vocalizations I can muster come anywhere near the realm of what sane people would deem "singing.")

Weirdness experienced and chuckles had by all, we all moved on with our lives, likely never to encounter our fashion-stunted but joy-filled Russian singer again. And then...

Today I came across this in-all-ways-wonderful post written by Justin E. H. Smith, which not only seeks to explain what in blue blazes the clip was all about, but provides remarkable historical and cultural context for it. A brief tidbit:

"The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil', or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль...The song he is interpreting, "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home," is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words...Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it's-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please --to genuinely please-- Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context."

Smith goes on to provide, as counterpoint, a rendition of the same song performed in a 1960 film, and then begins a fascinating dissection/celebration of Hill's performance. It is an informative and entertaining piece, well-written and appreciated by those of us who, while enjoying the clip at face value, still wondered...well...WTF?!?

However explanatory Smith's piece may be, a reading of the comments left for Smith by his readers again brings about the cloak of oddness: an ongoing, scholarly discussion of Hill's performance as symbolic of the wide cultural gaps between peoples of the world?!? When one commenter declared this clip to be a reflection of "the ethos of the Brezhnevian era: hell hidden behind pastel tones," I began wondering whether this wasn't all some big put-on. Heck, why not summon the ghost of William F. Buckley to debate with Gore Vidal the value of Edward Hill's performance as allegory to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the perceived elitism of America by the rest of the world while we're at it?

Still, a fascinating read, and the very fact that such a blog post as Smith's and such responses as those of Smith's readers would be inspired by so downright goofy a clip as this amuses me to no end. That I find myself inspired to write this blog post about that blog post is somewhat frightening; if any of you reading this feel compelled to write a post about this post about that post about that video, I recommend seeking professional help.

Or, just scrap the whole thing, put on a bad brown suit and a silly grin and sing along with Edward Hill. "Tra-la-la-la-laaaaaaa......"

Making Use of This Newfangled Internet Thing

Are you an avid follower of this here li'l ol' blog?

Do you enjoy reading my musings, opinions, and occasional rants?

Are you on Facebook and/or Twitter?

That's What I Was Going To Say now has an official Facebook fan page, and an official Twitter account! Fan TWIWGTS on Facebook and follow @TWIWGTS on Twitter, and always be in the know when new posts go up. Also, there are plans in the works for some Facebook-specific and Twitter-specific content, contests, fun and games. Why, it'll be like being in a special club!

Who wants to help build the clubhouse?

Back in My Day, We Liked Our Punk Rockers Vile and Our News Reporters Condescending!

Saw this online this morning and had to share. I remember seeing the news reports as an 11-year-old kid about the "invasion" of those nasty, evil punk rockers from Great Britain. Why, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious were taking us to hell in a handbasket, they were!

Travel back to January of 1978, when NBC's news reporting was, well, about as balanced and accurate as it is today...

New Wave for the New Week #55

UK Subs via last.fm

As band names go, "The United Kingdom Subversives" was kind of unwieldy. When Charlie Harper and Nicky Garratt shortened that name up a bit to become The U.K. Subs, however, they hit upon a winner. Of course, how good a band name seems is always greatly influenced by how good the music they play actually is, and how well the name and the music match. One might expect the overly-formal sounding United Kingdom Subversives to be playing something like yawn-inducing keyboard-heavy prog-rock in the Emerson, Lake and Palmer vein, but a band called The U.K. Subs just sound like a bunch of guys you'd hear down the pub blasting out three-chord chant-along punk rock for the masses. And damned if that isn't what they turned out to be?

Harper, Garratt, and a revolving line-up of additional band members have been there since the beginning, and unlike so many other first-wave punk bands who disbanded and then reformed in recent years to ride the nostalgia wave, the Subs never stopped.

Formed in 1976 and releasing their debut album, Another Kind of Blues, in 1979, The U.K. Subs sound has changed little in the past three decades. Harper's pre-Subs experience in the British pub-rock scene with a band called The Marauders seasoned the Subs' chant-along punk with just a little bit of straight rock-n-roll/R&B, making them a very British-sounding band indeed - think The Exploited slowed down by half a step or so, or The Sex Pistols had they never replaced Glen Matlock with Sid Vicious. The British fans rewarded them with a number of UK Top Forty hits: "Stranglehold," "Tomorrow's Girls," "Party in Paris," "Keep On Running," and several others were huge hits in their native land, and even though they never achieved similar chart success outside of the UK, they developed a strong worldwide following who continued to fervently support the band long after musical tastes had changed and the UK charts were no longer a regular stop.

After an initial salvo of three albums essential to any punk rock record collection worth its salt (the aforementioned Another Kind of Blues, 1980's Brand New Age, and the live Crash Course), the Subs settled into a regular schedule of releases that have continued up through 2008's World War - and have followed the pattern of each album's title beginning with the next successive letter of the alphabet, making it easy to keep their chronology straight! You can really jump into the Subs discography at any point and find enjoyment, but those first three records - especially the debut, in my opinion - are musts.

This week's NW4NW entry features two of The U.K. Subs' biggest British hits. First up, the wonderful "Stranglehold," a #26 hit in the summer of 1979 that was so beloved, the Subs performed it on Top Of The Pops twice in June of that year. After that, the seldom-seen promo clip for "Party in Paris," which went to #37 in 1980. Enjoy!

New Wave for the New Week #54

The Slits via last.fm

The Slits came together in London in 1976. Singer Ari Up and drummer Palmolive added Viv Albertine (guitar) and Tessa Pollitt (bass) to form the first all-female band on the British Punk scene. That none of these women could play their instruments was hardly a bother to them. That Ari Up's vocals randomly wobbled off-key and off-rhythm caused them no concern. They slashed and bashed and screeched and made music and got noticed - noticed enough to snag the opening band slot on The Clash's White Riot tour in 1977.

By the time they got around to actually recording their first album, Cut, in 1979, they had come a long way. Palmolive had left the band, and the remaining Slits had become involved with producer Dennis Bovell, who pulled their sound out of the slash-n-bang and into spacey reggae-dub, a sound which underscored the other-worldliness of Ari's trippy amateur-hour vocals. Cut is an unusual record, but an excellent one. From their exuberant (if unsteady) cover of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" to celebrations of "Shoplifting" and "Love Und Romance," there are no clinkers here. The centerpiece, though, is the loping, spiraling "Typical Girls." Here their lyrics still spit the anti-society Punk Rock mantra ("Just another marketing ploy/A typical girl gets a typical boy"), but the laid back reggae beat and half-finished feel of the song make the message far more palatable, and therefore more insidious, than had they snarled it like their safety-pinned contemporaries.

Two years later they released The Return of the Giant Slits, which saw the band exploring African and Asian music while continuing to make use of dub-reggae sensibilities. An OK record for what it is, but nothing near the grandeur of Cut. With that, The Slits went their separate ways until reuniting in 2005. Once again they took their time about recording; their third lp, Trapped Animal, appeared four years later, in 2009.

This week's NW4NW entry is the amazingly wonderful "Typical Girls" from Cut. Enjoy!

A Stunningly Poor Follow Up: eMusic.com FAIL Continues!

I'm sure you all read my rant the other day about the incredibly, offensively bad customer service I received from eMusic.com the other day - so bad that I ended up canceling the service after 5 years with them on the basis of the way I was treated. If you haven't, please take a moment to read it now.

Today I received the email confirmation of my cancellation, which contained the first inklings that maybe they did value me as a customer after all:


Granted, not the most heartfelt attempt to win me back, but it made me think for a moment: Had I acted rashly? Did I really want to lose my loyalty rate? What if, down the road, I did go back to eMusic.com?

And then I read on, and began laughing out loud at the next part of the email:


First of all, "Undo your cancel"? Tell you what - you guys "do your grammar" and maybe then I'll "undo my cancel."

Better still - notice the deadline they've given me by which to "undo my cancel"? February 7, 2010. The email arrived today, February 17, 2010. I actually canceled on February 15, 2010. "It's easy!" they say. Sure, if I had a time machine handy.

At least I can laugh at it now, but I shudder to think that this a company doing business online internationally. This is the best they can come up with?

Meanwhile, I now have some very nice gift cards for iTunes that I think I'll be putting to use. Thanks for playing, eMusic. We have some lovely parting gifts for you...

eMusic.com = FAIL

Let me share with you folks a tale of frustration, poor customer service, and how to go about losing a long-time customer in no time at all:

Being the music fan that I am, I have had subscriptions with both iTunes and eMusic.com for quite some time. In the case of eMusic.com, since 2004. I was always pleased with the catalog of music eMusic presented, and from the start their high-quality .mp3 downloads were, to me, preferable to iTunes' .m4p files. Whenever both services competed on a particular song or album, eMusic would get my business.

eMusic uses a slightly different model than iTunes' pay-per-download approach. eMusic charges a monthly subscription rate that allows you to download "x" number of songs per month, with higher-priced subscriptions allowing a greater number of downloads. eMusic also made things easy by allowing PayPal to be used to auto-pay each month.

For nearly five years, all was honky-dory, until this month's subscription payment. Knowing that my monthly downloads generally renew by the end of the first week of the month, I went up to the site last week to pick this month's downloads. Upon signing in, I was greeted with a message in bold red type telling me "Your PayPal account could not be authorized for payment! Please provide a valid credit card number or update your PayPal account information."

Well that's not good! I knew there would be no reason for my PayPal account not to be working, so, fearing that someone had somehow gotten into my account, I was on the phone with PayPal in no time. After a brief conversation with a helpful, friendly agent at PayPal, it was determined that (1.) no breech of my account security had occurred, and (2.) there was no obvious reason why payment should not have been authorized the same as it had been every month for the past five years. The problem must be on eMusic's side.

So I went to eMusic, and after twenty minutes of searching for a contact number, called their customer service. I explained to the agent there what the situation was, and she suggested I go through the "Update Your Account Info" process. No dice - three times we tried and it still came back saying the account could not be authorized for payment. This agent apologized, and then said she would escalate the situation to her superiors, and I would be getting an email response from them in about 24 hours with a solution.

Today, three business days (five calendar days) later, having not heard a peep from eMusic, I called back. Here's where the skies begin to darken...

I wound up being connected to an agent who seemed somewhat less than thrilled to be doing her job. Her thick accent made it difficult to understand all of what she was saying, but it quickly became apparent that there was no record of my previous call, or at least none that she was going to acknowledge. "You will need to provide a credit card number or some alternate form of payment," she kept repeating. I tried explaining to her that I had verified with PayPal that nothing was wrong with the account, but she paid no attention.

"I think you need to call PayPal and find out why they won't authorize," she said in a monotone voice. As I tried yet again to explain that I had already done that, I realized why she wasn't hearing me - she was talking over me! "I see you already tried to update your PayPal information several times. Why did you keep doing that?" she demanded, as if asking a child why he had drawn on a wall with permanent markers. "Because your agent suggested I do!" I sputtered, growing more frustrated by the moment. "Well, now your PayPal account is locked out by our security. You'll have to give us a credit card number."

I tried to ask how this was now my fault and why, after five years of everything working fine, I suddenly had to provide a credit card number, but she continued to talk over me. "Everything is case sensitive. Maybe you entered your PayPal password wrong." she sneered. Three times?!? Doubtful, especially since the PayPal site opened right up each time. "Well, I don't know what to tell you. You can wait 120 days if you like and then try again, or you can give us a credit card..."

I blew my stack at that point. "No ma'am," I said, a bit loudly and forcefully, "YOU need to determine what's wrong on your end. I have been with eMusic for years and have never had a problem. PayPal has confirmed that there is no problem. A promised resolution from your department did not arrive, and now you're telling me that because I followed the directions of one of your agents, that I must give you a credit card number? No, you need to find out what the problem is."

She then verified the last three payments that had been made, verified that February's payment had not been authorized, and again said, "Unfortunately, your PayPal account is now locked from our system for 120 days because you tried to update it three times..."

"Ma'am," I began through gritted teeth, "you can repeat that as many times as you like, but I am not going to provide a credit card number. I use PayPal because I don't want to give out my credit card numb..." I stopped because I realized she was again talking over me.

"...your PayPal account is locked out for 120 days." I heard her again reciting. "We do that because we value our customer's security."

"Do you value your actual customers?" I asked, "Because you're about to lose a long-standing one."

"Hold on one moment, let me see what I can do," she said. Onto eterna-hold I went, with the worst, loudest hold music imaginable. When she finally returned several minutes later, it was the same refrain once more, with feeling: "You tried to update your account too many times, so it is locked down for 120 days." she sneered.

"Then please cancel my account." I calmly requested. She didn't bat an eyelash: "OK, please hold for your cancellation reference number," which she then rattled off to me. And that was that.

I am flabbergasted at the complete lack of courtesy I was shown. I understand that sometimes there are situations that customer service call center folks cannot do anything about, which was likely the case here: the computer said PayPal was locked out, and I'm sure she had no authority to override the computer. But should that give her carte blanche to talk over me, to take an accusatory, condescending tone with me, or to blatantly refuse to listen to what I was telling her? And not even so much as a "We're sorry to see you go," when I asked to cancel? After five years? In fact, it seemed she couldn't get me through the cancellation and off the phone fast enough.

It is stunning how poor customer service can be at times, and how quickly a lousy experience can sour a person towards a business. You business owners out there should take note: whether you're an online business or a "real world" business, you need to know how your customer service people are treating your customers, because if they aren't doing it well, those customers will not remain customers.

Furthermore, upon reflection, a pleasant experience would have ended up very differently. I wasn't upset or ready to cancel when I first called. Even if nothing could have been done differently as far as a locked account, being treated with simple courtesy would have made a world of difference. Being spoken with instead of talked down to would have resulted in the retention of this customer. It's not difficult to do and it costs a business nothing to provide pleasant customer service, but poor customer service can cost plenty.

Congratulations, iTunes! You'll be seeing much more business from me!

The Knack's Doug Fieger Passes Away (August 21, 1952 - February 14, 2010)

Sad news to report: Doug Fieger, lead singer of The Knack, passed away yesterday at age 57 after a lengthy battle with brain and lung cancers.

The Knack were best known for their debut single, "My Sharona," which spent six weeks at #1 in 1979 and was the biggest-selling single of that year according to Billboard Magazine. There really was a Sharona - Fieger wrote the song about an ex-girlfriend, Sharona Alpern, who is now a real estate agent in California. It's choppy start-stop rhythms and anthemic sound made "My Sharona" a classic that continues to turn up on film soundtracks and in various commercials. In addition to kick-starting The Knack's career, the song indirectly also began the career of "Weird Al" Yankovic who parodied it as "My Bologna."

The Knack's label, Capitol Records, hoped to position the band as the New Wave version of The Beatles, even resurrecting the old orange-swirl label design they used back in The Beatles heyday specifically for Knack releases. The follow-up single, "Good Girls Don't," just missed the Top Ten, peaking at #11 later that same year. The following year "Baby Talks Dirty," a "Sharona" soundalike, hit the lower reaches of the Top 40, and would be The Knack's last charting single.

Fieger, however, continued to be a hot commodity in the New Wave/Power Pop world, writing or co-writing songs for many other artists, doing production work, and adding guest vocals or session work on other artists' records.

Fieger had been battling cancer for several years. He was at his home in Woodland Hills, CA when he passed. The Knack's Official Website currently bears the message, "Our hearts are broken, we will miss you Doug."

In his honor, here are all three of The Knack's Top 40 hits:


The Knack - My Sharona

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