I've come to reluctantly understand that most Americans are such committed inhabitants of the current moment that we tend to break out in hives if we can't reduce all previous epochs of history into neatly spliced multi-year chunks, in which a handful of visual and verbal and musical cliches come to represent those decades in their entirety. It seems as if we have become such insufferable children of this immediate impulse that we have begun to react to any art which demands anything beyond a cursory appreciation, let alone an immersion even one inch deeper than the surface, like someone has asked us to murder the reincarnation of our childhood puppy.
With that being said, it's still rather perplexing to me that Adrian Borland's exquisitely wrought and idiosyncratic musical landscapes of the 1980's, which he recorded as the leader and songwriter of a band he aptly named The Sound, have achieved the posthumous gift of near complete and total cultural invisibility, while steaming horsepuck like Kajagoogoo still soundtracks the throwback 80's dance parties of unendurable, over-privileged 30-year-old tinder addicts, who by some immeasurable miracle make even the Baby Boomers look like paragons of astuteness and wisdom.
Try this: Tear your ever-deadening eyes away from your hand-held digital crack pipe, sit alone in a dark room with the moonlight shining through the window, even if it's at a third floor room at a semi-dilapidated motel in Modesto, and let the opening track from The Sound's "From The Lion's Mouth" album, "Winning," wash over you for the duration of its four minutes and eighteen seconds. Let it find its way into your skin. Let it show you the truth about who and what you are. Then, when you're done, when you finally understand, throw that fucking phone into the ocean.
