Kevin's Watch

In rock mythology, the big distinction is made between the sixties and the seventies, but as Lennon's record (a sixties swan song) and Boy George's demonstrate, the sixties and the eighties contrast more starkly. Both records toy with the idea of "karma" as a symbol of cosmic comeuppance for the star-struck, but while it's interesting that pop stars of such different generations, with the careers of their peers splayed out before them like so many used-up Corn Kings, return to a concept steeped in rebirth, there the resemblance ends.

Over the clunkiest track Phil Spector ever produced, Lennon does his best to level himself, not in order to obliterate his own superstardom but as a means to (at least theoretically) elevate everybody else. By "instant karma" he seems to mean immediate consequences. Having just emerged from the cocoon of the Beatles, he spoke with tremendous authority about the havoc wreaked by trying to keep your head in the valet-attended clouds. Whether he's identified a universally applicable cosmic revenge principle is harder to say.

Where Boy George and Culture Club come from, authority means nothing. In their version of pop culture, authority is powerless and it's around that conundrum that they base their song. "Lovin' would be easy if your colors were like my dreams," declares George, over the slickest soul track his group ever made. For him, consequences can be avoided by becoming a changeling who eschews anything resembling permanent allegiance. Permanence itself may be the problem: "I'm a man without conviction," George says and then without a wink, "I'm a man who doesn't know / How to sell a contradiction." But of course, that's all he's ever sold.

Boy George sings as if in toying with the idea of a love that might last, a future that might actually come to exist, he's found the greatest sorrow of his life. And the harmonica backs him up. Lennon, for all his espousals of faith, struggles to keep up with the inexorable cadences of guitar and drum. Neither, in the end, mastered fate at all.

What got lost in all the hoopla over Boy George's preferences in sex and dress and drugs wasn't just his soulful singing but the skillfulness of his band, which played sophisticated modern pop-soul charts as well as any group in New York, L.A., or London. That's why "Church of the Poison Mind," with its latter-day Philly soul bottom and scathing harmonica break, its Stax-like horn punctuation, and Helen Terry's wailing vocal responses, remains thrilling long after all George's secrets (at least, all the ones anyone cared about) have been told.

In a sense, it's hard to see what the sexual-sartorial fuss was all about. From Little Richard and Bobby Marchan on one extreme to Liberace and Milton Berle on the other, cross-dressing has been a common habit among Anglo-American performers. It was George's posture not just as drag queen but as a fairly unapologetic homosexual (he could be coy, but he never denied his tastes) that required strong punishment. Just as Elton John's career fell off for several years after his revelation of his "bisexuality," George's star crashed long before the London cops decided to do their bit for for Fleet Street with his arrest for heroin (cruelly timed for just the moment when he was going clean).

Like most of Culture Club's songs, "Church of the Poison Mind" doesn't make its meaning especially clear. Mainly, it seems to concern an especially ideal pickup (and perhaps some self-criticism on George's part for his own dirty wishes upon first viewing that fine young thing). But there's nothing overeager about hearing the title as a slap at the voyeuristic world in which we live, and at least part of the mounting, moaning tension in George's vocal as an entirely reasonable sense of trepidation at the potential consequences for himself.

Farm Ur-Ted wrote:Not new-wave, not sissy-boy (yet still embarrassing), but I realized the other day as I was driving home that I still sort-of like Huey Lewis and the News.

Fist and Faith wrote:As for Howard, I know I heard the rest of that album, because I bought it. But I don't remember any of the other songs.

dANdeLION wrote:

Fist and Faith wrote:As for Howard, I know I heard the rest of that album, because I bought it. But I don't remember any of the other songs.

Too bad, because Things Can Only Get Better kicks ass.

sgt.null wrote:Caer Bombadil - WOuldn't It Be Good is great. but some dipshit covered it and just ruined it. buy only the original.

Caer Bombadil wrote:"Hungry Like the Wolf" followed on the Rio album by "Hold Back the Rain" was some of my favorite driving music. Hey, I sent off for a vinyl LP thru Amazon to get the album version because they butchered both those tracks cutting the intros & breaks short to fit on CD.