PERMANENT WAVES #1

An auspicious beginning?

Banner art by Hugh Puddle

Welcome, comrades, to PERMANENT WAVES, a rip-roaring rollercoaster ride through the music of yesteryear— yesterfortysixyears, to be precise. It’s 1980! According to rateyourmusic.com, a whopping 692 releases bearing a power pop primary genre tag were released in 1980, a peak that remained unmatched until 2018. Now, RYM is far from an infallible resource for data, but in this case, the numbers do not lie: To understand power pop, we must understand 1980. We must listen to all 692 (or at least, as close as we can get)

That big spike right at 1980 is because the y-axis is determined by percentage of database entries for that year, not raw numbers!

Anyways, you are at this point most likely asking “Why? Why put so much effort into something so seemingly trivial? What are your intentions here, and what makes you qualified as my witty and devastatingly beautiful tour guide through the music of 1980, anyway?” Well, statistically speaking, I know more about 70s power pop than anybody reading this, which is why I am the one writing, and you are the one asking very perceptive questions. My intentions, however, are multivalent, and effervescent. I’m doing this because I have power pop mindset, and I want you to have it too. 1980 is, in many ways, the culmination of the 70s, and so too is this feature to be the culmination of two years of rigorous pseudo-scholarly investigations deep into the origins of power pop.

To properly set your palate for the journey to come, and to start myself off with a bang, my first two ‘80 capsule reviews come accompanied by a super-sized one-time special offer: My personal top 10 albums of 1979! If you cannot bear the agony of me ignoring your favorite overhyped kerlassic (COUGHunknownpleasuresCOUGHCOUGH) in favor of some no name fuckface who spent the whole 70s getting good at ripping off the Kinks, well, consider it a warning: the takes will be HOT, and the gems will be OBSCURE. Let’s mindset, baby.

10. Wings - Back to the Egg

Sure, Paul McCartney’s past successes loom large over Back to the Egg (“Old Siam, Sir” struggles mightily to strut as hard as “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five”), but the late-70s deluge of minimalist, Beatle-inspired British songwriters (plus London Town’s frosty critical reception) seemingly prompted Wings’ leanest, briskest set, uh, ever? “Getting Closer” is a flawless little sunbeam of a power pop single, “Spin It On” is a hysterically fuddy-duddy stab at stroker-ace new wave punk, “After the Ball / Million Miles” might just be Macca’s second-greatest achievement as a balladeer after “Let it Be”, and “Baby’s Request” closes the book on Wings flawlessly- a trifle so sweetly nostalgic that you barely notice the cavities forming.

9. Blondie - Eat to the Beat

The pathos of Eat to the Beat is that of a band that realizes, somewhere in the backs of their minds, that they’ve already peaked and it’s all downhill from here. True to its name, it’s a feat of hedonism, dazzlingly overproduced, insatiably in love with itself. Christgau groused about “Die Young, Stay Pretty”: uhh buhh dying young is bad, though!!! Sure, fine, whatever, live a long life, if that’s an option. When you’re this famous, and on this much heroin, what are the odds that it feels like one? The actual problem with “Die Young, Stay Pretty” is that it’s cod reggae (though far from the most egregious out there). The continental city-slicker stuff properly eats, though. I mean, come on, “Shayla”? Alien abduction has never sounded so fuckin’ heartbreaking, and I’ve spent the past year barely noticing because it comes right after “Union City Blue”, possibly Clem Burke’s finest hour behind the kit.

8. Sun Ra and his Arkestra - Sleeping Beauty

Uh-oh, stepping far outside my wheelhouse here! I’ve never had much of a taste for post-Coltrane jazz, sorry to say, but this one right here is undeniable: beautiful, dreamlike, as enchanted as its namesake. It really flows.

7. Buzzcocks - A Different Kind of Tension

The prize cut here is “I Believe”, a stream-of-consciousness so cynical and disaffected that it makes for the perfect capstone to the Buzzcocks’ steady evolution from “why the hell won’t anyone fuck me??” to “who the hell could possibly think of fucking at a time like this??” The latter question’s already been answered by the time the song starts, though: the Buzzcocks shitsure could. A different kind of tension, indeed.

6. Tom Robinson Band - TRB TWO

Lucky thing for The Clash that the real Only Band That MattersTM split up after just three years, and was always too loud-and-proud gay to ever catch on with the straight-edge crowd to begin with. Todd Rundgren (take a shot) shows up on production duty for a sophomore effort that succeeds largely by spinning the wheels the band crafted on their masterpiece debut Power in the Darkness. The few attempts to show a bit more musical range bring mixed results (soulful piano balladry on “Hold Out” YEA, jokey music hall tripe on “Law and Order” NAY), but Robinson’s lyricism remains some of the boldest and biggest-hearted in all of rockdom, and newcomer organist Ian Parker proves an invaluable asset for steely, vibrant pub rock like “All Right, All Night” and “Days of Rage”.

5. Pink Floyd - The Wall

Animals is a more focused polemic, and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway did the whole surrealist psychosexual-bildungsroman rock epic thing first (and from a far less maladjusted perspective to boot), but there’s a reason no one’s making those albums into feature films- The Wall has both beat for sheer drama! Addiction, war, loneliness, fascism, childhood trauma, and the interrelations between all of the above— even by the standards of double albums, this one bites off far, far more than it can chew, and it’s Roger Waters’ valiant effort to digest it all that makes the darn thing so compelling. Well, that and a smattering of immaculate radio singles, from the psychedelic dissociation of “Comfortably Numb” to the hard-groovin’ rebellion of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”, to the dystopian paranoia of “Run Like Hell”. A suitably haunting and grotesque examination of how history and society conspire to make men into tyrants.

4. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports

The former Roxy Music synth wizard finished out the 70s by “inventing” a whole “new” “genre”, wow! Music for Airports is perhaps the landmark release in ambient music. I think I’m gonna try to mostly keep up a kayfabe of writing like it’s actually 1980 for this project, but in this case, I must return for a moment to 2026: Forty-seven years after the fact, I daresay, this album is still ahead of the times. As placid and twinkling and infinite as a cloudless night sky, imitated by thousands, surpassed only by a rarefied few. Power pop mindset is a dilapidated monolith in need of a little TLC, but ambient mindset is Zen Buddhism, the infinite hum of the universe itself. It’s a furniture music world, we’re all just livin’ in it. And it started right here. Not really wild about “2/1” though, maybe it worked better as an installation?

3. Stiff Little Fingers - Inflammable Material

Tom Robinson, bless him, feels like a man out of time, like an idealistic 60s folkie dropped into the late 70s and forced to make some kind of sense of the madness around him. SLF frontman Jake Burns, on the other hand, is every inch a product of the Callaghan era, and he is fucking furious about it. Assisted by manager and local political reporter Gordon Ogilvie, Inflammable Material bravely faces down one of the defining questions of the modern era: how can anyone with morals live in a world where freedom costs as many lives to maintain as oppression? I couldn’t have picked a more fitting album to smash the glass ceiling for indie releases.

2. The Beat - The Beat

A platonic ideal power pop record, no more and no less. The way guitar music sounds in my idle fantasies of being in a successful guitar band. Paul Collins wants to be with a rock ‘n’ roll girl, and, well…

1. The Tubes - Remote Control

The Tubes have been fascinated by television’s effects on us ever since their 1975 self-titled debut pointedly asked “What do you want from life? To get cable TV, and watch it every night?” On their astounding, clairvoyant fourth studio outing Remote Control, the band musters prog chops and theater-kid mania to tell the story of a boy who answers, guilelessly: Yes. That is all I have ever wanted. It’s gripping sci-fi tragicomedy, cloaked in ironic distance and stagecraft because the naked truth is simply too horrifying to confront earnestly.

Okay that was fun, now for 1980!

Eric Carmen - Tonight You’re Mine

I was actually sort of looking forward to this after hearing Eric Carmen’s first solo album, an accomplished soft-rock set built around the instant-classic power ballad “All By Myself”. By the time I finished his third album Change of Heart, I was dreading a further slide away from power pop towards charmless, mercenary adult-contemporary schlock. Luckily, despite that atrocious album artwork, Tonight You’re Mine is a course correction on the stylistic front, and Carmen is still a capable rock singer despite his hamminess. Unluckily, it mostly comes across as perfunctory. Opener “It Hurts Too Much” has a lush, pleasingly Ronettes-y bounce to it, and the title of “Lost in the Shuffle” is a real MINDSET of a double-entendre (yeah, I’ll bet you do feel lost in the shuffle, buddy). The remaining 25 minutes devolve into all his worst tendencies: sobbing melodrama, greasy pickup-artistry, and bland rawk.

Verdict: SKIP

Jim Carroll Band - Catholic Boy

The celebrated memoirist behind The Basketball Diaries also apparently wrote hit single “People Who Died”?? Here’s a hot take: the GWAR cover is better. The original is too long! Five whole minutes— what kind of punk is this? Catholic Boy is clearly more the project of a writer than the project of a musician- Carroll barely hits a single note across the whole album. The lyricism is, predictably, a saving grace, especially on “It’s Too Late”, one of the few moments where he takes a break from wallowing in the seediness of his chosen haunts. Mindset of the week: it ain’t no contribution / To rely on the institution / To validate your chosen art / And to sanction your boredom and let you play out your part.

Verdict: FINE