This week's show featured a jumble of 1970s and 1980s music that we dubbed An Arty Punky Sort of Pop (ok, a couple of these tracks were released in the very early 1990s too, if we're going to get picky about it). These are all artists and songs that might typically get classified as proto-punk, punk, post-punk, indie rock, new wave, or art rock. But each in its own way defies such easy classification. The lineup here is incredibly diverse, however each of these artists shares a certain style or approach: they're all somehow unconventional, challenging the norms and conventions of popular music while also clearly still working within them. Some of these artists play eclectic pop with punk or avant-rock tendencies, while others play proto-punk/punk/post-punk with experimental but nevertheless overt pop sensibilities. We can't quite put a finger on what it is they're doing and yet it seems to make a certain amount of sense - hence the vague specificity of the phrase An Arty Punky Sort of Pop.
Here's the playlist from our Thursday, February 6, 2014, broadcast:
The Modern Lovers - "Someone I Care About"
Beat Happening - "Midnight a Go-Go"
Half Japanese - "Eye of the Hurricane"
The Soft Boys - "Sandra's Having Her Brain Out"
John Cale - "Fear is a Man's Best Friend"
Magazine - "Because You're Frightened"
Jonathan Richman - "They're Not Tryin' On the Dance Floor"
The dB's - "Dynamite"
The Embarrassment - "Patio Set"
The Feelies - "The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness"
Violent Femmes - "Gimme the Car"
Television Personalities - "Salvador Dali's Garden Party"
Swell Maps - "Let's Buy a Bridge"
Pere Ubu - "Navvy"
Can - "Vitamin C"
Note: Be aware that the audio drops out unexpectedly at a few spots in the archived recording. Also, near the top of the show we mentioned that we were going to play Brian Eno. Indeed, the original intention was to play Eno's "King's Lead Hat" and also Talking Heads' "Don't Worry About the Government," but we ran long and those two songs unfortunately had to get cut.
Archived streaming audio of this show can be heard here now (playable in Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers):
