Yeah, let’s go down this rabbit hole a bit.
In 1988 I was just getting to the age that I wanted more out of my music but I didn’t know where to look for it.
The pre-internet world was rough like that. Especially in Nebraska.
I had Night Flight (1988–96) on USA on the weekends to hopefully introduce me to Frank Zappa or The The (it did both when I was 12 and I was all the richer for it) but I didn’t really know how to find things left of the dial, as the cliche goes.
Enter The Hidden (1987), a still-wonderful alien buddy cop flick starring Michael Nouri and Kyle MacLachlan in pursuit of a slug that jumps from body to body in LA at the zenith of its late 80s Bret Easton Awesome.
This slug takes over the body like a parasite and uses it until it gets too worn or too tired and it has to jump to another. For whatever reason this alien slug loves two things: Stealing sports cars and loud rock, particularly stuff that was on west coast labels like Enigma.
In one indelible scene it blasts this song and this song hit me like a lightning bolt straight from Zeus. I had never heard anything like it. It was so different it did that cool thing where I couldn’t get it out of my head while also not being able to remember how it went. It lived in that murky patch of memory. I was like “WHAT IS THAT SONG!??!?”
I tracked down the tape and while nothing else on the album was quite as good as this one song this one song was worth the six bucks on its own:
So then,
if you dated arty alternative girls in the 1990s (which were my preference, which was fortunate as they were the only girls that would talk to me anyway) you found yourself forced to listen to two songs that all arty alternative girls claimed were totally about them.
The first was ‘Jane Says’ and the less said about it the better.
The second was Concrete Blonde’s ‘Joey,’ which is in fact an excellent song.
But this song (above) – which is from the same album and feels like its sibling – holds up way more for me, all these hundreds of years later.
Fun fact: Michael Stipe gave this band their name. But it was The Hidden that connected me to Concrete Blonde.
—jason malmberg
Flommist Jason Malmberg is a simple man who believes in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art sometimes. Copyright © 2017 Jason Malmberg.
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