GEORGE CLINTON - COMPUTER GAMES @ 40

 

Marking its 40th anniversary today is the debut solo album from Funkadelic/Parliament founder, George Clinton, with Computer Games being released on November 5th, 1982. After dominating the R&B scene throughout the previous decade with the monster P-Funk collective in all its variations and manifestations, Things were starting to get dicey for Clinton in the 1980s. Computer Games was a brief commercial rally for Clinton before he’d be beset by grinding legal battles, personal struggles and lack of label support through the remainder of the decade. The album was conceived of as a response to the burgeoning electronic music scene which was rapidly infiltrating the funk/R&B/soul/disco dance music scenes. Rather than reject the insurgence, Clinton chose to embrace it and integrate it into his own methods of production. Though the album was listed as a solo work, the personnel for the project was largely the same musicians he’d been working with on the most recent Parliament and Fundadelic albums.

The centerpiece of the album is the epic Atomic Dog. Released as a single, it was created almost by accident by virtue of an inadvertently backwards drum machine recording in something of a drug addled miasma when Clinton stumbled into the studio one day in the middle of a blizzard. He could barely stand, but mumbled some incoherent instructions and then improvised his vocals, leaving the folks in the studio with the task of making some sense of it all. Miraculously, not only did they make sense of it, they turned it into pure dance floor gold. More than that, the song has become a template for countless grooves in the ensuing decades, which repeatedly sampled to the track’s riff to build upon as a foundation. It has become part of the DNA of hip-hop on the deepest possible level.

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES - A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE @ 40

 

Turning 40 years old today is the fifth studio LP from Siouxsie and The Banshees, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, which was released on November 5th, 1982. It was their most experimental and ambitious production to date and garnered universal praise from both fans and the music press.

After the success of their previous album, Juju, the group took some time to reassess their work and felt that, for the next release, they wanted to up the production values, particularly by introducing the use of real strings rather than synthesizers. Working on the non-album single, Fireworks, set the template for where they wanted to go. While John McGeoch was okay with the use of synths, Siouxsie and Steve Severin were adamant about going acoustic, with the former stating, “They give a real, earthy, rich sound. You could hear the strings spitting and breathing and wheezing.” Beyond that, producer Mike Hedges strongly encouraged the group to experiment with radical effects setups, tape loops, vocal layering and different instruments like recorder, tubular bells and chimes. The end result was a post-punk neo-psychedelic hybrid born of extensive drug use while working on the album. That tactic, while perhaps inspirational at the time, would sadly lead to a darkness which would prove fatal to more than one person in the long run.

The title of the album was conceived by Severin after watching a documentary about Hollywood prostitution. the “Dreamhouse” was an actual brothel in Hollywood which featured a number of prostitutes who had undergone cosmetic surgical alterations in order to make them appear more similar to the famous stars of the times. A good lookalike would be able to command a significantly higher price than the other girls.

A Kiss in the Dreamhouse was the final release in a triptych of albums, begun with Kaleidoscope and followed by Juju, which featured John McGeoch as a member of the band. His alcoholism would result in him leaving after Dreamhouse, replaced by Robert Smith of The Cure for a time. It’s a period for the band which saw them transform into sophisticated, adventurous trendsetters, moving well ahead of the pack when it came to pushing the boundaries after the initial wave of punk had subsided. With this album, they made it clear to everybody that they were a creative force to be reckoned with.