11th
The Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s
Guest Post: Family Fodder - Film Music
[Today’s entry is a guest post by Ian from Musicophilia and its sister site Musicophilia Daily. This 80’s list of mine owes a major debt to Ian’s diligent crate-digging and revelatory curating. In particular, see the absurdly awesome 1981 boxset.]
In truth, Family Fodder’s head-spinning “Film Music” had unfortunately little musical relationship to the 1980s (or to any other time before or since, really). So it can’t be said to be among the “Best of the 80s” in the sense of being in any way representative of the decade. You could argue that it was somehow a prophetic social satire, a preemptive strike against the dominant cultural themes ascendant later in the decade: vapidity, superficiality, narcissism, greed. But while Family Fodder were certainly a clever bunch who probably had plenty of post-punk-ariffic political and philosophical debates in the manner of Scritti Politti, listening to the music they made, heavy-handed commentary is really the last thing that comes to mind. The band drew on just about every strand of art-music from the previous twenty years or so, from Cage to This Heat, but eschewed imitation of any particular aspect of the past or then-present. They were artists driven from within rather than from without to create, and fueled by an openness to all possibility.
“Film Music” exemplifies the Fodder approach, summed up lyrically in another of their best songs (not accidentally titled “Philosophy”) this way: “when you make music, you play”. Whatever their thoughts on materialism and L’avventura-esque escapism—the songs protagonist sings “it’s empty, it pleases me” in a summery Euro way—the band is primarily interested in playing as most adults forget how, in fun that focuses rather than dissipates the participants’ humanity. It’s a shame then that both in spirit and in sound this isn’t really what we think when we hear the phrase “80s music”—if we’d had more music like this to counteract Reagan and Thatcher, instead of letting “rock” slip into the slumbering cocoon known as “indie rock,” arena pap like U2, or the musical non-entity of hardcore punk, the zeitgeist and the politics of the 80s (and 90s and 2000s) might have been different. The good news is that Family Fodder’s joy is so enveloping and visceral that when listening to this track, it’s easy to believe that this sort of musical adventurousness, humor, and fad-averse timelessness is always waiting just around the corner to be rediscovered and lived anew.
I love this song (and this band) SO MUCH. I mean, obviously. But I do. If you happen to read this tumblr, and you’ve never heard it, please listen.
