Wall of Voodoo, "Mexican Radio" (Track of the Week)

Every now and then I have to hand it to TikTok and YouTube because it will promote old songs I like in ways that my kids can appreciate. Just the other day, one of my daughters was singing the chorus to "Mexican Radio" and I was both delighted and puzzled. My daughters usually turn their noses up at my music, but if they encounter it on their own, they dig it. 

"Mexican Radio" was a rarity, a weird underground song that somehow managed to hit the mainstream in the benighted 80s, an era of conformity without an internet safety valve. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke, with the keyboards reminiscent of a ranchera accordion sound and the spliced in dialogue from a Spanish-language broadcast. Since then, I have found the song's deeper meaning.

At base, it's a song about the unknowability of other cultures. Mexico is not far from LA, and you can pick up its radio stations, but they sound like broadcasts from another planet if you don't know Spanish. You are confronted with the uncanny feeling that the world is a big place and that what you know of it is actually pretty small. Anyone who has traveled abroad by themselves knows this sensation. You find yourself in a whole other world where people literally do not speak your language. It's disorienting in the extreme, a "riddle" as the song goes. 

There are a lot of headlines about social studies education being under attack, but I have witnessed a more silent strike in education against learning foreign languages. Schools and universities across the country are closing their language programs, and students seem less interested in learning about them. That's a shame for so many reasons, not least because if language shapes our reality, learning new a language allows you to live in a different reality. The alternative is to be like the song's narrator, intrigued, but unable to comprehend the world next door. 

Classic Music Video of the Week: Flock of Seagulls, "I Ran"

Back in the days of my highest MTV consumption, I always looked forward to holiday weekends, since that often meant a countdown of the top 100 videos of all time.  Since I didn't have access to MTV until the mid-1980s, I had missed out on the New Wave strangeness of the channel's early days, when they would play British haircut bands ad nauseum since they had videos and other rock acts didn't.  (Little known fact: until Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," they really didn't play videos by black artists, which severely limited the pool of quality music available.)

Of all those ancient artifacts, I have always gotten a big kick out of "I Ran (So Far Away)" by Flock of Seagulls, whose lead singer Mike Score sported the kind of epically space-age hairdos that only Limahl of Kajagoogoo could compete with.  I loved, and still love, this video because it looks like they made it for about fifty bucks (or pounds, I guess) but it's more watchable than about 90 percent of the higher budget productions that have followed in its wake.

I try to imagine how the band were briefed about the video beforehand by the director.  I just imagine him saying "Alright lads, we've got a smoke machine, revolving camera, mirrors, tin foil, and two birds wearing plastic bags and barmy make-up.  Let's shoot this bastard!  Don't worry about the camera showing up in the mirror shots, I covered it with the foil, so no one's the wiser."

The New Wave-stlye airy synths and watery guitars enhance the uncanny visual feel of the images; I can't imagine this video working with a hair metal song, for example.  (We'll get to that particular genre later in this series, don't worry!)  Not having enough money to put what you want on the screen forces a certain kind of creativity, something this video and the films of George Lucas since he has had the money and independence to do as he pleases bring home pretty well.