{"id":1162,"date":"2008-01-24T23:07:59","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T04:07:59","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-01-09T11:12:32","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T11:12:32","slug":"where-was-inxs-when-i-needed-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/where-was-inxs-when-i-needed-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Was INXS When I Needed Them?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I heard the following song on the radio for the first time since it came out and was part of a popular album owned by college freshman girls I might have been trying to date. In fact, I&#8217;m certain that I tolerated the playing of this album in my presence a half dozen times for the greater good of enjoying the company of the young woman in whose dorm room I was sitting. The singer&#8217;s voice was good for this kind of stuff, but still&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This <strong>audio-only clip<\/strong> should give you a fair idea of what I heard in the car yesterday. You won&#8217;t be distracted by any annoying &#8217;80s video slo-mo techniques and asymmetric hairdos.<br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HPecGUzs_iw?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>For the good of Rock Town Hall, I made myself listen to this <strong>Yaz<\/strong> song, &#8220;Situation&#8221;, yesterday, with no college freshman riding shotgun. (You&#8217;re welcome.) As the stereo synth tricks settled down and the song got underway, I thought to myself, <strong><em>Where was INXS when I needed them?<\/em><\/strong> Had I entered college a few years later, that college freshman may have been playing me her INXS album instead of Yaz. <\/p>\n<p>Do you see how the structure of this Yaz song is so like the structure of any INXS song? As a songwriting template this is a recipe for <strong>&#8217;80s MIDI-mediocrity<\/strong>, but INXS always had the good sense of satisfying the streak of <strong>Rockism<\/strong> that was already settling deep within me. By putting some <strong>Roxy Music<\/strong>-based rock arrangements into the &#8217;80s equivalent of dimestore garage rock song structure, I could hear this type of boring song without feeling so antsy in that college freshman&#8217;s room, without wanting to drive off the side of the road while listening to the Yaz song just yesterday. Can <strong>RTH Labs<\/strong> develop a program that runs just about all &#8217;80s synth-pop through the <strong>INXS Rockist Cow-Tow Filter<\/strong>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I heard the following song on the radio for the first time since it came out and was part of a popular album owned by college freshman girls I might have been trying to date. In fact, I&#8217;m certain that I tolerated the playing of this album in my presence a half dozen times <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/where-was-inxs-when-i-needed-them\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[126],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}