Wow. This one.In 1981 I was still young enough to enjoy pure plastic pop songs and delve into the unnerving shadows of the post punk world and feel no contradiction. Those who did see a contradiction soon outed themselves as giving more importance to nailing their readings of politics on to what ever must hear track that appeared under the radar. They were not interested in music. This was provable by seeing how loudly they championed Redgum, Midnight Oil and other heroes of sloganeering clunk. I did like the music. Primarily. So, while I heard a difference between Mark Stewart and The Romantics they were and are residents of the same continuum. But this .....?
I saw the video before I heard it just as a song. It wasn't played on any radio station I listened to. The only way was to buy it which is what I did. I didn't buy it because it put its many hooks in me and dragged me to it. I bought it because it disturbed me and I needed to get intimately acquainted with it so I could destroy it.
Why?
Because even though I know that pop thrives on derivation from the underground and obscurity, absorbing what was once anger or compulsion and sausaging it back out as hyped up pulp this seemed too much.
We begin with a konkonkonkonkonk bass synthesier under which play strange dissonant synth brass chords. So far it could be The Human League of Reproduction but then the vocals start.
A dry young female voice, unsure of itself, sounding like it's just come home from school talking about looking at cars through a dirty old window (there's your opening synths, then, not twelve tone daring but fake car horns) suddenly the synth bass is taken over by a bass guitar, picked, articulate and thick like seven hundred punk songs from the few years before this. The rhythmic synth is now a chichichichichichi whisper in the same thuddathudda pattern as the bass.
Second verse and she's looking at all the Friday night fun but she's looking for the beat. But before she can mumble the last word, a gang of her clones as backing singers interrupt her all the way to the first chorus: We're the kids in America - whoa-oh, We're the kids in America - whoa-oh. The real words are sung female the Billy Joel/Cars whoa-ohs laddishly male. Final line of the chorus feels unrelieved or would if we weren't suddenly rushed into the third verse.
The synth is now a beepy Kraftwerk ostinato nagging like radio waves lost in the great beat of night while Kim gets tough with the boy she's just picked up. The opening synth bass is back and almost indistinguishable from the bass guitar. When the chorus bursts in this time it is relieved by a big male voiced la-la-la-la straight out of a Blondie hit with a growing keyboard swirl rising like a tide beneath it.
Last verse and the night is turning back into day as she rides the control on her pickup and thinks about the suburbia sprawling and then the final verse line warns the world about the new wave coming. Last chorus bigger than all the others before the coda.
A needlepitch synth draws a three-point figure that ends in a supertonic ready to scream the tonic of the closing chord progression which charges at warp speed with french horn sounding synths playing a big ominous four-note blast the like of which would characterise action cinema in the decade to come.
"We're the kids! We're the kids! We're the kids in Ahmerikah!" sing the backing vocal lads sounding as London as a pub full of soccer thugs. On so on to the fade which bears the power of the tidal swirl seeming even bigger in the distance than it was up close.
And guess what: not a single guitar chord until a few buried in the swell during the fade. It's all been keyboards, drum machines and a very prominent bass.
You know, I've just read that description and thought: I'd like that record. But I didn't and I don't.
The video was all jaded glamour as Kim walked through a very stylised set (a kind of Caligari krazy angle in 80s blue and pink) looking like she'd just got out of bed and hadn't even put the jug on yet. A gaggle of the non-Debbie Harry members of Blondie variously lounged, stood in new wave android poses or mimed playing the song (including a guitarist chugging through the non-existant powerchords on a Les Paul). As I said, that was the first way I heard the song as it wasn't played on 4ZZZ, 4MBS or 4EB. I bought the single because I could scarcely believe how it had been put together.
This was new wave for twelve year olds and at eighteen I was far too old to think of it as anything but market fodder. But the sheer cynicism of it, the wholly bloody gouging rapacity that took everything it could fit into three minutes from everything it had listened to for less time. I seldom care about lyrics but I seriously wonder if different words might have softened me to this and just lived with it as mainstream absorption. But even more than the almost sampled moments from electro, krautrock and punk it was the keys like suburbia, new wave, search for the beat, and the big yobbo choir with its whoa-ohs and lalalalaaahs and even the title. What was specifically American about this song? Hadn't references to America died out of UK pop music with the career of Alvin Stardust? Hadn't it become all tubestationatmidnight and gunsofBrixton and Hammersmiff Odeon? Well there was something to it and that's where it gets a little creepy.
Regardless of the historical revisionism that suggests punk was American and just exported to the UK by entrepreneurs like Malcolm McClaren etc when American bands started emulating the harder edge of British punk and post punk you started getting bands like The Cars who would have been a fine pop band if it weren't for the cool-nerd gear or The Knack who delivered a fine neanderthal rock song against a burntout background while wearing white shirts and thin ties and ex-mullet dos. There was an emerging scene of real interest developing in America but these folks weren't part of it. They joined Billy Joel who himself tried to affect a new wave look for a risible few minutes (I know, the previous year I used to drive around Brisbane with one my scene's hangers on who used to play that fucking album at industrial experiment levels every time I got in). Kids In America was designed from the ground up for that Walmart version of the subculture. It was saying: don't worry about going to all those seedy gigs or listening to that nasty student radio station, just take one of these five times a day and we'll get you through.
And this is by Brits who knew what they were doing. Kim's father wrote it with her brother who produced it. Wilde Primus had moved from his professional genesis as an early rock shouter into the maniplulator's paradise of A&R and his son Ricky moved into production. You could be forgiven for thinking that Kim had been conceived in that test tube entirely for this purpose.
I recently posted to a Facebook thread about this song. I hadn't thought of it for a very long time and I was more verbose than I should've been, considering the context. Which is why I started this blog. Here's what I wrote:
" I actually bought a copy of the Kids in America 45 as it fascinated me: it was manufactured to the point of high cynicism, taking the dudududuh bass from punk and backing vox from recent Blonide hits, the synth beeps from a rising tide of guitarless pop, the jaded glamour look of the video etc I listened to it a lot, clocking every trick from the pop song manual but could never actually get into it, however flavoursome it was with all of its hooks. I liked a lot of rubbish at that time along with anything else that might have been cooler but something stopped me from liking this. Even if I hear it now it's with curiosity rather than nostalgia."
And because no one gets away in this day and age when this tune is mentioned without the video, here that is, too:
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