Sigue Sigue Sputnik, "Atari Baby"
Around this time last spring I put Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11” (Apple Music, Spotify) into heavy rotation. “Love Missile” plays briefly at the beginning of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and in that setting I must have heard it every time I’d seen the movie, which is a lot of times. But through all those impressions (forty? fifty?) I never fixed on the backing music to that bedroom scene, and I most certainly never tried to identify it. It was detached and uncatalogued: cultural jetsam1 in my head, much like the few seconds of “Monkey Man” (Apple Music, Spotify) clipped into the party scene at Jake’s house in Sixteen Candles—which I only tagged and filed in 2012 when I bought the Specials’ first album on CD, after falling in love with another of that album’s tracks, “Too Hot” (Apple Music, Spotify), playing over the PA in Newbury Comics one afternoon.
Or for that matter, “Happy Birthday” (Apple Music, Spotify), which features during the opening credits of that movie. If they were me, and I was you rang unaccountably in my head for years before I was able to trace these lines back to Altered Images. And at the end, too, the beautiful new wave ballad that plays when (spoiler alert) Sam and her longtime crush Jake lean in to kiss2—that’s “If You Were Here” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Thompson Twins, a fact unknown to me until we did our Mixtape Diaries episode calling out great songs from movie soundtracks (Apple Podcasts, Spotify). In a million years I wouldn’t have pegged the Thompson Twins as the authors of that song.
Other long-unsolved mysteries included the English Beat’s “March of the Swivel Heads” (Apple Music, Spotify), which Alli sent me on a mix CD in 2002, allowing me to put artist and song title to the backing music for Ferris’s dead sprint home from hookey. Or even—come to think of it—“Oh Yeah” by Yello (Apple Music, Spotify), which Bob put on a mixtape for me years earlier. This was part of a team project we undertook one summer break, whereby four of us pooled all of our CDs together and took turns adding songs to the same blank cassette, each out of earshot of the others. Three of us would sit in a separate “green room” while the other took his turn adding a song to the cassette. When we finished our work and played the resulting mix through together, three of us yelled That’s from the end of Ferris Bueller! when the Yello song came on, and we called upon Bob to tell us who the band was.
All these stories suggest one direction for this post, which is that I could have settled all these open questions way back in the 1980s, if I’d sat through the closing credit rolls for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles. But that’s not where I’m taking this post. I’m here to talk about Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
I most certainly heard the name in the 1980s, but somehow some way I never saw any of their videos, couldn’t name any of their songs, and accordingly had no clue what they looked or sounded like. The brainchild of Tony James, onetime Generation X bassist and co-writer of another song in this Substack (see “Dancing with Myself”), Sigue Sigue Sputnik swung up into public view and quickly splashed down, to be filed away in a drawer with other curiosities of the decade. Along these lines, I didn’t hear of them again until sometime in the ’90s, when I bought a compilation CD with an obscure St. Etienne track on it called “Fake 88” (YouTube). The last two minutes of this song consist of a monologue by guest performer Stephen Duffy—of Duran Duran, before they broke big, alas—naming several dozen cultural touchpoints from the 1980s. Sigue Sigue Sputnik features early in the list:
Nikky Kershaw and Redken, Peter Tatchel and “Dirty” Den. Mark King slapped his bass, and early issues of The Face. Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Margaret Thatcher, Toto Coelo, and Spycatcher …
One day decades later I was loafing around the house, and it occurred to me to search up the band on Apple Music, then Google, just to see who the hell they were. I found and played the aforementioned “Love Missile,” tied it back to Ferris Bueller quickly enough, and short-listed it for a podcast episode (forthcoming).
Sigue Sigue Sputnik is one of probably a hundred possible extrapolations of the punk rock movement, eight to ten years down the line. The mohawks are longer, the leathers are tighter. It’s clear that Tony James was looking backward for inspiration—into the early 1970s, where the New York Dolls and Suicide lived. But a straight copy wouldn’t do, either. The look and sound needed updating, and so we get this exaggerated glam retro-futurism, with raunchy punk guitar and bass play in the grand tradition of Steve Jones and, well, Tony James. We’re the future! the Pistols had threatened years earlier, your future! (Apple Music, Spotify). Well, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were gonna show you just what that future looked like. Cross sleek and stark Blade Runner aesthetics with punk attitude, and you’re likely to get something that looks like this:
Let’s take inventory here. Fishnet balaclava? Check. Catcher’s mask? Check. Gold lamé, stiletto heels, power tie, stainless steel shin guards? Check, check, check, and mate. You may have heard a sample of the main title of A Clockwork Orange at the beginning of this song. More than just borrowed sound, that’s an homage. Timestamp 0:25 of the video shows the band members striding five-across down an alley, backlit, just as Kubrick famously captured Alex and his droogs walking the dark streets of London. Yet Sputnik’s aesthetic provocations manage to be even less subtle, and by a significant degree. The order of the day was shock and awe, by way of phallic imagery and machine gun fire. That’s not to mention the punning chorus that puts sex and drugs front and center: Shoot it up! Shoot it up!
There may actually have been a moment when Sigue Sigue Sputnik could have satisfied that themselves that they were the most dangerous agents in the culture. Problem is, 2 Live Crew would put out their first album a year later, and by the end of the decade black metal bands in Norway were burning centuries-old stave churches and flogging their front men’s skull fragments for merch. So let’s put the brakes on how dangerous they Tony and his mates really were. Even so, and even if forty years down the line the haircuts and posturing look dated and quaint, the Sputnik style overload is a hell of a lot of fun.
A few weeks ago I ordered in a vintage copy of the band’s debut LP, Flaunt It. Giorgio Moroder produced this record—Tony James sought him out because he so admired Moroder’s contributions to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” 12-inch (Apple Music, Spotify). Often a producer does his best work reining in his musicians’ ambitions and curbing their excesses. That didn’t happen here. Moroder and Sputnik were jointly committed to throwing every available sample, found sound, distortion, hiccup, and tape trick into the mix, leaving nothing on the cutting room floor. The extended version of “Love Missile” on my vinyl copy includes dialogue from Scarface, The Terminator, and Blade Runner, along with accelerated synth bursts from the William Tell Overture and the glorious 9th by Ludwig Van, among a hundred other Moroder gimmicks.
Worth noting, too, are the several ad breaks—some band-generated and wholly fictitious, others purchased by actual sponsors, including L’Oreal and i-D magazine—that the band dropped in between the tracks. This was a publicity stunt, but only in part: James had hoped to earn as much as $150K in revenue worldwide, which would allow the band to sell the LP at a discount. Sales fell fall short of expectations, but the deals the band were able to close make Flaunt It an even more idiosyncratic and compelling document. Of course, none of this goes anywhere without good songs, and Sputnik’s songs here range from pretty darn good (“Sex Bomb Boogie” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Rockit Miss USA” (Apple Music, Spotify)) to freaking great (“Massive Retaliation” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Love Missile,” and the title post of this track).
Last Friday I had Flaunt It on the platter all morning. Mondays and Fridays are remote days for our Office, so I was working at home. Later in the afternoon I had to run some errands, and because I wasn’t ready to give it up I searched up Flaunt It on Apple Music, to play in the car. I was driving up by the reservoir when “Atari Baby” (Apple Music, Spotify) came on the radio. The bass line hit me like a ton of bricks: a three-chord progression I’d heard a million times before in another song but couldn’t place. This song is a masterful MacGyver hack of three stolen components: (1) lead vocals and electronics copped shamelessly from Suicide, “Cheree” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Dream Baby Dream” (Apple Music, Spotify), specifically; (2) the Motown backing vocals from “Walk on the Wild Side” (Apple Music, Spotify); and (3) that chord progression I couldn’t identify for the life of me.
I played the song over and over in the car until I got home, then put the needle on the record. There’s nothing more maddening—at least for me—than knowing a tune and not being able to name it. More and more lately I have been unable to retrieve information I thought I had stored in my brain: That other movie this actress was in, That guy who homered in the playoffs two years ago, How that court case came out, and so on.
This is the part of the blog post where Kate surfaces to say I’ve been losing my keys, wallet, and headphones once a week for years. But that, I will submit, is a function of inattention. I never remembered where I’d put these items to begin with. By contrast, until lately, failing to recall important facts I had previously committed to memory was never a thing. When it happens, I usually brute-force my way to answering on my own. I just sit, and think, and think, until I am able to extract the information I’m looking for. I could go to Google in these cases, but it’s important to me not to get help. If I do, I’ve admitted that I’m slipping, cognitively—and I’ve missed an opportunity to shore up the hold.
And for that matter, what if I my phone dies, or I’m in the woods out of range of a cell tower? What will be my recourse, then, if I can’t immediately recall the name of the senior U.S. Senator from Wyoming?
Maybe I’m sweating this stuff too much. It’s possible these memory lapses aren’t any more frequent than they used to be, and I’m just more sensitive about them happening since I’ve turned 50. Kate’s told me that job stress can affect your medium-term memory, so this also could be temporary and unique to this particular moment. (Maybe someday I’ll feel comfortable telling the story of my work life over the past year. If/when that day comes, “Shot by Both Sides” (Apple Music, Spotify) will be the song of record.) If it’s simply the case that I’ve reached my hard drive’s capacity and everything new I need to remember—say, the names of another dozen student complainants—flushes low-priority data from 1994 into long-term storage, then much as I begrudge losing access to those once-essential facts, I can chalk at least some of my forgetting up to efficient information management practices. If it’s all still in my head and I just can’t fire the needed neurons to access it, then that’s another worry altogether.
In any case, over the rest of last Friday afternoon—remember: I was still on the work clock)—I spent a good couple hours assigning at least 30% of my RAM, and sometimes all of it, to the project of identifying the source of the “Atari Baby” bass line. Finally, and uncharacteristically, I gave up. It was driving me insane. And the problem was, I couldn’t put the question to Google. Someone with a musical background might have been able to reverse-engineer the chord progression from the sound, then type the chords into a text search. But that’s not me. My best bet in this desperate moment was to write to Carla, my friend and partner-in-Krautrock who knows more about music than anyone else in my life.
Her message back:
It does sounds like something but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s hard to get past the Suicide-ness of it all. Ha.
Yeah, okay. Thanks for nothing, Carla.
Come close of business, I changed into workout clothes and went downstairs to do some time on the elliptical. Lately I’ve been watching Loudermilk on Netflix, after many people recommended it to me, presumably on the logic that I’m a middle-aged music snob. It’s a terrific show. I was twenty minutes into my workout when my iPad showed me this exchange:
Ho. Ly. Shit. I stepped off the elliptical. I had to take a minute. For three hours I had been tortured by those three chords. Now, unaccountably, improbably—coincidentally?—here was fictional character Tracy Cutter singing them to Loudermilk. And not just singing them, but naming the band (the Who) and misnaming the song (“Teenage Wasteland” and “E major”), so that Sam could insufferably correct him (“Baba O’Riley” (Apple Music, Spotify), “F major”). There it was, served to me on a platter on streaming TV: the answer to the Burning, Unanswerable Question of My Afternoon.
Scientific American says the odds are 50-50 the reality we perceive is in fact a simulated experience generated by other intelligent life. That said, this whole Sigue Sigue Sputnik/ Loudermilk thing has nudged me off the fence. I am decided: whatever the rest of you are going through, I am most definitely not living in a “base reality.” For 50+ years I was bought in: it was good run, Alien Programmers. You packaged it well and nearly had me fooled. But last Friday I stepped out of the desert of my own unawares and banged my chin squarely against the outer rim of your sandbox.
Now I appreciate that in a universe this vast and this complex, improbabilities abound. Someone eventually wins the Powerball: that’s a one in 1 in 292 million chance. In June 1938 Johnny Vander Meer threw consecutive no-hitters. Kate agreed to marry me (see “New York City”). But consider these concatenated variables: (1) the number of recorded songs (hundreds of millions), (2) the number of published television episodes (tens of millions, by my best guess), (3) the number of hours I’ve been alive (roughly 450,000). The odds that a character in one of these television episodes would sing aloud and identify a song to me, within three hours of me making that song’s bass line the preoccupation of my afternoon—they’re more than astronomical.
In the week since my eyes were opened to this glitch in the Simulation, I’ve told my story to multiple people, all of whom have responded with shrugs and eye rolls. To be sure, there are factors at work here that make Loudermilk and Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s convergence on “Baba O’Riley” less improbable than my earlier writeup would suggest. It’s not hypercoincidental that an ’80s band and the writers of a rock-themed TV show would be attracted to and use that song’s all-time great chord structure. What blows my mind is that I experienced the convergence on a single afternoon, with Sputnik asking a maddening question and Loudermilk answering it. It was just too perfectly presented to suggest anything other than a pre-scripted narrative, and I’m quite surprised that no one I’ve told to date has been especially impressed.
Unless those non-reactions are part of the coding underlying and protecting the the integrity of the Simulation … ? Ah, I get it now. These higher intelligences are tricky devils.
Earlier today I looked up the definitions of flotsam and jetsam. Turns out flotsam refers to pieces of the wrecked ship, and jetsam is what spills out of its hold. It was a close question, but I think jetsam is the right answer here.
All of us ’80s teens agreed it was super-romantic that Sam and Jake were sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the kitchen table on either side of Samantha’s cake. Today’s stiff-limbed quinquagenarian wonders how they navigated the complicated logistics of actually climbing on the table and getting into these positions, somehow without getting frosting all over their pant legs.