no one talk to me im manifesting a beautiful world wher eim playing with that old mans hair

Go take a look at this beautiful trove of old SparkSound magazines someone is selling on eBay. For the price they might as well be made out of gold, but the seller's been nice enough to take big, largely readable photos of so many of the issues. Is there a similar digital hoard of scanned versions? I'd love to see more! (I've seen photo pages in full but only snippets of the rest.) The absolute like... raw, sloppy, fanzine chaos of these as as official publications from a major label band is blowing my fucking mind, even if it is just for the fan club. It's literally their mom cutting and pasting and cramming mentions from both Melody Maker and TV Guide onto an A3 sheet of paper, layouts be damned. The apostrophe on her typewriter is broken for a couple issues but she carries on with an asterisk. She's also around 60 by this point and banging this out to an audience of hundreds or thousands like it's a local Kiwanis club newsletter. But she's doing it with gusto, by gum, and it's punk as hell. The best thing about it is that the lack of style is made up for by the absolute top-tier access to the band, and her being surprisingly on top of pertinent details.

For those of you who weren't in a fandom before the internet, those behind-the-scenes photos were like your favorite band's proof of life. There was no Instagram or Twitter, or anything that proved they existed between national TV appearances and touring in your area (besides those mentions in Melody Maker anyway). If you were lucky, your fandom had the capacity to trade videotapes and people in Scranton could see local TV appearances in Los Angeles and vice-versa. If you were really lucky they weren't all copies of copies with potato quality sound and video. Likewise, if you wanted the 12" extended European dance mix of a song with a B-side unavailable in the US, you had to either special order it somewhere and pay through the nose, hope it was in the imports section of a record store (and still pay through the nose), or you had to trade cassettes or burned CDs and hope the other person didn't flake on you. The fact that she's saying "Don't go running to the import section yet, the single will be out on ____ record label on this date with this track listing" is WAY more info than we usually got from our official sources. All "Mary Martin" needed to do for exclusive content was take pictures of her sons on vacation. On one page she's absolutely dunking on Russell them in wry cut-and-paste captions and on another she is the perfect hype man, telling people shows at The Greek Theater are gonna sell out so get your tickets early (but hold your horses on travelling- they're working on Japanese dates for September so you may not need to fly to the US). The personal thank-yous! The CARE! *slams fist on table* If any other band had their mom as the head of their fan club it'd be the most contrived shit in the universe, a complete lie, or both. I fucking love these guys.

I'm feeling so targeted right now.

Or at least a "play the album, take a break, do a few requests" date at the Orpheum. (They might be too big for the Ace Hotel Theater now...) ✨🕯️✨🕯️✨🕯️

Happy 50th birthday Edgar Wright!

I love Ron's pose in these!

Poor Ron is one of two people in that room over 5'8" so he's gotta get into squat stance. 😂

Happy 50th birthday Edgar Wright!

I love Ron's pose in these!

I dropped this in Discord a while ago, but it bears repeating. (I know he's not Bobo or Meredith, but dammit he helped lay an important foundation.)

much to be said indeed

Adhd will have you too burnt out to eat or shower but give you the hubris to decide you can homebrew an entire d&d system on the back of a receipt

Shipping fictional characters isn’t representative of your moral values. It’s representative of your particular psychic damage and the themes and motifs that haunt you. Hope this helps.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I can only scream inside my heart.

You don't need a filtering bottle- at least like 90% of water fountains also have filtered/upright bottled water stations. (I'm a person very attached to my Britta- the water from these tastes fine, and is usually cold/er.) Plus there's a law in California that restaurants must give you water for free if asked for it. Feel free to DM me if you want any more tips! I'm somewhat local and I tend to go to DLand about once a year.

preparing for one (1) day at disneyland in september as if its a month long journey into the wilderness

Short Answer: Because you either break up in the mid-to-early 90s and go down in history as a successful "quirky new wave band" or you keep on going with ever-changing genres until you're a "IDK, AOR/AAA pop?" cult band (before a director of some merit comes and gives you a third fifth? wind).

(Aside: Did any station outside of LA play more than three Boingo songs? Like, they're LA Legends but my BFF from Louisiana knew "Weird Science" and "Dead Man's Party" and that was it until she moved here- and even then it was primarily seasonal/Halloween play.)

Long Answer/Perhaps An Infodump That You Did Not Require: American commercial radio, especially in large markets is/was broken down fairly hard into genres. These stations largely exist to 1) sell ads, and 2) promote current songs by current artists with new albums. Their playlists are often tightly limited, and they don't tend to play "deep cuts" (songs that aren't singles, basically). English language radio in Los Angeles has/had only one long-lasting "alternative rock" station, KROQ, that Sparks fit into well during their peak New Wave period. They weren't guitar-driven enough for Classic/Hard rock station KLOS, and too weird for Top 40 stations like KIIS FM. It might also be partially due to just how fucking prolific Sparks are/were. At their American peak from '81-'86 they released five albums in six years, which —for two guys in their mid-to-late-thirties who were not/never have been into the Columbian marching powder— is nuts. (At their most prolific, Talking Heads' median age was 26 and they put out their first 4 albums in four years. In 1983, Sparks' median age was 36.5 and they put out albums number 10 through 15 in six years. Like I said- nuts.) Most major labels squeeze three singles out of an album. AIMP only got one single, "I Predict", despite putting "...Monster of Love" out very quietly and only in the US. Basically, in the time it would take to stretch out one album's three singles, Sparks had already made another album. And another, and another. So by the time Sparks came back from hiatus with Gratuitous Sax, it was 1994 and there wasn't much room on KROQ for this electronic Oontz-Oontz Music in-between Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Sublime, etc. And the stations that DID play Oontz-Oontz Music were like "Dafuq is this? 'Let's Go Surfing'? I'm not playing this." (Or, in the case of stations like KROQ, stuck all their Oontz-Oontz Music into a 2-hour block on Friday nights or whatever. So things off Gratuitous Sax would likely have to fight with "harder" electronic bands like Prodigy, Orbital, Chemical Brothers, et al.) Or it went over well in Milwaukee or whatever, but it's Milwaukee so who fucking cares?

Also because they were not signed to a major American label for Gratuitous Sax (and because Payola never died, it just turned into "gifts" like X-Boxes and premium tequila) they couldn't elbow for promotional airplay like major labels can/could. Now imagine that same scenario playing in markets across the country —New York, Chicago, et al—  where they WEREN'T lauded as 'our hometown boys' and given increased airplay because of it.

As Sparks went on and kept defying genre/became even harder to promote with radio play, Devo, Boingo, Talking Heads, et al, had broken up and got frozen in time as 'New Wave' bands that fit perfectly within the confines of a commercial radio playlist. They could be played during an "All 80s Weekend" or popped back into rotation during a lull between releases by top alternative bands. And they were more popular/sold better than Sparks the first time around, so they were go-to hits that kept people from tuning away during ads.

(This isn't even getting into Napster and iTunes and algorithms and streaming and all the other stuff that turned terrestrial radio upside down.)

Gratuitous Infodump: Meanwhile, Sparks was able to thrive in Europe —and on music-heavy National Public Radio stations like KCRW— because of the public broadcasting model. Because that business model comes largely from individual contributions and public financing, they were/are free to play a wider variety of music without trying to sell highly targeted ads to Suburban Males from 18-25 or whatever. So they could play deep cuts, or songs from either/both Kimono and Sparks' new album because they had the freedom to do so in a way that most commercial terrestrial radio DJs (save Jim Ladd, Rodney Bingenheimer, and Steve Jones) couldn't.

Commercially and otherwise, Sparks are literally too weird to live and too rare to die.

TheMoreYouKnow.gif

I don't understand how people keep referencing "quirky new wave music" (oingo boingo, devo, talking heads etc) without mentioning Sparks?? Is it too synth?? Look me in the eye and tell me Kimono My House isn't an absolute vibe

This is probably some kinda fruity meme thing that I'm not using right because I'm old, buuuuuuut...

I saw this and this was the first duo that came to mind.

Found on Pinterest

And literally everyone but Catherine looks. Poor Ron. :(

Sparks & Les Rita Mitsouko - Interview (x)

(Ron questions if his fly is open, inspection ensues)

I am consuming a media and you are going to hear about it