I know this because I listen to a very modern radio station, but when they incongruously play Huey Lewis and The News’ – The Power of Love, I am unaccountably electrified (It’s not a genre I’m usually into) and beset by vivid mental images of Michael J Fox on a skateboard, stealing momentum from passing cars and wearing magnificent dark sunglasses…

I have been justly mocked for my strong childhood feelings about that movie, that music, and that decade, and I find myself at a loss now to cogently defend them, but they remain.

There was some damn fine stuff in the eighties, and I think in another decade we will look back and appreciate the eighties in the same slightly surreal way that the sensibilities of Pulp Fiction’s Jack Rabbit Slims Twist Contest scene idly worships the fifties.

<yellow> Ohhh Yeeeah </yellow>

I have raved here about the marvel that is SkullCandy before. Alas, my Smokin’ Buds finally packed it in the other day due to excessive mechanical abuse, and became suddenly monaural.

I have come to depend on their supernatural powers of noise-removal in my office, since the nature of cubicle-farms leads to a workplace which is never quiet, where there’s always someone talking, often more than one someone.

It is not entirely coincidence that I bought myself a new pair of SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket ear-buds at roughly the same time I bought Nine Inch Nails Ghosts. It is wonderful though.

Ghosts is a lyrics-free album. That should be stated up front for those of you who were hoping that Trent still wants to fsck you like an animal.

It’s also not especially danceable, a trait which much of their previous work is valued for.

I have heard it said that the album is an accoustic one. This is not the case. In fact, there’s so much of NIN’s trademark distortion and static that you can get seriously alarmed if Ghosts is the first thing you listen to on your new earphones.

I’m not going to rave here about the way this album is being distributed, or licensed, except to say that both are rather cool.

As music to fill the silence inside your head while you work, I have yet to find better.

As mechanisms for doing so, the SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket buds are well worth five times the $70 I paid for them: crisp, clean and packing more base than any speaker stack. They also seem, if possible, better than the Smokin’ Buds at obliterating the sounds of my office.

With this in my ears, I can work, no matter how much it all falls apart around me.

Pardon me while I rant and rave, cackle and chortle and foam at the mouth and dance complicated little victory dances to the strains of Thick as a Brick.

And at last, disco/punk fascism is dead! It may have been acceptable in the eighties, but now it’s buried, strangled by its own children, the likes of The Scissor Sisters, to give birth to The New Prog! We can have songs for the brain again! Single tracks can run on for half an hour without shame! Albums can even have a plot if they want to!

Hell, even Trent Reznor can make a story album!

Some of us never stopped believing.

It came as a stunning that’s-so-obvious-how-could-I-have-missed-it flash; randomly Googling while listening to Peter Gabriel: This song was his response to doing psychotherapy.

Suddenly it goes from being faintly obscure to being almost sickeningly blunt. Especially so for the self loathing… or at least that’s how I read the verse:

Don’t talk back
Just drive the car
Shut your mouth
I know what you are
Don’t say nothing
Keep your hands on the wheel
Don’t turn around
This is for real

It rings so true! This is the moment when the insight bites back and you see your worst actions and thoughts highlighted in terms of the kind of motives you most despise. It’s consistent because you despise the things you see in yourself, even if you’re not aware of them. Circular and nasty, and a lot like being trapped in a car with a gunman: This could kill you, and you can’t run away because it’s in your head. It’s you, but it’s a nightmarish, animalistic, vicious stranger.

This whole thing reminds me of one of my great internet wish-list items: a good honest site (i.e. not banner-ad whores or purveyors of unsafe pop-up-riddled crud) which focuses on the analysis of lyrics? The web festers with dodgy/ugly/dangerous servers for music lyrics, all with mixed qualities of transcription, but what about analysis? When Usenet was king, there was a very fine Jethro-Tull newsgroup which tended towards analysing Tull’s exquisitely obscure and suggestive lyrics. Want more! I know the world is positively teeming with people who shine at this kind of thing: fans who know all the secrets and detailed history of their favourite performer. Smarter souls than I have read the words to Looking through a glass onion and seen funny, complex hidden messages amidst the drug-haze. These people deserve their fifteen minutes of fame, and I want to pick their brains! O Web2.0, why hast thou forsaken me?

On a related but completely tangential note, is it just me, or is the entire backing for the end of Secret World ripped off in Oasis’ Fuckin’ in the bushes?