Adamski - Born to Be Alive
I never really go for the “techno” anymore. There are strains of it that I still listen to - Chemical Brothers, Joey Beltram, Plastikman, Aphex Twin… Maybe Beumont Hannant. And it’s so easy to disparage it, isn’t it? But there was a time that I actually went out to oontz oontz techno clubs. Hell, I even worked at one in Boston, helped organize raves, brought the first rave to Alaska, ha ha. That was funny. I broke into a warehouse, and I made flyers, rented a giant soundsystem from a pro sound place and had like 1,000 people there. This is the most amazing part: the cops came. I came out, and had made a rental invoice on my Mac LC with my inkjet printer. The cops looked at the invoice, and were like “okay, cool.” Hopped in their cars and went away. It still amazes me. First off, it was totally not a building certified for occupancy. Secondly, half the crowd was obviously under 18 and there was no doubt there was some booze and drugs there somewhere (though actually, I didn’t see any). I had no event permit, and this was the era before cell phones so they couldn’t really just call the owner of the warehouse - and I actually had no idea who the owner was. I just made up a company name on my fraudulent warehouse. It boggles my mind that I was no naive as to think it would work, and boggles my mind doubly so that it actually did.
So, I had a pretty all-consuming musical interest. I understood the pros of electronic music, but generally hated it had no melodies, no lyrics, no chorus and verse structure. So this Adamski track was actually sort of a precursor to what came later - electronica meets celebrity vocals, the “hit song’ on an otherwise fairly housey album. The UK was always better about this - there was a spectrum of dance music from Madchester to the dancey shuffle of My Bloody Valentine and Ride to the sorta electronica-cum-pop stuff to straight up dance. The US didn’t really have that. You couldn’t go to a club and dance to DHS and then the Mondays and then New Order. The nights got really balkanized here, which was really sad.
So this was one of the reason I liked this dumb little song. I still listen to it sometimes, and I sorta like it’s perkiness. I like Soho’s voice, and if the alternative is Hippiechick, I’ll take this every time. I’ve been trying to think for a while about what it is I like about this song - which is sorta why I haven’t written about a song in a while. But I guess I just came to terms with the fact that I just like it, no reason at all.
