It seems bizarre to think this way, but there are a very great few moments when trash culture can have a profound effect and influence on pop culture – even if it's totally impossible to understand why or how it happened. Such was exactly the case with Big Audio Dynamite; somehow in the early Eighties, a ragtag bunch of dispossessed punks and punk supporters ended up making music that would eventually influence not just punk, but Top 40 pop, electronic music of every possible form, alt-rock and more. There's no way such a broad sweeping effect couldn't have been an accident – no one has that kind of forethought – but the results of B.A.D. and the effect their music had on pop is still being measured as, even twenty-five years after the band's debut, the groundwork they laid is still being used by bands that are pulling platinum numbers.
Impressive right? Here's how the stage was set:
Guitarist Mick Jones (who had been fire from The Clash in 1983) was pissed off. His departure from The Clash was less than amicable, and he wanted to get something started musically, but wanted to make sure nothing he did could draw comparisons to his 'old band.' With that goal in mind, the guitarist worked in earnest with DJ and film director Don Letts to create something incomparable to anything anyone had heard before.
It worked. Big Audio Dynamite was a wholly unique entity when its' debut album, This Is Big Audio Dynamite, hit stores in October, 1985.
The eerie thing in listening back to This Is… now is that, twenty-fire years later, it's easy to pinpoint just what exactly Big Audio Dynamite influenced at the height of its' powers because those bands that came up with it wear that mark noticeably on their respective sleeves. Even more surprising is how far the band's influence stretched; Big Audio Dynamite helped to bridge the gap between punk and Hollywood because the slick sounds and rebel without a cause attitude played well in films like Pump Up The Volume and half of John Hughes' movies. There was some punk in Big Audio Dynamite (well, probably about as much as there was in Combat Rock), but also a pastiche of other sounds including some early strains of hip hop, funk, pop and some odd (for the time) found sound clippings and samples that would later become commonplace (both in practice and in content) to electronica and house music. Because of that, while nobody could have possibly known it at the time, Big Audio Dynamite ended up foreshadowing half of the big musical trends that would appear for the next quarter-century without even knowing it.
That influence covers the design and style, but then there are the songs themselves. Unlike similarly bent bands that laughed at the notion of generic constraint like Negativland, Big Audio Dynamite presents itself as an unabashedly pop-inspired creature that also uses technology as both a hook and as a means to present new combinations of sound. Songs like “Medicine Show,” “Sony,” E=MC2” and “Stone Thames” all mix cut-and-paste audio source material (from TV, movies, news broadcasts and more) with the very clean guitar licks and melodies that The Clash dragged into punk with Combat Rock and each bears touchings of electronic (electronic beats, elements of funk and R&B) that totally distract from just how subversive the songs really are; in each lyric sheet, there are mountains of incendiary and topical repartee that listeners will miss that listeners will miss if they're if they're caught by the (for its' time) party-ready bounce of the songs. Lines like “White knight write our wrongs/Lyrics for the protest songs/Number one – top of the charts/Rock n' roll – bleeding hearts” (from “A Party”) sound like Situationist sloganeering at its most obvious and light in print, but sound positively damning in the context; each of the songs plays on that razor's edge between pop nonsense and punk protest but B.A.D. never lets itself fall on either side of the divide. That would let only one side of the band's potential audience in, so they play to both by contrasting the sources instead to get everyone interested.
In the case of the first B.A.D. album (and at least a couple of those that would follow) the band presents a different and rather ironic form of punk that contains both social commentary as well as on punk itself. Here, the band knows that the first wave is gone and the disgusting, atrophied corpse of it was being paraded around under the New Wave banner, but the genius of This Is Big Audio Dynamite was that it played to that banner while simultaneously conceding that the whole thing was a farce. The band's ideas caught on in a dozen different ways, and the aftershocks of it are still felt every time Fall Out Boy (and dozens just like them) scream, “It's not a scene it's a goddamned arms race” as they parade around in their designer clothes, and hip hop acts play against type by ironically lifting some rock instruments; now, as it was when Big Audio Dynamite started, it's all up for grabs and easy use for commentary on the weakness and subjectivity of pop with the added bonus that it's fun to hear.
As if to further drive that point of pop weakness and subjectivity, Disc Two of the This Is Big Audio Dynamite Legacy Edition collects all of the vinyl remixes of the songs from the band's first record. Did they sound good on radio or as something to listen to on any given night before Miami Vice came on TV? Probably, but the remixes (which are reliant on the electronic of the day) haven't survived as well as the album cuts. The thing about B.A.D. (and what the remixes prove by negative example) is that, while the lyrics were solid and the sounds/effects were cool, removing one of those elements from the mix made a given song tediously repetitive and difficult to listen to. A perfect example of that shortcoming lies in the dub version of “Sony” which would serve as a very utilitarian bed for weather or traffic reports on radio, but little else. The other remixes here (many of them from twelve-inch vinyl – oddly) have aged about as well, but what else could listeners really expect? When the root of a band is set in technology, they're going to be forgotten as sounds improve; such is the nature of progress. As bleak as that sounds, the Legacy reissue of This Is Big Audio Dynamite does serve a purpose: on one hand, it shows how much things have changed in the realm of post-modern song creation and assembly, but also how much it hasn't as listeners can point to specific incidences in modern pop where many of these same ideas that were developed by B.A.D. are still used. When you look at it that way, not only does this reissue seem ground-breaking, it holds a valuable lesson, too.
Artist:
Unofficial site: www.esmark.net/bad/bad.htm
Billboard news release about the reformation of Big Audio Dynamite.
Watch:
Big Audio Dynamite EPK
Album:
The Legacy reissue of This Is Big Audio Dynamite is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
