volume 3
november 2000

The erotic and destructive in 1980s rock music

Index of the journal Tracking

A theoretical and historical analysis

Winter, 1988

by William Graebner

State University of New York

Duran Duran's song "Hungry Like The Wolf" (1982) explores the theme of lycanthropy, a form of bestiality which itself is an expression of the broader theme of eroticism in the sense of broaching the possibility of unusual, tabooed, or "perverse" sexual activities. To analyze interests like these, William Graebner argues, we need a theory that might clarify and explain rock music's significance on a cultural level.

1

"Eroticism" and nuclear destruction. Since the mid-1960s, when the role of music in the political struggles of that decade became too obvious to ignore, a serious literature has emerged around rock and roll culture. Critics, and finally scholars, examined rock's origins in the "race" music of the 1940s; analyzed rock music as the music of folk culture, counterculture, subculture, and class culture; and waxed eloquent over the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and a few other groups or performers whose lyrics were believed to rise to the level of poetry. [1] Yet with the exception of the English sociologists and a precious few American writers, scholars have not been inclined to use theory to explore rock music and rock culture. Moreover, the theory that has been utilized — by Dick Hebdige (1979), Carl Belz (1972), Simon Frith (1981), and Paul Willis (1978), for example — has been social theory, applied to explain rock music's relationship to social class, subculture, society, and other organizational constructs. Rock music remains untouched by the kind of cultural theory that might clarify and explain its significance and thus elevate its lyric content from social commentary to social criticism.

What follows is a modest effort to demonstrate how each theory might be applied in order to tease significance — or rather, a different, less obvious significance — from the lyrics and tone of rock music. For this purpose, I have chosen two themes that appear with some frequency in the rock music of the early 1980s — "eroticism" and nuclear destruction. And I have used theory and, to a lesser extent, history, to demonstrate how these ostensibly separate themes might be integrated into one coherent vision of modern man's search for the sanctuary of oblivion.

2

Themes. For two years in the early 1980s, Duran Duran peppered the top ten with a series of hits. The group's first successful recording had the catchy title, "Hungry Like The Wolf" (1982), and lyrics that described a curious sort of courtship:

Touchin' the ground
I'm on the hunt I'm after you
Smell like I sound
I'm lost in a cloud
And I'm hungry like the wolf.

The wolf also appears in "Rock You Like A Hurricane" (1984) by the Scorpions, a popular but less mainstream band than Duran Duran:

The night is calling
I have to go
The wolf is hungry
He runs to show
He's licking his lips
He's ready to win
On the hunt tonight
For love at first sting.

The word for this transmogrification of man into wolf is "lycanthropy". It has at least two derivations or uses. In psychology, it denotes, according to Robert Eisler's Man Into Wolf, "a particular form of raving madness manifesting itself in the patient's belief that he is a wolf, with lupine teeth, refusing to eat anything but raw, bloody meat, emitting bestial shows and indulging in unrestrained sexual attacks on any victim he can overpower" (Eisler, 1951: 34). [2] In history, lycanthropy refers to ancient Indo-European tribes — with names such as Lucanians, meaning "wolfmen" — who forsook pacific fruit-gathering to become roving packs of carnivores Eisler (1951: 27-28, 33-34). Whether one emphasizes its tribal origins or psychological manifestations, lycanthropy is an aggressive form of behavior. Because the theme appears so infrequently in rock music, one might be tempted to write off the two examples above as aberrations. [3] Instead, lycanthropy should be interpreted as a subset of a much larger thematic unit, for which rock music provides more ample documentation.

Lycanthropy is only one expression of man-becomes-animal, or bestiality. On the simplest level, bestiality involves no more than using animal and jungle metaphors to describe human sexuality. This could be accomplished innocently enough, as Fabian demonstrated in his 1957 hit "Tiger" — "I'm your tiger and you're my mate / hurry up buttercup, don't be late." In the 1980s, Jackson Browne — also no lecher — seems to revel in such imagery, referring in one song to "the mating calls of lawyers in love," and in another to "the hunters ... chasin' down the love they need." A recent example of bestiality is "The Warrior" (1984) by Patti Smyth and Scandal.

In short, the rock of the early and mid-1980s was "erotic." Not erotic in the sense of sexy or provocative — although much of it is clearly that — but erotic in the sense of broaching the possibility of unusual, tabooed, or "perverse" sexual activity. Bestiality — including lycanthropy — is one part of a trilogy of expressions or forms of eroticism. The others are sadism and masochism.

Again, one need not leave the rock and roll mainstream to demonstrate rock's interest in the perverse. "Hurts So Good" (1982) a suggestively titled song recorded by John Cougar Mellencamp, features the singer beseeching his reluctant girlfriend to "sink your teeth right through my bones." Canadian Bryan Adams first made his mark on rock music in 1982 with "Cuts Like A Knife", one of many early 1980s songs to take up the theme of the broken relationship. Although the song presents the protagonist's grief over the termination of a relationship that he took "for granted," it also expresses a strange pleasure at the same turn of events: "Now it cuts like a knife / But it feels so right."

Finally, England's Eurythmics nicely captured rock's eroticism in a lush, minor chord melody called "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" (1983). The singer had discovered the sadomasochistic content of those dreams:

Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused.

Expressions of pure, hard-core sadism are less likely to be heard on top-40 radio, but the bands that specialize in this brand of ethics — bands with names like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Van Halen, and Motley Crue — would not be considered underground, either. Their records sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and a live performance can be sampled at the local auditorium for the price of a ticket. Much of this music is explicitly and resolutely anti- female. "Live Wire" (1982), a Motley Crue anthem, is typical:

I'll either break her face
Or take down her legs
Get my ways at will
Go for the throat
Goin' in for the kill
Take my fist to break down walls
I'm on the top tonight, no, no.

In this and other heavy metal songs, sex becomes virtually indistinguishable from rape. "Metal Health" (1983) by Quiet Riot, contains the line "Join the pack / fill the crack."

3

Theories. Why, then, this infatuation with the erotic? The blatant, hostile sexism of the last two examples suggests an explanation rooted in the conservative, anti-feminist revolt of the 1980s. Although feminism remains a vital force for political and social change, the movement has been working against the tide of history since the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. The rape and violence fantasies of Motley Crue and Quiet Riot might be interpreted, then, as assertions — or reassertions — of traditional male dominance. These feelings of dominance have been voiced most clearly in the 1980s not because they are unique to the age, but because they are now sanctioned and approved by an anti-feminist 'Zeitgeist' that was not historically important a decade ago.

This explanation also links eroticism to social class. Just as the anti- feminist and anti-abortion forces tend to be concentrated in the working class, so eroticism is most apparent and most explicit in the rock genres most strongly identified with the working class. Heavy metal, for example, emerged in the late 1960s as the musical equivalent of Richard Nixon's "silent majority" — the white, ethnic, working-class revolt against the civil rights movement, the welfare state, the anti-war movement, and middle-class hippie culture (Carroll, 1982, chapter 4). As the "majority" became moral rather than silent, heavy metal became correspondingly more aggressive in its presentation of the erotic.

Another possibility is that the erotic content of rock music reflected actual changes in the content of adolescent and young adult sexuality. Since the emergence of genital herpes as a serious medical problem in the late 1970s, sex has become an arena of profound anxiety and great emotional violence. Rock bands do not, to my knowledge, sing explicitly of the dread possibilities posed by herpes and later, by AIDS. But at least one song, by a group called Men Without Hats, raised the issue implicitly. The song was titled "The Safety Dance" (1983), and it employed the classic rock and roll metaphor for sex, "dance." From an assertive beginning — "We can dance if we want to" — the song dissolves into the haunting and ironic refrain, "safe to (safety) dance." A very different, but by no means exclusive, interpretation of the "perversions" may be gleaned from the theory of Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse.

Freud believed that primitive, animal man became "civilized" man through the repression of his instincts; civilization as we know it — progress, the production of goods, law and order — depended upon the renunciation of pleasure and the subordination of instinctual happiness to the discipline of work and the ethic of production. Marcuse, like Freud, believed that repression existed, but he did not accept Freud's assumption that this repression was essential to civilization. In fact, abundance had made possible a new kind of politics, in which sexual repression had no place. In this new politics — this new struggle against the unfair domination of capitalism — man would have to assert, rather than deny, his organic and biological needs, "to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor." "Today," wrote Marcuse in a 1966 preface to Eros and Civilization, "the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight" (Marcuse, 1966: 3-5, 12, 15, 36, 93). [4]

Marcuse, then, might have interpreted rock's recent focus on perversions as the cutting edge of a revolt, a revolt erotic in content but ultimately political in inspiration, aimed at the capitalist apparatus that was the major beneficiary of sexual repression. If this sounds far-fetched and seems to grant too much artifice to a simple medium, this interpretation also finds some support within rock music. Consider, for example, the music of John Cougar Mellencamp. Taken as a body of work, Mellencamp's music at once celebrates the perversions — it "hurts so good" — while disparaging the "pink houses" that stands as a symbol of utilitarian capitalism — "Pink Houses" (1984). Just as revealing is a recent album by the heavy metal group Quiet Riot. The title — "Metal (not mental) Health" — is important, because, like Marcuse, it stands the Freudian argument on its head. While Freud (1947: 259)defined mental illness as a regression to "earlier conditions of affective life and functioning" — to the sexual perversions, for example, Quiet Riot insists that the road to mental health is paved with "metal" — that is, with lust, sexual domination, and eroticism.

The same message of liberation through the senses, conjugated for the middle class and somewhat reduced in intensity and directness for the pop music market, may be observed in Re-Flex's 1983 recording "The Politics Of Dancing" — "The politics of, ooh, feeling good / The politics of moving / Is this message understood." Marcuse might have been more willing to claim "99 Red Balloons" (1983) by the German singer Nena. In this song, the release of red balloons over the Berlin Wall signals the beginning of a 99-year nuclear war. With good reason, the song was seen as an artifact of the powerful German anti-nuclear movement. Yet when a reporter described it as a "protest song," Nena was curiously defensive. "We don't do protest songs," she replied. "We don't go through the world with our eyes closed; we know what's going on, but we want to have some fun, too" (Loder, 1984: 41). In fact, Nena's remark captures the essence of "99 Red Balloons", a rather upbeat tune that somehow manages to package Armageddon and good times. Perhaps without intent, the song made the point that the bomb functioned as a form of domination as well as an actual threat to life — Marcuse (1964: ix) had, in fact, said exactly that — and asserted its own antidote — fun — against that domination. This is Marcuse in action.

Before we rush to applaud our teenagers' interest in the erotic as a sign of healthy social reformism, it might be useful to probe more deeply at the relationship between rock's eroticism and the profound — and contemporaneous — anxiety about nuclear destruction. For this purpose, the most useful theoretics is that of French neo-Freudian George Bataille. Writing in Death and Sensuality (1962), Bataille, like Freud, begins with the assumption that the repression of eroticism is essential to an orderly, rational, individualistic, work-oriented, capitalist world. In such a world, according to Bataille, people necessarily experience a high level of "discontinuity" — a word that means, quite simply, separation from other human beings, or what Durkheim labeled "anomie". One expression of this discontinuity is traditional, calculated, sex-for-reproduction (Bataille, 1977: 171, 11-14). Lurking beneath the surface of this culture of calculation and control is an obsessive desire to shed the status of alienation and achieve what Bataille labels a "primal continuity." Something within us resents the discontinuity of our lives. We resent the high individualism that keeps us apart from other human beings. We resent the deferring of gratification and all the other sacrifices of pleasure necessary — or presumably necessary — for civilized life.

"Our only real pleasure," writes Bataille (1977: 15, 170-171), "is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can ... we want a world turned upside down and inside out." We yield to these profound desires — and here is where rock comes in — by first yielding to eroticism. For it is only in eroticism — in sadism, masochism, bestiality, incest, and the other "perversions" — that we can begin to feel those primal impulses that link us to other human beings (Bataille, 1977: 171). To this point, Bataille's argument carries a message not unlike Marcuse's in its emphasis on sensual liberation. But for Bataille the consequences of this venture into eroticism, no matter how essential, are different and more destructive than they are for Marcuse. In yielding to eroticism, we cease to be "human" and become veritable beasts, "wallowing in blindness and oblivion." Reduced to this savage state, we move rapidly from the violence of eroticism to death itself. "Eroticism," writes Bataille (1977: 105, 24), "opens the way to death. Death opens the way to denial of our individual lives."

If Bataille's theory is flawed or simply wrong, we can repair to some less threatening interpretive framework. But if the vision is a valid one, we may have to come to grips with rock's eroticism as an eerie, subliminal opening to death, latent with the possibility of suicide on the one hand, nuclear holocaust on the other. Unfortunately, the content of rock music does not take us much further than the theory, though it does offer some intriguing bits of confirmation. The same artists who deal in eroticism also trade in the imagery of death and destruction. John Cougar Mellencamp described some sort of sexual fulfillment in a phrase — "the walls come tumblin' down" (from "Crumblin' Down", 1983) — biblical in inspiration and apocalyptic in tone. Similarly, Eurythmics' "Love Is A Stranger" (1983) presents love as a "savage" obsession that "shines like destruction / Comes in like the flood / And it seems like religion." Quiet Riot's "Cum On Feel the Noize" (1984) also linked sexuality and death. But it did so less through the lyric — "Cum on feel the noize / girls rock your boys / And it's wild wild wild" — than through a furious and, I think, apocalyptic tone that permeates the performance.

Blue Oyster Cult's "Take Me Away" (1984) — predictably, a step removed from pop in the genre of heavy metal — subsumes sex and death in the same image:

A thousand stars your eyes can see
First one we see tonight
I wish I may I wish I might
I turn my hopes up to the sky
I'd like to know before I die
Memories will slowly fade
I lift my eyes and say
Come on take me away
Come on take me away.

Although this particular song makes no explicit reference to the erotic, its final lines bring to mind psychologist Theodore Reich's description of masochism as an open-ended "circuit of sexual excitement," culminating in martyrdom and death. In the last stages of the circuit, wrote Reich in Masochism and Modern Man (1941: 415-416), the "hastily preceding and proceeding fantasy has burst the door into eternity. The eye sees heaven's gates opened while growing dim. The instinctual aim is attained, and pleasure is enjoyed." The same images — eternity, heaven, the visual dimming — are present in both the lyric and Reichian theory. For a final example, consider the Police, a band with an affinity for masochism — "King Of Pain" (1983) — and an album, Synchronicity, that deserves treatment in light of Bataille's theory. Synchronicity, it seems, is a term from Jungian psychology. Jung used it as a point of contrast to the prevalent "scientific" view of the world that broke everything down into individual processes, each isolated from all other processes. Because synchronicity postulated "the unitary aspect of being," [5] it may be appropriate to see the Police engaged in the early stages of a search for continuity.

4

Sorting it out. What, then, can we make of rock eroticism? Is it no more than a signifier for a temporary dislocation in sexual relations caused by the herpes virus? Does it represent the revolt of the working-class male against the women's liberation movement? Should we interpret rock's penchant for the sexually perverse in Marcusian terms, as a victory in the struggle against the sexual repression of capitalism, or as an affirmation of Bataille's fear that our primal wish for unity with mankind will carry us into the arms of death?

I am not so headstrong as to assume that an historian can resolve or even responsibly arbitrate the disputes of psychology. Nonetheless, a sorting out is in order, and some of it can be accomplished through the historical method.

History tells us that both heavy metal and "punk" rock — a more radical genre that shares an erotic content with heavy metal — predate the sexual crisis, the former by more than a decade, the latter by several years. Although herpes and AIDS may explain the intensity of today's sexual anxiety, they cannot offer a complete explanation for eroticism.

Moreover, while the eroticism of rock music is fundamentally an adolescent expression, the erotic and perverse have been very much adult concerns. 1984 was a year in which television audiences were confronted with one taboo after another. "The Day After", a dramatic documentary about nuclear catastrophe, examined the taboo of death. Another, called "Something About Amelia", was about incest. And a third, "The Burning Bed", concerned wife-beating. In each case, viewers were instructed to evaluate the programs as exposes of important but seldom-treated social problems. Yet each also had an erotic component. It was hard not to notice that "The Burning Bed" starred former pin-up girl Farrah Fawcett. "Something About Amelia" was inherently erotic. And "The Day After", by emphasizing the powerful human relationships that could find root in a society devastated by the bomb, offered a vivid illustration of Bataille's argument of continuity through death.

Television's recent interest in erotica provides additional evidence that we are dealing with a phenomenon of interest to a much broader spectrum of society than the working class. It may be that the desire for a return to traditional sex roles — a desire, I have argued above, expressed in the hostile anti-female lyrics of heavy metal rock — has also seeped into the middle class.

Alternatively, rock eroticism may reflect cross-cultural attitudes toward issues largely, if not entirely, unrelated to sexuality and gender. One such possibility, outline by Marcuse, would put rock eroticism in the vanguard of an early-1980s progressive revolution. As absurd as this seems in an era dominated by the economics of Jack Kemp, the morality of Jerry Falwell, and the politics of Ronald Reagan, this option might be reformulated into a more sensible configuration, in which the erotic interest of the 1980s would stand as vestigial testimony to the lingering power of the sexual and cultural revolution of the 1960s. From this perspective, Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" and the Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane" are the descendants of "Hair" and "Oh Calcutta." Bataille's theoretics also understand eroticism as a means to an end — a quite literal end, as we have seen. History offers a kind of evidence for Bataille's view, since it confirms that two of the elements of the larger picture — eroticism and death (the latter represented in nuclear anxiety) — peaked, simultaneously, in the years from 1982 through 1984. While this may have been a coincidence, it certainly produced some interesting results. One result, as we have seen, was the fusion of the imagery of sexuality and nuclear catastrophe. So complete was this fusion that the Hollies' "If The Lights Go Out" (1983), a song about end-of-the-world love, concludes with the line, "I'll go down with you," in which sex and death have become inseparable. This is not proof that the rock audience seeks death, whether through nuclear holocaust or some other agency, but such an interpretation would certainly be empirically respectable and theoretically viable.

Notes

1. See: Gillett (1983); Belz (1972); Frith (1981); Hebdige (1979); Willis (1978); Lipsitz (1982); Christgau (1969) and other essays in Eisen (1969); McGregor (1972); Marsh (1979).

2. The most recent treatment of lycanthropy is: Otten (1987).

3. The wolf also appears as the subject in: Los Lobos; "Will The Wolf Survive?"

4. The quotations are from the 1966 preface: Marcuse (1966: xv, xxv).

5. On Jung's theory of synchronicity, see: Read et al. (1963/1970: 464-465).

References

Bataille, Georges (1962/1977), Death and sensuality. A study of eroticism and the taboo. New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1977 (reprint edition; originally published in 1962).
Belz, Carl (1972), The story of rock, second edition. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972.
Carroll, Peter N. (1982), It seemed like nothing happened. The tragedy and promise of America in the 1970s, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.
Christgau, Robert (1969), "Rock lyrics are poetry (maybe)." In: Jonathan Eisen (ed.), The age of rock. Sounds of the American cultural revolution. New York: Random House, 1969.
Eisen, Jonathan(ed.) (1969), The age of rock. Sounds of the American cultural revolution. New York: Random House, 1969.
Eisler, Robert (1951), Man into wolf. An anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism, and lycanthropy. London: Spring Books, 1951.
Freud, Sigmund (1947), Freud on war, sex and neurosis. New York: Arts and Science Press, 1947.
Frith, Simon (1981), Sound effects. Youth, leisure, and the politics of rock 'n' roll. New York: Random House, 1981.
Gillett, Charlie (1983), The sound of the city. The rise of rock and roll. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983 (revised edition, originally published in 1970).
Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture. The meaning of style. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1979.
Lipsitz, George (1982), "Ain't nobody here but us chickens. The class origins of rock and roll." In: George Lipsitz, Class and culture in Cold War America. A rainbow at midnight. South Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982 (chapter 10).
Loder, Kurt (1984), "Nena's '99 Luftballons' soars up U.S. charts." In: Rolling Stone, March 15, 1984: 41.
Marcuse, Herbert (1964), One-dimensional man. Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Marcuse, Herbert (1966), Eros and civilization. A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 (originally published in 1955).
Marsh, Dave (1979), Born to run. The Bruce Springsteen story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1979.
McGregor, Craig (ed.) (1972), Bob Dylan. A retrospective. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1972.
Otten, Charlotte F. (ed.) (1987), A lycanthropy reader. Werewolves in western culture. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972.
Read, Sir Herbert, et al., (eds.) (1963/1970)), The collected works of C.G. Jung, vol. 4: Mysterium coniunctionis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970 (second edition, originally published in 1963).
Reich, Theodore (1941), Masochism in modern man. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1941 (trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrude M. Kurt).
Willis, Paul E. (1978), Profane culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

Discography

Blue Oyster Cult, "Take Me Away" by Aldo Nova and Eric Bloom, copyright 1984 by ATV Music Publishing of Canada Ltd. and Les Editions Musicale Caporuacio and Welbeck Music of Canada Corp. All rights administered by ATV Music Publishing of Canada, Ltd. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Bryan Adams, "Cuts Like A Knife" by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, copyright 1983 Irving Music, Inc./Adams Communications, Inc./Calypso Toonz (BMI).
Duran Duran, "Hungry Like The Wolf" by Duran Duran, copyright 1982 Tritec Music Ltd.
Eurythmics, "Love Is A Stranger" by A. Lennox and D. A. Stewart, copyright 1982 Logo Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S. and Canada administered by Carbert Music Inc.
Eurythmics, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" by Lennox-Stewart, copyright Sunbury Music Ltd. Fabian, "Tiger" by Ollie Jones, copyright Roosevelt Music & Rambed Publishing Co., Inc. (BMI).
Jackson Browne, "Lawyers In Love" by Jackson Browne, copyright 1983 Night Kitchen Music.
Jackson Browne, "Tender Is The Night" by Jackson Browne, Danny Kortchmar and Russel Kunkel, copyright 1983 by Night Kitchen Music/Kortchmar Music/Olas Music. All rights reserved.
John Cougar, "Hurts So Good" by John Cougar Mellencamp and G. M. Green, copyright 1982 Riva Music Inc. (ASCAP).
John Cougar Mellencamp, "Crumblin' Down" by John Cougar Mellencamp and George Green, copyright 1983 Riva Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
John Cougar Mellencamp, "Pink Houses" by John Cougar Mellencamp, copyright 1983 Riva Music, Inc.
Los Lobos; "Will The Wolf Survive?" by David Hidalgo and Louie Perez, copyright 1984 Davince Music/No K.O. Music, Slash Records.
Men Without Hats, "The Safety Dance" by Ivan, copyright 1979 Off Backstreet Music/Les Editions Chapeau (BMI).
Motley Crue, "Live Wire"; music and lyrics by N. Sixx, copyright 1981 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp./Motley Crue Publishing.
Nena, "99 Red Balloons" by J. U. Fahrenkrog-Petersen, C. Karges.
Quiet Riot, "Cum On Feel the Noize" by N. Holder and J. Lea.
Quiet Riot, "Metal Health" copyright 1983 by the Grand Pasha Publisher.
Re-Flex, "The Politics of Dancing" by Fishman, copyright 1983 Jambo Ltd./Metric/Firstars Music (ASCAP).
Scandal, featuring Patty Smyth, "The Warrior" by H. Knight, N. Gilder, copyright 1984 CBS Inc.
The Hollies, "If The Lights Go Out" by Mike Batt, copyright 1983 April Music Ltd. & Batt Songs Ltd. Rights administered in U.S. by April Music Inc.
The Police, "King of Pain" by Sting, copyright 1983 Magnetic Publishing Ltd., represented by Reggatta Music. Administered in the U.S. and Canada by Illegal Songs, Inc.
The Police, Synchronicity, copyright 1983 A & M Records, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Scorpions, "Rock You Like A Hurricane" by Klause Meine, Herman Rarebell, Rudolf Schenker, copyright 1984 Summer Breeze Music. All rights reserved.

This essay was published in: Tracking: Popular Music Studies,
vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter, 1988)

1997 © IASPM / USA