Hello internet pals of music. I don’t have a lot of time to write today, or many of these days lately it seems, but let’s quickly celebrate the 30th anniversary of Stereolab’s Peng!
I need to think about something good, pure and hopeful today.
Stereolab, especially in their early stages, help with that. Their driving and often chirpy rhythmic force combined in a strange way with their progressive and humane politics like no other band I can still think of. Unlike Gang of Four (whose herky jerky tension could make them feel a bit insufferable at times, like the character Rick from the 80s British television show, The Young Ones), Stereolab perfected the bait & switch of a good-feeling pop song that delivered on all the Marxist and philosophical intellectualism needed to take them very seriously.
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Thirty years later, this still sounds exciting and hopeful, and not jaded and definitely not burdened by apathy or self defeat. Nothing is broken but covenants within society and individuals have the freedom to choose how we respond.
Congratulation eternally to Stereolab for truly expanding on the genres they were influenced by; they took the ethos and progression of Kosmische and pushed it excitedly towards the millennium, and everyone who heard (or now hears for the first time) the call is much better for it.
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