“An Important Place in Their Lives”: Musicland Sales Brochure, 1978
By The Mutants
How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life.
“No Glue or Glass Bottles”: The Gateshead Music Collective
An oral history of the Gateshead Music Collective (or GMC) in the words of the young people who started it, ran it, and frequented it in the 1980s…
You Weren’t Supposed to Be Spooky: Non-Halloween Songs for Halloween
By The Mutants
So read on to discover the songs that, despite having no actual connection to the 31st of October, yet produce a frisson of seasonal alarm in the paranormally persecuted inhabitants of mutant mansions…
On 4th and Broadway: Remembering Tower Records
Having grown up in the 1970s, an era when record shops were a fixture in communities and often served as neighborhood social centers, I became obsessed with a small store located on 146th and Broadway…
No Bondage, No More: ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’
By Eve Tushnet
I first heard about the X-Ray Spex from a Riot Grrrl flier handed out at punk concerts in the mid-’90s. Their one album, Germfree Adolescents, was on a list of woman-led punk music…
“A Train to the Astral Plane”: The Cosmic Folk of Jim Sullivan and Judee Sill
Originally released one month after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jim Sullivan’s psych-folk hidden gem UFO (1969) is characterized by a drifting kind of hopefulness. Over the floating strings and upbeat horns of The Wrecking Crew, who famously backed The Beach Boys and Phil Spector, the album’s lyrics consider alien abduction and psychic links…
From Buzz Bin to Dust Bin: Nuclear Anxiety in Belfegore’s ‘All That I Wanted’
As far as innovative 1980s music videos go, probably none is more immediately visceral and less popularly remembered than Belfegore’s “All That I Wanted.”
Spirit of the Age: The Science Fiction Aesthetic of Hawkwind
By Joe Banks
Hawkwind are an indelible part of the UK’s underground culture. It’s been over 50 years since they formed in the seedy cradle of London’s Ladbroke Grove, but they still enjoy a fanatical cult following both in Britain and around the world. They may never have scaled the commercial heights of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, but the influence they’ve exerted on modern music is profound…
The Thrill Is Worth the Pain: Hell and Survival in Dio’s ‘The Last in Line’
The first music videos to air on MTV and broadcast television were chaotic blurts of arty nonsense defined by pastel colors, cheesy dance party theatrics, and avant-garde visual effects…
All Tomorrow’s Spaceships: Future World Orchestra’s ‘Mission Completed’
Sometimes it’s in ephemeral fragments of the culture that time travel lurks. We learn to tune out the looming monoliths of the zeitgeist the same way we learn to tune out the sky: its ubiquitousness would otherwise be oppressive…
We Are the Mutants 