The new wave band released two singles, “White Boy” and “I’m Afraid of Me” that were unsuccessful on British single charts. Their international breakthrough came with the release of their third single “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The reviews were unfavorable at first but they it did not stop Culture Club from solidifying their place in the Second British Invasion.

“Do you really Want to Hurt Me” laid the foundation for Kissing to Be Clever—their 1982 debut album that featured a multilayered sound that transcended the boundaries of pop.

George said the song was about his relationship with drummer Jon Moss and all the other men he dated. Therefore, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” synthesized the feelings of insecurity and expression.

“I always had these awkward relationships, which only became awkward when other people became involved,” George said. “Jon was fine shagging me until his mum met me. He lived in a posh house in Hampstead and I was invited round for dinner. His mum answered the door and went ‘Oh!’. I ended up having to eat with the servants in the kitchen.”

Culture Club was asked to perform on Top of the Tops, a BBC weekly program that featured popular musicians, when Welsh rock and roll singer Shakin’ Stevens suddenly backed out. After the performance, Boy George received heavy criticism from Radio 1 and the press for his exotic self-presentation. George recalls newspapers asking, “Is it [Boy George] a boy or a girl?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pgu9TP618E

Throughout his career George embraced his androgynous style that was often publicized as a visual gimmick. His look was largely popularized in Culture Club’s eccentric music videos.

“ I did use a lot of make-up at the time, and it really freaked people out, George said. “People couldn’t deal with my sexual energy when they met me, and I loved that. It was my life’s work.”

Kissing to Be Clever featured other prominent Culture Club hits such as “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” “White Boy” and “Time (Clock of the Heart). These songs served as constant interchanges between traditional soul, synth pop, and disco funk. The blending of various cultural sounds and musical textures was not just a trend started by Culture Club but an obsession.

Their sophomore LP Colour By Numbers was a smash hit, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. Boy George responded to Colour By Numbers being ranked in the Top 100 Best Albums of the Eighties by saying, “Well it should be.”

Recorded with Steve Levine in Red Bus Studios, Culture Club sought to build off the success of their debut album by collaborating with various English artists. Backup singer Helen Terry helped save Colour By Numbers from the tropes of Tropipop found in Kissing to Be Clever.

Colour By Numbers featured their most coveted single “Karma Chameleon” which peaked at number one on 17 weekly charts around the world. Furthermore, “Karma Chameleon” became the biggest selling single of 1983. The anthem-like pulse of the melody subdued the dark lyrical message.

“The song is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing,” George said. “It’s about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren’t true, if you don’t act like you feel, then you get Karma-justice, that’s nature’s way of paying you back.”

Colour By numbers paid homage to an Elton-John-like sound in “That’s The Way (I’m Only Trying to Help You)” borrowed from the melodies of Gilbert O’Sullivan in “It’s a Miracle” and mimics Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight” in the opening of “Church of the Poison Mind.” Geroge had a rather non-chalant response to the album by stating, “I thought some of the singing was out of tune […] definitely the best Culture Club album, but I don’t know if it’s my best record.”

With tension mounting between the band mates, alleged physical and verbal abuse spurring between lovers George and Moss, and rampant drug consumption, Culture Club depended heavily on their critically-anticipated third album Waking Up with the House on Fire.

Although Waking Up with the House on Fire served as their third consecutive platinum album in America, it was viewed as a rushed. The only single to gain traction was “The War Song” which stood as an allegory for emotional conflict. The single cracked the top 20 Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Excess of drugs, relationship struggles, and fame, very well could have contributed to the disappointment.

As Culture Club split, Boy George’s illustrious career was tarnished by his cocaine and later heroin addiction. His youngest brother David O’Dowd said George had a $1,200-a-day habit that made him lose 56 pounds.

“We’ve just been waiting for a phone call from a reporter to tell us George has been found dead from a drug overdose,” said David “The only reward I want is my brother back—his habit is destroying my family.”

His addiction came as a shock to the public. Once “the harmless, lovable windup doll of pop, a cartoonlike fantasy figure […] who preferred a cup of tea over sex” was transformed into a shadow of his old self.

George was often outspoken against drug consumption. He responded to his own addiction by stating, “I’m an out-and-out heroin junkie […] you don’t have to be a doctor to know that I’m dying.” George would later revoke this statement on live television.

At the pinnacle of pop Culture Club fell and never really got back up. While pursuing a solo career, George was a part of numerous short-lived Culture Club reunions. George called a 1998 tour a, “nostalgia trip” featuring not type of, “Oprah Winfrey-type confessionalism” between band mates. The release of their new album Tribes has been delayed on numerous occasions.

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The quartet revived modern protest music with a combination of, “speedy grooves, sing-along tunes and deadpan lyrics that achieved a kind of boneheaded genius,” said Rolling Stone.

The Ramones had a relentless passion for live performance. This landed them a contract to perform at famous New York City Music Club CBCB. The Ramones would perform there over seventy-four times in 1974. Their sets lasted an average of twenty minutes.

“They started playing different songs, and it was just this wall of noise,” said founder of Punk Magazine Legs McNeil. “They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new.”

The Ramones had a definitive style of blue jeans, black leather jackets, and long hair with bangs cut just above the eye. This anti-glamour persona was a tribute to the greaser era that died a decade earlier.

Over the span of eighteen months, The Ramones released three albums with Sire Studios. Their debut self-titled album opened with smash hit “Blitzkrieg Bop,” which was named after the German World War Two bombing tactic. The song took a stand against Nazism.

Front man Joey Ramone wrote the second track called “Beat on the Brat.” It was inspired by his experiences growing up in the lower class suburb of Birchwood Towers. “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” also dealt with the concept of adolescent trauma through the usage of minimalistic lyrics and simple chord progressions.

Their next two albums Leave Home and Rocket to Russia were released the following year. Leave Home featured more sophisticated songs than their debut. The Ramones successfully found a balance between traditional rock and innovative pop.

Leave Home featured a cover of Henry Glover and Morris Levy’s classic “California Sun” as well as their trademark track “Pinhead.” The album also included “Carbona Not Glue”, which was a follow-up track to their controversial “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” The track was later removed from the album to avoid a potential lawsuit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyEEdcow2vE

Rocket To Russia continued to show their promise. The album would later become their most financially successful album to date. Surf Rock and Bubblegum Pop influenced their single “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” which was about, “a teenage girl [who] eschews surfing and her friends’ dance parties to head to New York City and be a punk.” Joey Ramone affirmed that it was the first teenage rebellion song ever made.

Their lighthearted lyrics were often considered to be parodies with a twist. The Ramones continued their Surf Rock influence with the track “Rockaway Beach” which became their highest charting Billboard single in their career.

The album also protested more serious issues such as lobotomies and drug abuse in “Teenage Lobotomy” and homosexuality and infant disease in “We’re A Happy Family.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQlM59sDJVo

The Ramones perfected a sound that was, “Short and simple, frantic and full of hooks,” said PBS. “Their hectic pace was as evident in their music as in their work schedule. Relentlessness and mayhem became synonymous with The Ramones and with punk itself.”

After the release of their fourth studio album Road To Ruin, producer Phil Spector offered the Ramones an opportunity to costar in a musical about rock rebellion. Rock & Roll High School marked a vital shift in the direction of the Ramones. Phil Spector insisted that the band shifted to pop music. Their highly anticipated and expensively produced album End of the Century ruined their momentum punk rock aesthetic.

Their stripped-down sound influenced a long line of punk predecessors such as Patti Smith, The Talking Heads, The Clash, Nirvana, Metallica, and Green Day. However, the industry mocked them, the media rejected them, and radio stations refused to air their music. This in turn heightened the tension between the band mates.

“The Ramones toured steadily – playing something like 150 shows some years, spending hours and days going from city to city in a van, often finding fault with one another and erupting into fights,” said Rolling Stone. “They would climb into their van and ride to a hotel or their next show in silence. Two of the members, Johnny and Joey, did not speak to each other for most of the band’s 22-year history.”

The love affair between Linda Danielle and Johnny Ramone ruined the band’s relationship with Joey Ramone. When him and Danielle married, he became cynical and isolated, yet refused to leave the band.

Sire Records hired five different producers to work on their next six studio albums: Pleasant Dreams (1981), Subterranean Jungle (1983), Animal Boy (1986), Halfway to Sanity (1987) and Brain Drain (1989). It was an era of constant bickering, substance abuse, numerous lineup changes, and mental instability. The band was seen to have a curse.

“It sounded as if the Ramones were competing with their own shadows; they played faster, harder, as if trying to catch up with many of the hardcore bands that were running with their original template of short songs and high-speed beats,” said Rolling Stone.

The 1985 release of “Bonzo Goes To Bitburg” was seen as the light amidst the darkness for the Ramones. Featured as a single on Animal Boy as “My Brin is Hanging Upside Down” the single was an emotionally charged commentary on the Reagan Administration and their involvement in Bitburg Germany. President Reagan set down wreaths beside 44 Nazi SS graves. The term “Bonzo goes to Bitburg” was coined by protesters after the incident. The track became a massive success on college campuses and catalyzed protests among concerned Americans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su0Hvt6hTmA

The punk rock band from Forest Hills Queens proved that music was the proper response to the arc of history. Their curse was a reminder that protest, though well-intentioned, came with opposition. The Ramones will be remembered for their steadfast effort to promote equality through their definitive style, simple hooks and politically charged lyrics.

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“No other group carried such a weight of expectation – and tradition – as the Smiths,” said the Guardian. “Had they not risen to the occasion, it is not overstating the case to say that the entire trajectory of recent British rock music as we now know it – that’s the line from the Smiths to the Stone Roses to Oasis and on to the Libertines and today’s indie darlings, Arctic Monkeys – would not have been traced.”

The single “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” reached Number 10 on the UK Charts and established The Smiths as both prominent musicians and social activists. Johnny Marr wrote “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” in an hour in a New York City hotel room.

“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” examined human worth and the concept of time over a whiny guitar, sporadic tambourine, and climbing bass. The 1960 Sandie Shaw single “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” inspired the title.

The single was vital in establishing the relationship with their longtime producer Stephen Street and stood as a prelude to their political-critique album “Meat Is Murder” which debuted less than a year later. The production disappointment of their first self-titled album inspired Johnny Marr and Morrissey to produce “Meat Is Murder” with Stephen Street as their engineer.

The “Meat Is Murder” cover used a photograph entitled “Soldier Rests.” It featured Marine Cpl. Michael Wynn in Da Nang, South Vietnam. The wording on the helmet was changed from, “Make War Not Love” to, “Meat Is Murder.”

The opening song on the album “The Headmaster Ritual” was a critique on corporal-punishment within Manchester schools. Morrissey used unsettling imagery, clattering sounds, and hypnotic onomatopoeias to show the breadth of emotional and physical abuse. Childhood tribulation was also found in the sole single “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” which used a conversational approach to discuss suicide and loneliness.

Morrissey later revealed to Melody Maker that the song was in response to the harsh journalistic attempts to expose him as a fraud. His opposition of the Thatcher Administration and monarchy lead to this tension. A similar discussion of suicide and loneliness was found in their single “Asleep.” It shows the devastation of not wanting to wake up.

Morrissey was a vegetarian from the age of twelve and used his media controversy to express his beliefs for animal rights. Morrissey forbid his band members from being photographed eating meat and insisted that his tour venues serve no meat on the nights he performs. Their pro-vegetarian track concluded the politically strident album.

“The meteoric rise continued with Meat Is Murder debuting at Number One on the British chart; the group also caused a stir with Morrissey’s stage presence, the singer wearing a garland of gladioli in tribute to Oscar Wilde, a hearing aid in homage to Fifties balladeer Johnnie Ray, and a ducktail haircut patterned after English rocker Billy Fury,” said Rolling Stone. “His champions, though, hailed his oblique, angst-driven songs as latter-day examples of Ray Davies-styled social commentary.”

Their single “Shakespeare’s Sister” was released a month after “Meat Is Murder.” Although the single received minimal commercial success, it was vital towards the progression of the band. The title refers to a Virginia Woolf feminist essay that argues if William Shakespeare had a sister of equal ability she would not be as famous.

It’s essentially a suicide drama set to a demented rock’n’roll rhythm,” said the Guardian. “Musically the song evokes an older, more raw rock era, with echoes of both Bo Diddley and the early Rolling Stones in its galloping rhythm. Lyrically, though, it draws on an incredible variety of sources, none of which would have impinged on the consciousness of a less erudite, or indeed eccentric, songwriter.”

Their third studio album “The Queen Is Dead” spent twenty-two weeks on the UK charts and went Gold in the United States shortly after. Ex-Aztec guitarist Craig Gannon made his debut on the album. Through Macbeth references, pronounced backbeats, and a hard rock, Morrissey shatters, “the myth that he is a self-pitying sap,” said All Music.

“Morrissey delivers a devastating set of clever, witty satires of British social mores, intellectualism, class, and even himself.” At the forefront of the album their two smash-hits, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

“Panic” was their first recording after “The Queen Is Dead.” The song mentions the chaos unraveling within Britain. It condemns disco for ruining pop music. “Panic” was a response to the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and received heavy criticism. The pinnacle of this criticism was when Journalist Nick Kent called the song a mandate for, “Rock terrorism.”

After a disappointing American tour, a severe car accident hospitalizing Morrissey, the firing of Gannon, a heroin addicted bassist, and an exhausted Marr, The Smiths disbanded. “It was possibly the most fraught, emotional and oft-lamented breakups in musical history,” said Rolling Stone. The Smiths were revered for their politically-charged ideologies, everyman sentiment, and desire to reconcile with their haunting past.

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The album “London Calling” immortalized The Clash in 1979. In a time when punk rock never left the local pubs, musical experimentation was seen as a commercial cop out, and lyrics revolved around the same feats of nihilism, The Clash were called, “The Only Band That Mattered.”

“Bands had either collapsed under the weight of their own violent tendencies or were snatched up by corporate America and transformed into pale imitations,” Said Music Box. “Overflowing with ideas, the songs effortlessly leapt from rockabilly to reggae to hard rock, while folding in elements of blues, jazz, R&B, and folk, and all of it was delivered with the pummeling fury of a tempest unleashed.

Besides their unique sound, The Clash discussed topical issues like substance abuse, rampant consumerism, oppressive establishments, distant revolutionaries, nuclear tension, and unrequited love in the album. Alas- “London Calling” was a vulnerable introspection into a pained human condition.

With Drummer Nicholas Headon arrested for heroine possession and lead vocalist Joe Strummer in Paris for unknown reasons, tension built up between band mates. Nicholas Headon was forced to leave the band. He was replaced with drummer Terrance Chimes. The Clash were in desperate need of a follow up to “London Calling”.

“When we came to the U.S., Mick stumbled upon a music shop in Brooklyn that carried the music of Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, the Sugar Hill Gang,” Strummer told Monthly Review. “These groups were radically changing music and they changed everything for us.”

This old school hip hop collaboration lead to The Clash single, “The Magnificent Seven.” Regardless of its minimal commercial success, the single was an important prelude to their next album.

“Combat Rock” was released in 1982 and became an instant success. Their album peaked at number 2 on the UK Album Charts and spent 61 consecutive weeks on US Album Charts. This certified “Combat Rock” as a double platinum album within the US.

“Combat Rock” opened with smash hit, “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” which documented the dismal relationships within the band. The follow up track, “Rock The Casbah” concealed their protests underneath a repetitive hook- disco dance beat, a satirical music video, and abrupt electronic sound effects.

Heaton composed, “Rock The Casbah,” before he left the band. The lyrics discussed an Arab King who restricted the import of Western music in Iran. He ordered Jet fighters to bomb any citizen who listened to Western music.

The jet fighters ignored their orders. This freed the citizens to celebrate their freedom. “Rock The Casbah,” blared out of an Iranian radio tower. It was a triumph; the definition of punk rock.

Their Manager Kosmo Vinyl told Rolling Stone that “Rock The Casbah,” was a filthy ode to the girlfriend of Heaton and had a pornographic connotation.

Strummer told Rolling Stone that he decided to take the song in a different direction when his other manager, Bernie Rhodes, asked, “Does everything have to be as long as a raga?”

“I looked at it and for some reason I started to think about what someone had told me earlier, that you get lashed for owning a disco album in Iran,” Strummer told Rolling Stone shortly before he died.

“Rock The Casbah,” was chosen by the Armed Forces Radio to be the first song broadcasted to troops in Desert. Another track on “Combat Rock”, “Straight To Hell,” observed a post Vietnam America full of broken families, stigmatized immigrants, and unanswered pleas for peace.

“Know Your Rights,” was released three weeks prior to the album. It listed three cynical, almost patronizing human rights:

1. “The right not to be killed. Murder is a crime, unless it is done by a policeman, or an aristocrat, know your rights.”
2. “The right to food money, providing of course, you don’t mind a little investigation, humiliation, and, if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation.”
3. “The right to free speech (as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.”

At the pinnacle of their rock immortality, commercial success,  MTV induced fame, Political prowess,  whatever you would like to call it, The Clash fell apart. Their last album “Cut The Crap” struggled to find its intended audience, racked up unkind reviews, and failed to bring in any steady revenue. Strummer and Simonon permanently disbanded The Clash shortly after.

“Postwar prosperity was melting away into rising unemployment, shrinking social service programs, and increasing poverty,” Said Monthly Review. “The wrecked economy fueled an incendiary social situation as racism, xenophobia, and police brutality became the order of the day. Mounting feelings of anger, frustration, and a deepening sense of isolation left much of English youth feeling hopeless.”

Their legacy was not found in sold out football stadiums, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions, platinum albums, or punk rock sentiment, but their radical protests, and their left winged ideologies that inspired a lost generation.

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