I’ve been spending more time at home than usual, which means more time to listen to more music. So every once in a while, I’d pick an album I’ve never listened to before, and share my thoughts. Current blockbusters, established classics, accidental finds on Bandcamp – everything goes. This time: The strange, briefly successful social experiment of self-aware 80s excess that was Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
At the top of this review, I should note one important thing: The music on this album doesn’t matter. This isn’t a critical assessment of the quality of the songs here (I’ll get to that later); it’s an honest summary of the mindset behind this project, admitted quite freely by its initiators.
The lore of British electro-punk band/human art installation Sigue Sigue Sputnik is that Tony James, its founder, recruited the other members based on looks and attitude, not musical experience (of which they apparently had none). It was always meant to be more of a visual concept than a recording act, aesthetics before acoustics. Which meant I’ve had to watch videos and read interviews in order to form my opinion on Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s debut album, Flaunt It.
So what was Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s whole deal? Essentially, the band was designed to comment on 80s popular culture – commercialized, globalized, tech-savvy, violent and superficial – by embracing and maximizing it. A sort of satire by hyperbole that nonetheless served a genuine desire to become famous, or rather infamous, by all means. And while music was seemingly not a main concern for the group, the songs on Flaunt It do reflect this concept of highly stylized decadence quite coherently, right from the first track.
On its surface, “Love Missile F1-11” is anything but coherent: On the album version I picked, synth patterns and guitar bursts combine with dialogue from Blade Runner and excerpts from Ode to Joy and William Tell Overture, while vocalist Martin Degville enthusiastically sings of aerial strikes. But as this mess of a track progresses, its tongue-in-cheek nihilism becomes clearer. It fits into the lineage of 80s Cold War party songs, where the only way to face impending doom is through a sense of total abandon. In this context, the sonic overload of the track and Degville’s repeated commands to “shoot it up” simulate the frantic lawlessness of humanity’s final moments, so that the rest of the album can drift even further from its human element.
SSS proudly presents itself as manufactured on the record, which gives credence to Tony James’s claim that all of their songs sounded the same. Indeed, several songs on Flaunt It rely on foundations very similar to those of “Love Missile,” like a demented assembly line. The eighth-note synth riffs in these songs recall the analog days of punk, which James experienced as a member of the mildly successful Generation X, but also hark back to early rock & roll with their heavy vocal reverb. One of these soundalikes, “21st Century Boy,” makes the connection evident by referring to Degville as “Elvis 1990,” turning the album into a supercharged rock star fantasy.
In its album version – as a band with little regard for artistic integrity, SSS issued their songs in multiple variations – “21st Century Boy” plainly lays out the main themes of the project, with declarations like “Sigue Sigue Sputnik: affordable firepower” and “I am the ultimate product.” The emphasis on the band’s own marketability is so exaggerated, and so at odds with their cluttered dance-punk sound, it’s impossible not to read some irony into it. And yet, SSS appear to be willful participants in this game of intrusive hyper-capitalism. This is, after all, an album where the songs are interspersed with ads for both actual and fictional products, with little of the whimsical inventiveness of the Who’s similar effort 20 years prior.
Beside selling ad space on their record, the band’s deliberate blurring of the lines between intellect and artifice comes out in different yet equally strange ways. Several songs seem to depict sex with machines and weapons, including a lusty synth-pop ballad titled “Atari Baby.” Then there’s “She’s My Man,” which infuses these cyborg wet dreams with dicey gender politics, although the lyrics are too obtuse to determine the band’s social stance.
Their intentions are much clearer on “Rockit Miss U.S.A,” where Degville’s sloganeering effectively describes the US obsession with firearms. Through references to Star Wars and Dirty Harry and lyrics like “I feel bigger with a trigger,” the song summarizes how popular culture sells the idea of weapons as objects of desire, tools of justice and extension of physical prowess. It’s a rare glimpse of honesty on this otherwise cynical ploy of an album, the group’s fascination with violence standing for that of a superpower whose glamorized brutality posed an imminent threat of global annihilation at the time.
It’s moments like these that show the potential for actually good art in SSS’s disorderly aesthetics and mixed intentions of protest and profit. Yet in the end, the band seemed to have been lost in its own irony. After Flaunt It, produced by Giorgio Moroder, they denounced their punk credentials even louder, returning in 1988 with a polished pop-rock single refined by British hitmakers Stock Aitken Waterman and void of any hint of sarcasm. They fully embraced their superstar fantasies, at which point the fantasy was over and they quickly lost all commercial appeal.
As they sustained themselves on hype and burnt out fast, Sigue Sigue Sputnik don’t appear to be too influential. But there are still echoes of Tony James’s creation in later experiments like Lady Gaga, who’s straddled the line between commenting on pop culture and reveling in it, all while wearing costumes as lavish as anything Martin Degville ever donned. Unlike SSS, Gaga managed to reveal her authenticity and musical skills despite her maximalist indulgence, and thus be taken seriously as an artist. Then again, James and Co. never aspired for artistic greatness or anything deeper than surface level, so in that sense Flaunt It is a resounding success.
Or rather, it might be summed up by Malcolm McLaren, an early fan of Sigue Sigue Sputnik who’s experienced success a few years prior with his own image-first-music-second project, the Sex Pistols: “They looked great; they were wonderful in print. Their mistake was making a record.” A pretty impressive mistake nonetheless.
Random on Purpose 