#so it's real complicated. and cartoonishly homoerotic.

[soaked-ghost]

most normal boss employee relationship

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: Soft Cell’s 1981 debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret! The first great gay synth-pop album, and the one that walked so that acts like Bronski Beat, Erasure, and the Pet Shop Boys could run. Yeah, “Tainted Love” is cool, but have you ever heard “Sex Dwarf”? Full transcript after the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today’s video tackles Soft Cell’s 1981 debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. While “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” is not necessarily a household name, this album did produce one track that I can just about guarantee that you’ve already heard, assuming you have any familiarity with Western popular music.

Music: “Tainted Love”

“Tainted Love” is one of those classics that’s almost too big for its own good, with an enormous shadow in popular culture. Few compositions from the 1980s, from the general arena of synth-pop, or, indeed, in the popular music canon, have quite as much of a legacy. As an introduction to the significance of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, it’s not an awful start, but it does have a bit of an “obvious single choice” feel--not only for that huge hook, but also for how tame, even quaint, it starts to feel compared to the other stuff here. “Tainted Love” is a gay song, sure, but it’s only expressing that idea in an abstract manner--it is a cover, after all. What the remainder of the album lacks in “DUN DUN,” it makes up for in frankness and remarkably candid handling of sexuality, which still manages to be a bit shocking, even as this album reaches its 40th birthday. Could anyone but Soft Cell’s Marc Almond really have sold us the raw, lurid raunchiness of “Sex Dwarf”?

Music: “Sex Dwarf”

Beyond the outrageously explicit nature of “Sex Dwarf,” its most noteworthy characteristic is just how playfully, cartoonishly devilish it is. I’ve always read it as a work in the grand tradition of the queer community reclaiming the trope of the camp gay villain, seen so often in popular media. In its purest form, this gay villain archetype is the ultimate expression of chaos and disorder--their rejection of social norms of gender and sexuality and their threat to the status quo go hand in hand. While it’s reprehensible to simply equate queerness with evil, there’s a long tradition of reclaiming that same imagery, turning the lavish power of such transgressor figures into a badge of strength, and that’s how I tend to interpret “Sex Dwarf.” That said, for as much as tracks like these seem to almost force a specifically gay reading of the album, it also seems interested in themes of sexuality and sin, more broadly. Take the track “Seedy Films,” for example, a more playful number full of slinky clarinet, teasing rattles, and breathy, almost gasping female backing vocals, seemingly suggestive of a more heterosexual vantage point.

Music: “Seedy Films”

I like to think of each track on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret as coming to us from the perspective of a different anti-hero, each as unreliable and capricious as the last. Another key track that complicates issues of perspective and identity is the album’s tense opener, “Frustration.” “Frustration” delivers on its title musically, with a stubborn refusal to ever resolve its constant melodic tension at any point during its runtime, making it legitimately fatiguing and stressful to listen to. Its lyrics might be interpreted as a critique of the boredom lurking behind mainstream society’s “ideal” life of suburban safety, and a send-up of the alleged appeal of fitting in and being normal. But we could interpret it equally well, as a song that’s less about being “straight” in the sense of “square,” and more about being heterosexual--perhaps as the lament of a closeted gay man, tormented by an incommunicable internal struggle, despite all the material comforts in the world.

Music: “Frustration”

Either way, “Frustration” can be compared to “Secret Life” on the flip side, which focuses on the idea of a divide between one’s external facade of a respectable and ordinary existence, and the darkness of one’s internal, deviant, carnal desires.

Music: “Secret Life”

Whether their narrators are parsed as gay or straight, their songs are certainly tense tales of repression and release. And they’re also mediated by the idea of being trapped in a tame, and particularly middle-aged existence. The clearest expression of the theme of getting older, and possibly more and more constrained by the need to put on airs of respectability, is, naturally, “Youth”:

Music: “Youth”

The stale, conservative lifestyles of the middle-aged certainly don’t seem like the most natural subject matter for a debut album by a pair of twenty-somethings, but I like to interpret this fixation as a bit of a memento mori. The urgency of enjoying life’s pleasures, now, is checked by the fear of a future in which that window of opportunity is closing. As I said earlier, all of these tracks are narrated by some character or construct, and in that sense, the real identities of Marc Almond and David Ball matter fairly little. In the world of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, nearly everything feels constructed or artificial--it’s all just an act, as much as “Secret Life”’s narrator puts on a respectable front. The superbly campy “Entertain Me,” which wouldn’t feel out of place in some cult musical, engages most clearly with the idea of performance, bringing in a giggling call-and-response choir and a chaotic clamour of percussion in its desperate attempt to, well, entertain us. Critically positioned at the top of the second side, it’s the perfect place for the album to second-guess itself as a work of art.

Music: “Entertain Me”

That track is certainly more “Rocky Horror Picture Show” than “Architecture & Morality,” isn’t it? While the synth-pop acts penetrating the mainstream before Soft Cell, like Gary Numan and OMD, had a bit of punk’s rough, low-budget, DIY ethos to them, Soft Cell were the first ones really crafting performative, self-aware post-disco synth-pop, that owed more to the swooning divahood of Donna Summer in “I Feel Love” than it did to the starched shirts and robo-rhythms of Kraftwerk. Much like disco, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is truly a production--dense, luxurious, tweaked to perfection in a studio, and featuring several traditional instruments that are uncommon in rock, such as “Frustration”’s saxophone and “Seedy Films”’s clarinet.

The most noticeable thing about the cover of the album is almost certainly its lurid blue and fuchsia lighting, gleaming harshly against Almond and Ball’s leather jackets. It immediately takes us to the sweaty, nocturnal, and of course, homoerotic world this music dwells in. The duo stare us down, with fairly cross or standoffish posturing, suitable for an album as in-your-face as this one. There’s a bit of a narrative hook here, with Almond either producing this mysterious, almost certainly illicit package, or perhaps tucking it away. Almond’s sunglasses are a small detail, but one that I think holds a lot of contextual significance. There’s a long history of erotic art aimed at the gay male audience utilizing devices like hat-brims and shades to create a “disrupted gaze”--a sort of lightly objectifying, or compartmentalizing, manner of sexualizing its subjects. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Ball’s snakeskin necktie, which is another classically sexy touch. Note also the neon light motif used for the text, which contributes to that nightlife feel as strongly as anything else. With a name like “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret,” it would’ve been truly sinful to write that out in anything besides this warping neon, and it’s the perfect title to accompany an album that’s as insistent and gleefully tawdry as they come.

Earlier, I had contrasted Soft Cell with other major players in synth-pop who came before them, and I think that context is vital to understanding why this album is so indispensably important. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is, quite simply, the first great gay synthesiser album. Growing up in America, the rock and roll heartland, it’s hard to escape the understanding that electronic music is inherently gay-coded. But that’s an impression you won’t get from that first generation of artists, who presented as unpretentiously butch, and were more interested in singing about factories, spaceships, and telephone lines than about sex or romance with anybody. The deep relationship between queer culture and the music synthesiser simply wouldn’t have blossomed the way it did without Soft Cell, and the unforgettable worldwide success they achieved with “Tainted Love.” Without that foot in the door, the rise of groups like Bronski Beat, Erasure, and the Pet Shop Boys later in the 80s would’ve been unthinkable. That alone makes Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret a piece of essential listening for anyone seeking to understand the history of electronic music.

While Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret remains Soft Cell’s great masterpiece, and they never reached the same heights of commercial success again, they went on to release two additional studio LPs before disbanding in the mid-1980s. Marc Almond went on to have a fairly successful career as a solo artist, bagging a few additional hit singles in the UK, and David Ball became half of the house duo The Grid. The pair did re-unite in 2002, to produce a rather serviceable LP called Cruelty Without Beauty, which explores many of the same themes of their earlier work, albeit through a lens of Information Age dread.

Music: “Caligula Syndrome”

In 2019, we were told to expect the true final report of Soft Cell, in the form of a grand farewell concert entitled “Say Hello, Wave Good-Bye”--a title pulled from one of the singles off Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. But, for all of the hype, it looks like that really won’t be the end for them after all, as Soft Cell have announced yet another reunion in 2021, and another new studio album in the works. So we’ll have to see what else these two have in store!

Overall, my favourite track on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is the single “Bedsitter.” It’s all about questioning whether the life of hedonistic excess is really worth it in the end. It’s about those moments one spends between benders, binges, and flings, gripped by emptiness and self-doubt. Therefore, the presence of “Bedsitter” adds some nuance, and undercuts a lot of the easy, simple conclusions we’re tempted to make, from a surface-level reading of the album as a free-love bonanza. With languid and melancholy verses clashing with a disconcertingly anthemic refrain, it’s filled with tension from within, and despite its lack of external conflict, it comes across as one of the more unsettling tracks we have to choose from. That’s all for today. Thanks for listening!

Music: “Bedsitter”

[tonysopranosfeverdreams]

thoughts on hannibal? or its similarities to killing eve and the will/hannibal and eve/villanelle dynamic?

So I wanted to digest this for a bit before i replied! i think, on a general level, hannibal is surpisingly unique and appealing to me for its genre in the sense that it doesn't take itself too seriously, despite being a drama. There are moments of acting and writing where the show acknowledges the humor or absurdity of different situations and encourages the audience to experience it and enjoy it as well? which makes it easier and more enjoyable (also i think just more clearly a work of fiction/more removed from life) to sit through, in terms of both killing eve and hannibal it was really just shocking to me how similar they are in inspiration and plot? in both cases, the main pair are kindred spirits, one who is like...cartoonishly a villain to some extent (again...their names are VILLANELLE AND HANNIBAL) and another who has all the makings of your run of the mill protagonist. But the complication factor in each case is that, actually the villain's actually able to be loving and selfless only for their counterpart, where, alternatively, will and eve's attraction to their counterparts works as a mirror of an inner self, and a revealing of a more honest or real version of who they actually are. In terms of narrative they're pretty aligned as well? Each season ends with one partner betraying the other for the first 2 seasons ((insert homoerotic stabbing/betrayal montage) but then levels out at a place where they've found a middle ground and can be together to some extent for a while??