#osmonds

55. Yo Yo by The Osmonds debuted Sep 71 and peaked at number three, scoring 1068 points.

Hi Anon! Thanks for a great question.

Regular readers of Passionate Reply have already probably encountered me griping about the fact that pre-Moog music generally holds little appeal for me. I talked about some similar stuff in my earlier response to a question, “WHAT IS THE OLDEST SONG YOU LIKE?” You can go and read that if you like, but suffice to say music essentially starts with the indispensable “Autobahn,” for me.

But, of course, there was electronic music before Moog. It was rarer and clunkier of course, but here again, regular readers of Passionate Reply know that I love a lot of obscure and/or amateurish electronic music. So what’s the obstacle? In my mind, I think a lot of this comes down to what I often call the musical “DNA” of a work.

In the conventional reckoning of genres, we have this category called “electronic” which is used as a sort of dumping ground for more or less anything that uses electronic instrumentation. “Electronic music” stretches from mainstream dance-pop hitmakers like the Pet Shop Boys to gothic, counter-cultural industrial acts like Skinny Puppy all the way to the loony bin of experimental weirdness that contains the likes of Silver Apples.

Are those really all the same genre? Do they belong in the same bucket? Well, we could talk about that question all day. But I think the main takeaway here is that not all “electronic music” comes from the same sensibility. Electronics are a tool, and music made with electronic instruments is no more inherently homogenous than all music made with strings or percussion is! (Could you imagine if we had a genre, “percussive music,” and we pigeonholed every song with drums into it?)

So, to your question...I like Hammond organs and Mellotrons and the other really early stuff, as instruments, and as sounds. But the consciousness or sensibility of the “electronica” that I enjoy hadn’t formed yet. Of course, part of why it DID form the way it did was because it took a while for synthesiser technology to trickle down and become accessible and affordable enough to enough people for the forging of this shared culture--the soul of electronic music as we know it today. (Once again, I think you can look to Kraftwerk as the first “ideologically electronic” band in this tradition.) During the time of pre-Moog organ technology, nobody was really using it in a manner that I especially sympathize with, and by the time that culture had arisen, that sort of tech was becoming obsolete. That said, given the recent vogue for analogue synthesisers, stylistically lo-fi audio treatments, and other such clunker chic, I’d love to see a contemporary avant-garde musician or two try and incorporate those sorts of instruments into more of a synthwave sound!

Okay, enough rambling. I know a lot of people are just here for the jams, so here are a few choice cuts.

THE OSMONDS - “CRAZY HORSES”

I touched on this one before, mainly aiming to tackle a cover of it by KMFDM. It’s easy to see why they were attracted to it, since it’s considered a proto-hard rock song, and the combination of its chugging rhythm, dark lyrics, and strident Wurlitzer organ riff makes it more or less a blueprint for an industrial track.

STEPPENWOLF - “BORN TO BE WILD”