Unplug the jukebox and do us all a favor. That music's lost it's taste so try another flavor.” - Antmusic
Adam and the Ants – Kings of the Wild Frontier – 1980
I have no idea how this record came into my possession. I know that I listened to it over and over and over. I took it with me places so I could sit and listen to it. I recall going to my cousins' house and holeing up in the basement so I could listen to Kings. I loved it.
And you know why? Cuz it's brilliant, that's why.
The double drums. The clanging semi-power chords. The bombast. The Indian motifs. The multi-layered vocals. The rockabilly chorus. The chukka chukka of an onslaught.
And that was the FIRST SONG! “Dog Eat Dog” is a seminal song in the pantheon of modern rock. It's a meta track. All about how good they look. How great they are. It's fun. It's powerful. And it's a melange of everything I just mentioned.
One more thing:
It never took itself too seriously. The whole record. Even when talking about killers in your home and death and stealing from Indians, there is a sense of everyone having a grand time. Tossing the Kitchen sink into the kitchen sink and then running out to find more sinks to toss in.
It's a crazy record. Adam and Marco (Pirroni, his co-writer now after the McLaren debacle), along with Chris Hughes, drummer and producer have crafted a sound and named it.
“Antmusic”.
The song is a puffed up war cry for something new. Which would just be cute if they really didn't bring it.
But Adam does. He brings it. Hard and big.
One thing, though. Adam and crew run out of song ideas about 2 minutes into each one. So they usually just let the chorus repeat forever. No one was in the studio telling them to stop. This is the biggest detriment to Adam's work and it will annoy me for the next 15 years.
Even this early in Adam's career he was already making waves on the musical circuit.
“Feed Me To The Lions” as well as “Press Darlings” address the press, notoriety and the difficulties of dealing with that kind of low-end media.
This is easily offset by the sheer weirdness of the spaghetti western antics of “Los Rancheros” and the pirate shanty, “Jolly Roger” and the cock of the walk, story of the band tune “The Magnificent Five”.
And then there's the disco song, “Don't Be Square (Be There)”. Which is one of the weirdest tracks I've ever heard and would probably (as many of these songs) have fit well on Dirk but with newer musicians, a musical vision and a guitarist able to pull it off, in Marco Pirroni, it just fucking works.
The paranoia slightly touched on in Dirk is explored further with the somewhat terrifying one-two punch of “Ant Invasion” & the even darker eulogy for the Indian, “Killer in the Home”.
The eponymous track is a testament to the era. That something as baroque and strange could be a hit, let alone a single, is remarkable. It really shows the growth in tastes and how far we had come as listeners, not 25 years after the original Elvis shook his hips.
Alas, 25 years later, we haven't really progressed at all. Instead, we've moved further back to the era of bubblegum and crooners. Too bad, really.
Kings of The Wild Frontier is one of the most important records of the New Wave/New Romantic era. You gotta trust me on this one. It's one of the 1000 records you need to hear before you die.
Grade: A+
A-Side: Dog Eat Dog, Antmusic, Kings of the Wild Frontier, Killer in the Home
BlindSide: Ant Invasion, Feed Me to the Lions, Don't Be Square (Be There), The Human Beings
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