Love Junk - Pursuit Of Happiness (1988)
Besides blathering on about my own favorite music, I consume a ton of content about other people’s favorite music. This week, I’m taking some advice. This one was recommended by fellow Substack pub Vinyl Hour!
I think it’s funny impact that TPOH’s I’m An Adult Now had on me, because I was 15. But I guess it was an entry into an imagined world of adult problems, even if I didn’t really have any at the moment. Plus I was deeply sold on the kind of grim and fatalistic lyrics and attitude that I’d end up liking in music for decades. I was still a few years from hearing Warren Zevon and Lou Reed and Tom Waits, but this was a gateway to it.
I never heard the rest of the record until Vinyl Hour! talked about it. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more pop-oriented but still rocking jangly rock there was filling out the long player, with more heartfelt lyrics than cynical ones.
Consciuousness Raising As Social Tool was a particularly interesting track to me. It’s a brief lyric that seems to poke fun at performative activism. But it reads differently in our modern world where self-help often equals self-negating asceticism.
Tree of Knowledge is a similarly involved and thoughtful lyric.
Luckily it’s not all the thinking person’s record. When The Sky Comes Falling Down and She’s So Young could easily have been giant radio hits.
It’s a pretty great record, although that would have been lost on me back when I thought Anthrax was the greatest band in the world.
