07-19-1980 – The Game – NME

FLOGGING A DEAD PANTOMIME HORSE
by Paul Du Noyer

ABANDON HOPE: all ye who enter here . . .

Between them, Quiss and Keen represented everything that was depressing about music in the ’70’s – like emotional emptiness dressed up as spectacle, like irrelevance to anyone’s life, like the mega-success bought by corporate push and a new market of almost Pavlovian docility. They represented the elevation of mediocrity. Given half the chance they’ll carry on the same way straight through the ’80’s as well. Neither enterprise shows even the slightest inclination to play it any other way but safe.

After all, why kill the dinosaur that lays the golden dung?

Why, indeed, even bother to acknowledge the artist’s nominal responsibility to make an effort, when every shred of evidence suggests that your public actually prefers yesterday’s re-heated leftovers? What splendid good sense to keep contriving those same old inspirational vacuums, in the confident expectation that nature will rush to fill them with cash. It would be nice to hope that these bands will one day recognise their creative bankruptcy and retire with dignity – nice, but unrealistic.

Instead, we get two more utterly unnecessary albums full of a music which ran its course a good six years ago: lumbering slack-jawed, big-booted heavy rock; either in harmony syrup (Queen) or with cartoon crassness (Kiss). Both are slick, glossy and soulless. Neither mean a thing. Both have been joylessly conceived with cynical disregard for every value which ever made music genuinely important to life. But who can blame them? What performer needs to get wrapped up in all that social/emotional realism stuff, when every chart screams out advice to the contrary? Give us the old razzle-dazzle, anything but the truth. Give us ELO and Oblivion Neutron Bomb.

As a matter of fact, all the comparisons to be made here are immensely flattering to Queen. Like Kiss, they’re flogging a dead pantomime horse, but it’s at least one of their own design. You must strive to forget every Freddie Mercury song you hear, but at least you remember it in the first place. And so on.

All that’s remotely interesting in the Kiss package is its strip-cartoon cover – all about the press efforts to uncover our heroes’ true identities. Even that’s a bit puzzling, because I don’t care what Kiss really look like, and I don’t know anybody who does. True, the band are showing ever-growing refinement and skill at what they do, but it’s still difficult to imagine them producing anything memorable. It’s that mysterious Grand Funk Railroad syndrome – American acts become massively successful then vanish from your consciousness as totally as if they’d never existed.

Elsewhere, both albums are being hailed as contemporary masterpieces. Me, I’m going to bed.