Radio 4

Radio 4’s second full length, Gotham!, arrived at my parents’ house in Illinois at some point in early February. And though I didn’t listen to it for a couple of weeks (it came along with a couple of other discs) when I finally heard all that the record had to offer, I began telling everyone I knew who had moderately decent musical taste that Gotham! was most certainly the best dance record of the year and probably one of the best records of the year. I listened to the record incessantly (actually, I still am listening to it incessantly), made tapes of it for ayone who showed any bit of interest, and made sure it was always in my car cd player when driving long distances.

In fact, the record impressed me so much that I was spurred into doing something that I had never done before: writing a critical essay in the hopes that it would be published in a significant alternative weekly like the Chicago Reader. For the first time in a relatively long time, I was excited to be writing about music. I was enthused and inspired by the sounds of Radio 4 and in the piece (which placed the record within the context of the death of danceable rock songs in both mainstream and underground rock and their current reemergence) I tried to describe not only the sounds, but the feeling that the songs evoked:

“On Gotham!, every song is worthy of a dance break like the one that follows ‘The Breakfast Club’s infamous in-school toke-up session. Molly Ringwald should be bobbing her head and stamping her feet in fits of ecstatic, tension-releasing joy to the sounds of tracks like ‘Certain Tragedy and ‘Our Town’.”

I even wrote one of the best paragraphs I think I’ve ever written when I concluded the essay with the words:

“Rock’n’roll has always been hedonistic. It’s the reason why Christians deemed it the devil’s music; why a generation of disenchanted young people raised during the Reagan era helped to make ‘alternative’ the mainstream, even if for only a couple of years; and why the last ten years of underground music has, in taking itself a bit too seriously, encouraged its proponents to deny themselves the opportunity to dance. And though rock has experienced competition from studio-concocted pop, laptop-developed electronica, and street born hip-hop, it continues to change and grow, be political and sometimes even make people dance. If Gotham! proves anything, it’s just how good a bit of dancing can be.”