Missing Persons Put Their Own Imprint on New Wave In So Many Words

In tribute to Scrabble Day, that vocabulary expanding game that introduced us to what makes a Triple Word Score I shine my musical high beams on the spaced out New Wave quintet known as Missing Persons. Specifically I wish to make a few points about "Words". In the first half of the '80s New Wave came on like gangbusters. To be a New Wave sensation on MTV all you needed was reasonably well developed fashion sense, a tendency to be more than a little camera friendly, and a synthesizer that sounded like it was plucked out of the cantina of some rec room in the Orion Nebula galaxy. Sure one could make out the presence of drums and possibly some rapidly interchanging guitar wizardry but in New Wave land synthesizers ruled with an iron fist. My holy (or unholy depending on whether synths annoyed the crap out of you) trinity of New Wave intro songs are Gary Numan's "Cars" which is operating table icy, The Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star" which might have proved its own prophecy by failing to get any higher than #40 on the Billboard Singles Chart, and M's "Pop Muzik" which sounds like it was composed in a mad genius's secret laboratory. The body of work from Missing Persons doesn't fall far from this zone of personal detachment. "Words" is a blast for me because of how the instruments fight with each other, as if they're trying to prove lead nymph Dale Bozzio's point that there's no use talking when no one's listening to the words. For starters we get this ton of bricks subtle synth riffs followed by Warren Cuccurullo snapping at it with a guitar flash not unlike the sudden pouncing motion of a cat jabbing at a ball of yarn. This musical mano a mano endures for several seconds before Dale sets off on our voyage asking the perfectly innocent questions: "Do you hear me? Do you care?" Right off the bat you can tell there's a real social isolation at work. She speaks. He's stumbling around in a fog displaying an appalling lack of communication skills. Being I'm an avid book reader as well as an obsessed music lover I grin pretty widely at the lyrics: "It's like the feeling at the end of a page when you realize you don't know what you just read." Folks, I've read a hell of a lot of books in my time. The amount of stuff I actually remember from those books is far less impressive. I know exactly what it's like to devote all that cosmic energy to what you think is going to be at most an edifying or at the very least an entertaining read only to discover the snoozing donkey between your ears never woke up. On to the brand of atmospherics. Dale Bozzio, Warren Cuccurullo, and triple synth wielders Chuck Wild, Patrick O'Hearn, and Terry Bozzio (who also lays down some splendid drum drilling here) are Earthlings yet the single they hatched in late 1981 is from another dimension. Do you see the Milky Way on your right? Is the moon growing intimidatingly close. Congratulations. Now you know what listening to a Missing Persons record feels like. Many's the Walkman wearer who rocketed off to prime escapist entertainment listening to Dale, one of, if not the most exotic babe of all the '80s femme starlets, as her unique voice gave way to the occasional ditzy squeak, a possible precursor to any one of a number of pre-teen males' masturbatory fantasies. In the '90s, Bjork became that out of this world siren, in the 2000s Lady Gaga assumed that position. Really the only '80s female vocalist who might have been inhaling the same level of cocaine to maintain her persona was Grace Jones. Try to YouTube a Grace Jones interview sometime and you'll see while she's a woman capable of commanding a room she's not necessarily someone I'd want to be left alone with. In Dale's defense the infancy stage of MTV was blank canvas modes of expression and not much else. Videos were pasted together on the cheap. A lot of what you saw in the beginning was cam corder quality at best. There was not much of any precedent set for artistic achievement beyond the likes of Toni Basil's cheerleader pep rally  in "Mickey". Missing Persons photogenic, glammed up look was a direct product of they're being savvy enough to know that if you spritzed on enough hair mousse/Aqua Net (Dale's look in this video backs up at least one other band member's notion that she looked like a piece of candy. To this day you have to ask yourself, "What's keeping those jugs in place?" Musically 'Words" has lots to recommend it. The way the synths and guitar bounce off each other never fails to engage my attention. As alluded to earlier, Terry kills it behind the kit. The overall vibe is bouncy, pleasant, cotton candy easy to digest. On top of that, Dale really is asking a socially relevant question. What are words for when no one listens anymore? Come to think of it that's a very timely question. Our supposed leaders in Washington should take a second to reflect on that. A New Wave delectable lifted from the Reagan Era has the same relevancy lyrically here in the Obama Era. Our higher ups need to shut up more and bitch less. Maybe then actual headway might get made, the kind that will speak highly of our notch in history. The chords swirl around my head, crooking their fingers in an attempt to whisk me away from my suburban living room to a galaxy where dreaming isn't a sneer worthy way to occupy one's time. Some 30 plus years later "Words" is still a New Wave intro study worth talking about.