The lyrics Siouxsie sings are about a newspaper story she read about a local community group living in high-rise flats who were plagued by crime and had CCTV cameras installed to try and reduce the crime -- but then they became addicted to watching the footage as if they were watching a reality TV show. It was kind of a comment on Reality TV forty years before Reality TV became a fact.
Thanks, I wondered about that, as the lyrics seems kind of oddly prophetic. I guess it is a song in the same vein as Paradise Place (allegedly about obsession with looks and plastic surgery.)
As per your comments about the era this album was recorded -- this was one of a series of British rock/new wave albums recorded between 1978 and 1981 which are now regarded as hugely influential even to this day. At the time "Juju" was released in mid-1981 the Banshees felt a friendly kind of rivalry with their new wave rock peer group (Public Image Limited, Pere Ubu and Wire). Siouxsie in particular felt she was obliged to push the musicians in the band into ever-more increasing extremities partly because she felt they were not taken seriously as musicians. The album producer Nigel Gray (who at the time was producing The Police) swore he'd never work with the band again because he was so appalled at the sound they had arrived at and the record company, expecting hit singles, were also appalled and thought the group had committed career suicide, but it turned out to be their biggest selling and most enduring album. The famous "horse being thrown off a cliff" quote came up because John McGeoch was struggling to find a satisfactory lead guitar line to fill in the gaps between Siouxsie's singing and Budgie's tom-heavy drum playing on one of their most famous songs "Night Shift" (also on this album). And of course he obliged most expertly! Also listen to the first song from this album "Spellbound" and then listen to "Bigmouth Strikes Again" by The Smiths, released a few years later, some tracks from Sinead O'Connor's debut album "The Lion and the Cobra", PJ Harvey's debut album "Dry" and some "OK Computer" songs by Radiohead and you may be surprised at the line of influence coming from "Juju". Not very obvious I know but all the clues are there.
The best band of the 80s, they really pushed musical boundaries, you should definitely explore more! They became very experimental and post punk psychedelic!
Also -- during the recording of this album Siouxsie asked guitarist John McGeoch (genius guitarist who sounded like no-one else and who was a major influence on The Edge of U2, Johnny Marr of The Smiths and Radiohead) to make the guitar sound like "a horse being thrown off a cliff" lol.Then theres Budgie's fabulous drumming, using toms like hi-hats and snares like toms. Watching him actually playing the drums is really exciting in itself!
Excellent reaction and criticism. Much much better than other reactions I've seen on UA-cam about this band. It is difficult to define the music that S&TB achieved at first glance, since their primary interest was not to place limitations on themselves and to color emotional structures very close to the human psyche.
Your comment about the 2 chords reminded me of Rick Beato's video about the best songs with only 2 chords... Fleetwood Mac's - Dreams, and America's - Horse with No Name. Initially the song made me think of an excellent song by Propaganda - Duel.
These Orwellian themes were hugely influential in the 80s. Lyrics in this reminded me strongly of Judas Priest's Electric Eye, which is on almost the exact same theme!
I'll comment again later when I finish the review section, but I just wanted to comment that this band together with The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division and other bands kickstarted what ended up being Gothic Rock. This album, Juju, has specially textural and rhythmic elements typical from the subgenre.
Yeah, it felt quite a bit different from yesterday's Police track. I'm less worried going into the rest of the week now knowing this that is a bit atypical.
@@CriticalReactions Yeah, this is incredibly goth in feel, and like most proto goth bands would feel equally at home in the post punk theme as it does in new wave. This will likely be yet another week where the sample pool will be too wide to give you an idea. I will say though that both new wave and post punk do share this strange alliance between convetional structures and subtle left of field departures. It's repetitive until it isn't, so to speak.
I think the lines between Punk, post, goth and new wave were all very blurry, particularly in the earliest part of the 80s. Like I said about the Police, I think all of the bands that came out of 1st phase punk who didn’t stick to rigid simplicity radiated out in all of those directions named above.
Though Siouxsie started as punk- and her vocals usually sound more or less disembodied and cool. I would say much of the new wave in 1980, 81, maybe 82.. had a stainless steel, remote, antiseptic sound. I’m not totally sure why (I was only 10-11 yrs old then) but the use of synths, electronic, and socially - the threat of nuclear war, new technology, longer work hours & wondering if these things would cause us to lose our humanity - possibly played a part. There are lots of songs that are about these kind of existential crisis (Under Pressure, Synchronicity, Planet Earth, Sweet Dreams..) probably could make a long list. The sound started to thaw out a little from 84 onward.
Ha, finally some Siouxsie....! and wow, rough pick (who picked it, btw, I wonder ?). If I was to pick a song of this great album to make you discover it, i'd rather not pick that "wee bulldozer" but more the next song "Nightshift" of which you had 2 seconds in the video, or "Arabian Knights", or "Voodoo Dolly', but any of those will have this bass & drums forward sound, quite typical of Gothic Rock but also aweing a lot to Post-Punk where for me it rather belongs than New Wave per se (The Cure, on their side, went from Punk to Post-Punk & Cold Wave to New Wave/Pop). The "doubling" of vocals you will find it in all the album, btw, with though more choir parts in "Arabian Knights" for instance, which has a more traditional structure...But the whole album i would call it "Atmospheric Tribal Gothic-Cold Rock" or something like that...worth a listen in its entirety, if, of course you can handle the repetition which is inherent to the Post-Punk genre...
I meant to get to Siouxsie when I was exploring post-punk, but I ended up quitting before I got to them. Definitely enjoyed this. It's a bit more repetitive, but like so much of post-punk I love the combination of mildly abrasive and cool sounding surface aesthetics (the guitar tone, the vocal style) combined with the emphasis on catchy, super poppy hooks. While I've never been a huge punk fan I have always had a soft spot for the punk (or punk-influenced bands) that had knacks for catchy hooks, and if they could combine that with an interesting sound then it's just icing on the cake. Will definitely make this band a priority.
If you haven't heard it yet...I strongly recommend you listen to and analyze their classic, "Cascade", from 1982. I think you'd find it a rather powerful affair. The poetry of it, alone (by Steven Severin, the bass player and co-founding member of the band), is incredible. Siouxsie's vocal on it, is supernal.
Never heard the song and never really listened to them, but sounds like I really need to now. The instrumentation beyond the vocals really reminded me of Leprous for some reason.
Its a great album, bought it on its release & my friend and i were lucky to see them touring the album at The Apollo in Glasgow. We were punks the crowd were punks. Strangest thing i took away from the day was a heavy metal fan , a lad, just in front of us head banging away to the gig.
Interesting. I've never listened to this band before. It reminds me a lot of Switchblade Symphony, a darkwave band, in nearly every aspect. Can't imagine that's a coincidence.
Good evening from venerable New England...Bonkers is a perfect way to describe this band... I forgot how fun and weird this band is and I would classify this as more new wave than anything else..And this song proves you don't need 15 different chords and 6-7 minute songs with multiple passages for it to be interesting..A very nice way to spend my evening...✌️🤘
You need to include 1981, the year it was made into the context of the song. The surveillance tech of today didn't exist. But the song is a warning of things to come. And now it's here.
Try Tool Lostkeys,Rosette stoned Lyrics are so funny and good It's about a man kidnapped by Aliens They tell him how to safe the earth and send him back...but than he has forgotten it all and gets crazy
To add context, when the album was originally released on a 12 inch LP record, the break ended side A of the record. When the record was flipped over to side B, the song would pick up again after the break.
Siouxsie had no training at the beginning screaming a Dalek staccato. Learn later to use her voice. But 30 years of screaming has destroyed her vocals .
Sorry to break it to you, but Beavis and Butthead beat you to doing a Siouxsie reaction: ua-cam.com/video/V4wMWb9U0Gs/v-deo.html It's interesting to hear you find so much oddity in this track, because my own history with Siouxsie & the Banshees (and similar bands) is that they sounded very new to me in the early 80's, but then over time I heard them as not nearly as different from what came before as I had thought. (I remember a family member during a car ride when I was subjecting others to some of their music saying some Siouxsie--I think it was from Kaleidoscope--sounded 60's-ish. That seemed really wrong to me at the time, but not much later I realized, yes, some of the guitar sounds echo earlier psychedelic music.) I am not sure the difference and freshness I was hearing at the time has anything to do with what you find different about the track, but your take does make me wonder if there was more reason to hear them as very different, back when I did. I think when one is young and are at an age when one is developing a sense of being part of a distinct generation, it's easy to latch onto minor differences in music (or perhaps other areas) as signifiers of something new. But after listening to a lot more earlier music, some of that newness may start to sound more and more derivative. Industrial music? I hear some of that in the first two Kraftwerk albums. Heck, I hear hints of it in the Beatles' Anthology version of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Eventually, a listener might find something like that origin of a sound, maybe in some unlistenable academic electronic music from Germany in the 1940's. And even then, it might have been inspired by a live gamelan performance the composer heard at a World Fair.
Totally agree. As music gets defined and categorized it becomes easier to find it in other works. And this certainly applies retroactively. Also my mind is a bit blown at realizing that Beavis and Butthead were (maybe) the first paid music reactors -- if we count Mike Judge getting paid to write and voice their lines.
@@CriticalReactions Oddly, I actually saw that Beavis & Butthead segment on TV in the 90's. I didn't watch that show regularly. Maybe that's the reason the video reaction idea seems familiar somehow. I wanted to come back and say I still like Siouxsie & the Banshees, since part of my comment above might suggest otherwise. They are one of the post-punk acts that have held up the best for me. That doesn't mean I expect to listen to them regularly in the future, but I already have ended up returning to them more than I expected to at one time. I probably would not have chosen "Monitor," but while it's not at the very top of the list of their songs for me, it's a good song, and not one that's going to get covered as often as some others, so a good pick all around. Juju is probably their best album.
You have videos like Dear Prudence that look like gothic psychedelia - there’s definitely a phase for this band where that’s happening. I always thought that, probably because I discovered them in 84 when Hyena came out.
I think you made the connection between the lyrics, vocals, and music towards the song end of your reaction. You mentioned a switch to a to a rhythmic rigid vocal structure which to me signifies a militant, controlling aspect to the monitor. It’s almost claustrophobic.
whoever picked this song thank you
😁💜🤗
The lyrics Siouxsie sings are about a newspaper story she read about a local community group living in high-rise flats who were plagued by crime and had CCTV cameras installed to try and reduce the crime -- but then they became addicted to watching the footage as if they were watching a reality TV show. It was kind of a comment on Reality TV forty years before Reality TV became a fact.
Great,thanks,I've been wondering about the inspiration for those lyrics since '81.I just assumed Sioux was referencing Orwell or Huxley.
Thanks, I wondered about that, as the lyrics seems kind of oddly prophetic. I guess it is a song in the same vein as Paradise Place (allegedly about obsession with looks and plastic surgery.)
As per your comments about the era this album was recorded -- this was one of a series of British rock/new wave albums recorded between 1978 and 1981 which are now regarded as hugely influential even to this day. At the time "Juju" was released in mid-1981 the Banshees felt a friendly kind of rivalry with their new wave rock peer group (Public Image Limited, Pere Ubu and Wire). Siouxsie in particular felt she was obliged to push the musicians in the band into ever-more increasing extremities partly because she felt they were not taken seriously as musicians. The album producer Nigel Gray (who at the time was producing The Police) swore he'd never work with the band again because he was so appalled at the sound they had arrived at and the record company, expecting hit singles, were also appalled and thought the group had committed career suicide, but it turned out to be their biggest selling and most enduring album.
The famous "horse being thrown off a cliff" quote came up because John McGeoch was struggling to find a satisfactory lead guitar line to fill in the gaps between Siouxsie's singing and Budgie's tom-heavy drum playing on one of their most famous songs "Night Shift" (also on this album). And of course he obliged most expertly!
Also listen to the first song from this album "Spellbound" and then listen to "Bigmouth Strikes Again" by The Smiths, released a few years later, some tracks from Sinead O'Connor's debut album "The Lion and the Cobra", PJ Harvey's debut album "Dry" and some "OK Computer" songs by Radiohead and you may be surprised at the line of influence coming from "Juju". Not very obvious I know but all the clues are there.
I appreciate your knowledge and insights
The best band of the 80s, they really pushed musical boundaries, you should definitely explore more! They became very experimental and post punk psychedelic!
“this is bonkers!”-That’s probably the best summary of why I listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees. Everything they do is just different and original…
Also -- during the recording of this album Siouxsie asked guitarist John McGeoch (genius guitarist who sounded like no-one else and who was a major influence on The Edge of U2, Johnny Marr of The Smiths and Radiohead) to make the guitar sound like "a horse being thrown off a cliff" lol.Then theres Budgie's fabulous drumming, using toms like hi-hats and snares like toms. Watching him actually playing the drums is really exciting in itself!
Excellent reaction and criticism. Much much better than other reactions I've seen on UA-cam about this band. It is difficult to define the music that S&TB achieved at first glance, since their primary interest was not to place limitations on themselves and to color emotional structures very close to the human psyche.
Your comment about the 2 chords reminded me of Rick Beato's video about the best songs with only 2 chords... Fleetwood Mac's - Dreams, and America's - Horse with No Name. Initially the song made me think of an excellent song by Propaganda - Duel.
These Orwellian themes were hugely influential in the 80s. Lyrics in this reminded me strongly of Judas Priest's Electric Eye, which is on almost the exact same theme!
I'll comment again later when I finish the review section, but I just wanted to comment that this band together with The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division and other bands kickstarted what ended up being Gothic Rock. This album, Juju, has specially textural and rhythmic elements typical from the subgenre.
Yeah, it felt quite a bit different from yesterday's Police track. I'm less worried going into the rest of the week now knowing this that is a bit atypical.
@@CriticalReactions Yeah, this is incredibly goth in feel, and like most proto goth bands would feel equally at home in the post punk theme as it does in new wave. This will likely be yet another week where the sample pool will be too wide to give you an idea. I will say though that both new wave and post punk do share this strange alliance between convetional structures and subtle left of field departures. It's repetitive until it isn't, so to speak.
I think the lines between Punk, post, goth and new wave were all very blurry, particularly in the earliest part of the 80s. Like I said about the Police, I think all of the bands that came out of 1st phase punk who didn’t stick to rigid simplicity radiated out in all of those directions named above.
One of my favourite SATB tracks.
You should definitely explore more from this band.
Though Siouxsie started as punk- and her vocals usually sound more or less disembodied and cool. I would say much of the new wave in 1980, 81, maybe 82.. had a stainless steel, remote, antiseptic sound. I’m not totally sure why (I was only 10-11 yrs old then) but the use of synths, electronic, and socially - the threat of nuclear war, new technology, longer work hours & wondering if these things would cause us to lose our humanity - possibly played a part. There are lots of songs that are about these kind of existential crisis (Under Pressure, Synchronicity, Planet Earth, Sweet Dreams..) probably could make a long list. The sound started to thaw out a little from 84 onward.
Ha, finally some Siouxsie....! and wow, rough pick (who picked it, btw, I wonder ?). If I was to pick a song of this great album to make you discover it, i'd rather not pick that "wee bulldozer" but more the next song "Nightshift" of which you had 2 seconds in the video, or "Arabian Knights", or "Voodoo Dolly', but any of those will have this bass & drums forward sound, quite typical of Gothic Rock but also aweing a lot to Post-Punk where for me it rather belongs than New Wave per se (The Cure, on their side, went from Punk to Post-Punk & Cold Wave to New Wave/Pop). The "doubling" of vocals you will find it in all the album, btw, with though more choir parts in "Arabian Knights" for instance, which has a more traditional structure...But the whole album i would call it "Atmospheric Tribal Gothic-Cold Rock" or something like that...worth a listen in its entirety, if, of course you can handle the repetition which is inherent to the Post-Punk genre...
I meant to get to Siouxsie when I was exploring post-punk, but I ended up quitting before I got to them. Definitely enjoyed this. It's a bit more repetitive, but like so much of post-punk I love the combination of mildly abrasive and cool sounding surface aesthetics (the guitar tone, the vocal style) combined with the emphasis on catchy, super poppy hooks. While I've never been a huge punk fan I have always had a soft spot for the punk (or punk-influenced bands) that had knacks for catchy hooks, and if they could combine that with an interesting sound then it's just icing on the cake. Will definitely make this band a priority.
Juju is a sick album.
Haaa! That's Siouxsie & The Banshees for you! Brilliant band.
It's been years since I've listened to them. I still like this particuliar voice and style, thanks !
Long time favorite song. Thanks for the review.
If you're looking for more traditionally structured songs from this album try Spellbound or Arabian Knights.
If you haven't heard it yet...I strongly recommend you listen to and analyze their classic, "Cascade", from 1982. I think you'd find it a rather powerful affair. The poetry of it, alone (by Steven Severin, the bass player and co-founding member of the band), is incredible. Siouxsie's vocal on it, is supernal.
Never heard the song and never really listened to them, but sounds like I really need to now. The instrumentation beyond the vocals really reminded me of Leprous for some reason.
Its a great album, bought it on its release & my friend and i were lucky to see them touring the album at The Apollo in Glasgow. We were punks the crowd were punks. Strangest thing i took away from the day was a heavy metal fan , a lad, just in front of us head banging away to the gig.
Interesting. I've never listened to this band before. It reminds me a lot of Switchblade Symphony, a darkwave band, in nearly every aspect. Can't imagine that's a coincidence.
the bands acid years. listening to the album on acid when it was released was immense.
The album juju by Siouxsie and the banshees is the most quintessential!😅😊
Pure 1984. Big brother watching you.
Good evening from venerable New England...Bonkers is a perfect way to describe this band... I forgot how fun and weird this band is and I would classify this as more new wave than anything else..And this song proves you don't need 15 different chords and 6-7 minute songs with multiple passages for it to be interesting..A very nice way to spend my evening...✌️🤘
In this song I feel... The Cure, mid 70' Led Zeppelin... change those guitars to a Funk Metal texture u almost got Janes Addiction
Jane’s addiction loved Siouxsie
I mostly feel Deftones
You need to include 1981, the year it was made into the context of the song. The surveillance tech of today didn't exist. But the song is a warning of things to come. And now it's here.
Yes! 100% sadly.
Try Tool Lostkeys,Rosette stoned Lyrics are so funny and good It's about a man kidnapped by Aliens They tell him how to safe the earth and send him back...but than he has forgotten it all and gets crazy
If you're gonna be doing a bit of a dive into new wave, gotta hit up a Blondie song for sure!
I don't think early Siouxsie is very representative of new wave however
The greatest British band of all time
To add context, when the album was originally released on a 12 inch LP record, the break ended side A of the record. When the record was flipped over to side B, the song would pick up again after the break.
Umm - no it didn't!! Monitor ends side 1 Side 2 starts with Nightshift
In the UK a monitor is llso the name for the cencorship.
AMAZING BAND SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES!! 🤗💜🙂
Great analysis.
Almost my favorite S&B Trac so you picked an awesome to disect technically think it's their head bang & air guitar Trac EBABCOCK
Great song and subject matter as real as it comes.
Does it have anything to do with the adaption of Orwells's 1984 movel into the movie?
Need to check out Suburban Lawns
Olso.
Siouxsie had no training at the beginning screaming a Dalek staccato. Learn later to use her voice. But 30 years of screaming has destroyed her vocals .
Limited, not destroyed, her vocals.
How to get extremely boring about fantastic song.
That's his style, but I appreciate it for what it is.
Sorry to break it to you, but Beavis and Butthead beat you to doing a Siouxsie reaction: ua-cam.com/video/V4wMWb9U0Gs/v-deo.html
It's interesting to hear you find so much oddity in this track, because my own history with Siouxsie & the Banshees (and similar bands) is that they sounded very new to me in the early 80's, but then over time I heard them as not nearly as different from what came before as I had thought. (I remember a family member during a car ride when I was subjecting others to some of their music saying some Siouxsie--I think it was from Kaleidoscope--sounded 60's-ish. That seemed really wrong to me at the time, but not much later I realized, yes, some of the guitar sounds echo earlier psychedelic music.) I am not sure the difference and freshness I was hearing at the time has anything to do with what you find different about the track, but your take does make me wonder if there was more reason to hear them as very different, back when I did.
I think when one is young and are at an age when one is developing a sense of being part of a distinct generation, it's easy to latch onto minor differences in music (or perhaps other areas) as signifiers of something new. But after listening to a lot more earlier music, some of that newness may start to sound more and more derivative. Industrial music? I hear some of that in the first two Kraftwerk albums. Heck, I hear hints of it in the Beatles' Anthology version of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Eventually, a listener might find something like that origin of a sound, maybe in some unlistenable academic electronic music from Germany in the 1940's. And even then, it might have been inspired by a live gamelan performance the composer heard at a World Fair.
Totally agree. As music gets defined and categorized it becomes easier to find it in other works. And this certainly applies retroactively.
Also my mind is a bit blown at realizing that Beavis and Butthead were (maybe) the first paid music reactors -- if we count Mike Judge getting paid to write and voice their lines.
@@CriticalReactions Oddly, I actually saw that Beavis & Butthead segment on TV in the 90's. I didn't watch that show regularly. Maybe that's the reason the video reaction idea seems familiar somehow.
I wanted to come back and say I still like Siouxsie & the Banshees, since part of my comment above might suggest otherwise. They are one of the post-punk acts that have held up the best for me. That doesn't mean I expect to listen to them regularly in the future, but I already have ended up returning to them more than I expected to at one time.
I probably would not have chosen "Monitor," but while it's not at the very top of the list of their songs for me, it's a good song, and not one that's going to get covered as often as some others, so a good pick all around. Juju is probably their best album.
You have videos like Dear Prudence that look like gothic psychedelia - there’s definitely a phase for this band where that’s happening. I always thought that, probably because I discovered them in 84 when Hyena came out.
I think you made the connection between the lyrics, vocals, and music towards the song end of your reaction. You mentioned a switch to a to a rhythmic rigid vocal structure which to me signifies a militant, controlling aspect to the monitor. It’s almost claustrophobic.
This band isn't really into follow ing anybody