CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Adam McGovern
July 29, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of reconsidered passions, reassessed hates, and reversed feelings everywhere in-between. Series edited by Adam McGovern.

MISSING PERSONS

Like my mother, the content algorithms of the 2020s know me better than I know myself. The cloud-radio in my electric car calls up songs I haven’t listened to in 40 years, and makes me realize I liked them all along.

We tend to see musical taste as subjective, but in the days before our playlists were each curated for an audience of one, personal taste was a lot more conditioned on what other people think. Those of us who identified as outliers guarded our margins fiercely, with strict rules for what we allowed each other, and ourselves, to enjoy.

While we sat in front of MTV for hours-long jags, it satisfied us to think the suits had filtered out the edgier artists we knew were missing from the diluted mix that did get on.

And one thing that was always on was Missing Persons. The clockwork syncopation of “Words” and the strangely blissful melancholy of “Destination Unknown” seemed like earworms genetically engineered to go straight to your subconscious. Resistance was futile, but though I couldn’t get them out of my head, I also couldn’t recognize what they were rhyming with that was already in there.

Or, I wouldn’t. There were any number of ingredients of Missing Persons’ sound, imagery and success that I felt obliged to reject. Their limited palette of electronic tones felt remaindered from Gary Numan’s or Devo’s keyboard-memory; we’d heard this before and enjoyed pointing it out. Their alienation felt like an affectation; our own outsider anguish repackaged as a fashion statement. Their lead singer Dale Bozzio’s discarded-mannequin aesthetic and Betty Boop-bot delivery seemed a troubling Reagan-era retreat from assertive feminism, not so much in the foreground as on display.

To groove to “Words” would be to capitulate; to succumb to “Destination”’s mournful beauty would be to wallow. The truth was, the abandon of bouncy pop like “Words” made way too direct an appeal to a body I didn’t even feel I was in, and the wistful gloom of a “Destination” came way too close to the long and deep post-adolescent depression I would rather not realize I was sliding into.

While I was running from those truths, there were contexts and comic timing I was rushing right past. These were virtuosos masquerading as one-note new-wavers, veterans of (and actually then still serving in) Frank Zappa’s stable of symphonic players and audio anarchists. Bozzio was a double-agent taking her real-life Playboy Bunny past and pushing it beyond its dissolute extreme to short-circuit gender norms from within. The band economically reprocessed their biggest hits’ programmed-sounding rhythms and run-down-battery melodic patterns into their lesser hits like “Walking in L.A.”

Observations like that last one are assisted by digital radio’s roulette of associations. So is the realization that Missing Persons were as much leaders as followers, to judge from, say, their whole career being condensed into ’Til Tuesday’s defining hit, the lushly numb “Voices Carry,” later that decade. The direct lineage between Bozzio’s posthuman persona and Lady Gaga’s artificial identities is more something I can figure out on my own, with the fog of period specifics cleared away.

Missing Persons made their mark and reached their peak with the businesslike efficiency of a marketing team, both the perfect product of and comment on the moment that created them. Now I can appreciate it fully, even if I myself was partly missing when I heard it first.

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CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

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