After over a decade of avoiding the evil conveniences of streaming music on Spotify, I have finally given up.  I’ve been enjoying the exploitative service for a full year now, contributing fractions of pennies to my favorite artists and turning my head when Belly’s “Delete Spotify” profile-pic message appears while their songs play.  As proof of this shame, I’ll share my Spotify Wrapped data for 2024 below.  As you might expect, it’s changed my music-listening habits quite a bit, fracturing the full-album sessions I get listening to LPS & cassettes at home to instead rely on shuffling songs on discordant playlists while I’m on the go – something I haven’t experienced since owning iPods in the aughts.  That fracturing is not entirely inherent to the digital-listening era, though.  There were plenty of artist-showcase compilations that preceded the LimeWire playlist era, and some were even released into movie theaters.  I remember being especially blown away by the near-impossible line-up of the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, which improbably included performances by Chuck Berry, Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, James Brown, and The Rolling Stones.  That roster is nearly indistinguishable from hitting shuffle on a 1960s playlist on Spotify, and I have since discovered its 1980s punk equivalent in Urgh! A Music War.

Urgh! A Music War is a no-nonsense marathon of live performances from early-80s New Wavers, attempting to document the exact moment when punk got weird. It’s like stumbling into a local Battle of the Bands contest and discovering your all-time-top-10 favorite acts in just a couple hours . . . mixed in with a bunch of other bands that are pretty good too.  The MVPs of this live-performance playlist include Devo, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Go’s, Klaus Nomi, Gary Numan, Joan Jett, The Cramps, Gang of Four, Dead Kennedys, Au Pairs, Echo & the Bunnymen, Pere Ubu, Magazine, X, XTC, and I guess The Police, if you’re into that kind of thing.  There is no narration or context provided to connect these acts and, unlike the single-event documentation of The T.A.M.I. Show, the performances are split between separate concerts in the US & the UK.  Urgh! makes more sense as a live compilation album than as a feature film, which might help explain why it was released on vinyl a full year before the movie version hit theaters, and why it mostly faded into obscurity outside a few cable broadcasts and a subsequent made-on-demand DVD-R release from the Warner Archive.  Still, it’s a staggeringly impressive list of new wave & post-punk acts to collect under one label, as long as you’re willing to look past the disconcerting number of white Brits playing reggae in the mix.  I even made a couple new-to-me discoveries in the process, adding some tracks from Toyah to my “Liked” playlist on Spotify and finding no results on the app when I searched for the band Invisible Sex.

The major triumph of Urgh! is entirely in the assemblage of its line-up, since most of its filmed performances are straight-forward rock & roll numbers; such is the essence of punk.  Only The Police introduce a stadium-rock grandeur at the film’s bookends, concluding this breakneck showcase on a bloated, dubbed-out medley of “Roxanne” and “So Lonely” that’s drained of whatever punk ethos the band might’ve had in them before they blew up.  Without the sing-along crowd participation that bolsters The Police, the 27 other bands on the docket have to stand out through pure rock & roll energy, since the camerawork & editing do little to back them up besides occasionally scanning the crowd in the pit and on the curb for streetwear fashion reports.  The political reggae band Steelpulse spices things up with a skanking Klansman.  Lux Interior from The Cramps enthusiastically fellates his microphone while teasing the exposure of his actual dick, which is barely concealed by sagging leather pants.  Spizzenergi vocalist Spizz goes a little overboard trying to add novelty to the band’s performance of their punk-circuit hit “Where’s Captain Kirk?”, putting more energy into spraying the crowd & camera with silly string than into reciting his lyrics.  Since the talent on hand is so overwhelming in total, each band’s memorability relies on small moments of novelty.  That is, except for Devo, Gary Numan, and Klaus Nomi, who incorporated a keen sense of visual art to their stage craft that translates exceptionally well to this medium.

Urgh! A Music War is glaringly imperfect. As amazing as the line-up is, it’s sorely missing The B-52s, whose Wild Planet-era material would’ve fit in perfectly.  Of the acts included, there are a few like X, XTC, and Peru Ubu that appear to be suffering late-in-the-set exhaustion, not quite living up to the energy they bring to their studio recordings.  The imperfections and inconsistences frequently account for the appeal of this musical-styles mashup compilation, though; it’s the same appeal in listening to a well-curated Spotify playlist on shuffle.  The cut from Gary Numan’s future-synth phantasmagoria to the no-frills rock & roll of Joan Jett and The Blackhearts is especially jarring and says a lot about the precarious identity of punk at the start of its new decade.  It’s the same thrill I get when my Spotify “Liked” list jumps from City Girls to Xiu Xiu to Liz Phair, except that it used to be immortalized on vinyl & celluloid instead of relying on the whims of a malfunctioning algorithm.

-Brandon Ledet