Since first hearing “World Shut Your Mouth” back in 1987, I’ve pretty much been a huge fan of Julian Cope (and, shortly afterwards, his earlier band, The Teardrop Explodes). I count his sprawling eco-conscious opus from 1991, Peggy Suicide as one of my favorite albums of all time. As versed in unfettered, balls-out rock-blitzkrieg as he is in timeless pop hooks, Cope’s gifts for both songwriting and showmanship are robust, a fact that’s made his more relatively recent forays into less accessible frontiers all the more frustrating.
Since the mid-to-late 1990’s, Cope’s prolific muse has led him down a few adventurous paths that have largely betrayed his more celebratedly pronounced musical chops, often -– to my mind -- at the expense of his output, giving full sway to his notorious eccentricities and putting message before music. If you’d cut your teeth on his work with The Teardrop Explodes or his poppier fare on St. Julian or the afore-cited concept album, Peggy Suicide, albums like 2005’s Citizen Cain’d or 2008’s Black Sheep probably left you a bit nonplussed. I gather he’s since returned to more melodic, song-based territory (fueled, strangelly enough, by a newfound love of beer), but I can’t say I’ve heard that material s yet.
So, while I abandoned the increasingly fruitless folly of keeping up with his tireless musical output of the last two decades, I remained an avid reader of his website, Head Heritage, for quite a while and will cotinue to cherish and regularly listen to everything in his catalog up to and including 1995’s 20 Mothers.
Oddly enough, this windy preamble obfuscates that this post isn’t really about Julian Cope at all.
I can’t remember what I was searching for at the time, but I came across this homemade video for “The Amerian Lite,” the penultimate track off Peggy Suicide. Not really a video so much as simply a still shot (and mistitled “The American Life”), this video features a photograph of New York City with the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming in the background.
The weird thing is, while the options are obviously finite, I'm not entirely certain of the spot picture.
Probably snapeed at some point in the 80`s, is that West Broadway at Spring Street ?
What say you? Weigh in.
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