Blast from the past! One of the quintessential Toronto bands of the Canadian New Wave, circa 1980, Martha and the Muffins weren’t half-bad in retrospect, not bad at all, despite being what we all used to refer to derisively as “CanCon”. Their signature tune, and perhaps the ultimate evocation of 1980s Toronto, was Echo Beach, which bopped along just fine, but didn’t rock quite as hard as this one, with its bitchin’ guitar solo and obligatory saxophone interludes (it was the Eighties, after all). Plus, it was about the first thing to hit the charts since the execrable I Am Woman to put out an unabashedly feminist message, which seemed sort of novel at the time. Now, I suppose, the male backlash crowd would complain that Women Around the World at Work is just so nauseatingly woke, egads, and why does everything have to be about how lousy men are anyway?
Well, because men generally are pretty lousy, and the only thing holding anything together on this dirtball is the tireless work of billions of women, the bulk of whom get sexually harassed and shat upon for their trouble, while living in fear of being sexually assaulted, which about one in four of them will be, right here in woke North America. So shut up and listen.
Besides, it’s a rockin’ little number, isn’t it? The sound benefitted from the great Daniel Lanois, making his debut as a producer, who’d soon achieve fame working with U2, Bob Dylan, and other such luminaries. It peaked at a disappointing #24 on the Canadian charts, about 20 spots behind the theme from the movie Arthur, which from where I sit tells you everything you need to know about the music-buying public.
What the heck, here’s Echo Beach, now indeed far away in time.
the needlefish 