The Horror of Sparks’ 'In Outer Space' (1983)
Released eight years before 'American Psycho' it perfectly captures the hedonistic anhedonia of the 1980s
“But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.”
(Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho, 1991)
Watching Sparks at the Royal Albert Hall with my partner yesterday [30th May 2023] I turned to her after Ron and Russell Mael and their four-piece backing band had played through a track off their new album, 'A Love Story', and commented, “that’s an evil sounding song”.
My mum says she was scared of Ron Mael when she was a child. It would have been back in 1974 so she would have been on the cusp of adulthood when she watched Sparks perform the iconic 'This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us' on Top of the Pops. In that performance – which prompted, in the apocryphal story, John Lennon to call Ringo Starr and tell him to “turn on the telly, Hitler is performing with Marc Bolan” – Ron is completely inscrutable, as stern and taciturn as Russell is dandyish. Like the great 1920s silent film star, Buster Keaton, he might be described as the “Great Stone Face”. Ron’s moustache is, after all, modelled on that of Charlie Chaplin… though, as his lyrics to 1982’s 'Moustache' gamely point out – “when I trimmed it real small, my Jewish friends would never call” – it just as much recalls the Great Dictator as the Tramp.
My mum is not alone in finding Ron Mael creepy. Indeed, in the Sam Pekinpah-directed video for their 1981 single 'Funny Face', little girls run away screaming from the sight of Ron wearing a predatory wolf mask. The lyrics of the song are about a famous model who fears he is only valued for his looks, attempts suicide by jumping from a bridge, fails, but finds that in being facially disfigured he is now much happier – his wish to have a “funny face” having come true. The song is about the existential fallout from a society that judges people based upon superficial appearances.
Which is what the video demonstrates. Ron, in his goat mask, innocently brandishes a handful of flowers and smiles amicably at the children playing. He tries to offer the children some kind of cake or pastry and then is batted away by a concerned mother.
Meanwhile, it is the beautific Russell who gyrates in his long tan overcoat, looking on in his reflective aviator shades. The video makes it very clear that it is Russell, not Ron, who is the degenerate menace that should be feared, despite appearances.
The first key to appreciating Sparks is understanding that Ron is the lyricist. Those strange, whimsical lyrics have – with very few exceptions – been written by the seemingly conservative square who sits behind the keyboards. As such, Russell is the actor who dramatises Ron’s lyrics, bringing his different narrators to life. (Also, because he’s the older brother, this means Ron can make Russell sing such stupid, self-incriminating lyrics as “Hello everybody this is Russel, right before I speak I’m gonna make a muscle”). This dynamic is brought to live as a genuinely discomforting visual metaphor in the video for their otherwise rather sweet 1980 song 'When I’m With You' with Ron controlling Russell as a ventriloquist’s dummy.
For a band generally regarded as irreverent, goofy and funny (all true), Ron’s lyrics have often been disquieting and troublesome. A handful of examples that pop to mind are the self-loathing narrator who pleads for his lover to “just pretend I’m Sherlock Holmes” on the 1982 track that shares the fictional detective’s name; the 'Big Boy' who turns up and throws the girls around – anthropomorphised rollercoaster as “well-equipped” macho man; the paedophilic narrator of Terminal Jive’s queasy 'Young Girls'; the emotionally-abused and devoted husband of 'I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car'; whatever on earth 'Under the Table with Her' is about… I mean, their most recent single 'Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is' is basically a 3-minute version of Thomas Ligotti’s anti-natalist tract The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.
On its surface, Sparks’ In Outer Space (1983) break-out album in America (where it reached No. 88 on the Billboard 200 albums chart) is one of their lightest and most irreverent albums. In his '25 Albums by Sparks' article, Adam Cadre ranks it low in his personal list of favourite Sparks albums, summing up its lyrical content as “satirical tales of characters in search of coolness, popularity, and hedonism—obsessions of the ’80s to go with the sounds of the ’80s”. In their review on the equally comprehensive ‘Sparks Project’ on kittysneezes.com Matt Keeley describes it as “one of the weaker albums”, while his co-reviewer Aila says that “the switch that always goes off in my brain when I hear this one is the same as when I watch a "so bad it’s good" kind of movie. Basically, this is the Troll 2 of albums.”
However, while this seems like damning with faint praise, Aila hones in on the satirical thrust of the album when she proclaims that “Sparks had taken the glossy, plastic-sounding music made by a few bands around this time (most notably DEVO), and raised it several levels to a plateau of absurdity”.
Yet, the reflection that this is “probably the funniest Sparks album overall” (which I would have agreed with when the Kitty Sneezes article was released back in 2011, but would now say that IOS has been outdone comedically by 2020’s A Steady Drip, Drip Drip) potentially misleads the reader into thinking IOS is not an achingly sad and disquieting album, obsessive charting closed systems of desire that preclude the possibility of real human communication or connection!
'Cool Places' begins with what sounds like it could only be a drum machine… yet the album notes inform me that David Kendrick played drums on the album. Rarely has an actual drum kit sounded less like a drum kit played by an actual human. Likewise, the lyrics, sang alternatingly by Russell and the Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin, sound like the words people would say in an infomercial rather than reality:
I wanna go to cool places with you
I wanna take you cool places tonight
I wanna go where nobody’s a fool
And no one says uh, "Hey girl, need a light?"
I’m more inclined to refer to Urban Dictionary on the topic of cool than any other more reputable source. The site’s users variaby define ‘cool’ as someone “being themselves and not caring how other people view what they say or do”, the “ironic deconstruction of an ideal state” and “someone who receives the respect of others”. ‘Cool Places’ uses the term (including its derivative ‘cooler’) some fifty-eight times to deadening effect. If ‘cool’ had some kind of referent at the start of the song (Russell’s salmon suit jacket in the music video, perhaps) by the end of the song it has been transformed into a completely emptied out signifier. Russell and Jane’s narrators are consumed by the persuit of an unattainable ideal that completely defines their joint self-worth. Russell recalls that “last Saturday night” the cool club they wanted to attend wouldn’t let them in; Jane reassures us that this time, “they let us in, so I’m feeling alright” [confusingly this is related in reverse]. Russell concludes that they must, therefore, be “cooler now”. The abitrary whim of a doorman has determined their status of cool but there is no other evidence they they are any more or less cool than they were the previous weekend! Coolness is not only a desirable commodity, the rules by which you obtain it are completely obscure and unintelligible. The interminable repetition of the end of the song of “I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go” points towards the endless deferral of this signifying system, which is all desire and no payoff. The music neither rises nor falls but remains flat throughout.
Not coincidentally, the music video for 'Cool Places' was directed by Graeme Whifler. If you ever wanted to clue in the viewer that this single was not taken from a straight-forward pop album, using the music video director most associated with avant-garde eyeball-headed subversives The Residents would be the way to do it. While the 'Cool Places' video is nowhere near as unsettling as Whifler’s video for the Residents’ 'Hello Skinny' it is relentlessly unappealing in its use of garishingly clashing colours, blue-screen and Ron’s maniacally gurning face.
Not content to hammer home his point in one song, Ron continues to pursue the same theme of deadning superficiality in the second track of the album, the muted tinny pop anthem 'Popularity', which even when reworked by Erasure on 1997’s Plagarism still remains determinedly anhedonic… despite the pumping bass and drum fills. The original works best, however, in its bleakly subdued minimalism. Supposedly there are two (two?!) guitar players on the track (Bob Haag and Leslie Bohem) but it must just be the Roland guitar synthesizer I can hear, as well as the endless 3/4 beat of the drums and Ron playing a simple chord progression on the cheapest sounding keyboard imaginable. I find it musically almost unlistenably bleak, even while Russell’s falsetto reaches a kind of emotionless crystalline perfection.
The yearningly optimistic lyrics only add to the eeriness. Russell’s narrator claims that he is glad he’s “got all those friends” and sings about meeting up and chatting with them. Yet it is like an unconvincing AI chatterbot or alien trying to talk about friendship. We learn nothing about these friends (or the narrator’s lover) save for the fact that “they’re all alright”, with Russell then reflecting, “maybe that’s why we’re friends”. The lyrics are composed almost exclusively of simple compound sentences – “I like you and you like me a lot/ And it’s nice to be all alone with you too/ But it’s also nice being out with our friends” – which adds to the sense that the narrator is thinking like a computer program, calculating the optimal number of friends through Boolean logic rather than human feeling. It is not only the lack of empathy that is disturbing, but the lack of passion or true desire on the part of the narrator. As with coolness in 'Cool Places' so with popularity in 'Popularity'. The songs work together as a poisonous symbiotic pair – it is important to be popular in order to be cool; it is important to be cool in order to be popular.
Of course, Ron isn’t just sneering at the cool kids and those who want to be popular… 'Cool Places' and 'Popularity' wouldn’t feel so melancholy if they were just written from the outside looking in. One doesn’t write a song like 'When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’' if you aren’t interested in gaining fame, fortune and a measure of popularity, whether from critics or fans.
My assertion about Ron does not merely derive from extrapolating wildly from his lyrics, however, but also from a fascinating interview he and Russell gave in 1983 alongside Andy Warhol.
The interviewer, Maura Moynihan, remarks to Ron that one thing she’s noticed about Sparks’ songs is that Ron is “still writing about the same rock ‘n’ roll themes that Elvis created about having a good time and going to parties”. “One thing that works to my advantage,” Ron replies, is that “I’m… in a way… emotionally retarded. That’s kinda where I live… in those kind of things… cool places and parties and all”.
Because we dismiss this as simply tongue-in-cheek, it’s worth reminding (or acquainting) ourselves with the fact that Ron and Russell spent high school playing football and baseball and surfing. The Mael Brothers were not nerds.
As such, the album’s next track, 'Prayin’ for a Party', written from the perspective of a teenage kid, should be taken as just as earnest a declaration of dedication to partying hard as similar sentiments from the Beastie Boys and Andrew WK. Crunchy electric guitar chords usher in the most homely lyrics on the album in which Ron/Russell bids goodnight to mum and dad, who remind the narrator to say their prayers before they go to sleep. On his knees he prays… for a party!
Prayin’ for a party, c’mon Lord, c’mon Lord
Prayin’ for a party
All of my friends are prayin’ like prayin’ fools
Send us a little jive and we’ll be all right
I will readily admit to this being the least horrifying, most wholesome track on the album, but I think there is something a touch disquieting about a kid so desperate for a party that he prays to God until “both [his] knees are red”. The holy communion between a child and God exploited in the service of hedonism! Still, it’s nothing on the next song, ‘All You Ever Think About is Sex’.
The track is one of the band’s most insidious ear worms, its lyrics tracking the relationship with the narrator and his nymphomaniac partner who only ever thinks about sex – exclusively. This starts off innocuously enough. The couple have sex at Christmas and are busted by a nun; they do so in a museum beneath a mastodon; they state their positions on the White House lawn. Illegal, perhaps, but not harmful.
However, after the repeated refrain of the chorus – “all you ever think about is sex (alright with me)” – the recounted situations get a bit more inappropriate still. Russell asks whether his partner remembers “the Dodgers and the Mets” where “fifty thousand people saw us and turned red”. Okay, so they’re exhibitionists… problematic, but hardly disturbing. Then, just as casually, comes the next line: “I'm still not recovered from Saturday's faux pas/ When your father came home, saw us, and dropped dead”. In the previous verse, Ron uses rhyming couples, here he rhymes the fourth line unexpectedly with the second line. As such, “dropped dead” is given an appropriate suddenness, which isn’t given time to register in the short second before Russell begins the chorus again. The fact that the narrator sees causing his partner’s father’s death as a “faux pas” suggests the deadening of sentiment already charted by both 'Cool Places' and 'Popularity'.
This emotional portraiture is finally underlined with the lyrics to the bridge of the song in which Russell sings, “In this world of lovers we don’t love each other much/ Fact is, we’re too busy to love each other much”. The repetition (in place of an expected rhyme) intentionally strikes hollow. Neither the narrator nor his partner care about each other or anything else save getting their rocks off. Like the narrators of 'Cool Places' and 'Popularity' (and arguably even the narrator of 'Prayin’ for a Party') in place of emotional intimacy, they have pure chemical exchange, perfectly matched to the stupid simple pleasures of the keyboard melodies Ron provides for each song [especially knowing from the earlier glam rock albums how much more musically sophisticated his melodies can be when he so chooses]. Of course Andy Warhol looks on at Ron with such silent approval in the interview above.
The next track, 'Please, Baby, Please', manages to distill the 1980s synthetic production sound down to pure vibes, with a moody, pleading performance by Russell. This is Sparks’ laconic version of the Police’s 'Every Breath You Take', or even Momus’s 'Closer to You' from a few years later. Here Russell plays a self-styled “sensitive guy” who just wants the object of his desire to treat him a little better… like the similar narrator of FFS’s 'Johnny Delusional', he’s not about to take no for an answer… love bombing and cajoling the baby of the title, sending her flowers and candy – the things he claims to “detest” – in his bid to impress her. The Roland synthesizer shimmers and stabs, the track chugging along at a faster BPM than most of the other tracks on the album. This is the track to which, for me, Joey Migeed’s review of the album on Kitty Sneezes applies most accurately:
Armed with nothing but a LinnDrum and a Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer, Ron Mael cooks up a batch of tunes carefully orchestrated to lure the listener with hooks and melodies at every turn, while keeping them at arm’s length with deliberately cold and uninviting production […] Throughout the album, the catchy singalong lyrics grab your attention, but the thudding electronic drums and the glistening, robotic synthesizer lines make sure that you never become too comfortable in this world. Sparks want you to only watch and observe this artificial landscape upon which they’ve constructed these grim character studies, and dance along to the beat while you’re at it.
Migeed describes 'Please, Baby, Please' as “a me-too synthpop trifle” and it’s towards the end of the track that Ron tips the lyrics from the straightforwardly creepy into the alarmingly criminal with the remarkably squicky line, “You ‘no speaky the language’ when I get near/ And I'm losin' it fast, I'm gettin' weird”. In an even sleazier-sounding track from 1986’s Music That You Can Dance To, Russell sings about a taciturn woman who responds to his advances with a seeming complete lack of language or communicative ability… but at the very least the fact that the only words she is able to say are “let’s get funky” suggests that she is interested in the amorous narrator; in 'Please, Baby, Please' there is zero indication that the intented recipient of the lyrics is anything by a confused and/or terrified victim.
And then 'Rockin’ Girls' is even creepier! If you can imagine a hot and flustered Elvis doing a MIDI-guitar ode to teenage girls on the cheapest equipment in the sweatiest dive bar then you have successfully imagined what this horrible song sounds like. Russell’s yearning, yelping, Southern-inflected vocals genuinely make me feel a little bit sick here. The track, as linked, is significantly improved by a somewhat unsettling performance by a growly-voiced cigarette-smoking woman, in what looks like a cheap hotel room, who dances along to the track while lip-syncing to it!
Ron sets his sordid stall early with the opening lyrics to this track, which are:
Rockin’ girls
Just 17
The cutest thing I've ever seen
C’mon baby, rock with me tonight
Not worrying about falling foul of the Californian penal code, the 35-year-old Russell – as firmly in character as when Danny Elfman sang 'Little Girls' – reflects, “I hope I never have to see the doctor ‘cause of you; I hope you never have to see the doctor ‘cause of me”. While the guitar riff is plenty lively, the song intentionally never picks up, remaining weirdly flat and affectless throughout in spite of the intensity of Russell who sounds like he’s channelling Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and other 1950s rockabilly perverts. The weirdest, most queasy lines once again come towards the end of the song. While imploring the girl to “c’mon” and “let’s go” Russell’s narrator repeats, “You still look kinda slow”, either suggesting 1.) She’s not dancing 2.) She’s not keen or interested or… how my brain always reads it… 3.) She seems cognitively impaired. Oof. Intended as darkly funny, I think, but I find it a tough listen!
Things actually lighten up somewhat with the next track, the straightforwardly humorous 'I Wish I Looked a Little Better'. Migeed sees the track as stepping outside of “the satire and sharp social commentary” of the rest of the album, reading it as the kind of goofy character study that would have fit in well on the brothers’ preceding album, 1982’s Angst in My Pants. Musically the track is certainly less stripped down and subdued, sounding more like the bouncier new wave pop-rock of that (super fun!) album. While I essentially agree with Migeed’s verdict, I do think the track gains a degree of darkness and pathos if read against Sparks’ earlier single, the aforementioned 'Funny Face'. In that track, the narrator hates being judged on his good looks and the superficiality this implies. At the end of the song he is finally happy after a suicide attempt leaves him facially disfigured.
In 'I Wish I Looked a Little Better', however, the narrator laments, “Turn out the lights and I might have a chance/ I guess I look slightly worse than the Elephant Man/ Whoa, oh, oh, I wish I looked a little better”. While the fact that this has been his fate since high school suggests that it is not literally the same character as from 'Funny Face', the fact that the situation has flipped speaks to the album’s concern with superficiality in a culture in which looks really are everything. The lyrical concerns remain just as cloyingly shallow for the next track, the surprisingly gorgeous 'Lucky Me, Lucky You' in which Russell once again duets with Jane Wiedlin. Wiedlin’s bubblegum pop vocals match nicely here with Russell deadpan vocals and the tune is nicely light and airy. So light and airy and asinine in fact that it is easy to miss how utterly without love and affection the couple is… Stranded on a desert island together they each pronounce themselves lucky (“Lucky me/ Lucky you”) yet Wiedlin’s narrator freely admits that once she loses her tan Russell’s narrator will immediately be off. Russell confirms this, openly replying that he’ll get a job and will marry a marvellous blonde. Even outside the island, noone seems to care about the two of them and whether they have lived or died. “Maybe the world has decided we died in that gale”, they sing together; “We were the ones who they voted most likely to fail”. Only a horribly cheesy game show-like keyboard tune interrupts the harmony.
Now comes the stupidest damn track on the album, 'A Fun Bunch of Guys from Outer Space'. I will admit to not having much to say about the lyrics to this one apart from the fact that the title always reads like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference to me. For her part of the Kitty Sneezes review, Cait Brennan comments that the album’s production sounds “echoey, tinny, beepy, wishy-washy” and suggests that it isn’t even Russell singing on 'A Fun Bunch of Guys from Outer Space' but a “weird European guy”. Russell has a talent for putting on accents (as evidenced by 'Eaten By The Monster of Love') but I will readily admit that it does not sound like him singing here! Either way, the aliens claim to be a fun bunch of guys, who have come to Earth to get a tan. Like the aliens from Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985) they pick up TV signals in their spaceship, entertaining themselves by watching reruns of sitcoms. If there is a satirical point here it is that even the unknowable wonders of outer space have been colonised by trash American/ Californian culture.
The final track on the album 'Dance Godammit' is a dance tune from Hell, an anhedonic dirge that lurches forward as horribly and inexorably as the grave. The drum sound is crisp and played at 1.5 speed it would actually be danceable. As it is, however, Russell intones “It’s the sound/ of today/ Played so loud/ you’re in pain” over a depressingly plodding beat that never builds, just continues. The key lyrics are “I get scared/ when I’m alone/ So I don’t/ stay alone/ I like clubs/ I like girls/ I like music/ And that’s it”. So many other bands of the period would record these lines as though they were cool; in the ‘90s they’d probably have been sung euphorically. The Pet Shop Boys would have sung them with an arch ironic distance to deaden the pathos (as in 'I Want a Dog'). Indeed, that’s how Russell sings for so much of this album. However, on this track, he starts off in this register, but gradually lets the mask slip, with backing vocals coming in that sound increasingly desperate and sad. By the end of the song we’re only left with these backing vocals. It’s a very subtle shift, but it always pulls me up short.
Ultimately Sparks have released at least a dozen stronger albums than In Outer Space in terms of musical inventiveness, humour and pathos… and yet… this is the damn album that I return to again and again hoping against hope that it will sound a little different on the next listen, more organic, more human, more forgiving. Personally I feel like American and British culture have largely doubled down on the worst aspects of the 1980s in the decades since. Like social media or a Netflix binge, In Outer Space numbs against the unmediated pain of reality and, in doing so, just adds to that pain. It is a plastic death’s head laughing with a rictus grin as we dance, cross-eyed and painless, into the abyss.