Results: Weird Music Wednesday: Suicide

Imagine you're an Upper Midwestern teenager in September 1979. You're watching a punk/new wave/power pop-themed episode of (mostly) live music Tv show The Midnight Special. You're familiar with most of the acts featured: The Cars, Iggy Pop, M. Lene Lovich, The Records Then there are two guys--a singer looking like a snarling, disaffected Elvis Presley impersonator (Alan Vega, born Boruch Alan Bermowitz) and a keyboardist with eyes covered by huge, glammed up sunglasses (Martin Rev, nee' Martin Reverby)--whose two songs are are at turns surreal, romantic, abrasive. frightening, and, in a show that already intended to be edgy, the edgiest of the lot. They are Suicide, and they blow. your. mind. Do you think y o u r mind would have been blown, too?

Suicide was formed a few years before their startling network television debut linked with the previous question, when Rev visited the New York City art gallery Vega operated (and lived in). They got on well enough to form a musical duo, with Vega's rockabilly-inspired vocal style fronting Rev's effects-laden keys. Their pioneering synth punk was executed to reflect their city's decay and grime at the time. Early Suicide concerts were often confrontational affairs, sometimes inspiring audiences to rioting. Were you ever inspired to similar action by a musical act you've seen perform?

If you're still wondering how so extreme(ly weird) an act as Suicide scored a slot on The Midnight Special, it likely had a great deal to do with The Cars' leader, Rick Oscaek, producing their then-forthcoming second album. If that kind of patronage seems unlikely, it may seen even unlikelier that a song from Suicide's second long-player, "Dream Baby Dream," would later be recorded by so celebrated a singer as Bruce Springsteen. Are you at all surprised that Ocasek and Springsten appreciated the work of such a musically radical duo as Suicide?

Before Vega's 2016 death (not from suicide!), Suicide's sound didn't remain static over the course of their studio albums. They embraced optimism on the album Why Be Blue? and controversially incorporated incorporated hip-hop and rave-ready techno elements on American Supreme. Though never a commercial powerhouse, they encountered trouble in releasing their third studio album. A Way Of Life, on the Wax Trax! label. Many aficionados of that record company apparently bought that album thinking it would contain the kind of industrial; dance music--from acts including Front 242, KMFDM, and The Young Gods--Wax Trax! usually issued. But no! Have or do you base(d) any of your music purchases on the label that released it?

Though never a commercial powerhouse, Suicide confrontational, subversive and, to my ears, catchy music has influenced countless other electronic musicians, a fair many who have achieved the kind of hits and notoriety Vega and Rev, perhaps, bristled aty achieving. can you think of any other relatively obscure musical acts that have, to your reckoning, impacted the artistry of more commercially successful acts?