Really, you have to think about it in the context of the time. When vocalist Joe Stack screams “Look who’s coming to visit / it’s 1984!” at the opening of Informed Sources‘ new retrospective Fun Under the Sun, the year in question was not some speck in the strange and distant past. Nor was it far off into the future, some vaguely scary time that science fiction writers were spinning dystopian cautionary tales about. “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” was recorded in 1982, just a couple years shy of the era in which George Orwell had set his scary totalitarian prophecies. Social and political turmoil was spread all around the globe, there was civil unrest at home and abroad and people legitimately began to worry that, wait a minute, dang, what if Orwell was right? “Guess who’s coming to dinner? A man who’s calling you sinner / with hate in his face and a gun in his hand, look what happened to your free land!”
Times of tension are wonderful breeding grounds for musical and artistic responses, and here in Philadelphia, Informed Sources raged and roared for three fruitful years between 1981 and 1984. They reacted with with volume, power chords and amplifiers, fuzzy blasts of hardcore informed by the D.C. torchbearers in Black Flag but also borrowing healthily from the nihilism and high drama of UK post-punk acolytes The Damned and Joy Division. This new retrospective is not only an essential piece of Philadelphia history, but an essential snapshot of the era. Continue reading
