Tyson's Secret Domain: Kenny Loggins vs Coil
July 16, 2014 2:58 PM Subscribe
How Mike Tyson used the music of Coil to intimidate Michael Spinks before knocking him out in ninety-one seconds.
"This heavy metal sound is Mike Tyson about to make his way in, I believe. The sound is deafening here in the arena so I won't try to yell over it. It's interesting to note that Mike Tyson selected his pre-fight music as just noise. Every once in a while you hear the clanging of chains."
"This heavy metal sound is Mike Tyson about to make his way in, I believe. The sound is deafening here in the arena so I won't try to yell over it. It's interesting to note that Mike Tyson selected his pre-fight music as just noise. Every once in a while you hear the clanging of chains."
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble
This is just unspeakably awesome. I love Coil.
posted by infinitywaltz at 3:14 PM on July 16, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by infinitywaltz at 3:14 PM on July 16, 2014 [3 favorites]
Trump looks so adorably young.
posted by gottabefunky at 3:18 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by gottabefunky at 3:18 PM on July 16, 2014
Admittedly, I'm watching the video on a phone and can't hear it too well, but I didn't recognize it as a Coil song.
One commenter suggests SPK.
Also, the writer took a sort of dismissive tone about Coil's music. Or maybe I'm just sensitive about my favorite music...
posted by rock swoon has no past at 3:22 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
One commenter suggests SPK.
Also, the writer took a sort of dismissive tone about Coil's music. Or maybe I'm just sensitive about my favorite music...
posted by rock swoon has no past at 3:22 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
item: "I kinda wished he'd picked this one ."
Can you imagine Tyson coming into the ring to the Tainted Love cover?
posted by boo_radley at 3:23 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
Can you imagine Tyson coming into the ring to the Tainted Love cover?
posted by boo_radley at 3:23 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
"Everything that Tyson does is intimidating". Like that time he raped a woman three years after this fight. "I've got goosepimples on my arm".
posted by Nelson at 3:23 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 3:23 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
Anyone know the name of the song? It's not in the article.
posted by Ratio at 3:24 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by Ratio at 3:24 PM on July 16, 2014
I kinda wished he'd picked this one
Pretty sure I knew what that was going to be; not disappointed.
posted by en forme de poire at 3:28 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
Pretty sure I knew what that was going to be; not disappointed.
posted by en forme de poire at 3:28 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
I can think of some Whitehouse songs that would've led to a full scale riot.
posted by naju at 3:42 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by naju at 3:42 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
Animal New York claimed it was How To Destroy Angels, their first single.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:47 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by lumpenprole at 3:47 PM on July 16, 2014
I can see how you would think it was HTDA but the bass doesn't sound right.
posted by en forme de poire at 3:51 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by en forme de poire at 3:51 PM on July 16, 2014
Yeah, I was trying to match them, but I can't seem to do it. Still trying.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:55 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by lumpenprole at 3:55 PM on July 16, 2014
One thing I coincidentally learned today: Peter Christopherson is responsible for the artwork of Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.
posted by naju at 4:08 PM on July 16, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by naju at 4:08 PM on July 16, 2014 [2 favorites]
Not Coil.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:11 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:11 PM on July 16, 2014
It wasn't a psych job. Spinks was tailor-made for Tyson. Tall, lean, untested chin and apparently defenseless against hooks. And Tyson threw nothing but hooks. Upstairs and downstairs with leverage, speed and almost life-threatening power. At the time I was surprised it lasted as long as it did...
posted by jim in austin at 4:14 PM on July 16, 2014 [6 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 4:14 PM on July 16, 2014 [6 favorites]
It actually might have been Coil "How To Destroy Angels", but it was about 10 minutes into the track, which is where the really loud metal clanging is in full swing. I mean, it is a 16+ minute track.
posted by daq at 4:17 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by daq at 4:17 PM on July 16, 2014
Oh yeah, that wasn't a fight about being psyched out. Spinks didn't have time to get psyched out.
Still a cool little piece of historical trivia (no matter what the actual music was). Tyson was such a production. No flash, no glitter, no real boxing. Just complete destruction. It's hard to remember now how unstoppable he seemed.
posted by lumpenprole at 4:17 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
Still a cool little piece of historical trivia (no matter what the actual music was). Tyson was such a production. No flash, no glitter, no real boxing. Just complete destruction. It's hard to remember now how unstoppable he seemed.
posted by lumpenprole at 4:17 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
I was expecting a different COIL song.
I was hoping for this one
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:18 PM on July 16, 2014
I was hoping for this one
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:18 PM on July 16, 2014
This was fact checked when it went around about a month ago and the consensus was that it was not Coil.
There was a suggestion it was actually Sergio Cervetti - Fall of the Rebel Angels
posted by anazgnos at 4:20 PM on July 16, 2014
There was a suggestion it was actually Sergio Cervetti - Fall of the Rebel Angels
posted by anazgnos at 4:20 PM on July 16, 2014
So how did the announcers come up with Coil? I refuse to believe they thought, "Hey, this sounds like that band from the club the other night…"
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:23 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:23 PM on July 16, 2014
The idea that it was Coil originates with The Awl, as far as I know.
posted by anazgnos at 4:32 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by anazgnos at 4:32 PM on July 16, 2014
It doesn't sound to me like either How to Destroy Angels or the Cervetti track. The youtube clip in the Awl story has different instrumentation. In particular, it sounds to me like it has a heavily distorted bass guitar hitting long extended notes, and some kind of percussion that sounds like roto-toms. I don't know what it is, but I like it.
posted by googly at 4:42 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by googly at 4:42 PM on July 16, 2014
Nelson : "Everything that Tyson does is intimidating". Like that time he raped a woman three years after this fight. "I've got goosepimples on my arm".
I'm all for demonizing, not lionizing, Mike Tyson. But let's face it - those criminal acts were three years in the future. The announcers only knew they were introducing the athlete, not the rapist.
Two Mike quotes:
"He called me a 'Rapist' and a 'Recluse'. I'm not a 'Recluse!"
"He was screaming like my wife." - on the Tyrell Biggs fight.
--
Finally, back to the FPP: No, silly article fanboy writer; Spinx was not psyched out. He was knocked unconscious by one of the most powerful fighters ever known, who (as jim in austin points out) trained for months to bring him down. Spinx was over the hill; Tyson was on the rise.
In any other sport, Spinx' age and experience would have made him better. He would have compensated for the longer recovery times and lower reflex speed, the old damage, and so on, by bringing years of experience of defeating his opponents - and of experiencing defeat, and learning from it.
But in boxing, each defeat and each victory* brings permanent brain damage. It's like picking the champion nuclear-reactor-emergency-door-shutter - 2000's champion doesn't stand a chance against the new kid.
*Almost every victory. Not this one - Michael never laid a glove on Mike's skull, AFAICT.
posted by IAmBroom at 5:24 PM on July 16, 2014 [2 favorites]
I'm all for demonizing, not lionizing, Mike Tyson. But let's face it - those criminal acts were three years in the future. The announcers only knew they were introducing the athlete, not the rapist.
Two Mike quotes:
"He called me a 'Rapist' and a 'Recluse'. I'm not a 'Recluse!"
"He was screaming like my wife." - on the Tyrell Biggs fight.
--
Finally, back to the FPP: No, silly article fanboy writer; Spinx was not psyched out. He was knocked unconscious by one of the most powerful fighters ever known, who (as jim in austin points out) trained for months to bring him down. Spinx was over the hill; Tyson was on the rise.
In any other sport, Spinx' age and experience would have made him better. He would have compensated for the longer recovery times and lower reflex speed, the old damage, and so on, by bringing years of experience of defeating his opponents - and of experiencing defeat, and learning from it.
But in boxing, each defeat and each victory* brings permanent brain damage. It's like picking the champion nuclear-reactor-emergency-door-shutter - 2000's champion doesn't stand a chance against the new kid.
*Almost every victory. Not this one - Michael never laid a glove on Mike's skull, AFAICT.
posted by IAmBroom at 5:24 PM on July 16, 2014 [2 favorites]
From the book Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music:
Coil proudly politicized their identity as self-declared gay, pagan men, a combination illustrated in the subtitle of their 1984 EP How To Destroy Angels: “Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy.” Their spiritual practice was exceedingly important in their music: less cultish and chaotic than TOPY, and more grounded in an Albionic arcane.posted by stbalbach at 5:27 PM on July 16, 2014 [5 favorites]
The Guardian put it, “In the mid-1980s, gay pop was coming out of the closet, but Coil were the first resolutely queer group; their words dealt with desire, disease, dirt, death and drugs, and their collages sounded dark, dank and dangerous.”
Coil gets much deeper coverage in David Keenan’s book England’s Hidden Reverse. Their legacy, though, is one of ever hinting at a secret world, an unspoken, unspeakable way of being. This perception was unintentionally fueled by the notorious difficulty of finding their records, which was due to poor distribution.
Coil in its later years was frequently treated by some writers as too good to be industrial—again, the old cliché of “transcending the genre.” During the mid-1980s, however, not only were they a central lattice in industrial music’s widening net, but they were vital in the development of a largely English esoteric underground.
Animal New York claimed it was How To Destroy Angels, their first single.
It definitely, definitely isn't. The music in the Tyson video is very synthetic, synth/drummachine/sampler, but the Coil track is much more organic, built with live recorded sounds, and, while percussive, doesn't really have any rhythm to it. I can see how they're superficially similar and in the fog of memory could be conflated, but, no, comparing side-to-side, they're clearly not the same at all.
There was a suggestion it was actually Sergio Cervetti - Fall of the Rebel Angels
That's much closer, but the rhythm's still lacking. In the Tyson video, the sampled clangs are going ♫ ♩ ♩ ♩ which I'm not hearing in that.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:59 PM on July 16, 2014
It definitely, definitely isn't. The music in the Tyson video is very synthetic, synth/drummachine/sampler, but the Coil track is much more organic, built with live recorded sounds, and, while percussive, doesn't really have any rhythm to it. I can see how they're superficially similar and in the fog of memory could be conflated, but, no, comparing side-to-side, they're clearly not the same at all.
There was a suggestion it was actually Sergio Cervetti - Fall of the Rebel Angels
That's much closer, but the rhythm's still lacking. In the Tyson video, the sampled clangs are going ♫ ♩ ♩ ♩ which I'm not hearing in that.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:59 PM on July 16, 2014
Well this is (embarrassingly) my introduction to Coil. I love you, Metafilter.
posted by a halcyon day at 7:18 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by a halcyon day at 7:18 PM on July 16, 2014 [4 favorites]
I think that's a very interesting piece of performance art, particularly into how it plays into the narrative of Tyson being an unstoppable force in the ring (which at that point in his career, I think was a reputation already well-established)... but if you think that it did anything to help him beat Spinks, you don't know anything about boxing. I'd argue that the fact that Spinks' manager apparently pitched a fit about the state of Tyson's gloves before the match, thereby pissing off Tyson, had much more of an impact.
posted by axiom at 8:00 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by axiom at 8:00 PM on July 16, 2014 [1 favorite]
My exposure to Coil has been almost entirely remixes and one-offs on compilations. They did a remix on NIN fixed that started great but wound up a bit more dance-oriented than what I was into at the time. They did a pretty good remix for Scorn on Ellipsis too, but again the rhythm was sort of just not doing it for me. Amazing synths and effects though. The only original I heard over the years was on a comp called Macro Dub infection, and the song was called the hills are alive. That was the first one where I liked every bit of it. Those guys have a very interesting sound. I really got to dig deeper.
posted by Hoopo at 8:26 PM on July 16, 2014
posted by Hoopo at 8:26 PM on July 16, 2014
Those guys have a very interesting sound. I really got to dig deeper.
My favorite album of theirs is "Love's Secret Domain", and I think it's also probably the most accessible one. It isn't on iTunes, but there's a couple used copies on Amazon for not too expensive.
posted by rifflesby at 8:36 PM on July 16, 2014
My favorite album of theirs is "Love's Secret Domain", and I think it's also probably the most accessible one. It isn't on iTunes, but there's a couple used copies on Amazon for not too expensive.
posted by rifflesby at 8:36 PM on July 16, 2014
No flash, no glitter, no real boxing. Just complete destruction. It's hard to remember now how unstoppable he seemed
This is actually a massive miss-characterization of the boxer who tore apart the heavyweight ranks in the 80's. Tyson was an elite athlete who was trained pretty much 24/7 from the age of the 13 by master trainers in a highly technical style that was tailored to his body type and that maximized his athletic gifts. At his peak, he was a come forward counter puncher who utilized head and upper body movement to evade his opponents attacks, get into range, and fire devastating combinations after his opponents' misses created opportunities.
The Tyson that lost to Buster Douglas in Tokyo and subsequently went on to become a punchline in the 90's had long since split from his original trainers because of death and disagreement and begun to neglect his training. Tyson's style required him to maintain a high level of technical and athletic proficiency. As his skills deteriorated, he became the crude slugger people remember who relied on his power and his image of unchecked ferocity to intimidate his opponents.
The crude slugger Tyson became is the one people remember, but it is not the one who Michael Spinks met that night in Atlantic City. That boxer was among the most technically proficient and skilled heavyweights ever.
posted by eagles123 at 10:36 PM on July 16, 2014 [8 favorites]
This is actually a massive miss-characterization of the boxer who tore apart the heavyweight ranks in the 80's. Tyson was an elite athlete who was trained pretty much 24/7 from the age of the 13 by master trainers in a highly technical style that was tailored to his body type and that maximized his athletic gifts. At his peak, he was a come forward counter puncher who utilized head and upper body movement to evade his opponents attacks, get into range, and fire devastating combinations after his opponents' misses created opportunities.
The Tyson that lost to Buster Douglas in Tokyo and subsequently went on to become a punchline in the 90's had long since split from his original trainers because of death and disagreement and begun to neglect his training. Tyson's style required him to maintain a high level of technical and athletic proficiency. As his skills deteriorated, he became the crude slugger people remember who relied on his power and his image of unchecked ferocity to intimidate his opponents.
The crude slugger Tyson became is the one people remember, but it is not the one who Michael Spinks met that night in Atlantic City. That boxer was among the most technically proficient and skilled heavyweights ever.
posted by eagles123 at 10:36 PM on July 16, 2014 [8 favorites]
Tyson is not the greene childe and this has nothing to do with the coil.
posted by locidot at 12:33 AM on July 17, 2014
posted by locidot at 12:33 AM on July 17, 2014
It's a great take on the fight and all the pomp preceding it. Tyson's re-working of that, stripping it away, was a nice aspect of his ring appearances but paled next to his technical proficiency.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:58 AM on July 17, 2014
posted by From Bklyn at 1:58 AM on July 17, 2014
No flash, no glitter, no real boxing.
The announcer before the fight said about as much:
"No socks. No flashiness to anything but his boxing."
But make no mistake, Tyson was a real boxer, he just rarely got a chance to show much of it, as he was such a new (ugh) paradigm in the sport. Of his fights during that era, I think Pinklin was the only one able to withstand the initial onslaught and actually make a bout of it.
posted by ShutterBun at 2:17 AM on July 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
The announcer before the fight said about as much:
"No socks. No flashiness to anything but his boxing."
But make no mistake, Tyson was a real boxer, he just rarely got a chance to show much of it, as he was such a new (ugh) paradigm in the sport. Of his fights during that era, I think Pinklin was the only one able to withstand the initial onslaught and actually make a bout of it.
posted by ShutterBun at 2:17 AM on July 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
Amazing entrance. I remember watching that when it happened but couldn't really hear or get a sense of the music. Someone needs to find out what it was!
posted by chaz at 2:54 AM on July 17, 2014
posted by chaz at 2:54 AM on July 17, 2014
I would have went with Penetralia, myself. Man, I miss those guys.
posted by malocchio at 8:14 AM on July 17, 2014
posted by malocchio at 8:14 AM on July 17, 2014
Oh, I agree that he was technically amazing. I meant "none of what we had previously thought of as boxing".
His ability to generate intense, focused, perfectly aimed power was so new that there was no defense against it. At the time, it seemed almost inhuman. But of course it was the result of insane hard work with careful strategy. It's just you never really saw that in the ring.
I always wonder what it would have been like, having paid for a ringside seat at that fight, only to have it over inside of five minutes.
posted by lumpenprole at 2:32 PM on July 17, 2014
His ability to generate intense, focused, perfectly aimed power was so new that there was no defense against it. At the time, it seemed almost inhuman. But of course it was the result of insane hard work with careful strategy. It's just you never really saw that in the ring.
I always wonder what it would have been like, having paid for a ringside seat at that fight, only to have it over inside of five minutes.
posted by lumpenprole at 2:32 PM on July 17, 2014
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posted by boo_radley at 3:05 PM on July 16, 2014 [3 favorites]