- DAY BOW BOW. Who were the European weirdos who turned experimental dance music into one of the '80s most overused music cues?
"There are a bunch of books about these guys but they're expensive and in German so I didn't read them." Here's all you need to know about Yello. Dieter Meier grew up amongst the gnomes of Zurich and never didn't have money. Right about the time Van Halen was blowing up they decided to head out to Hollywood, where they spent a lot of money on other musicians. As a consequence Dieter became sort of a Swiss Bob Geldof in that there was no obvious reason for him to play Pink in The Wall and no obvious reason why he could launch something like Live Aid other than that Henry Kissinger is far more important as a guy who knows diplomats than as a diplomat himself thus did Yello get heard by everyone who is anyone and some of it trickled down to you, the proles. There are two structures in music: there's the stuff the creatives listen to and there's the stuff you listen to. Massive Attack is the ad creative's Fleetwood Mac. Sometimes it escapes into the normie world. Yello was the vehicle by which a self-supported rich AF Swiss artist exposed himself to the American creative class and that's why he's still got one of the biggest studios in LA which is open by invitation only.