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One of the curious effects of YouTube–and, indeed, of the World Wide Web in general–is that the faint, vaporous memories of one’s cultural youth need no longer be so faint; type in a few search words, and you can empirically refute or verify some bonkers notion that’s been rattling ’round your brain. Such as: Did Richard Branson really appear in the video for the 1980 XTC single “Generals and Majors,” a video viewed just once, in one’s early teens? On the evidence of the video posted above: Yes indeed, that really was Branson. At 2:40 in the clip, the Virgin chief’s trousers fall down, Benny Hill-style. Not until the heyday of Sean Combs’s Bad Boy label would a label boss again make such an oafish appearance in one of his artists’s videos. May 15, 2006 More Rock Snobbery »
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Sylvester. Aggressively queeny black disco singer of the late 1970s (1947–1988), posthumously regarded by dance-music Snobs and queer theorists as the spangly materfamilias of modern, hedonistic club culture. (He paraded about in drag years before RuPaul and OutKast’s Andre 3000.) Though such amyl-popper anthems as “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat)” were never huge chart hits, they won the crucial appreciation of the Studio 54 cognoscenti, making Sylvester a chic name-drop in Manhattan to this day. His hefty backing singers, Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes, later scored their own gay-disco hit as the Weather Girls, with “It’s Raining Men.”