Fuck the post-punk snobs.

Listening to Cabaret Voltaire's Sound of Sheffield Vol. 1, I only own it because the tracklisting accurately reflects the sequence my early-Cabs 7" listening sessions take. To all you lazy writers who unthinkingly refer to the Crackdown as CV's "commercial"/"pop" or, unimaginatively of all, "compromise" watershed, listen again: Silent Command, without the Watson's-loft production (like early Scritti, in a way) is poppier than anything on Crackdown. That Stevo brokered LP is often confused with selling out -an easy way to explain away the shift in production philosophy, the uneasy way that claptraps carry house-music connotations so unpalatable to the modern day noise/industrial historian. There still exists among the open-eared music fan a dank Corp that retain the dour long-mac philosophy that was unable to process the re-adjustment, re-definition, of what it meant to be uncompromising and subversive that the Cabs went through. Their dancefloor epiphany -discotheque as Control stage/battlefield -was too close to the mainstream's assimilation of Synthetica, Human League going nuclear in 1981/Soft Cell/Architecture and Morality et al. Listen again!