Music / Club Ninja

I guess I'll see ya, dancin' in the ruins tonight!

Club Ninja is the 10th studio album by American rock band the Blue Öyster Cult. Interestingly, it was released in Great Britain at the end of 1985, several months ahead of its release in the USA in 1986. This may have been to capitalise on a British and European tour at this time.^note For consistency with earlier entries, this entry will use the American release year of 1986 Their previous release, The Revölution by Night was considered a commercial dissapointment after the success of 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin and 1982's double live release Extraterrestrial Live, and pressure was growing for the group to come up with an unambiguous success.Club Ninja received mixed critical reviews. While some reviewers hailed it as a return to form, with one saying it starts out as lead and turns into gold, others expressed disappointment and considered it "musically anonymous" and "symbolic of the band's decline and disintegration".

It did not help that the band's personnel woes had become more intense: drummer Rick Downey had left, to be replaced by Jimmy Wilcox, and keyboards player Allen Lanier left the band during the recording sessions, considering the material prepared for this album to be sub-par and beyond redemption. He also objected to being replaced by Tommy Zvoncheck. Shortly after this record was released, Joe Bouchard was to follow his brother Albert out of the group, citing the stresses of continual touring and the apparent failure of the band to sustain its best work. He would be replaced as bassist by Jon Rogers, and Ron Riddle would replace Wilcox as the band's fourth drummer.^note At this point, with only Bloom and Roeser left of the original line-up, the despairing fan nickname Two Öyster Cult would be applied to the group. This lack of continuity would plague the next LP, 'Imaginos''

Dancin' In The Ruins was a minor hit from the record, and was backed with a pop video that saw significant airplay on MTV.

Their next studio album would be the realisation of the troubled concept album, Imaginos (1988).

Band members

• Eric Bloom – lead vocals, stun guitar
• Buck Dharma aka Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser – vocals, lead guitar, keyboards
• Joe Bouchard – bass, guitar, vocals
• Allen Lanier, keyboards. ^note  Allen left the band during this recording session, believing he was wasting his time with sub-par material. He also did not get on with Tommy Zvoncheck. While it is possible there is some Allen Lanier on this album, he specifically asked not to be credited.
• Tommy Zvoncheck – keyboards, background vocals
• Jimmy Wilcox – percussion, background vocals

Additional musicians

• Thommy Price – drums
• Phil Grande – guitars
• Kenny Aaronson – bass
• David Lucas, Joni Peltz, Dave Immer, Joe Caro – background vocals

Production

• Sandy Pearlman – producer, management

Other:

• Howard Stern – opening spoken section to "When the War Comes"

Tracklist

Side one

1. "White Flag" (4:43)
2. "Dancin' in the Ruins" (4:01)
3. "Make Rock Not War" (3:58)
4. "Perfect Water" (5:31)
5. "Spy In The House of Night" (4:24)

Side two

1. "Beat 'Em Up" (3:24)
2. "When The War Comes" (6:05)
3. "Shadow Warrior" (5:42)
4. "Madness To The Method" (7:28)

It's the time and the season for the nasty tropes at night

• Aging Would-Be Hipster: The music video for the single "Dancin' In the Ruins" has an uncomfortable visual air of this. While a tribe of late-teen skateboarders and dancers are performing to the music provided by the band, it becomes obvious that most of the band members are well into their forties and while they are playing some good hard rock, they are in the background and not really interacting with the kids.^note Some interaction shots appear to have been edited in later almost as an afterthought It's almost as if the video director had thought "how do we make this relevant to the kids of today who will be watching this video on MTV?" and had the inspiration of "Skateboards! Kids dancing! It cannot fail!"
• Anarchy Is Chaos: The songs deals with concepts of change and movement, often violent. "When The War Comes" makes a distinction between the three colours of flags - white for surrender and red for revolution, adding the now forgotten Black Flag - historically representing political anarchy. The Anarchists under the Black Flag were the often-forgotten third force in the Russian Revolution (White represented the Tsarists and Red the Communists). The song "Madness To The Method" is about nihilism - mindless destruction for the sake of it, often confused with anarchism.
• Call-Back: The BOC's first three albums are referred to by fans as the "Red, White And Black trilogy", an allusion to the minimal colour schemes used in the sleeve design by a record company that really didn't want to allocate too big a budget on an unproven band. Those three primal colours are also frequent allusions and references in the early songs. The lyrics also repeatedly refer to the idea of flags. The White Flag of surrender; the Black Flag of anarchy and nihilism; and the Red Flag of violent revolution.
• Gangbangers: The protagonists depicted in "Madness To The Method'', young men compelled to prove their masculinity by spending destructive Saturday nights destroying things, getting into fights and seeking to have as much sex as possible in the "hormone warzone". The song is a melancholy ballad accepting that this is tragically inevitable, as a rite of passage in modern America.
  • The music video for "Dancin' In The Ruins" uses the theme of a group of anthropologists exploring the underbelly of a city, who discover a feral teen gang, perhaps an extended family, of youths who affect tribal dress and live for dancing and skateboarding.
• Gratuitous Ninja: the album gets here on three counts. first the album title; second, the rear cover design of a Space Ninja throwing band-themed shuriken; and thirdly, the track about Ninjitsu, Shadow Warrior.
• Homage "Perfect Water" is at least in part a homage to pioneer deep-sea explorer, diver and marine biologist Jacques Cousteau.
• Pyromaniac: the protagonist of "Spy In The House of Night'' gets his sexual thrills from arson.
• Random Number God: "Perfect Water".
  Where two blocks of ice, melt into my hands like dice,
  And I roll (a seven!) A seven on the floor of the sea (Perfect seven!)
• Rule of Three: The final chorus of Dancin' In The Ruins is repeated 3 times.
• Teens Are Monsters: The toxic masculinity described in "Madness to The Method".
  • While they appear peaceable enough and are happy to have the band play for them while they dance and skate, the youth tribe of "Dancin' In The Ruins" have just enough of an air of sinister menace about them.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: the album was released at the turn of 1985 into 1986. But, taking a close look at the video for Dancin' In The Ruins, the anthropologists covertly filming the youth skateboarding tribe in some sort of post-apocalyptic wilderness are labelling their video with the title Skate punk docu 2-18-89
  • Perplexingly, the cameraman may be glimpsed later in the video with a loaded film can labelled with the date 11-19-88. still two years in the future...