Enough songs about me being a sad panda. Instead, we be marvelling at this from (allegedly) 2005, amazing stutter-beat horn loops weaving in and out and in and out of each other.
I was a bit harsh on this when it was in the Jukebox, because Yummy Bingham’s vocal is basically her trying to be heard above the din, so she gets a bit shrill and tinny, but that… works, now. A bit of distance, and hell, this is spectacular. The straining she’s having to do – you know how some vocal quirks just demand imitation (see: Andy Partridge and the letter “r”, Emma Pollock and the letter “o”)? Yummy’s tweeting is very much along those lines.
The surprising sloth of the tune really helps too, lots of things engaged in some kind of languidness competition, beats lump along oh-so-slooowly as Yummy and Jadakiss stretch out over the top of them… mmm yes, as Kate Bush once said for somewhat different reasons.
Another relatively dismal Saturday night (house party, sofa, young people, not sure I got round to taking my hat off before buggering off home to curl up in semi-frosted bed – it’s rather worrying how recurrent this story is becoming) bleeds into another sun-kissed Sunday morning at work. And… it’s…
Well, it’s my last one for the foreseeable future, having got gainful employment during the week at long last. The familiar cast of characters on the other end of the phone gets to be some other poor sod’s fun now. Just another eight hours of sitting, looking a bit glazed, ‘typing’ some ’stuff’, further Cornish pasty-induced mental turmoil (helped this week by the microwave being crocked), and all the while wishing I could start a conversation with The Young People here.
Outwardly, I do not exactly give the signs of this. I roll up at ten-ish, try and act like I ain’t smelling as bad as I know I most definitely am, then spend the next few hours staring STRAIGHT AHEAD in case people think I might be interacting with them in some way. Cos when they start thinking that, then complications arise. And I’m not very good with those complications. My voice flings itself into these horrible John Oliver-esque inflections, acting like there’s some massive bloody punchline at the end of everything. I get this sort of disembodied feeling, like I’m watching myself cock everything up even as I’m actually doing it…
I have basically spent more or less all my time at this job trying to act like there is not a part of me that wants to exclaim, very loudly, that, with certain caveats (as in not actually owning anything of theirs beyond their singles collection – the first one, not the recent one), I really, really like a-Ha.
This realisation dawned upon me cos The Young People here like to compare the stuff they have on their iPods, so I thought, “oh, that’ll start conversations. I have stuff on my iPod!”
Then I looked at my iPod, and there, right up the top, Morten y son conjunto. That’ll impress ‘em. RECOMMENCE STARING.
But:
A-HA ARE BRILLIANT!
And this, at the very most, is their third-best single. At the very most. That bit where Morten asks “Do you know what it means to love you?” like he’s just invented Shakespeare? Third-best.
Here’s the thing – with a-Ha, you are seriously asked to believe that they have just invented Shakespeare. Cos oh, they sound like it. This is one of those songs that captures the moment of separation perfectly, a few seconds after it happens – Morten ruefully contemplates, pianos and string sections feel his pain.
And now she’s telling me she’s got to go – UH-HUH-WAY-EE!
Are we reaching too far to suggest it’s that non-specific away that’s the real kicker here, that she has nowhere to go but away from him? Even after he’s been tearing himself to pie…
…ces?
Do you know what it means to love you?
It resolves itself gently, Morten lets it subside eventually (in the video, this happens when a woman stops a man shooting a lion – sometimes, inventing Shakespeare goes a bit far), but those three minutes are exquisite, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Perfectionism is fine, you see, so long as you are actually perfect. Which “Hunting High and Low” is.
Albeit that “Take on Me” and “The Sun Always Shines on TV” are more perfect.
The Boost is a harsh bastard of a chocolate bar anyhow. A solid stick of biscuit or something in the centre, surrounded by a layer of caramel, surrounded by another layer of chocolate. If memory serves, that’s kind of the same system the brain runs on, where brain = biscuit, layer of fluid (amniotic? Or is that your knee?) = caramel, skull = chocolate. So basically, this is a chocolate bar purposely designed to keep the integrity of its biscuit safe via encasing it in a protective layer of caramel, then adding an outer shell of chocolate just to make sure.
If you’re wondering why I’m talking about a chocolate bar in terms of something that is capable of sustaining cranial trauma, why not try doing what I did this morning, and put one in the fridge, then take it out, say, four or so hours later. And then try biting into the bugger.
I’m tempted to say it’s like eating a lump of wood, except it’s like eating a lump of wood inside another lump of wood , both of which have been glued together using that stuff that holds CDs onto the front of magazines.
Your first bite is useless. It will not bloody go. And your teeth are stuck. So you have to start waggling your whole head about in an attempt to dislodge the thing from your mouth. That done, you have another go. This gets you through to the caramel, or rather to the idea of the caramel, in that your teeth are now bloody glued to the thing, so you keep on going downwards in the hope of preserving your fillings while waggling your head and trying to yank the fecker out of your mouth…
And then the chocolate all splinters off over your desk, into your keyboard, onto your jumper, and everyone thinks you were trying to make a semi-amusing homo-erotic analogy when all you wanted was to eat a fucking chocolate bar without it melting all over your fingers, cos then you’d just have to lick it off. So, aside from crumbs getting everywhere, and still hardly any of the bar consumed, and the realisation that Boost’s main taste is meant to be the unholy melding of chocolate, caramel and biscuit, which isn’t so much a flavour as the vague aftertaste of nausea – aside from all that, now you want to exhume Sigmund Freud solely so you can tell him to fuck off.
Oh, and the biscuit part appears to not actually be biscuit, but rather nuggets of biscuit suspended in chocolate-flavoured sand.
Dearest WordPress – why is it, that when you are showing me other blogs you host that I may be interested in, they’re always about Arsenal Reserves? I mean, seriously, apart from the FoxNews one and the feller who writes about, er, West Ham Reserves, you seem to think that this is the great stuff I go for. And, well, it isn’t. So, in future, if you could please refrain from telling me about The New Adventures Of Nacer Barazite, that would be nice. Thank you.
The Hits is bumping for the Real Love album at the moment. And I am noticing all the songs on the album seem to be about either breaking up or being heartbroken. Is this a condition of the times in which we live, or is it just that the people who put this compilationg together are thick?
WordPress tells me someone’s finally clicked the sidebar link for Cod Almighty! Thank goodness for that. Y’all should follow suit, though how many of you would actually get anything out of it I am not entirely sure.
So, those threatened words on Private’s ‘Crucify My Heart’. Shall I bother re-posting the video? Go on:
Our big problem here – this song is raw hook. Pure hook. And, well, nothing but the hook. Any pretence at verses is given up on about a minute in.
So is that enough?
Indeed, is “enough” really the right word to be using here? For pop, surely, should never be talked about in terms of “enough”. As many, many, many people have reminded us many, many, many times, the business of great pop is not merely about sufficing. Indeed, sufficing, comfort, the filling of space – these are the anathema of pop music, no? These are background noise, these are what we do to fill in the gaps, these are just things that are there and are alright but have nothing to recommend them beyond not being Westlife.
Scandinavian pop is often accused of being empty of heart, of being an exercise in the perfection of formulae for eliciting reaction. These are the recycling centres, clean and shiny, digesting the things the rest of the world comes up with and then trying to refine, to perfect them, free of circumstance, free of context, free of history. Abstraction masquerading as emotion, soul formulated and controlled by Laboratoire Garnier.
Does that matter here? This song, fairly clearly, is not really about getting one’s heart crucified. This song is about theatre, drama, and really swoopy hand gestures. It is about Private the band as group identity, stood in the 4-1-1 formation, the lass with the afro operating in a kind of free role roving behind the striker and coming forward to give support when necessary. It is about Private stalking forward towards the camera, propelled the brutish disco rhythm and the squeeze of those synths in the pre-chorus. It is about the servants popping in from the flanks to provide and dispense with props as necessary. It is pomp-pomp-a-domp-domp-domp.
Mostly, though, it’s that chorus, and it’s those words getting shot of all meaning and turned into SOUND! Actually, no, hang on – this is about getting yr heart crucified, and it is about that feeling fucking ooooh!
OOH! You twist it and turn it! OOOH! You twist it and burn it! OOOOOH! You slice it and BURN IT!
And then you crucify my HARRR-ARRR-ARRT!
FUCKING SING IT!
Oh, the hell with it flagging past about one and a half minutes. FUCKING SING IT! FUCKING SING IT! This is a business of hooks, and Tom Troelsen’s stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. Nothing else on the album comes close to this, because this is divine. This is hook in excelsis, the end of the fumbling in the dark, the pulling out the light at the end of it, and latching onto it and firing it with full-on conviction!
In pop terms, this is getting out the best silver, the nice china, those sets of commemorative coasters of the presidents of the USA before 1900, because those things are about occasion, about knowing that there comes a time when it is right to use them, that there is such a thing as occasion – special occasion, i’faith – and This Is That Time. This is the bloody hook. This is the chorus. Get the girl with the afro. Shit is on.
I refuse to feel cheapened by my adoration of this. I can’t come up with a theory here, not one that could go beyond what I’ve said already. There is something primal and true and alive about this shit. All that good stuff. All the good stuff. It’s physical, intensely physical, sensual, soulful, the tearing, the twisting, the up-lifting. Divinity, ladies and gents. It’s bloody powerful stuff, I do declare.
I dunno, the blueness, the sphericalness of the maracas in this video (a version of “Perfume (All On You)”, sounding not very much like the MP3 I have, but an awful lot better) is something I find a bit troubling. Quite apart from the fact that they probably don’t make any noise at all.
Let’s cheer ourselves up a bit. Two videos below that are quite fantastic for dancing about to, and at least one of which I have more words on but I’m leaving work in about twenty minutes so there’s not really the time right now.
APOPTYGMA BERZERK – Cambodia
It’s big, it’s electric, it’s German, it’s a Kim Wilde cover. Don’t be expecting subtlety or nuance or anything – every single thing is sort of sung in this Molko-esque snarl – but oh, the sheer size of the bastard, eh?
PRIVATE – Crucify My Heart
OK, so for a run of cheery videos there are an awful lot of goff-looking European lads here. Anyway, Thomas Troelsen’s the dude here, and his CV is quite something, if his Wiki is anything to go by. For now, though, just know that this song is basically all chorus. And it’s a very, very good chorus.
I’m not sure if it matters or no, but my favourite single of this year seems to be changing constantly at the moment. Currently, it’s this:
Goldfrapp’s “A&E” – “Friday Night, Saturday Morning” gone wrong, gone worse. This is more than just boredom, more than an observation on the mundanity of the five-days-in, two-days-out pattern that life slips into. More than pinning your problems on your town’s lack of a branch of fucking Belgo or whatever. Life and love are dissolving with every second of this song. There is no particular redemption, no particular narrative, just three minutes of static oblivion cunningly disguised as Goldfrapp giving you what you want.
It’s a blue, bright blue, Saturday, hey-hey,
And the pain has started to slip away, hey-hey…
It’s a return to their chill-out roots! Duh! There’s an acoustic guitar! “You could easily imagine it in the current top ten,” as, er, Scott Walker might say. On The Drift.
More an attack on the current than the top ten, though. There’s the air of bank advert about that opening couplet, is there not? Nice, easy, free-floating. No weight or attachment to anything, just nice burbling noises while you imagine just how easy your second mortgage will be. Lifestyle pop. Num num num.
I’m in a backless dress
I mean, that’s practically Duffy, the old backless dress thing. Nice bit of vintage fashion. Grace Kelly – mmm!
On a pastel ward, that’s shining
Oh. Hang on.
Think I want you still, but it may be pills at work
Oh.
In “A&E”, going out becomes horrific procedural, a routine conducted in order to prove to yourself that you are loved, or that you can be loved, or you can love. Half-killing yourself just to prove you’re alive, that sort of thing. Here, though, it becomes a particularly gruesome type of self-harm, like that Jam sketch where the woman arranges for tragic accidents to happen to other people so that she can befriend them, but now the perpetrator and victim become one and the same. Love here becomes the fib underpinning everything – what does pop music tell us the void in our lives is? Love! Needing people, wanting people.
I was feeling lonely, feeling blue
Thought I might be needing you
There isn’t even any actual romance at work, just a sort of assumed lack, a need for someone, anyone at all.
So she goes and she dances on her own and attempts to be less on her own, and it doesn’t work. It’s hard to tell what happens next – How did I get to accident, emergency?
Do you really want to know how I was dancing on the floor?
I was trying to call you while I was crawling out the door
Does she leave on her own? Does she go home? Does she cry? Does she want to die?
She has no idea. About… anything. So out she goes, looking. No tears, no melodrama, just the weird disconnect, the chillout excavated and finding nothing beyond the numbness. So we settle for this numbed bliss, we let the pain slip away into a nice, distant corner of the memory where we can forget it, so we’ll carry on living for the now and that will be alright, because if the problem’s not there right now, it may as well not be there at all, and that is absolutely alright and fine. We can make believe like the leaf men are embracing us when we’re just face down in some dogshit.
We all wanna be happy, innit? But how? Other people! How do we get other people? We have to make them notice us. We dance on the floor. We try to transcend ourselves, get past ourselves, destroy ourselves in the hope that someone better will magically emerge out the other end. We medicate, we intoxicate, we ply ourselves with the cures in the hope that one of them makes us better, for pity’s sakes, that one of them is actually the answer we’ve been looking for, the key that unlocks the fantastically brilliant person we could swear to god is bloody well in there somewhere.
I hoped you’d call
I hoped you’d see me
And what if there isn’t anyone in there at all?
“A&E” is a screaming failure of the senses, of emotion, of the belief that somehow your instinct will lead you to figure out what it is you’re meant to be doing. This is not beautiful, but it’ll be called that. This should not soundtrack bank adverts, but I’ve this awful, awful feeling that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
It’s not unusual territory. A brief squint down this blog reveals that it really, really isn’t unusual territory. But “A&E” handles it in such a superficially charming manner. This is on the Radio 1 A-list because acoustic guitars sound nice, and yet the entire point of this song is that these nice sounds become nothing more than placebo, Dylar, a medicine that doesn’t do anything at all except make you forget for a bit. No resolution is achieved; nothing is really improved. They may or may not have come to see her. The tone leads one to suspect that they saw her dancing on the floor and all they could think was that she was shit at dancing.
“A&E” is not just some wolf in sheep’s clothing deal, smuggling in subversive messages under cover of nice wheezy synth noises. This ain’t The Beautiful South. The gauze is there because “A&E” is apart from the world, not for purposes of purity, but because it has become alienated. It sees what goes on but doesn’t really get it, can’t interact with it, can’t quite understand it.
I should try writing about the happy songs more. There’s lots of good ones about right now, there really are. Lots of songs that are fantastic for dancing to and singing along to and so on. But “A&E”… I don’t know. I needed to say something.
