I’ve probably listened to this song 40 or 50 times over the past few days.
When I graduated college and started working in Manhattan, electroclash was pretty big, and I loved it because around that time David Bowie had really softened me up both for the post-punk/New Wave heirs to his sound specifically and theatricality and “posing” generally. I still love it and don’t go in for the backlash, because to me it was never about a scene, it was about sounds and ideas, but one criticism I did take to heart was from someone who said that the electroclash people missed the BIGNESS of early ’80s electronic pop music, particularly in terms of the vocals. I’d take that a step further and say that the big vocals wouldn’t work in electroclash because of the ironic distance that material took from the ’80s originals. Which is fine, but what you lacked is the cavernous, glistening, unabashed emotion of great ’80s pop music. There was no distance–these people were putting it all on the line all the time, investing this enormous sense of drama into pop songs that you really didn’t see with the quiet earnestness of ’70s acoustically driven pop music. It’s impossible for me to listen to songs like “Let Me Go” or “Smalltown Boy” or “West End Girls” or “Head Over Heels” without picturing some actual young human being someplace during that decade listening to these songs, feeling every note and every word, crying or swooning about what’s going on in their own lives and how it’s reflected in the music.
So anyway, that’s what I get from this song, too. Afternoon light and good memories that hit so hard they make you want to vomit, like the past is tangible and its intrusion is disorienting you. I wish the video didn’t stick quotes around the sentiment, but the beginning and end of the clip get it to a certain extent, I think. It almost doesn’t matter because you’ll see your own video in your head. It’s a good song.
great fucking song.
I was bemoaning to someone the other day (maybe it was Dave, in fact) about how ’70s acoustically driven pop music has no heir in today’s music like this. Well, maybe not exactly that. I think I was specifically talking about how since acoustic music went out of style on the radio in the late ’70s, the general public’s view of anything with an acoustic guitar has warped into a series of expectations for the music to be flat and lifeless. Just like 90% of music with any kind of synthetic sound is viewed almost instantly as either inherently cheesy or intentionally ironic, the same amount of acoustic music is looked at as dreary and boring.
Of course, it doesn’t help that most new records taking an unplugged approach to pop music fall into a category that for lack of a better term I’ll call “pussy ass bullshit,” but God damn does it still suck anyway. I had to review that new “Nightwatchmen” album for Jesse’s magazine, and it was like an hour of the most dreary, fallow complaint folk imaginable. It seems weird to say that the guy who wrote The Battle For Los Angeles could make a record so boring, but it was all there.
Also, you should write about music more often.
I don’t mean to categorically denigrate ’70s acoustic music. You don’t own as many Neil Young and Nick Drake records as I do (to say nothing of All Things Must Pass and Led Zeppelin III) without liking acoustic music from that era. I’m thinking more of your basic AM radio staples of the day–though even there, I’m known to rock some Bread once in a while. It’s really the California cokehead music I just can’t take at all–the Eagles, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, that kind of thing.
Anyway, point being, for a while I looked at the ’80s as this super phony plastic overreaction to the sincerity and legitimacy of ’70s music, but now the ’80s stuff hits me a million times harder on an emotional level than, like, “Fire and Rain.”
It’s funny you should say that about “without picturing some actual young human being someplace during that decade listening to these songs, feeling every note and every word, crying or swooning about what’s going on in their own lives and how it’s reflected in the music.” What’s fascinating to me is that this still goes on. My WoW guildmates who are in their teens and early twenties listen to a lot of old school, and also a lot of synth pop and new wave, and just this afternoon one was talking about how much the Pet Shop Boys seemed to capture her moods when the world seems not quite right.
The road goes ever on, I hear.