"Troy" by Sinéad O'Connor

I remember it. Toronto in a... well, I don't remember the weather. I do remember being a kid and playing hooky from school. I remember watching MuchMusic and seeing the VJ introduce some woman with a funny name and a funny accent. She was bald, which, to my twelve-year-old mind, was absolutely hysterical. I was only half-watching as whatever banal questions were met with whatever banal answers. So far, so irrelevant.

Until they played the video.

I don't recall when else I have been so utterly captivated. There's not much to the video except her naked and in gold paint. Yet somehow the video perfectly complemented the song. Which was...

It was...

Twenty years later I still can't explain why this song effects me the way it does. Something about it just pierces through my (admittedly thick) armour and slays me. Every time.

Maybe it's the way she effortlessly goes from whisper to scream, all the time in perfect control, with a searing heat, both of passion and of anger. Maybe it's the way those strings create a perfect vessel on which to navigate the stormy seas - tiny and plain but never capsizing.

Maybe it's just how completely and utterly new this strange creation was; how it was able to take my prematurely-wizened "been there, done that" twelve-year-old mind and slap it out of complacency, saying "There is much more out there that you still have no idea of".

It was just as mythical as the phoenix she sings about.

It seemed to show that there were entirely new modes of expression I was unaware of. Entirely new definitions of beauty and of power. I was completely floored. Transfixed, silent, mouth agape for the six-plus minutes of the song.

Turns out after the video, when they cut back to the studio, the entire working staff of MuchMusic was as shocked and transfixed as I was. There was the kind of reverent silence you probably get when a statue of the Virgin Mary starts crying. Then there was just this applause all round. It was so intriguing to me to see people spontaneously react that way on TV (remember that in the 80s, spontaneity on TV was a bad thing). Especially seeing people spontaneously react the same way I just had. It was truly wonderful.

Then, of course, Sinéad O'Connor became superhuge with a Prince cover, tried to continue pushing the envelope while under the spotlight of fame, messed up tragically, became a punchline, then, after all that... recorded a reggae album.

Strange...

Still, before becoming a parody, she was the future of music. Hell, perhaps she was the future of Western Civilisation.

And after this accomplishment, a million punchlines are irrelevant.

"Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S

When I first heard this song, I was going through some kind of irrational ‘no hip-hop’ phase. I don’t really know why – it was probably hip-hop’s best ever era, and here I was more or less refusing to listen to it (though oddly I seem to know all of the era’s greatest hip-hop tracks – somehow.

What I was listening to was all kinds of arty English music – you know, playing the part of suburban Canadian sophisticate. My wardrobe wasn’t entirely black, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the songs I was listening to.

Anyway, suddenly there was ‘Pump Up the Volume’. To somebody with the musical rigidity of a North American radio station, ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was uncategorisable and thus did not compute. It was on 4AD, home to the artiest of the arty and the Britishest of the British, and had a cover that looked like it. It was by a band that technically didn’t exist (M/A/R/R/S were a one-off collaboration between two bands I’d never heard of and would never hear from again), it had about a million different remixes (okay, probably 5 tops, but that was revolutionary back then), and best of all, it wasn’t really a song at all.

It may not seem like such a big deal now, but that fact that ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was actually bits of a bunch of different songs cobbled on top of each other completely amazed me. I mean, I’d heard plenty of songs with samples and/or with scratches (and I’d heard ‘Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ and tried – and failed – to me impressed by it), but this was somehow more compelling. I immediately gave myself over to silly rhetoric about how all songs would sound like this in the future (for a brief moment, they did, first and foremost the Coldcut remix of ‘Paid in Full’, which might as well be the same track). What they call the ‘magpie’ aesthetic appealed to me conceptually, while still sounding good. It's a rare beast that, as they say, appeals to the mind as well as to the body.

Now, of course, songs like this are illegal (for the most part)… It’s easy to get overly swept up in the politics of sampling – it is an interesting discussion where things really aren’t clearly black-and-white – but what I miss about song constructions like this is how they manage to be both arty (thus appealing to my teenage self) and undeniably visceral as well. It seemed like people really were pushing the boundaries of what music was, all the while creating product that was genuinely enjoyable and danceable (not that I would have been caught dead dancing back then…). It isn’t often that you hear songs that are genuinely ‘prophetic’ – giving you a sense of what the future will be like – but listening to Ofra Haza trilling exotically over a flood of breakbeats, chants, soundbite phrases, scratches, guitars (how déclassé!) and kitchen sinks back in the day really did give you a sense that music was somehow changing.

Even if it turned out to be a false prophecy in the end…

Incidentally, if you ever doubt the arty credentials of this song, consider this: I have never seen it since or even found reference to it online, but I am absolutely sure that I can remember, when the song was popular, seeing its ‘sheet music’ for sale in a music shop. Picture, if you will, ‘sheet music’ for this song. Has there been a better conceptual-joke objet d’art since the glory days of dada?