"A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell
Truth be told, I’m not all that impressed by Joni Mitchell. Perhaps it’s that at times I find her sincerity insincere, or it’s just that the iconoclast in me rebels against the reverence with which so many people view her.
More to the point, it’s probably that that reverence raised my expectations just a little too high, especially when in the 80s, what you had was 80s Joni, which is not the most pleasant of sensations.
This, i.e. the “Blue” album, is meant to be the starting-off point for Joni, but I reckon it’s an acquired taste. She sings like a child, plays guitar like a child and leaves all of her songs as frustratingly half-finished as Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”. The very definition of twee, it created legions of wide-eyed ingénues pouring their hearts over their six-string acoustics. Somehow, it’s the music of slumber parties, of girls clumsily expressing feelings they have but can’t identify.
So why is it not rubbish? Why is it, in fact, amazing? Well, I’m not sure, really, but I reckon it’s got something to do with that melody: indelible to say the least, on first it doesn’t resonate at all, but at the strangest points thereafter it reasserts itself in your memory. That childish three-string guitar line manages to haunt and ensnare at the same time.
Her poetry is, again, the poetry of the angsty high-school girl, yet in the same way that mawkish poetry can still touch, it is still beautiful, filled with a handful of great lines, involving such subjects as the devil, paint, the northern star. All set in a backwoods bar in some place presumably very, very cold in her homeland Canada, whose name Joni trills in the song, sending up our backs that queer shiver of embarrassed pride that we Canadians have come to call patriotism (I can’t imagine Americans would ever react in the same uncomfortable way at a musical mention of their homeland).
It all comes together in the chorus, though, where her voice trills in a way that will turn off as many as it will clue in, fingers squeakily sliding up the guitar neck as the voice squeakily slides up into a falsetto, and the awe-inspiring conflation of the blood of Jesus, the wine at the bar and the soul of the song’s subject.
Stunned into reverent silence by that beautiful chorus, the listener suddenly finds it all coming into place – this is music with no distance whatsoever between performer and listener. Joni seems so amateurish because those who we actually know in our real lives are amateurs too. She could be sitting on the edge of someone’s bed in the upstairs of a suburban house, or on a wooden barstool in the empty bar of the first verse. This is art as in the opposite of artifice, and all the more touching when you realise how readily Joni Mitchell is associated with artifice.
"Brass in Pocket" by the Pretenders
The sound of self-confidence. This amazingly sexy track gets where it’s going not by being kittenish or by being coy or by being in any way demure. This song is sexy because Chrissie Hynde demands that you find it sexy. She doesn’t holler or scream, she doesn’t even try very hard. She just has a gleam in her eye and a confidence in her stride that removes all doubt.
Chrissie Hynde is interesting. By now she’s been unimpressive for so much longer than she was ever impressive that it’s difficult to remember how high she once flew. For years and years now it’s been just one of those revolving-door ‘bands’ (like The Cure) playing MOR that pretends to be ‘alternative’ merely because its singer used to be.
How alternative did she use to be? Well (despite being from
The verses aren’t up to much, really. It’s all just a build-up for when we get to Chrissie delineating what parts of herself she’ll use to ‘make you see’, peaking in a great phrase where she sings, ‘gonna use my… my… my…’, baiting you into expecting something perhaps dirty, ‘imagination!’ she calls out, cool as a cucumber, and the joke’s on you because your imagination’s in the gutter.
She then points out what’s blindingly obvious, that she’s ‘special’, and a bunch of anonymous male voices (the remaining Pretenders, presumably) parrot it helplessly until she practically reaches out of the speakers, grabs you by the necktie (for this is a song from 1979, and thus you are wearing one, and a skinny one at that) and forcefully demands of your attention, “give it to me!”
Yes ma’am.
And we did, for several years more as she insisted on making further good music despite all kinds of tragedy in her band. Eventually, as must happen to all good things, she ceased being special.
Yet the amazing thing about having once been so clearly special is that the allure never truly goes away. It doesn’t matter if she never releases another good song; decades later when Chrissie Hynde dies, she will still be special.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles
You know, there are few things in this life less interesting than reading people prattle on about the Beatles. The tendency to present the Beatles as something special, unique, unprecedented and in all categories distinct as opposed to a very, very good band that made a lot of good music for a few years has, in my opinion, backfired. Your average punter feels he can’t appreciate the Beatles the same way he might appreciate, say, the Who. I mean, I half feel that I need to create a special ‘directory’ when uploading them onto my MP3 player, for Christ’s sake.
The thing is, though, bravado and marketing aside, the Beatles were pretty amazing. There are at least a dozen Beatles songs that deserve a rightful place here, and presumably we’ll get to them all sooner or later. This one, not a single or even a song you ever hear much on the radio, is the concluding track on “Revolver”, without a doubt their finest album. From start to finish, there’s a total of maybe two or three songs that merely good, not exemplary. No hyperbole.
This one… well, this is John Lennon tripping out on LSD and reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Forgetting Aldous Huxley rhetoric for a minute, it’s all very Buddhist – Lennon apparently even wanted chanting monks on the track. Strange, though, that this is the Beatles as Buddhists, because instead of being calm and meditative, it is an unholy din from start to finish.
I can’t imagine what EMI must have thought when they heard the cacophony of seagull squalls, backwards guitars, lumpen misshaped drums and (most brilliantly) a one-note bass line. How cool is that? On top of all of that is Lennon clearly not going gently into the good night, shrieking into a chasm of echo. This is good-trip as bad-trip, or someone who can’t see the difference between the two or doesn’t care.
Apparently the mess of sounds in this track came to be through tape loops brought in by each member (the seagulls apparently Paulie laughing) – so in a sense this is a democratic “Beatles composition”, but it’s impossible to imagine it coming from the mind of anyone but John Lennon. I dislike the notion that has become established ‘truth’ that Lennon had all the talent and McCartney had all the white teeth – Lennon made his fair share of crap and McCartney more than his share of genius. But it is a different type of genius, and I don’t think Paul ever could have found beauty in what is deliberately ugly quite to this extent – even if he was the first one making avant-garde musique concrete. They were just too different. What Paul made was also brilliant, but I don’t know whether it was ever quite as… for lack of a less-clichéd word, provocative.
Nor, mind you, were Oasis, a band that tried to get rich off of Lennon-deification to the point of actually covering this song, a band that wouldn’t recognize unbridled genius of this nature if it bit them on the ass…
"Can't Get You Out of My Head" by Kylie Minogue
Ah, Kylie. What can I say?
I am neither a gay man nor a teenage girl, so by rights this song, like the rest of Kylie Minogue’s oeuvre, should do nothing for me. In fact, more to the point, it should trigger my gag reflex and send me hurling, right? That would be the expected typical adult heterosexual male response to Kylie? And then to run off and play some
Kylie’s music is angst-free low-calorie entertainment. The thing is that I reckon that’s a compliment. I’ll take genuinely artificial over artificially genuine any day. And Kylie brings to her pop ditties a legitimate dedication to, and pride in, making people happy.
“Can’t Get You Out of my Head” doesn’t mean anything. It’s a skip-rope melody over a roller-rink beat. Its catch phrase is ‘na na na’ repeated over and over again. A nine-year-old could dance deliriously to it and appreciate it in just the same way I do.
Is there anything wrong with any of that? Not a bit. Songs like this can fall very easily into tackiness, phoniness and deliberate childishness. In my opinion, this song has none of these shortcomings, and Ms. Minogue herself deserves most of the credit for that: her performance is filled with sexiness but confidence, a love of life that still takes life seriously. It took Kylie a long time to get to that stage (and she didn’t hold onto it long): between “I Should Be So Lucky” and this (not the widest progression musically) she went through all kinds of phases, but finally came back to what she was good at, with an appreciation that being good at this kind of music is (a) no small feat, and (b) a real gift.
The result made her superhuge, or else remade her as superhuge. The trick? Showing that ‘pop’ really does mean ‘popular’, in the most democratic vox populi manner possible. I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying this song – in keeping with the opening paragraph, I should say that while I can imagine lots of people claiming not to like this song, in their hearts, alone in their rooms with their headphones on, I can’t imagine anyone not being transported to a place of simplicity and of innocence.
No wonder she’s such a gay icon!"In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins
We’ve got a bit of a double-feature this week, looking at the same artist at his very best and at his very worst.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: Phil Collins isn’t one of the greats. In many ways he’s exactly what’s wrong with the music industry, in fact. Genesis in the 70’s, meh. And it wasn’t his band, anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s been Phil Collins’s dream to muck up R&B into chicken-dance music for retired old ladies ever since trying our for the Monkees, but spending the 70s in a band that had certain powers to ‘evoke’ led him in the 80s to intermittently feel obliged to continue putting out mood music, amongst the cheese. Both under the name “Genesis” and under the name “Phil Collins”. Let’s be frank: in the 80s it didn’t make a bit of difference which name was on the label, did it? The contents were interchangeable.
Apparently, Phil was getting a divorce. He was depressed. He was experimenting with his new studio. He was making demos. He improvised the lyrics and most definitely did not see a man drowning another man and most definitely did not train a spotlight upon said killer during a concert. Actually I can report to you a lot about what Phil Collins has said concerning this song. The reason, of course, why Phil’s spoken at such great length about this song is that it’s the only song reporters have ever wanted to discuss with him.
What, they were going to ask about that great horn line in “Sussudio”?
Have you ever heard of the phrase “suspension of disbelief”? This is, I believe, the correct way to listen to this song. Convince yourself that this is not the guy who slaughtered “You Can’t Hurry Love” or did that “I Can’t Dance” song. This is not a dodgy balding Conservative with on freak moment of glory. This is an absolute frickin’ genius. Lie to yourself. It’ll make it all better.
Concentrate on that amazing mood he constructs. The sparseness – the chainsaw guitars somewhere in the background, the drum machine casually trotting along like a person aimlessly tapping his pencil on a desk, the array of weird sounds over top. Concentrate on, get this, the majesty of Phil the vocalist: the thespian way he moves from quiet rage to white-hot rage. The way subtle effects like echo and vocoder come in and out of Phil’s vocal line to spice things up.
It continues that way for several minutes: tension, followed by more tension, followed by more tension still. Then, of course, like a famous story often told or movie often watched, we know what’s going to happen yet it still knocks us off our feet.
Phil, bathed in vocoder, grunts out the line, “it’s no stranger to you and me”, and then suddenly it happens. At exactly 3:39, the world temporarily comes to a stop for the single most glorious drum break in the history of recorded sond. It starts at 3:29 and is over by 3:42. Phil Collins earned his place in music history with precisely three seconds of music. But there’s no way to overstate it. No human can resist air-drumming at this point, as Phil Collins invents the best advertisement ever for drumming as a professional career.
But like I give a damn about technically impressive instrumentation. You won’t find any Yngwie Malmsteen on this list, and for good reason. The thing is that the drum break, and the eternal drum fill that follows, makes perfect sense in terms of the emotional weight of the song: it’s the explosive summit of a three-minute crescendo, a gradual increase of tension until it shatters stupendously into relief. Shakespeare could not have scripted it better.
Forgetting boring discussion involving Ahmet Ertegun and overdubs, Phil was dead brave to release this as a single. Radio was brave to play it. The public was brave to love it. It was an amazing moment when Phil suddenly looked like the Genesis member to beat, artistically.
And in history’s most lunk-headed move, he proceeded to follow it up with the faux-cheery “I Missed Again”, the first in a long string of grandma-rock ‘classics’.
But if you close your eyes and just wait for that drum break, you can picture Phil Collins as the coolest man in history.
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow" by the Shirelles
Ah, youthful innocence. There are, and have always been, people who claim that this generation loses its innocence more quickly than the previous generation. Being now old enough to claim that if I so choose, I do wonder. I think that a lot of the perceived generational differences we claim have to do with our own shifting perspectives, not those of any given generation. As we slide into age-induced conservativism, perhaps we colour our own childhood memories differently, so that when we see a child today behaving more or less exactly as we did, we misremember our own youth and see today’s kid as more licentious.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we truly are going to hell in a handbasket, morally.
To learn, let’s go back in time – way before I was born, before even my parents were old enough to worry about the sentiments expressed herein. I have no idea what age group the record labels presumed this was written for, but I suspect it’s the teen age group. Popular music is generally marketed to teens, and in 1960 I don’t think anybody marketed anything except movie soundtracks and big band music to adults.
So this is an experience meant for teens. The lead singer’s crystal-clear vocal performance is so filled with fear and anticipation that you suspect it really was recorded on the verge of her ‘first night’. The strings (an absolutely gorgeous use of strings) conspire to inflate the romance inherent in the event, but the singer is all about uncertainty. She is quite naïve, not very worldly at all, and quite dependent on her boyfriend for emotional satisfaction: all very pre-Kennedy era.
As Carole King’s lyrics, artful yet conversationally plain, explain, she is about to surrender her virginity to her boyfriend and is terrified that he’s just in it for the conquest and will disappear the next day.
In that light, almost fifty years seem to have changed nothing. Girls today – and if not at the same age group then at least in the neighbourhood – ponder the same dilemma. This girl is not married; this is not a ‘wedding night’ song. This event is happening in a bedroom in either her house or the boyfriend’s house, with the parents downstairs watching TV, unaware. They’re both young, emotionally unaware, yet going with it anyway.
And she’s looking for assurance. Perhaps the most explicitly female emotion there is, outside of motherhood, is the need for that ‘first sexual encounter’ to be a sharing and bonding experience for both of them. This is a need that men, particularly teenage men, are almost entirely bereft of. This is why it matters that the words were written by a woman, and an 18-year-old woman at that (addressing, no doubt, her songwriting partner and soon-to-be husband). In an era where older men were awkwardly putting insincere words into the mouths of teenage girls, this song is so completely legit because it’s written by someone who knows, who feels the emotions expressed in the words. This is virginal female sexuality laid bare, and though it might be filtered through a the lens of a more inhibited era, the emotions are just as raw and real as if they had been written today.
I hear this song with a bitter nostalgia: not for the era, which is almost a full generation before me, but for the age at which girls feel this way, and age that has now long passed for me.
And perhaps if I find myself judging the kids of today, it’s with more than a twinge of jealousy.
"Ojos Así" by Shakira
Okay. Let me just say it and get it out of the way: Shakira is an immensely talented woman who deserves financial recompense for her talent at whatever cost that may entail. Whew. I feel better.
I say that sentence because I’m not a snob, truly. I don’t sit there with a latte sniffing and accusing any underground artiste who’s ever sold in excess of 10,000 copies of their music of ‘selling out’. Glamorizing obscurity (or in this case ‘authenticity’) for its own sake is a little pointless. It is genuinely a pity the sacrifices artistes sometimes have to make for a wider audience, but life is not always fair.
So… who am I to criticize Shakira for going blonde, moving to the States, collaborating with Gloria Este-frickin’-han and singing repeatedly about the size of her breasts? Right? Hey? Plus, “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Objection” are all right. The less said about songs whose titles end in “…Clothes”, the better.
But this… this is a hurricane, a whirlwind, a force of nature. This is something fundamental in the human spirit brought forth and recorded onto modern machines. Exotic as hell, it seamlessly mixes Arabic and South American – Lebanese and Colombian – with a guitar sound and an attitude out of American heavy metal, all grafted onto a Euro techno pulse. Yet despite all of this, it never sounds anything less than natural and never for a minute pushes you away by being foreign or disparate. Listening to this song makes you feel that there’s a little bit of American- and European-influenced Lebanese Colombian in all of us.
Okay, tongue ever so slightly in cheek. The thing is that I really don’t understand why this is not enough for the world. Why something this stunning, this powerful, this forceful didn’t suffice to make Shakira a star, why inevitably it came down to the language she was singing in. The first question I have is whether or not we here in the English-speaking world are truly so provincial that we cannot connect to music whose lyrics we can’t understand. For every “99 Luftballons” whose original happily manages to outsell its ‘translation’, there are a dozen singers taking English lessons in order to pursue that golden ring. And the second question is why, outside of the English- (and in this case Spanish-) speaking markets, sales should increase the moment the singer puts out an English-language song. I mean, a foreign language is still a foreign language to, say, a German, isn’t it?
Shakira speaks excellent English and writes great lyrics in English too. But I’m not sure if I can find an English-language song by her that has quite the passion we can hear in this song as she declaims forth over that beguiling mix of eastern percussion and western machines. No, I don’t know what she’s saying. But I fee what she’s saying. And since music is a gut-reaction experience, that’s the more important thing, in my opinion.
Pity so few people worldwide, or at least so few record companies worldwide, appear to agree.
Oh, and as a final note, isn’t she drop-dead gorgeous as a brunette?
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