This waltzing photograph of a song is hard to resist. Listening to it you’re brought in front of a scene pregnant with possibilities, and left to your own devices to make sense of it.
The setting is ‘a rooftop in Brooklyn, at one in the morning’. Everything is seen through this frame or filter. Brooklyn is one of those magical locations that has a weight to it that, for example, Swindon will never have. It’s not Manhattan and it is New York.
It’s one in the morning - perfectly legitimate, given that it’s the city that never sleeps, but it also gives the suggestion of the illicit, that this meeting may not be one to have in the light of day.
And what’s taking place at one in the morning? It’s up to you to paint the picture, as we’re never told. The subject to whom PJ is singing ’said something, really important’ - but we never find out who it is, or what was said. Ambiguity reigns.
There used to exist the perfect bar. It was on a sidestreet off Amsterdam’s main square, simply sitting there, waiting to be stumbled on. For years I used to go back there, sure each time that it wouldn’t dissapoint, until that dreadful winter evening when I turned up after an evening flight from Dublin, only to find that, for whatever reason, the place had gone leaving boarded windows and faded advertising posters in its place.
For the perfect bar, there’s also the perfect evening. It’s summer, and the air is warm but not stifling. The streets are busy with locals and tourists alike. You need to be on your toes in this city, to avoid being run down by a determined bicyclist whose only obligation to your safety is a nonchalant bell ring.
You walk into the bar, with a friend, ready to meet other friends. Soon you’ll have the whole bar almost to yourself given that it seats at best twenty people. Almost, because it’s important to leave space to possibility, to new arrivals and new avenues for the night to take.
The door, such as it is, remains open allowing a constant contact with the street - a shaft of light spilling in to the dim recesses of this long and shallow bar. You drink strong and sweet Duvel, unhurriedly, savouring the smell and texture, while beside you a friend starts rolling. The bar-man is friendly but unobtrusive - fiercely practical.
Towards the back there’s a pinball machine with lights flashing enough to give a sense of movement in this still space, but no-one in this perfect bar will ever be so out-of-place as to actually play a game here.
Then, as you start to feel that giddy tightening of your stomach, moments after your first drag, the only thing missing is the music - but no fear, there’s a jukebox filled with genius, right behind you. Sly Stone is there, beside Thin Lizzy. REM jostles for space with Solomon Burke, and for later in the night we can choose between Jimmy Cliff, Janis Joplin, or the Pixies. But right now there’s only one song you want to hear, because every perfect night needs a start somewhere:
Ladies and Gentlemen, Going Down to Liverpool by the Bangles.
That pounding bass drum, chiming guitars and those roller-coaster vocals. Forget that it’s the bangles, forget that it’s a song originally written by the Waves (as in Katrina and the Waves) forget everything, and sip your beer while tapping your toes against the foot-rests of your bar stool, in this perfect bar. Everything else can wait.
Don’t break the spell here - click on play, and close your eyes, cause this video will ruin everything
There’s an embarassing moment that happens to nearly all students of a foreign language,
when they over-eagerly grasp to a similar sounding word to that of their own native tongue, only to find out that it’s a ‘false friend’ with a completely different meaning. Approaching Kate Rusby’s fragile and beautiful No Names, from the album could initially pose a similar problem. You could be fooled by the first line, where she sings liltingly ‘Take my hand’ for all the world as if simply translating the classic George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore song Can’t help falling in love into yet one more alternative version (at last count over thirty artists had officially covered the tune).You’d be wrong though, and would end up missing a fragile yet steadfast song with the added bonus that it features a guest vocal from the massively overlooked Roddy Womoble from Idlewild.
The song, rightly nominated for a Mercury Music Prize in 2006, has a simple guitar throughout allowing Rusby and Woomble’s delivery of an enigmatic text to provide all the tension. This is folk music, but not of the ‘finger-in-the-ear-and-pint-in-hand’ variety conservatively churning out respectful standards. Rusby, with a voice that sounds as old as the hills (in a good way) - though she’s only in her early thirties - has based her career on melody and pushing boundaries, not in an ostentatious way but concrete nonetheless.
No Names is, in a sense, a perfect duet, as it centres completely on the relationship between the two voices. They join together with a pleasing symmetry, female/male - english/scottish (both Rusby and Woomble sing in their own accents), and yet there’s a fault line between them.
The song’s key line is ‘how it came to this it’s not clear’, and like the all the best songs it’s open to interpretation. One thing is for certain, it’s a song of parting - of bravely acknowledging love and its loss. Is it the song of a couple that, with all the will in the world, can’t go on together - or is it the song of two people facing the imposed separation of death? The song shifts and slides to accomodate as needs must.
One thing is for certain, sometimes in the dying days of the year we all need to take stock and face sadness, and this song is a perfect hand to hold whilst doing so.
The only version I could find online accompanies this Johnny Depp film clip - I’d recommend clicking on play, and then closing your eyes. It’s a song that needs no super-imposed visuals.
It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week - that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia issued a fatwa against him).
News of her death pushed me to listen, with a slight sense of guilt, more attentively. There’s a host of factors at play whenever we discover new music - and guilt isn’t necessarily a bad motivation.
A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work - or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of course, they’re detectives in which case we get to hear too much.
Try looking for mentions of mortgages in the modern pop/rock song and you’ll hit the same brick wall. Foreclosures, or even dissapointing returns on pork bellies from the chicago market - something which one is sure that the investment minded songwriter, like M. Jagger, is probably more than a little aware of - are noticeably absent from the classics, so bear with me as we put together a tenuous play-list with which to confront the credit crunch.
R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it
Best played over your morning coffee as you check to see whether the bank in which your savings are held has gone bust, or as you check to see how much your variable rate mortgage is going to cost you this month.
Jenny Owen Youngs’ What the Fuck was I thinking
With a slight modification, it could work as a soundtrack when you’re trying to think exactly why you signed up to a particular mortgage.
Jimmy Eat World Futures
Perhaps the only song in the list to fit the tag without adjustment, Futures hits a hard-rock nerve on the Bush administration zeitgeist which has helped create the conditions to change to cost of living for millions worldwide
“Hey now, you can’t keeping saying endlessly
My darling, how long until this affects me?
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brother my cup is empty
Let’s get melodramatic, and imagine that things really do go over the edge. Cave’s begging song is no shrinking-violet, but filled with indignation and menace. Best played, at ear-shattering volume, to any banker you may know.
O brother, my cup is empty
And I havent got a penny
For to buy no more whiskey
I have to go home [...]
O my friend, my only brother
Do not let the party grieve
So throw a dollar onto the bar
Now kiss my ass and leave
And finally, for a glimmer of hope, Cake’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive, for the main because, unlike Gaynor’s version, there’s no doubt in the cake version that the subject of the song will indeed survive, and is completely over the object of his misplaced affections. Hopefully an anthem to be adopted by economists in their droves abandoning the neo-liberal ship.
I’m a fence-sitter (as painful as that may be, literally and metaphorically) when it comes to the dread argument about Politics in music. Like most things in life, it all depends on how it’s done. When you forget the primacy of the song, whilst evangelising, you’d be better off - and equally effective, which is to say not very - handing out Socialist Worker Party flyers on a wet and windy afternoon in any given Northern city. When you feel obliged, as M.I.A. (the artist otherwise known as Maya Arulpragasam ) has a number of times, to declare your politics over and above the structure of the song you’re singing, then you need to be judged not on aesthetic grounds but according to ideology, and precious few songwriters have ever been accused of effecting social change through their MTV delivered tracts.
But, on the other hand, I take exception to the rule that great tunes need to have a lyrical content equal-to-but-not-exceeding ‘Sugar, honey-honey, you are my candy girl, and you’ve got me wanting you’. It’s a question of starting points - and M.I.A.’s starting point on Boyz is revolutionary, first and foremost in the sounds used. Listen to the opening beats, and tell me you’ve heard something like it before, and I’ll call you a liar. THe closest touchpoint you can have for it is her previous work, on her debut album Arular’s Bucky done gun, but this is a huge leap forward. Before M.I.A. was undoubtedly interesting, now she’s indispensable.
The musical force behind the song is a mash-up of rythms and musical cultures. At the forefront is the urumi drum, a traditional drum played (usually by untouchables) in the Tamil Nadu state of India and in Sri Lanka, from where M.I.A’s family emigrated to London. Mix that in with some Trinidad ‘Soca’ style, and you have a world-beat that’s less to do with the worthy sounds of Manu Chao & co. and more to do with calypso clashing with, well, the clash.
So, on a musical level, this is in itself political - without bragging about it. It calls into question the rythmic and melodic mores that dominate the global music industry - where the only ‘third-world’ nation allowed to break out of ‘world music’ boredom is Jamaica with its reggae and dancehall cultures. In a culture where innovative sampling simply means finding a ’70s tune that had middling success first time around, and rapping over it, M.I.A.’s sampling of musical cultures is art.
The lyrics take on a stock-standard hip-hop call out and turn it on it’s head.
“HOw many boyz are crazy
How many boyz are raw
HOw many boyz are rowdy
How many start a war”
Brash, sexy, and not just a little bit sexist - but, when the oppressed turns on the oppressed and makes them dance at the same time, then, to recall Lenon’s revolution, you can count me in.
Rolling Stone nominated this #9 in their list of the 100 top songs of 2007 - an oversight, considering they had the likes of Rhianna and her vapid bubblegum Umbrella at #3 (not that it’s a bad song, when done right - check out the Biffy Clyro version that’s doing the rounds). Nobody, for this monkey, has done anything as remotely innovative or catchy as this in a long time - or political, for that matter.
An unusual choice, perhaps, given that it’s probably not the strongest song on an album - from the choirgirl hotel - which is arguably not Tori Amos’s strongest, even though it boastsPlayboy Mommy andJackie’s strength. And yet there’s something very special, and at the same time characteristic about this gentle love song.
What’s great about the song is, that despite it’s gentle tone, it grabs you straight away -in less than 8 seconds - with its first two lines:
Had a northern lad
Well not exactly had
In less than 8 seconds you’ve got a a full story, one that has questions oozing out of its frame. Why is it important that he’s a northern lad? Is it because she’s implicitly not a northerner, that she never managed to entirely have him? etc. A rarely muscular opening for Amos - compare it withPlayboy Mommy, for example, and almost 20 seconds in the piano intro is still setting the scene.
The other thing I love about the song is that, though it’s muscular and stripped back, that’s not to say it’s lyrically direct. Tori Amos tells a story, but never feels obliged to go from point a to b to do so. Lyrically She’s the queen of the poetic non-sequitur:
“First he loved my accent
How his knees could bend
I thought we’d be ok
Me and my molasses
“
In opposition to the lyrical content, that is elusive and indirect, the music takes a comfortingly safe route, gently rising and falling without drawing undue attention to itself - something not to be sneezed at, given Amos’s undoubted virtuosity. Just listen toCruel, orHotel(which immediately succeedsNorthern Lad) and you realise that when she plays it straight, it’s for a reason - as opposed to, say Chris Martin, who plays it straight ’cause that’s what he does…
The final thing that I love about this track is how it manages to have its own character, and at the same time be characteristic of much of her work. There are echoes of themes, in the text and music, that make their presence known through the song - for example, it’s hard not to hear an echo ofTear in your Hand, as she sings:
I feel the west in you
and I feel it falling apart too
Don’t say that you Don’t
And if you could see me now
So in the end the song both reinforces the picture I have of Amos as an artist, while at the same time subtly changing it.
