I Feel Love

“What I’ve got they used to call the blues”: and these days, they call it something else, but exactly what is an open question. One of the effects of the economy and understatement of Karen’s performance is that you’re not quite sure of the real extent of the misery the singer is feeling: it could be anything from mild ennui to clinical depression. But it’s not just the biographical fallacy that sways me more to the latter end of the spectrum (unfortunately, every single Carpenters song has to submit to being read as a coded harbinger of fate).

What makes this song one of the greatest ever about depression is the way its easy-listening template allows it to evoke numbness, boredom, anhedonia. An inability to feel is after all one of the main symptoms of depression, which ought to make litotes (rhetorical understatement) one of its master tropes…if it were, music in general would be a lot less lugubrious. Here, though, the sense that what’s being said is standing in for something darker even carries through to the supposedly hopeful middle eight, where, we are told, Karen is comforted by the thought of “the one who loves me”–has any such appeal ever sounded less convincing? It might just be that this is a weak part of the song, but given the sublime beauty of the rest of it I’m prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt here: we are going through the motions on purpose.

In a performance that relies on understatement, small gestures come to the fore: here it’s the slight vibrato on “hanging around”, the plangent harmonica melody, and the very odd, sudden mid-note sforzando on the very last word (”dowwwwwwwwwwwOWWWWWwwwwwwwwn”), an effect I’m unaware of having heard in any other pop song.

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The first PSB single I remember hearing was “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”–obviously something of a watershed because it introduced me to not only the Pet Shop Boys but also Dusty Springfield. (It was a few years later that I became a fully-fledged Dusty fan, but I guess “What Have I…?” planted a landmine that was waiting to be stepped on. A delightful land mine, of course.)

So it must have been somewhat after the fact that I first encountered their debut single. But “West End Girls” has subsequently gained a kind of aura for me that’s never quite been replicated in the rest of the PSBs’ career. It seems to me like the most coolly sophisticated pop song of all time. Part of that is to do with the spoken verses (you can’t quite call it “rapping”). Neil Tennant’s singing voice has never been a favourite of mine; fey, insubstantial male voices are a bit of a stumbling block for me in a way that the female equivalents (obviously) aren’t. But when he just talks in that posh accent with no downwardly-mobile pretensions whatsoever, it’s one of pop’s most refreshing disconnects.

Unlike “Billie Jean” where the lyrics seem to me completely beside the point, I really like the lyrics of “West End Girls”. But I like them in an impressionistic way, again I really have no idea what the song is “about”. East End boys and West End girls, I guess. So: desire across class boundaries? That makes it sound a bit too much like Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” though. Maybe it would be very obvious if I did what I never do and just sat down and read the lyrics properly, but to be honest I’d rather not know. “West End Girls” is just one of those euphonious phrases, like “the storming of the Winter Palace”, that is wonderful to contemplate in its own right.

The production, too, is a miraculous navigation of the murky waters of post-New Pop, managing to sound neither dessicated nor pandering in a gruesome White Soul kind of way. It just exists, geniunely unique and unrepeatable. The Pet Shop Boys released a more or less unrivalled string of superb singles following this, of course, but still, nothing quite as good.

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The first recollection I have of being aware of Michael Jackson’s existence is seeing the video (or film clip, as we called them back then) for “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” when it was released in 1979. This might seem odd considering that I was born in 1970 and Michael and his brothers had been releasing hit songs throughout my childhood, but it’s a measure of the rather sporadic relationship I had with pop music back then (and to some extent continue to have). I’m always bemused and slightly envious when I read the various serial commenters on Tom Ewing’s Popular give very precise recollections of their own experience and the public reception of any given pop single, up to and including what the drummer was wearing when it was performed on Top of the Pops. For one thing, my family was never allowed to watch Countdown (the Australian equivalent of TOTP and at least as influential on the rest of my generation), so I only got to hear music by accident or by occasionally tuning into AM radio (which was all there was).

Anyway, “Don’t Stop…” more or less instantly became one of my favourite songs and could easily have been included in this list. But I chose “Billie Jean” as the more life-changing track, even though I can’t remember whether or not I actually liked it when it was relased in 1983. (I was one of the few people in the world who didn’t shell out for the Thriller LP, I remember that much.) As a memory trigger the song has a melancholy edge; ‘83 was the year I started high school and “Billie Jean” is associated very clearly for me with the dancefloor at school socials, always a rather lonely place for me but also the place where I discovered I actually loved dancing, choosing to make a virtue of the fact I wasn’t dancing with anyone and experience it as a kind of dialectic between alienation and community. Hey, I was before my time! (NB my dancing exploits did not extend to any attempt to moonwalk; in any case I looked down on “prescribed” dance moves and communal dancing of any kind, groaning inwardly every time the strains of “Nutbush City Limits” started up…)

“Billie Jean” was an ideal soundtrack for dancefloor epiphanies because it is so downright ominous; and here I’m only talking about the music, this is one of those songs where I choose to completely ignore the lyrics, and indeed it was many years before I even realised what it was “about”. There’s the famous stalking bassline of course, but for me the really terrifying elements of the song are the staccato keyboard stabs that puntuate the whole thing, and the scintillating descending string line that comes in the second chorus (a brilliantly delayed moment; once you know the song well its absence creates a real tension in the first chorus).

I could go on and talk about how the downbeat tone of “Billie Jean” reveals Michael’s inner turmoil and prefigures the vicissitudes of his career, but nah, I’ll save that crap for when I talk about Karen Carpenter.

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I was thinking of selecting “Confide in Me” as my Kylie song for this list, but in the end that just seemed too safe, this indie-approved, unexceptionable Kylie from the point in her career (well, one of the several points) when she decided to try her hand at being a Serious Artist. Remember the label shift to Deconstruction (ha!), the black-and-white cover of Kylie in a trouser suit wearing thick-framed glasses and the title “Kylie Minogue” in restrained Helvetica? Très chic of course, but I still have a soft spot for the original SAW Kylie (note to younger readers: by SAW I mean not the torture porn franchise but “Stock Aitken and Waterman”, ask your mum and dad), the Kylie who was more or less strictly for The Gays, the Kylie I saw perform at Mardi Gras (the only time I ever went, actually). In any case, “Better the Devil You Know” has always been my favourite Kylie song so in the end it was the only possible choice.

I thought then, and still do, that the music is quite striking, especially the harmony. Listening to sequence of contortions required to shift the key from the B flat major of the verse to the distant D flat major of the chorus (”a hundred times or more-ore-ore-ore!”) you’re struck by how weird SAW could actually be at times. No I’m not going to push some “they were more avant-garde than Stockhausen!” line, but for anyone who thinks they made paint-by-numbers pop this is a corrective. There’s an even weirder example in “What Do I Have to Do”, another song from the Rhythm of Love album that marks the high point of the Kylie/SAW collaboration.

I’ve also always found Kylie the most enjoyable to listen to of all the female singers with undeniably weak voices. She seems to find a way of putting her limited instrument to the best possible use, and this song is certainly an example of that.

Mostly, though, this one’s about memories, my first tentative forays into gay life (in Adelaide! the glamorous Mars Bar! but still!), my learning not to be embarrassed by cheesiness. It occurs to me that the latter is a subtext in the whole “rockism” debate, there’s an association for me at least between anti-pop sentiment and the closet. I wonder whether that’s why some gay men become such ardent popists. It certainly always made me sceptical of the young gay men I would meet (they were often my students and would expound this point of view earnestly in their essays) who thought that their interest in indie music was some act of guerilla resistance against hegemonic gay culture. I quite liked hegemonic gay culture because of what it rescued me from, and I still do. And of course I still love Kylie.

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I’d hoped this song would come up closer to December. It was easily my favourite song of 2007, but I know everyone was a bit Umbrella (ella ella)-ed out by the end of the year. Still, iTunes tells me I have to write it about it next, so write about it I shall, lest I descend into a vortex of moral chaos by ignoring my own arbitrary rules.

I wanted to pick something very recent as a kind of safeguard against this list claiming any kind of canonicity. It’s not a list of “songs that have stood the test of time”–on the whole I prefer songs that haven’t–and the inclusion of “Umbrella” shouldn’t necessarily be taken to imply that it has some intrinsic excellence that wil still be apparent in a decade’s time. That said, I do in fact think that it has an intrinsic excellence that will still be apparent in a decade’s time.

Despite its ubiquity, I first heard this song when Natalie Gauci performed it on Australian Idol (a measure of how much I dip into and out of pop music). The fact that such a tough, beat-driven ballad can be transformed so convincingly into an Alicia-Keys-esque piano weepie gives a clue about one of the reasons it’s so great: it’s actually got a really good tune. The number of R&B songs released over the past few years that are melodically memorable in their own right, divorced from their production, is amazingly small. Listen to how hopeless any extant cover version of “Cry Me a River” or “Crazy in Love” is and you’ll see what I mean: they are great songs because of their production. The hooks are in the samples, beats, keyboard riffs, etc, not in the melody. There’s nothing wrong with that of course! Obviously you could say the same about an awful lot of my favourite tracks. But there is something refreshing about two previously rather undistinguished composers managing to come up with a vocal line that’s so well-structured and memorable. (Admittedly, the middle 8 is a bit blah.)

So we start with a great melody, but there are also things about this particularly incarnation of it that stand out. One is the aforementioned toughness of the beats, such an interesting counterpoint to the tenderness of the lyrics, and a kind of reinvention of what counts as a ballad (you can see this continuing in something like Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love”). The other astonshing thing is the impossibly portentous bassline in the chorus, a great blast of long notes that always reminds me of a church organ. (This resemblance becomes even more striking in the final chorus where, just like in a hymn, the bassline changes, something I’ve never seen pointed out before, although that may be because I haven’t looked.)

Does being a fan of this song entail being a fan of Rihanna? I’m not sure; it’s funny how despite absolutely loving this song I’ve felt no real interest in hearing more of the singer. I didn’t think much of “Shut Up and Drive” with its rather clumsy use of “Blue Monday”. Admittedly, I do rather love “Don’t Stop the Music”, a track so gay it could have been performed by the Young Divas (or at least Ricki-Lee). But I don’t feel any real need to connect with this artist; I like the rather diffident way she just lets the music do its job.

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Is this the nearest thing we have to prog-disco? Consider the evidence: unlike most disco tracks (and unlike most of my Top 52) it’s really best heard in album context, as part of the continuous suite that forms the first side of the LP of the same name. Then there’s the sense of seriousness underlying the whole enterprise; its pleasures are won at the expense of outright “fun”. Related to that is the fact that I feel driven almost against my will to make very pretentious comparisons: for instance, I’m unable to resist saying that if “I Feel Love” is the Tristan und Isolde of Disco, this is the Parsifal. “I Feel Love” is about, or rather just is, a plateau of libidinal excitement; “From Here to Eternity” (as the title suggests) has to do with the indefinite extension of time itself. Stop me before I go on.

(As an aside, “From Here to Eternity” is one of those titles, like “The Power of Love”, that seems irresistible to lyricists: it’s also the title of totally unrelated songs by Frank Sinatra, Michael Peterson and Iron Maiden!)

More mundanely, the past couple of years have been good ones for the sounds inspired by this track. You can feel its influence all over the place. The oddly wrong-sounding drum patterns (like the snare has been pulled too tight or something) are echoed in the ultra-hip Black Devil Disco Club (originally recorded just one year later, in 1978). The vocoder vocals, I don’t really need to elaborate on. And the seriousness, well, it saturates the whole Italo revival with its typical mode of deadpan, anhedonic blank irony (see especially the output of the Italians Do It Better label, the ne plus ultra of glumness being the extraordinary Chromatics album Night Drive. I’m indebted to Tim Finney for his insights about this stuff…unfortunately I can’t give a link because he only blogs on Facebook these days!)

One of the interesting things about Giorgio is that despite what seems to be the direction he’s heading with From Here to Eternity (the album), he doesn’t end up disappearing down a rabbit-hole of abstraction. Instead he spent much of the 80s composing impeccably commercial songs for film soundtracks: “The Neverending Story”, “Together in Electric Dreams”, “Flashdance”, “Take My Breath Away” and so on. Then again his score for Metropolis (which to my shame I’ve never heard) suggests he still held a candle for modernism. Indeed Giorgio just might be the perfect synthesis of the avant-garde and the commercial. Which is one of the reasons this is his second appearance in this list, and I can now exclusively reveal that it won’t be his last.

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This might not be my absolute favourite JT song–that would be the magisterial “My Love”–but “Like I Love You” was, not to put too fine a point on it, life-changing. It was hearing this song back on 2002 that renewed my interest in chart pop and more or less set me on the path I’ve been on ever since. Plus, no matter how unfashionable they are now, I had to include a Neptunes track in my top 52 (Timbaland will be otherwise represented, of course).

I’ve probably had more arguments on the internet about this song than any other (including one with a grammar pedant who thought the title should be “As I Love You”; plus ça change…). I wrote a big long thing about it once for some people as a kind of Popism 101 primer. I think I might have even rehearsed the then-popular notion that “chart music was much more avant-garde than [insert whatever indie band would sound most provocative, usually Radiohead].” I can’t seem to find it although I’m sure I posted it somewhere, but the general drift was that it was a brilliant example of the beat-driven aesthetic of early-00s R&B, melodically very sparse and leaving most of the harmonies implied (as opposed to 90 R&B which tended towards harmonic saturation).

Or to put it all another way: “DRUMS”.

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This is my favourite “indie” song ever. Sonically, there’s nothing very remarkable about it at least as far as instrumentation goes. It’s your stock-standard guitar/bass/drums. The guitars are chimey and sweet, a bit Johnny Marr-ish but with some post-punk angularity as well. What you notice first is of course the “unusual” vocals of Sue Tompkins, and you will know within about half a minute whether or not they’re going to be your cup of tea. The closest thing to Sue’s vocal style in my knowledge of musical history is the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, so 20th century classical buffs should in theory be lapping it up from the saucer. (That’s a clumsy attempt to extend the “cup of tea” conceit, in case you didn’t notice.) The lyrics, though, are like nothing else; they come across as the stream of consciousness of someone with OCD, hammering home the same rather obscure motifs over and over again. It’s good to hear indie music harnessing the power of repetition. One of the fun things you can do is make up your own substitutes for the lyrics, for instance at the beginning I always pretend Sue is singing “Fallujah, Fallujah, Fallujah, Fallujah” instead of “If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya”. There’s another bit which sounds a bit like “MP3, MP3, MP3, MP3 (etc.)”. Both of these substitutions are rather unlikely given that the song came out in 2000, but it seems natural to want to engage with and personalise this music on that kind of dream-logic level.

Some facts. Life Without Buildings were from Scotland, a country which, on a per capita basis, is better at indie music than any other country except New Zealand. They released only one (perfect) album, Any Other City, then they broke up. I think this is fantastic. More bands should follow their example. Last year they posthumously released an album called Live at the Annandale Hotel which as the name suggests was recorded in Sydney. They were harbingers of the post-punk revival, which may or may not be a good thing; in any case I would rather have Any Other City than the entire combined works of Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party etc. What they have in common with best of the original post-punk, and what makes them different from their successors (we are now out of facts and back into opinions), is an absolute confidence in and commitment to their own vision, a complete lack of pandering or ironic/apologetic self-consciousness, and not least, real originality.

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Since Any Other City is currently deleted (boo!), I’ve made both streaming and download versions available. There’s a noticeable blip at one point; apologies for that, this is the only version I have (I confess I don’t actually own a CD copy).

Stream:

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You can also listen to some tracks from Live at the Annandale Hotel (including “The Leanover”) here, and download it at eMusic.

As many of my readers will know, Perlon is one of the most prominent labels in the broad subgenre of dance music that for a while we were calling “microhouse”, although nowadays everyone calls it “minimal”. That’s just “minimal”, noun, as in “I like minimal”. Still sounds pretty awkward coming out of my mouth at least, but there it is.

People who know about these things think there is an identifiable “Perlon sound”…I’ve even seen MP3s tagged with “Perlon” as their genre. (This is quite different from a bigger, more eclectic label like Kompakt, which puts out everything from hard techno to ambient…arguably all infused with a certain personality, for sure, but nobody would say “I know a Kompakt record when I hear it”.) The “Perlon sound” generally refers either to ultra-choppy, oddly funky techno a la Pantytec, or streamlined minimalism as heard on something like Melchior Productions’ No Disco Future LP, cerebral and introverted but still very much dancefloor-oriented. Both of which styles are absolutely wonderful–indeed Perlon in all its guises might be my favourite label ever–but they can make the label appear to have a chronic case of the self-seriousness and chin-strokingness that infects the minimal scene as a whole. What’s sometimes forgotten is the more whimsical, playful, loose-limbed side of Perlon, as heard in the odd loungey interludes of Markus Nikolai’s Back (the first long-player they ever released) or the Prince inflections of Morane’s Trick EP.

Nikolai is a third of Morane, and has also been involved with Narcotic Syntax, so I guess he might be the magic ingredient in this side of the label. Narcotic Syntax, a collective revolving around James Dean Brown and yapacc, has always been my favourite Perlon “project”. The titles of their releases, like the “Calculated Extravagant Licentiousess” and “Reptile Sweat Accelerator” EPs, and their eagerly awaited (by me at least) debut album “The Creed of the Eternal Narcoverse” (worthy of the KLF that one) make it clear that they’re following their own rather odd path. If you have a taste for that particularly Germanic kind of whimsy, you’ll really go for them. (They’ve never come up with a title quite as brilliant as Pantytec’s “Pony Slaystation”, admittedly…)

Selecting dance tracks for this project was not the easiest thing. Post-1990 dance music in general is underrepresented compared to what I actually listen to, because it’s often an overall sound that I love; picking out particular tracks as “the best” can seem arbitrary. Not this one, though; there was never any question about “Electronic Liquid” making the 52. When I first downloaded it I just couldn’t stop listening. The beats start off simple by Perlon standards, but beautifully balanced. The smooth keyboards puncuated by staccato stabs and little bass farts combine to produce an irresistable mix of slickness and funk. But (rather unusually for a dance track) it’s the lyrics that really make this track addictive for me. I won’t attempt to describe the bizarre stream-of-consciousness spoken-word ramble that lasts virtually the entire seven minutes, except to say that it includes perhaps the best deployment ever of the word “blimey”, and displays a delight in wordplay that is, again, very German (future blog post: a defense of the German sense of humour). And then there’s the fact that, like other Narcotic Syntax tracks, you never quite know where this is going: it’s not one of those dance tracks that establishes a groove and sticks to it; it has U-turns that are unexpected and quite delightful.

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Listen:

This was only ever released on vinyl, and even that is no longer available, so here’s the full 256kbps version for you to download.

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the heady days of 2003-04, those more innocent days when a loose collective of bloggers, congregating around a few nodes like ILM, Freaky Trigger and Blissblog, created a kind of worldwide symposium of pop music, if that doesn’t sound too pompous. This blog was always on the fringes of that phenomenon–I always felt like I was faking it a bit, and it was with as much embarrassment as pleasure that I would find myself suddenly being linked to by the likes of Simon Reynolds and Ian Penman (I wish I could say I had grown up poring over their every word but in actual fact before I started reading their blogs I didn’t know who they were. That’s for anyone who thinks I’m being falsely modest when I say I’m a dilettante!)

A couple of artists are emblematic of that time. They produced music that everybody seemed to like, that seemed obligingly to have been conjured up by our own fantasies of the ideal pop synthesis. So in those pre-MySpace days we did what we could create a vibe around them. The first of these was Dizzee Rascal, although if Dizzee is now something of a household name (at least for the hipper brand of household), it’s hard to see whether the blogs had much of a hand in that…there was always a kind of irony (much remarked on at the time) about our collective enthusiasm for someone we doubted had ever read a blog, who certainly didn’t write one, and who was perhaps only dimly aware that he had this obsessive, geeky international fanbase. (These days, incidentally, that kind of presumed ironic distance between artist and consumer seems to have disappeared completely; someone like Dizzee would have a blog now, or at any rate a MySpace page.)

Things were different, though, with the Junior Boys. Not only did Jeremy Greenspan have a blog, not only was their (original) label run (if memory serves) by someone who participated actively in ILM, the JBs might have been the first artists ever to have included an acknowledgement to the blogosphere in their liner notes. They were “ours”. It’s that sense of personal connection that’s made me choose for this project something from that era, the title track of their first album, rather than a track from their follow-up So This Is Goodbye, even though in many ways I prefer the latter. But then after two albums the JBs’ catalogue is already an embarrassment of riches.

As for the music itself, it’s obviously inspired its share of wordage already: here, for old times’ sake, is k-punk (check out the post title, ha ha), the late great tufluv (including an interview, but no permalinks so you need to scroll down), and, well, me (complete with cringe-inducing use of the phrase “bigged up”). To say a bit more about “Last Exit” (the song) in particular, it’s the slowness that hits you first. The space between the beats, then the sudden bursts of frenetic activity. Then the skeletal bassline that seems like a series of suggestions, leaving you to fill in the rest for yourself. The patented “vulnerable” singing. My very favourite things about the track, though, are the beautiful, sparing keyboards and spectral backing vocals, swirling as they disappear into the distance, like something you hear out of a car window as you’re driving past (to borrow someone’s description of this–who was it?–as a driving-home-in-a-taxi-after-a-night-out type of song). Then there’s the gorgeous Fennesz remix that bathes the whole thing in an echoey lagoon before drowning it in a tsunami of static (you can have a tsunami in a lagoon, right?). In fact I don’t think I’ve heard a single remix of a JBs track that hasn’t been great in its own way.

Reading back over those old blog posts, one is struck and perhaps a bit saddened that the JBs haven’t yet become the major (as in charting) artists that some of us wanted them to: as far as I know the nearest they have come to a mass audience so far has been the use of “In the Morning” for a hip-hop routine on the US edition of So You Think You Can Dance (nice that it was a hip-hop routine, actually). Still, they’re doing fine on the indie scale of things, and they’re only two albums into their career, they are part of the so-called “long tail” and that’s enough to be going on with.

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For your delectation:

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