I Feel Love

The idea of “good taste” is regarded with suspicion by the bien-pensant dance music intelligentsia of our day, and not without reason. The quest for tastefulness can lead to noodly, jazzy deep house or ultra-subtle progressive odysseys, in other words some of the most boring dance music ever created, and in turn it tends to be associated with a fun-hating disdain for some of the most enjoyable (big gay anthems, “cheesy” electro-house, breakbeat hardcore back in the day, etc).

But when it comes to “Where Love Lives”–without question one of my half-dozen or so favourite tracks of all time, and already crowned No 1 on my diva house top 10–it seems hard to escape the notion of “good taste”. Part of its appeal is indeed that everything is so perfectly judged: the unusually rich-sounding, understated but instantly memorable opening piano riff, the subtle, ingratiating percussion, and the momentary frisson when the vocal line finally enters and what you’re hearing is not quite what you expect–not a wailing New York diva but the low purr of a contralto at the very bottom of her range. (There’s a certain transatlantic thing going on here: the production–we are of course talking about the 12″ “classic” mix, the only mix of this song worth giving your time to–is the work of those doyens of New York House, Frankie Knuckles and David Morales, while the vocals come from one of the seemingly endless stream of low-pitched black female vocalists coming out of the UK in the early 90s–see also Shara Nelson, Carleen Anderson, her out of M People, and so on.)

Beyond its formal perfections, though, what really makes this song stand out for me is the deep melancholy it inspires, quite unlike any other house track I can think of. On the one hand I think it is a strangely melancholic track, even lyrically (the words are those of a love song but at the same time they seem to be distancing the singer from the subjective experience of love…”I’ll take you down, deep down, where love lives”, as if love is the product not of spontaneous feeling but of a place or, by analogy, of the music itself). But a large part of the melancholia for me specifically is also no doubt the force of memory–I can still remember the first time I heard it on a dance floor, in some dodgy Hindley Street nightclub where my friend Fiona and I were making our first tentative forays into the clubbing life (although it probably wasn’t really the first time; I suspect dance tracks have to be heard more than once before they emerge out of the miasma sufficiently to be consciously remembered). This was when dance music really did seem like something revolutionary and new (as indeed it was)…and I really think that seemed as true of house as it was of techno. (1990, when this came out, might have been the first year we were expected to make some kind of choice between the two.) This was maybe the record that cemented my affiliation, as it were, with house as “my” music (it’s one of the few records I own on vinyl). And whatever swerves in more technoid directions my taste has taken since, it’s not an affiliation I’ve ever had cause to regret.

Oh, and if there was an actual point I was making about good taste, it seems to have got lost. In any case, excellent song.

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There are only inferior mixes on YouTube, so here is the 12″ Classic Mix in all its glory:

I’m happy to say you can buy this track at iTunes, but the compilation it’s on contains a number of mixes which are helpfully unlabelled, so make sure you get the right one, namely track one, 6′54″ of perfection.

Björk’s music is experimental in the specific sense that usually seems to be the result either of putting a hypothesis into practice (what happens if I record a song in the toilet, I sample this or that obscure instrument, I base a whole album on the human voice, etc.), or of working backwards from a desired result (an atmosphere, an emotional response) to find the specific technical means necessary to achieve it. For better or worse, her music wears its process on its sleeve. Beautiful and memorable as it often is, it’s usually possible to explain in precise technical terms how a given effect is achieved. At least it would be if you possessed the technical language, which when it comes to production trickery I generally don’t. Nevertheless, in finding something to say about “Jóga”–which is certainly a beautiful and memorable song–I feel the need to break it down to its elements, even more than I do with most music.

So, first, the harmony: “Jóga” starts with a string accompaniment in a minor key but when it gets to the chorus (the “state of emergency” bit) it changes to the relative major. (I hope I’m right, I’m relying purely on my ears here rather than a score. Anyway, it’s definitely a whole minor-major thing.) But when the second chorus comes around, something interesting happens: although the string accompaniment remains exactly the same, a second, lower, electronic bassline enters, plunging the whole thing back into the original minor key. Then for the final chorus we’re back again to just the strings, and the major key. Brilliant.

Second, the beats. Björk apparently wanted the percussion to evoke erupting volcanoes, and it definitely has a seismic feel to it. Unlike conventional electronic percussion (in dance music, for instance), the “drums” here don’t mimic their acoustic counterparts by combining a sharp attack with a sudden decay. Instead, they spread the meat of the sound more evenly, making you unsure whether what you’re listening to counts as “percussion” at all. (Credit to producer Mark Stent here of course.) When I heard that Björk was collaborating with Timbaland on her latest album, my first reaction was “but Björk doesn’t need Timbaland!”–there are pop artists in need of tuition in the transformative power of interesting beats, but Björk isn’t one of them.

Finally, the singing. One of the ongoing themes of this project will be my attraction to female singers who manage to bring off brilliant effects with manifestly “incorrect” voices. (For some reason they’re much more numerous than their male counterparts.) Björk is an interesting case in point, because although from a conventional technique standpoint she’s all over the place–taking loud breaths at completely random moments, quavering whenever she has to hold a note, and belting out high notes in her trademark quasi-shriek–she is in fact one of the pop artists most admired by people who really know about singing (at least in my limited acquaintance). Alex Ross, for instance, is a big fan. The thing is, at her best her voice seems so supremely suited to her material that her departures from orthodoxy become virtues. As here, for instance, those loud breaths just suggest a kind of mad impatience to get her point across (as do the three “missing” beats in between the two halves of the chorus), and the shrieking high notes are transformed by abstraction in the haunting echo-chamber effect towards the end of the song.

Not that it always works for me: as much as I love her and think of her as a “good thing”, Björk is a rather hit and miss artist for me. In particular, her more strident moments, like “Army of Me” or (from the new album) “Earth Intruders” just seem annoying in a Cranberries-”Zombie” kind of way. (Harsh, I know.) In fact I find the whole Volta album rather a disappointment. I like the brass band, but Björk’s gift for melody seems to have deserted her, I hope temporarily.

My relationship with Björk’s music also has strange peaks and troughs that have nothing to do with its actual worth; for some reason I completely lost touch with her after Debut and didn’t really reestablish contact until Vespertine, despite being vaguely aware at some level that she was producing music I’d probably find quite interesting. So in fact I didn’t really get to know “Jóga” until I bought the Greatest Hits album. Belatedness, now there’s something else that will be a recurring theme…

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Here’s the video (NB this is a shortened version of the song but it gives you the idea):

Download: iTunes

(I believe in some parts of the world Björk’s music is available on eMusic too; not Australia, unforunately.)

Well done computer, a good random pick for my first effort, and not just for seasonal reasons (”River” was a Depressing Christmas Song before Depressing Christmas Songs became a fad); if there’s one thing that’s unlikely to send people running away screaming, shoving sharp objects into their ears and the like, surely it’s a Joni Mitchell song. I’ve witnessed avant-garde noisetronica buffs become melting pools of sentiment over the Blue album, and while I’m not the first to say it, there’s something about Joni that entices you outside what you or others might think of as your musical boundaries.

Crediting an artist with “crossover” appeal can sometimes be tantamount to damning them with faint praise; sometimes it’s not so much a matter of someone “transcending” their genre as politely toning down its eccentricities and emphasising its continuity with one or another version of the mainstream in order to appeal to the biggest possible audience (or what snobs call the “lowest common denominator”). Certainly a cynic could find such qualities in Joni’s music. As someone not entirely in tune with sixties/seventies folk as a whole, I appreciate the virtual absence from Joni’s songs of lyrical archaisms (”’twas”s and inversions and references to obscure herbs, etc.). In a similar vein, the lack of fake sea shanties and other traditional song forms is pleasing. Nor do Joni’s political songs share the stridency and earnestness of much of that era’s output; has there ever been a more downright fun protest song than “Big Yellow Taxi”, or a dreamier, more ethereal one than “Woodstock”?

But each of these absences in Joni’s music give way not to some form of bland populism but to a positive, eccentric uniqueness. For instance, no-one is better than Joni at writing lyrics that mimic natural speech (due allowances made for the way they used to talk back then, but you have to love “He tried hard to help me, you know he put me at ease/And he loved me so naughty, made me weak in the knees”). And if Joni’s song forms don’t sound much like traditional folk music, that’s because she’s essentially a modernist, taking melodic ideas and stretching them into semi-improvisatory flights that deny her songs any foursquare symmetry…listen to the way the melodic line takes wing (sorry) on “I wish I had a river so long, I would teach my feet to fly”. This kind of thing can maybe be taken too far…I’m more of a fan of the Joni who created Blue, which is still recognisably a collection of pop songs (albeit defamiliarised pop), than her later excursions into outright jazz. But her melodic inventiveness throughout her career makes her as much a forerunner of Kate Bush or Björk as she is of the Sarah McLachlans of this world.

As you will have guessed, I could equally have picked any number of Joni songs, especially off Blue. But “River” is such a miracle of a song, I mean how you use “Jingle Bells” in a song about depression and lost love without becoming maudlin is beyone me, but Joni does it.

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Obviously there’s no official video, so here it is with some figure skating! Actually this is rather brilliant and I intend from now on to consider it as the real video for the song:

Download: iTunes

(See note on download links here.)

It seems to me that I’ve generally been a better blogger when I’ve set myself a regular task and kept at it. Writing about new entries on the charts, doing Australian Idol recaps, that kind of regular self-imposed discipline seems to inspire me to write–or, failing that, forces me to write under some simulacrum of inspiration, which may or may not be in itself better than nothing but seems to oil the cogs and gears and produce more regular bouts of the real thing.

Enough preamble. MY PROJECT THEREFORE IS THIS: I have chosen 52 songs, not necessarily “my 52 favourite songs ever” because canons (even personal ones) make me nervous, but of course 52 songs that I think are bloody excellent and have meant a lot to me, so much so that they’ve managed to edge out at least 52 other songs that are only slightly less excellent and have meant only marginally less. The list of 52 already exists and is at this point unchangeable (you’ll just have to trust me on that as it will only be revealed piecemeal), no matter what undreamt of wonders of pop perfection or unexpected swerves of taste are foisted on one over the course of the undertaking (I just hope I don’t wake up one morning and realise I hate disco). Every week I will write a little (or maybe sometimes a big) “piece” about one of these songs, chosen at random by the magical “shuffle” facility on iTunes. (Um, please try to ignore the Hornbyesque overtones; just because he wrote a ghastly book called 31 Songs, I hope essayistic song-by-song meanderings can still exist without being thought of as inspired by his example–or necessarily, for that matter, by antagonism to it, although that would obviously be closer to the mark.)

To enable readers to hear the chosen song each week, I’ll embed a YouTube clip or similar, or if that’s unavailable, a low-quality streaming MP3. YouTube happens to be the easiest way of hearing a lot of music these days, but because I’m not particularly a music-video-oriented person I won’t be writing a lot about the videos, just so you know. Nor should you expect an explication of the lyrical content of most songs, since I don’t really listen to lyrics that much. In keeping with my (recently acquired) belief in paying for music you like, I’ll attempt to point the reader in the direction of higher-quality MP3s for sale (if possible in DRM-free form), or failing that, CDs. Only in the event of neither of these being readily available will I offer a higher-quality MP3 for download. Like most of the music blogs I most admire (past and present), this is not and never will be an “MP3 blog”. (For a pretty eloquent case against free MP3s of commercially available music being offered up even by genuine “enthusiasts”, see Ewan Pearson in the comments to this post.)

As my more quick-witted readers will have noticed (if I still have any readers), 52 happens to be the number of weeks in the year, meaning that this project will, if all goes to plan, extend throughout 2008. Gosh! As New Year’s Resolutions go that might seem over-binding, but I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of months and it still seems like a reasonable idea, so although I can’t make any promises about regularity I’ll do my best to keep at it.

Incidentally, what do I mean by “song”? I’ve defined the term pretty loosely, so tracks without vocals, or with minimal vocals, qualify (I did initially think of excluding them but that came to seem a bit silly, especially given the non-lyrical slant I expect to be taking). But I’m only covering “pop” music (again, loosely defined) going back to the 60s, and naturally coming mostly from the styles and periods that interest me most. (A “my favourite classical tunes” project might happen in the future if this one proves worthwhile. A “my favourite jazz tunes” project would consist of about two and a half items so will probably remain unrealised.) I’ve made no attempt at “coverage” of any sort, in fact there are some genres I’m quite fond of that are almost totally unrepresented, because they don’t really have standout tracks for me. I’ve only allowed myself one song per artist, but artists who’ve reappeared in different guises are OK (so for example I’m allowed, potentially, one Joy Division and one New Order, although as it happens I’ve ended up leaving one of them out; not the one you might be expecting, incidentally). Multiple tracks by the same producer are of course fine (hi Giorgio), as long as they are not listed as the principal artist more than once.

I’ve tried to avoid making choices just because they might reflect well on my taste, socio-politico-theoretico-musicological subject position, esoteric knowledge, etc., but then I’ve also tried to avoid excluding songs just because some cynic might think I’ve chosen them for such a reason. (Of course, I don’t have much esoteric knowledge about pop music; hopefully those in search of esoterica know where to look, but this will inevitably be the work of a dilettante.) Nobody’s motives are ever completely unmixed, but I hope it will be clear that my choices are basically in good faith. There are some choices that are very obvious, some that Nick Hornby himself might approve of (but who cares, I like them anyway), some that will make certain readers cringe, but the important thing is that I love all of these songs rather passionately, and I hope some of that love and the reasons for it come across.

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Note on download links: where iTunes links are provided, they’re to the Australian store. I don’t know if they’ll work overseas, but I guess you all know how to search for a song if it comes to that. I won’t provide Amazon.com links because Australians can’t download MP3s from Amazon.com yet, but obviously Americans might prefer to look for stuff there as it’s always DRM-free and in MP3 format. (iTunes is starting to introduce DRM-free tracks, but not in MP3.) If something’s available at eMusic, I won’t bother giving an iTunes link because I think eMusic is better; also if you’re not already a member you can sign up for a trial and get free downloads, potentially including some of these very songs! For dance tracks I’ll give links to Beatport where applicable. If anyone knows of any legal outlets I’m missing that might be preferable to the above, let me know. Full disclosure: I’m in the process of signing up for various affiliate programs, so if you use my links and actually buy stuff (or in the case of eMusic sign up for the free trial) there’s a chance I might get a kickback.