You’ve probably already heard of the rather excellent muxtape site; well, here’s my effort. Something a bit different from my usual; in tribute to winter’s very sudden arrival in Melbourne it’s a collection of tracks that give me chills (in one way or another).
The site has a lovely interface and is a real joy to use. There seems to be a glitch with some of the timings: a couple of my tracks show up as 0:00 (they still play fine). But apart from that everything works beautifully. Even though it’s very “now” the site feels kind of retro, and not just because of the mixtape metaphor: it doesn’t (yet) have any of the social networking doodads we’ve come to expect as normal features of this kind of site. I find myself wondering how I can let people know I like their mix if I can’t leave comments? Where do I see a list of people with similar tastes to me? How do I “friend” people? Where is the ranking system, the Facebook integration, the TypePad widget? (There’s RSS, that’s about it.)
Apparently some of these things are coming, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the pared back simplicity and the fact that there are only two ways of finding mixes: following a direct link from an outside site, or clicking on one of the random links on the homepage. I’m hoping to experience a bit of serendipity; my random clicks so far have generally turned up a whole lot of indie rock but I can still hope. It would be nice to be able to leave comments, though; that’s one social networking feature I’d actually go for.
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.
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.
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.
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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Watch:
Download: iTunes (they don’t have the album unforunately, but they do offer the song as part of a compilation that’s not very accurately called True Disco.
Um, I really have nothing to say except the fact–which will be old hat to most of you–that I’m posting this from here. I’ve had my laptop for over a month but bizarrely this is the first time I’ve taken advantage of free wi-fi. It’s nice. I just wish more places had it. (Australia is apparently very primitive in this regard).
Anyway, I’m here until my battery runs out (supposedly I have 35 minutes left) or it just all gets too happy-houry, when I will re-emerge into the stifling embrace of Melbourne’s Indian Summer. So in the unlikely event that anyone (a) is nearby, and (b) reads this in time, come and say hello!
As some of you know, I’m been planning a career change: I’m attempting to do what people rather gruesomely refer to as “monetising my skills” by going into freelance copywriting. A major part of promoting myself as a writer will, naturally enough, be a blog. Not this blog, because this is more of an ideas dump (ie what a blog actually should be) than an advertisement by the pithiness and on-message-ness of my writing. So I’ve started a new blog, called (pithily enough) Textual. Don’t read it if you’re not interested in copywriting (or marketing and language more generally), but well, if you’re interested, it’s there. For obvious reasons I would particularly love some people to leave comments over there, preferably nice ones along the lines of “Hey, what a great post! You must a wonderful copywriter! Can I hire you?” etc. (I’m interested to see that one of my long-time blogging role models, Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger, has also started a blog about his “day job” in a field not far removed from mine…pure coincidence, I promise.)
One more thing, I need some help with my market research: If you’re an Australian small business owner, or know someone who is, I’d be ever so grateful if you or they could answer a brief online questionnaire about marketing. It will take about 5 minutes, it will all be confidential, and I won’t be adding anyone to my mailing list without their permission. I have two questionnaires, one for general small business owners which is here, and one specifically for web designers and developers which is here. I’ll be forever grateful!
Absolutely brilliant storyline on Neighbours at the moment about the mutual emotional dependence between, er, longtime companions Harold and Lou. The subject of their relationship has been broached before, but tonight Karl Kennedy actually referred to Harold as Lou’s “soulmate”! Fascinating stuff.
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).