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366 Songs 312: Fire Brigade

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of those classic pop songs that people should deconstruct and try to get to the bottom of pop music DNA. Certainly, it has all the pieces that you’d expect from a late ’60s pop hit, right down to guitars that sound alternately like the Byrds and the Shadows and harmony vocals to die for (There’s also a piano somewhat down in the mix, which feels oddly particular to that era; you can hear it most clearly just after the choruses, for some strange reason). There’s also that amazing bridge – which starts at 1:36 in the video above – where the song falls down and the builds itself back up again, which is likely my favorite part of the whole thing, aside from Roy Wood’s weirdly nostalgic, neurotic lyrics about a schoolboy crush that terrorized him (“Friends all seem to laugh/I fear I’m apt to make a compromise/Try to reassure myself/My head must need some exercise/Half past ten in the morning/She just took me by surprise,” and later, “I’d love you all to meet her”).

This is an irresistible song, something that sounds hokey and throwaway and then you realize that it’s in your head and it’ll never, ever come out.

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No Big Deal

I know, I know; I’ve been more silent here than usual since yesterday, but it’s just down to work and – for once! – seeing friends and talking instead of writing here. Nothing worse than that, for a change. Which doesn’t change the fact that I have to catch up on things here again, but still.

(The image is from Low Life by Rob Williams and D’Israeli as it appears in 2000AD Prog 1808, by the way; a comic strip that manages to mix comedy and something close to horror in a surprisingly good, somewhat deceptive way.)

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“That Stubborn Thing Inside Us That Insists, Despite All The Evidence to the Contrary”

I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.

Seriously. That man can make rhetoric sing.

I didn’t realize how nervous I was about the election last night until Obama won, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me, I have to admit. That line about “the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism” (Craig Ferguson’s summation of the appeal of Doctor Who, in case you were curious) has never felt more true to me than watching Obama triumph last night.

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366 Songs 311: Electioneering

Why, yes; I am apparently amped up on electionjuice today.

I have a love-hate relationship with OK Computer, the Radiohead album that hosts this song. On the one hand, it has some great music on there – “Paranoid Android” is probably my favorite Radiohead track of all time, and “Fitter Happier” is kind of wonderful – but on the other, it’s where the band’s prog tendencies started to take wing, leading to some of their most unlistenable, pretentious output. “Electioneering,” though, is a very traditional song in terms of construction, and even “rocks out,” as the kids would say despite Thom Yorke having an attack of politically-themed Tourettes while recording the vocals. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering what Radiohead would have become with a more traditional front man…

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Vote For Me And I’ll Set You Free (Slight Return)

This is the first time I’ll have voted in a US Presidential Election; I only became a citizen in 2009, after all, and so I missed the chance to vote in the historic election of America’s First Black President by a matter of months, somewhat frustratingly for White Liberal Bragging Rights purposes. Nonetheless, it’s nice to feel as if I have a voice in this whole thing after living here for a decade, you know? I am a big fan of democracy and voting and that big ball o’ wax, despite the fact that – as a 38 year old man – I have only ever voted in three general elections.

That’s not my fault, I promise; the 1997 election in the UK was the first one I was able to vote in, and I did – I can still remember a good friend telling me that he’d voted Conservative because, really, they were all the same anyway, and my feeling of I don’t know if I can stop myself wanting to argue with you until you finally admit that you’re wrong as I listened – but then I started doing the Transatlantic thing before the next British election. I remember voting in the 2001 election, but by the time the 2005 one came around, I was firmly in the US and en route to becoming a US citizen.

The 2004 US election, I missed entirely. Obviously, I couldn’t vote, but I wasn’t even in the US for the majority of it; I was flying back to Scotland to be with my family following my mother’s death. I have unhappy, unformed memories of catching a connecting flight in Amsterdam, trying to find a television showing international news to find out whether or not George Bush had won a second term, as silly as that sounds. The 2008 election, we watched avidly from our couch; I remember clearly the sense of Everything will be different now when Obama’s win was announced, as well as mild disbelief that he had actually won.

I admit to having some sense of anticlimax about voting, this time; the way Oregon does voting is by mail ballot, so there isn’t the “entering the booth and punching the ballot” experience at all. I actually filled in the ballot more than a week ago, sent it off the next day, but it’s only really today that I feel as if I actually participated, if that makes sense. Viva Democracy, and may your guy win – as long as he’s the same as my guy, of course.

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366 Songs 310: Ball of Confusion

Why, yes; this did seem a particularly appropriate choice of song for Election Day (“Vote for me and I’ll set you free!/Rap on, brother, rap on”), but beyond the cheap joke, this is just a wonderful song with an amazing arrangement; listen to the organ in the background, the bassline crouching in the background and those horns making you wish that everything could sound like this, the drummer bringing it when necessary and those vocals. If only electioneering could sound as enticing as this song, politics would be a very different thing indeed.

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“Shut Up and Deal”

Re-watched The Apartment last night, remembered (a) how loopy the morality in old comedies can be, (b) how great Jack Lemmon was in his prime (Who today can do the nebbish, well-meaning thing as well?), and (c) how ridiculously cute Shirley MacLaine is in that movie with her short hair and heart on her sleeve.

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366 Songs 309: Monday Monday

Monday gets a bad rap, in pop culture. Garfield hates them, as do the Boomtown Rats. And yet, the Mamas and the Papas built this deceptively simple, wonderfully hooky song about them, so they can’t be all bad. Not that this is a tribute to Mondays; it’s another “the weekend is over, and so is the fun” song, despite the zingy strings in the background and lush harmonies smothering the bad news with sunshine (“Oh Monday morning/You gave me no warning/Of what was to be”). I’m a big fan of songs where the sound and the intent seem at cross-purposes, and this is definitely a prime example of that; you listen without really paying attention, and it seems like a relaxed, mellow upbeat tune and then the lyrics tell an entirely different story. Just goes to show: Two-part harmonies counterpointed with two-part harmonies make everything better. Someone should deliver the television news like that.

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366 Songs 308: He Thought Of Cars

A particularly melancholic song from a somewhat melancholy album – Unlike Parklife, The Great Escape is never actually fun, as such; it’s sad or its angry, and sometimes it’s both, but “fun”…? Not so much – “He Thought of Cars” is a song that continually falls out of control, the oppressive guitar riff beaten back by the choruses, but always returning, a musical migraine that threatens to overwhelm and suffocate the sadness and surrender of the lyrics (“Everybody wants to go/Up into the blue/But there’s a ten year queue”). Without the benefit of the fade in/fade out, the live versions of the song have an entirely different feel to them that, I suspect, is far closer to what was originally intended:

…It’s just more… I don’t know. More violent in the opening, more abrasive and really underscores the fragility of the verses, and the way the song concludes feels more… final, for want of a better way to put it. I wish this had been the structure (and intensity) of the recorded version. It makes for a clarity of purpose that the album version lacks. This was always a song about being trapped, in so many ways.