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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Despite officially being a Marianne Faithfull song – appearing on her album of the same name – this is, to all intents and purposes a late-period Blur song, falling between 13 and Think Tank and bearing all manner of similarities not only to some Damon Albarn material from Gorillaz, but also – and particularly – “Black Book,” the b-side of 2000’s “Music is My Radar” single.
Both songs have a swampy quality, and a feeling that the lyrics (as revelatory as they may be, and I think in both cases, they are – Moreso than Albarn intended, perhaps) are somehow less important to the overall sound of the whole thing, leading to a lot of repetition and the voice as instrument rather than focal point. Repetition is big in both songs, but perhaps especially “Kissin’ Time”; the song becomes little more than a loop of itself by halfway through, with the song falling to and fading into one more chorus and then a slow, hypnotic, somewhat beautiful degradation. It’s a song that only makes sense with a fade out; it’s a narcotic, an inescapable thing that would make an end feel insincere and unreal. Your time will come, the song goes, but that almost seems like a… a threat, maybe? A promise? Something to taunt, either way, something to make that time seem unattainable because you’ll always be within this particular moment.
I guess the main difference people are noting is that obsessions are narrower – in scope of the topic, or (geographic) space, or in time. A crime beat is a broad category. Obsessively following every detail of a particular crime for a while until it’s solved (or there is nothing more to say), is an obsession. Once the story is over, obsession is closed, and the reporter moves to a new topic.
But another way the difference is explained is that an obsession is actually broader, not narrower, by being multidisciplinary. Instead of looking at many stories from one angle, it focuses on a single story from many angles. This may be a way to solve some Wicked Problems. So, looking at the Big Picture of crime, e.g., causes of crime and what measures potentially reduce crime in various parts of the globe, cultures, past eras, etc, from every angle possible, is also an obsession.
The idea of “obsessions” as journalistic beats is, in itself, becoming an obsession for me. The idea of following an idea and continually coming back and coming back and coming back to it, exhausting it, is one that I – ironically? – keep coming back to. It’s in my head recently because I have been criticized by editors lately for doing that very thing too much, and I’m not sure whether to apologize or argue the case for doing so…
I’ve written elsewhere about how important 1997 was to me when it came to understanding and accepting music that wasn’t just “white boys with jangly guitars,” but listening to this again for the first time in some years, I realize that Tricky’s Maxinquaye album came even earlier and laid the groundwork. Listen to the backing of this song, and revel in how un-pop it actually is. Here, I’ll make it easier for you:
There’s a lot going on in there; it’s wonderfully layered, percussion playing off percussion to create something akin to melody at times, even when the organ sample isn’t leading you in the background to where it wants you to be. But by the time you get to the sampled, looped “Hey man” in the second half, followed by the piano loop sounding just a little bit off (Too fast, a little manic, especially when it gets overdubbed by itself, just a little out of synch), there’s an entire atmosphere to this track, a biosphere of story and feeling that’s punctuated with noises that come from places that we might not recognize as music elsewhere (The… what, roar of something that follows the piano?).
It’s a brave choice to put as the second track on a debut album (Especially considering that “Overcome,” the first track, is far more traditional in its construction and instrumentation – The pan pipes almost sound accidentally comedic now – and less abrasive to the untrained ear; It was the first single off the album, as far as I remember, although I may be wrong), but it works as the following track nonetheless, and serves as a warning and tease for what’s to follow: “If you like this, then there’s more to come,” if you will.
There’s something seductive about it, as music, even before you get to Tricky and Martina Topley Bird’s vocals on top. Again, this is Martina’s show, with beautifully scratchy, casual vocals that sound playful and sexy (That laugh at 2:36!) while Tricky’s murmuring behind her sounds like an ugliness hidden under the surface, some scary monster and super freak that’s on the same level as the animalistic roar/squawk, ready to jump out and bite when you let your guard down. The illusion of confusion, reflected from lyric to sound to feeling. The track as a holistic experience, disorienting and welcoming all at the same time: An invitation and reminder that it’s okay not to be certain and convinced of what’s to come.
Because I’ve just wrapped up all my October invoicing, I can now tell you that I wrote 198 stories of varying lengths last month* (Six for Time, which is a new record since I switched to longer-form Op-Eds for them), in addition to 4 podcasts and a live television appearance. All of that’s just work; there’s also been sick dogs, vet visits, regular gym sessions, trips out of town and more happening. Suddenly, the reasons behind my seemingly-permanent exhaustion last month become worryingly clear.
The funny/not funny at all thing about doing invoicing is that you suddenly realize how horrendously you’re undervalued, if you’re me. I worked out that I am making a stupidly low amount of money from two of my regular outlets, which makes me think that it may be time to start looking for other places to spend my time/effort…
(* It’s actually more; there are at least two stories I’ve written that haven’t appeared either yet or never will, for reasons that I don’t entirely understand. Plus, there are all the blog posts and things I wrote for this site, too, but they don’t really count because they’re not for work; I don’t even want to think about what happens when I add that to the list.)
