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366 Songs 001: This Will Be Our Year

Maybe it’s just me, but this feels like an appropriate song for New Year’s Day, especially with the touch of… bitterness, perhaps? pessimism, or sadness, maybe, that follows the title (“This will be our year/Took a long time to come,” remember). I first heard this song in the dying days of Britpop was Menswear covered it as b-side for their second last single, and it sounded like pop music was supposed to in some weird way; ramshackle, joyous and with harmonies and piano and its heart on its sleeve. Years later, even though I’ve since discovered the Zombies and the joys of Odessey and Oracle, the album that the song first appeared on, the Menswear version is still my favorite version of the song; there’s a happiness to it that feels… more genuine, perhaps, less precious, than even the original to me, with its Brian May-esque guitars and the feeling that they’re rushing the song, like they just have to get it out (It helps that it ends with someone saying “Yowza!” for no immediately apparent reason. Don’t ask me why, but it does).

(Yes, I know that they get the lyrics wrong a couple of times, but I don’t care.)

There are numerous touches in the song that mean that it’s no surprise that I’d be totally sucked in: the descending chords at the start (especially when done on the piano), lyrics about holding hands – I don’t know why that always gets to me, but it does – and the importance of harmony vocals. It’s a song that’s been covered a ridiculous number of times, moreso as the Zombies’ cultural cache (deservedly) grows, but almost every version brings a smile to my lips no matter how terrible.

Here’s the original version, complete with the awesome horn arrangement that’s missing from a lot of stereo mixes of the album (including the “official” album as it’s available today, I think). This is more gentle, more graceful than the Menswear version, and likely more beatutiful:

Here’s hoping that this will be our year. After all, if it is, it has taken a long to come.

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A Startling Look Into The World That’s Coming!

“The World That’s Coming” is a phrase that comes from OMAC, a Jack Kirby comic cover-dated October 1974, which just so happens to be the month in which I was born. The idea that OMAC is the same age as me seems weirdly wrong, somehow; Kirby comics feel eternal in some way to me – I have no problem accepting that it’s 37 years old now, for example, but the idea that it was just 20 years old when I was in school, or in its teens as I was struggling with acne and puberty seems somewhat mystifyingly wrong in ways that I can’t properly explain.

It struck me, awhile back, that I am always living in The World That’s Coming, these days; not just in the sense of living in the future that Kirby was writing about in the mid-70s (OMAC is filled with futuristic devices and ideas that have come to fruition in one way or another) – although we’re in “the 21st Century,” a phrase that still feels like the future to me sometimes, more than a decade in – but also in that I make a large part of my living writing about technology, social media and the like, and so am constantly thinking about what’s to come (Another part of my living is made writing about comics that are months from coming out, speculating as to their meaning, their plot, their quality, the whole shebang). And so… The World That’s Coming.

The plan, such as it is, for this blog is pretty much a personal challenge: To write more for myself in 2012, without making myself crazy. There’ll be 366 posts about pop songs over the course of the next year – intended to be one every day, but that’ll slip at some point, I can tell, so then I’ll have to double up or whatever to get caught up – and lots of other ephemera, me working out ideas that I might use at Techland or Newsarama or whatever, as well as just… random things. Photographs, memories, commentary on whatever’s on my mind at the moment. We’ll see what happens together, I guess. Are you ready for The World That’s Coming?, as DC Comics used to ask.