I’ve never done these blog-meme things before this week, and this particular one’s overripe to boot. But the other week Sandy and I were walking down the street, talking about Vanilla Ice’s reality show, and he confessed that until recently he hadn’t realised that the riff from “Ice Ice Baby” came from somewhere else. Time for that musical baton! Along with handy MP3 downloads! And characteristic overstatement! So for my purposes, I’m only taking the most important part —
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
“Being Boring” — The Pet Shop Boys
Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the 1990s…
The day after the Blogtalk conference, I was on the train, listening to this, the saddest song ever, when I suddenly burst into tears. At that moment, it occurred to me that this song held a key to some important questions about everyday life and the conception of mundanity within cultural studies — questions that have occupied me of late. Dealing as it does with the labour of mourning, with personal connections to the ravages of AIDS, there’s some heavy shit implied in this song. But it’s all about dignity under fire, and the defiant importance of being fabulous. There’s nothing programmatically political here — “being fabulous” is seen a thing that people just do; and yet when situated within a continuum of camp culture and raised as an “answer” to tragedy, it nonetheless signifies resistance, of a molecular sort, in the middle of trauma.
We can sit around talking about what cultures of “everyday life” and “mundanity” mean, but I think this song constitutes an interjection into those debates. “We were never being boring,” it says. I’m not sure what implications it has for the idea of the heroic, but I think it rejects the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary that such debates always seem to be founded upon. And unless we’re going to move the goal posts because “Western gay culture” somehow isn’t “ordinary” enough, I think it’s clear that the Pet Shop Boys provide a vital model for what I’ve lately been calling “neveryday life” — the common space where banality, trauma and the incandescently spectacular channel each other. A space where lyrics like “Turn on the news and drink some tea / Maybe if you’re with me we’ll do some shopping” coincide with orchestral melodrama, as they do in a PSB song like “Left To My Own Devices”. To me, the key to camp is realising that you can’t reduce it to ennui — its tone is not “sarcastic” and therefore a flat sneer, but a knowing invocation of “neveryday life” affectual overload.
“Under Pressure” — David Bowie and Queen
“Insanity laughs under pressure / we’re cracking”. I’ve written about this song — in my mind one of the greatest ever recorded — on numerous occasions. Here’s what I said last time:
I want to think more about love songs. I tell you, I find lines like “Why can’t we give love one more chance?” incredibly moving and profound, and not inane at all, especially when they occur in a Queen/Bowie song/video that is actually all about the nexus between the transformative desires of social movements, their attempted thwarting through State repression and capitalist urbanism, the return of the repressed Dead Girl, and kissing.
As I said to Sandy on the street, “Under Pressure” speaks to me in a way that few songs do. I rediscovered it after returning from the protests at Woomera in 2002, and it sounds incredibly teenage, but I felt like it was written for me. It’s a song about choosing sides, and the revolutionary potentials of “love” (as opposed to liberal “compassion”):
It’s the terror of knowing
What this world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming “Let me out”
Pray tomorrow gets me higher
Pressure on people
People on streets
Turned away from it all like a blind man
Sat on a fence but it don’t work
Keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed and torn
Why — why — why?
I’m puzzled that despite its manifest popularity, this song doesn’t seem to figure by any consensus as a “great song” in Bowie and Queen’s respective canons (perhaps Bowie would say, “It’s too late / The European canon is here”). I put this down to the misguided idea that it was “just” a quickie collaboration, an “unfinished” (and thus unworthy) song, as somehow evidenced by Freddie Mercury’s scatting, which is taken as “filler” for places where they couldn’t have been bothered writing words. But nothing could be further from the truth: Mercury’s vocalisations are outside vocabulary because sometimes there are no words for the level of crisis we face. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song that’s more about something. Ever.
“A Change is Gonna Come” — Sam Cooke
Personal interfaces to social movements again! What I said last time:
That this was left off the soundtrack album of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is inexplicable, because for me, Cooke’s song is the most affecting thing about the film, its elegiac tone perfectly harnessed. The strange thing is, I don’t even remember if Lee used this version of the song. The manifest lyrical content — about the weary optimism of the struggle against racism in America — was given an extra mournful context when the song became a hit immediately after Cooke’s death, and as Malcolm drives toward his death in Malcolm X, this becomes heartbreakingly eerie, full of sweetness, ambivalence, doom and hope.
Eminently political, but not an anthem. There’s a clue there.
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” — Cyndi Lauper
I went through a very long phase of replaying the opening four bars of this song over and over on my Walkman. Total joy. But I also read this as a really sad song. How else can I approach this: “Some boys take a beautiful girl / and hide her away from the rest of the world / I wanna be the one to walk in the sun / Oh girls, they wanna have fun…” (I’ve always fantasised about doing a mournfully slow, acoustic Johnny Cash-style cover.) Of course, Lauper knows how powerful this moment is; when I saw her perform it live last year, she chose to pause at the end of that line, fist raised in the air, for the longest time. She did a lot of that.
“Try Again” — Aaliyah
In terms of losses to the R&B universe, lots of people expected me to be completely heartbroken about Destiny’s Child calling it a day, but I was completely prepared for it. But I wasn’t prepared for Aaliyah’s demise, and I’ve never really gotten over it. I think I might have even gone home early from work, I was so upset. (Incidentally, one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen was a guy on the street sporting this tattoo on his shoulder:
Swoon.) Aaliyah had a talent that was unmatched in R&B: the ability to be just so — a potent, spooky antidote to the over-melismatic cauterwaulings of many of her peers, and devastating in the right context. In “Try Again”, it’s perfectly deployed. I miss her.
[ tags: aaliyah, aids, bowie, camp, crying, cultural-studies, cyndi-lauper, everyday-life, mourning, music, overstatment, pet-shop-boys, pop, queen, sam-cooke, trauma, vanilla-ice, woomera ]
