I always found this song kind of creepy and haunting. Though ‘haunting’ is such a tired, tired adjective. It seems, to go by the words, she’s talking about nightlife – night wrapped in neon. Making this the least celebratory ode to nightclubbing ever written, if such it is. The year being 1978, it may be about Debbie Harry’s adventures as a Studio 54 habitue, adventures with Andy, New York brilliant night life, though she sounds awfully rueful about it. But the lyrics being very vague, and the mood being very low, who can tell. Deciphering pop songs is a pointless task anyway, just like writing about art is pointless – “So, yes, the painting has great swaths of yellow which create a textural effect.” Um, I’ll try to imagine it. You get what you get from it, and you’ll get what you get from a pop song. Besides, Blondie were never famed for the depth of their songwriting. It was more about the energy and the image. And speaking of Blondie, seems they have a new album out, Panic Of Girls, which I will get back to you on, as soon as I’ve absorbed it.
I might have guessed some wit would make a Facts About Cats video and fill it with lolcats. Inspired. Truly. Is there an emoticon for sarcasm? I never thought it would come to this, but I’m kinda over the whole lolcats meme. Getting old, lolcats, getting old. Besides, clearly this song is not about cats. It’s about boys. Cats are benign little creatures. Nobody needs a lesson in how to deal with them. It’s the boys on the corner you have to watch out for. I do think Timbuk 3 is making a fine metaphor for navigating the rough shores of love. Because if you’re not careful you will get eaten just like a helpless little bird. We can even extend the metaphor a little; cats don’t have to be just boys, cats can be anybody callous and cool who eats innocent birds for breakfast.
More of Mick Jagger’s patented ersatz country, this time in the service of a character sketch, which I think he does not enough of. It’s impossible to tell whether it is about someone real or just a sketch or even if it’s honest or joking – Jagger is opaque that way. At first I thought he was mocking the poor schlubs who get their feet wet waiting for girls who are not international jet-setters to come out of work – Jagger can be mean that way. Then I thought, maybe he’s thinking back on his own days of waiting in the rain for girls who work and have stains on their dress. Looking at the conversation going on on YouTube I saw an entirely different view. Some people are hearing it as a tribute to a whole generation of ‘factory girls’ – the hardworking women who kept industry churning during the war years. Mick Jagger, born in 1943, must have known a lot of such women growing up, and no doubt remembers a few of them. He could have been thinking of people he knew as a child when he wrote this song. We can only speculate, but however you understand it, it’s one of Jagger’s best observational lyrics.
Musically, it’s an interesting beast too. Keith Richards called it “Something like ‘Molly Malone’, an Irish jig; one of those ancient Celtic things that emerge from time to time, or an Appalachian song.” Charlie Watts said “On ‘Factory Girl’, I was doing something you shouldn’t do, which is playing the tabla with sticks instead of trying to get that sound using your hand, which Indian tabla players do, though it’s an extremely difficult technique and painful if you’re not trained.” And Jagger said “The country songs, like ‘Factory Girl’ or ‘Dear Doctor’ on Beggars Banquet were really pastiche. There’s a sense of humour in country music anyway, a way of looking at life in a humorous kind of way – and I think we were just acknowledging that element of the music.” All interesting things to know. Of course there’s no reason why Jagger couldn’t have been thinking of an old girlfriend, and remembering factory workers in the forties, and at the same time been happily poking fun at Appalachian folk music.
Nico was a bit of a nihilist, wasn’t she. She was so morbidly attracted to dark and destruction. There’s a scene in James Young’s memoir The End where Nico is found shooting heroin and watching a video of an open-heart surgery. Telling. As for this song, well, it appears to be about death and/or dying. I think she’s singing about dancing on her own grave, at least that’s the picture in my mind.
It’s holding me against my will
And doesn’t leave me still
Amazons are riding out
To find a meaning for
The name, my name
In the rain
My spinning on my Name
In the rain, in the rain
When did it begin?
When did it begin?
Why am I not facing the wind?
My mother and my brother
Are facing the wind.
Why are they facing the wind?
Why are they facing the wind?
There’s nothing more to sing about
Not now or when they carry me away
In the rain
My spinning on my name in the rain
My spinning on my name in the rain
In the rain.
When did it begin?
When did it begin?
Why are they facing the wind?
Anne Vyalitsyna – Anne V. for short – has become known as a new generation pinup. She got the kind of high-fashion sex-bomb career once enjoyed by the likes of Heidi Klum. She’s definitely known as a body. Not The Body - that nickname’s retired – but still an outstanding body. It’s not that she’s got a substantially better physique than other models, but she’s so exuberantly, vividly athletic, just so darn healthy that she makes everyone else look wan. But she not just in the bikini business – serious fashion loves her too. She can really swing it from high to low and back again.
This is funny. Well, not in and of itself, but in context, somehow. The fact that the song is a tale of seduction, from what I can gather, coupled with, when you watch the video, Donald Fagen’s looks equals hilarity. Fagen looks like a bus stop stalker and to hear him invite a presumable girl to kick her shoes off and party is a wee bit creepy. And a lot of Steely Dan songs are tales of seduction, Hey Nineteen being particularly skeevy. In fairness, Fagen hasn’t always looked like something that washed up on the side of the highway, yet nor was he ever exactly kitty-bait, if you catch my meaning. Songs definitely can gather an unintended layer of context based on what the performer happens to look like. This one for sure would be less creepily amusing coming from the mouth of someone handsome.
What Billy Idol lacks in facial expressions he makes up for in peroxide. Probably he feels compelled to wave his fists and snarl all the time to somehow balance out his natural prettiness. I mean, if he wasn’t wearing leather and waving his fists he’d look like a total pansy. No, you gotta hand it to Billy; he hasn’t strayed from his campy leatherboy persona in all the decades we’ve known him. Which you can view as a lack of imagination on his part, or more nicely, as having a clear understanding of his own strengths and limitations. He’s Billy Idol – he isn’t going to rewrite the Odyssey. He’s just going to prance about in leather and sing really great fun rock songs and look hot doing so. Ohhh, now I really want to see a Billy Idol Odyssey musical! Get on it, Billy!
There isn’t, for some reason, an all-encompassing Black Uhuru lyrics database on the web. (Yet, probably.) So I don’t have any way to find out what they’re singing, exactly. But what I’m getting from this song is a variation on ‘hear no evil’. “Watch your eyes when you see, watch your mouth when you speak.” That’s what I’m getting, though it could be ‘wash’ not ‘watch’. Though that wouldn’t make sense. I think the message is, be very careful with what you see and hear, what you say. My personal philosophy has always been; mouth shut, eyes open, ears to the ground. Information is power, we all know. But foolishly talking you can dig yourself a grave.
Again with the William Blake. You think you’ve got a fairly fluffy rock song, courtesy of Marianne Faithfull having an 80′s moment. Then she goes all ‘tyger, tyger’ out of nowhere. Not to be surprised though. Marianne Faithfull is about as literate a rock star as we’ve got. Quoting a little Blake is all in a morning’s work for her. She named her album after a Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel; Les Liaisons dangereuses = Dangerous Acquaintances. You probably don’t even know who that is. Faithfull, meanwhile, has been known to bookend albums with long readings from Dante and Shakespeare. I’m sure rock-loving literati are griping that if she had to shoehorn William Blake in, she could have chosen lines less familiar. I mean, OMG, The Tyger is just so mainstream!
As you may have guessed, Moby whipped this video up when the Extreme Ways single was chosen for the soundtrack of The Bourne Identity, a movie I myself didn’t much care for. Normally I also don’t much care for songs from the soundtracks of action movie starring Matt Damon, who I don’t much care for. But I watched that movie, under duress maybe, and thought the song was catchy, this being before I really knew who Moby was. Then I heard the album 18, and became a fan. I now find the song very funny. If you’re familiar with Moby’s mild’n'meek persona, his singing about living an extreme life with ‘so many dirty things you wouldn’t even believe’ is acutely ridiculous. I can’t imagine ol’ Moby doing anything more extreme than perhaps braving a non-vegan latte. Moby’s nebbishness is his charm, of course, and if he wants to sing about being ‘extreme’, good for him.
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