Suzanne Vega has a very literary imagination. Meaning that she writes lyrics that look good on paper and make sense without the support of music. If she should decide to write a book, I would be supremely excited. A lot of stars write books, mainly about themselves and the times they’ve lived through, and some of those have strong merit but most don’t. A Suzanne Vega memoir, if there isn’t out there already that I don’t know about, would be a thing of beauty. I also think she could even tackle real writing, like a book of poetry or fiction, if she isn’t doing that already. This song is about imagining movies, a common pastime. Which couldn’t be more literary of itself, it’s one form of entertainment mirroring another in an endless cycle.
What an appropriate coincidence, a Beatles song on the night of the big Paul McCartney show. Except for the fact that it’s a John Lennon song, that is. Not that I would put it past Sir Paul to whip this one out in tribute to John. Which would be magical. If any song has become a sort of de facto eulogy to all things Beatles, it’s this one. It’s almost been hammered into corny nostalgia oblivion, but for the saving grace of being genuinely brilliant. I’ve read that Lennon wrote the song with two people in mind – “Some are dead and some are living”. The dead one being founding Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, who died tragically young and the living one John’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, author of the uproarious memoir John Lennon In My Life.
Another one of the many things the world can thank Moby for – besides taking electronic chillwave music mainstream, promoting veganism and tea, and just being such a lovable little domeheaded dweeb – is introducing gospel music to people who people who otherwise wouldn’t appreciate it. He did that by taking some of the brilliant aspects of gospel, the powerful and emotional vocals, and taking away the things that have always kept it away from mainstream ears, namely the whole religious aspect that makes not-churchy people blecch. I do appreciate gospel music; it’s incredibly moving and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a great gospel singer send folks into fits of hysteria by the power of her voice. But gospel being, you know, gospel, I get turned off by all that devotion and Jesus talk. There’s only so much “Praise the Lord!!” that an unbeliever like me can handle before I go running back to my Satanic Majesties. To be clear, Moby did a great service cherry picking and showcasing some great gospel singing on his records, but there’s also a little bit of an uncomfortable racial aspect to it. Because, to be blunt, most white people’s mental association with the words ‘gospel music’ is sweaty black people having conniptions at a tent revival. That image is based on reality, yes, and there shouldn’t have to be any negative associations with a cultural tradition that goes back generations and generations. But it does make some folks squeamish, probably because of the somehow still entrenched image of black people as being irrational and half-savage. Nevermind that there are plenty of white revival churches where people have conniptions and blabber in tongues and handle snakes, and the only real difference is that their music sucks. It remains that, aside from the really discerning music lovers, white people don’t like gospel music because it’s a black people thing and not even one of the cool ones. So can we have some gospel music without all that pesky racial context and God stuff? Oh thank you Moby, you’ve made gospel music safe for middle class, middle American, middle of the road white folks. And again, none of this is Moby’s fault, and if he wasn’t aware of the cultural hot pot he was getting into, he has certainly had to deal with it since. He just made some great music, and if he helped some listeners appreciate and maybe listen to more gospel singers, then even better. It’s the problem of society, still being racist as all fuck, for bringing a lot of weird and destructive (and generally unspoken) assumptions, prejudices and accusations to bear on what should just be music to be enjoyed.
Not enough individual Sparks songs on the net. Nevermind, here’s a whole album. Which you probably already own on the original vinyl, but if you don’t, you’re welcome. As you can easily guess from the image, Sparks have never been about pleasing the lowest common denominator. They’re kind of an acquired taste, most appealing to fans of camp, satire and musical parody. They’re simply too sophisticated and weird for common audiences.
Oh, and speaking of truly excellent role models…Amy Winehouse is probably not one of them. Unless the 27 Club is one of your ambitions in life, an opportunity I’ve already outlived. I do think that Winehouse was a very inspiring figure and a good role model, until she got all derailed. She was, obviously, brilliant. There’s nothing in her early performances that hints she would end up being her generation’s Janis Joplin. I know every two-bit obituary writer has made that comparison, but who better to carry it than Amy Winehouse? Like Janis, she was a bundle of raw talent who couldn’t distinguish between singing the blues and living them. You couldn’t tell all that at the start, but it was pretty clear that here was someone about to blossom into a serious star. More than her late-life drunken antics, it’s the early performances that make me the saddest. Before the big hair and tattoos, before the whole persona, there was a slightly awkward Cockney girl who seemed to have more voice than she quite knew what to do with. She was still foundering around for the right balance between her jazz influences and her modern sensibility, but she was already an impressive writer. Because outside of all the glamorous/debauched rock star mannerisms, what really made her an inspiration was her songwriting. The title of her first album, Frank, couldn’t have been more apt. She wrote frankly about herself, and by extension, the life of a modern girl who might drink too much and have too many one night stands but isn’t one tiny little bit ashamed of those things. I think Winehouse was and remains a great feminist icon, for the way she presented modern day womanhood; complicated, sometimes troubled, often drunk, unabashedly sexual, heartbroken, fearless, dirty minded, brave, intelligent, self-created, foul-mouthed, fashionable, selfish, drugged out, articulate and above all, totally shameless. Because we girls today like to drink and fuck and cuss and drink some more until we fall down, and if we do those things all the way to our early graves, well, that’s still better than living up to some false ideal of ‘propriety’.
Suzanne Vega has been such a part of my growing up. I think every little girl needs a smart, sensitive red-haired woman for a role model. I’ve had a lot of role models over the years, and I’m not saying all of them were notorious for their drug consumption, but yeah, a lot of them were. There’s a lot to be said for the “Fuck you society imma shoot up and get ugly” school of empowerment, a la Marianne Faithfull or any number of genius lunatics. But there also needs to be some real-life-appropriate inspiration as well, which is where Suzanne Vega comes in, being all smart and articulate and resolutely not insane. Because while I’d love to be that kind of DO ALL THE DRUGS!! kind of person who flies around the world fucking everything that moves, that’s just not a realistic goal for anyone not bearing a death wish, and honestly I – and we all in general – would be better off with the more settled life of a writer or an artist who just watches the world and quietly makes observations.
The only convincing love story of our time. Or was that Lolita? At least Dolores Haze was alive and breathing, and that’s passe now. Indeed, the most convincing love story of our century must needs be with something inflatable, deluxe and disposable. Bryan Ferry was, in 1973, prescient about the unbearable loneliness and ennui of millenial living. So he was a bit off on the technology; he was still thinking of inflatable dolls in the literal sense, the digital inflation of our fantasies not having come to be yet. Still, old fashioned plastic or new fangled digital, he’s captured the soul of modern man, all alone in his spotless environment with nothing to interact with but his own breath. Could we all be any sadder, isolated and immobile with our shiny toys and 3D Evil Monster Porn? Or does this nationwide state of existential boredom even exist? I don’t think it really does, but it’s one of our talking points as a culture. Most of us can still – despite spending too much time alone watching unnaturally inflated women do unspeakable things – interact with one another and even experience (and share!) basic emotions. It’s vaguely romantic, I suppose, to imagine yourself as the only living being surrounded by others so hopelessly disengaged they can only invest themselves in lifeless shiny objects. You can both feel sorry for such characters and envy them – they have their dream homes and everything in the world but their souls are empty. It’s not exactly a new theme either. Wasn’t pretty rich people’s ennui what Gatsby was all about? (Seriously, tell me if it was, I’ve never read it.) What’s new is how, the culture vultures cry, we are all disappearing into a vortex of virtual ‘reality’ in which solipsism and masturbation have replaced all desire or ability for human interaction. That’s just silly of course. Like I said, most of us young moderns have the rational thinking skills to make a distinction between real and not-real life, and are comfortable taking our pleasures in both worlds. The idea of modern youth quietly going insane alone with an iPad is just the most recent iteration of out-of-it older people freaking out about how the younger generation is all going to hell because women’s ankles! novels! automobiles! the waltz! not wearing a hat in public! flappers! rock and roll! women voters! men with long hair! contraception! drugs! free love! gay marriage! the internet! and all the other things that everyone thought would lay society low but didn’t. So no, we haven’t all collectively taken leave of reality just yet. But that’s not to say we’re not without our slivers of loneliness, disengagement and ennui. There’s always some sense of hopeless romantic sorrow in the story of one man and his inflatable doll, because he’s pathetic and yet we can relate to him, because he reflects our own pathetic little obsessions, and if he happens to look like Bryan Ferry then it’s romantically pathetic and kinky hot.
I often dream of what movie would have all Brian Eno compositions as the soundtrack, and how great it would be if whatever the movie was could fit perfectly the music with the images. Does such a movie exist? There are movies with Brian Eno music in them, sometimes even a lot of it, and sometimes they’re even good movies. I even think there’s one where all the music is Eno and it might be a very atmospheric documentary about floating down some endless river. But none of that is what I imagine of course. Then I get it; I don’t need to imagine a movie because this music is the soundtrack of my life.
Here we have some fine, clean, upstanding young men from Seattle, who are in no way into drugs or cross-dressing – I give you, Nirvana! Well, maybe not so much, depends on how you would define ‘fine and upstanding’. Honestly, I think that Kurt Cobain was about as fine and upstanding a person as you could hope to share needles with. He didn’t become the voice of his generation for being a dingbat, you know. That title, of course, is a heavy one, and unfortunately, Cobain couldn’t handle bearing it. He didn’t set out to be the voice of anyone but himself and he had enough problems without being forced to personify the collective self-image of all the young people alive in America at that time. His suicide, besides illustrating why suicidal people shouldn’t own guns, did two things; it turned him instantly and permanently into the pop cultural figment he didn’t want to be, and it cemented him in the public mind as, understandably, a very gloomy, depressed and depressing individual. Obviously, he was gloomy and depressed. But, as you can see from that video, or if you’ve ever seen or read any of his interviews, he had a pretty wicked sense of humor. He got off some real zingers in his time.
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