Getting Over Yourself: Fiona Apple – Shadowboxer (and the rest…)

A song for… welcomes its newest contributor, Bettina Hamilton (yay!), who debuts with the familiar experience (for me at least) of getting it so, so wrong…

It’s hard to say to exactly why the public image of Fiona Apple in the North American Autumn of 1996 was so abhorrent to me, but I do have a few theories handy.

Perhaps the stylised, dimly-lit contrived party/mess of the basements, dens, bedrooms and bathtubs of the videos of both ‘Criminal’ and ‘Sleep to Dream’ had something to do with it. The bare torsos, long legs and the Lolita get-up – the pigtails, the mismatched satin underwear, the knee-high socks- and the wounded sex-kitten-in-foetal-position act definitely ground my gears. Perhaps all the pouting, staring, lips-open-and-ready games that Apple played with the camera were just too much to take.

But most likely it was the intoxicating/excruciating mix of staged vulnerability, anorexia and an unshakable mental image I had of male, middle-aged music execs high-fiveing around the table over long lunches for their deft exploitation of a young, doe-eyed waif who could play the piano and sing like a lounge act double her age, all justified as the girl ‘could really write’ (!) (fancy that) that really let me get my hate on.

Anyway. >> to 2003/04. What happened? Don’t really know/ can’t remember, but one day someone did put on this album (Tidal) at work. The next day I put it on again myself. And so forth. I finally shut up and listened (it can take a while sometimes).

How had I so completely missed/misinterpreted the sardonic tone of ‘Criminal’? How had I never noticed that  ‘Shadowboxer’ was just a fucking great song? And ‘The First Taste’? A song so sexy that when it came on whilst jogging, I’d have to take a break. Every time.

Perhaps what was missing in Fiona Apple’s music was the fumbling awkwardness and clueless agony of adolescence and what was present were the well-articulated beginnings of the self-indulgent grey areas of adulthood. What was missing for me as a teenager- sex, love, relationships- was what Fiona Apple already knew best. Dear Fiona, Please accept my apology.

Unhappy Children: Stardust – The Music Sounds Better With You

Listening to Stardust‘s  “The Music Sounds Better With You” takes me back to the scratchy fabric of the corduroy couch we had in the lounge at our holiday house. It was strangely bulbous, immediately soft, but essentially firm, and there was always sand and loose change in the crevices.

I remember lying with my face against the couch while music videos blasted from our massive cathode ray TV (which was, if I recall, similarly brown,  with knobs that you had to pull in and out to switch on and off), sharp cuts and sharper dance moves framed by the polyester wisps of this scratchy fabric.

I wept a little earlier, when hearing this song – though I am a world away from this room now – because I realised the source of the peculiar joy it evokes in me. At the time it was a kind of lifeline. With its video (a boy liberating himself from chilly domesticity through imagination) and its divinely saccharine sentiments it carried a complete message: better times would come.

Moving to a new city: Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy

At first glance, Smalltown Boy seems to be written for anybody who has moved from a small town to a larger one. It could belong in the pantheon of songs that include ”New York, New York” (which Frank Sinatra made his own), where the motivated outsider triumphs in an environ dripping with the opportunities that do not exist at home.

But that’s clearly not what’s going on.

I’ve just relocated to Berlin and I’m utterly overwhelmed, trying to eek an income and gigs for my alter ego Aurora Kiss. Walking to the post office on some mindless errand, Bronski Beat‘s Smalltown Boy crept into the headphones of my Hello Kitty mp3-player.

And I began to think, sure, the music never fails to get people dancing. It’s upbeat, but perhaps manic is a better word given the underlying melancholia in its cascading minor chords. And lyrically – in stark contradiction to “New York, New York” – the song is not about triumph in a new homeland. In fact there is no reference at all to the destination, only the hurt and the suffering most of us incur growing up in our own claustrophobic home towns, wherever they may be.

Of course, frontman Jimmy Somerville wrote the song to describe the experience of being persecuted for his homosexuality in Glasgow – his small town – and his flight to what I imagine was London. So it is a song about being queer. But in interviews I’ve watched Somerville invites anyone who can identify with the song’s alienation to take it on board.

With the repeated refrain “Run Away, Turn Away, Run Away, Turn Away, Run Away”, Smalltown Boy is the perfect song for a new life in a new city – adrenalin, elation, but a new world inevitably defined by the old.

Walking home from a lover’s bed at dawn: Jon & Vangelis – I Hear You Now

It’s 6:00am. You can’t feel the ground. The streets are empty save a jogger who can’t possibly understand the peaks and crevices of desire you’ve cascaded over for the hours the moon was in the sky.

You’ve just left a lover’s bed, for the first, perhaps the second time.

This moment doesn’t need a song, but if it did, it would have to be ‘I Hear You Now’ from the partnership of electronica composer Vangelis and progressive rocker Jon Anderson.

Vangelis’ sweeping synths will be familiar to anyone who watched Harrison Ford hunt cyborgs in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

To my mind, there’s always seemed something a little bloated about Jon Anderson’s main project, the psychedelic Yes. I want to like it but can’t. But matched to Vangelis’ relatively more linear and contained songwriting, Anderson’s vocals and romantic lyrics start open up ethereal worlds.

Yes, Vangelis’ sweeping synths, Anderson’s euphoric vocals, the song sounds and feels ‘new-age’ religious. But the sacred experience Anderson is singing about is actually entirely secular.

“I Hear You Now”: It’s about encountering this other person, in some real, really real way, on a deep and primary level, stripped – impossibly of the deadness of everyday relations. The song evokes both musically and lyrically the heightened sense perception and the weightlessness that comes with the discovery of a person who is a retort to all the darkness and insecurity.

At least, that’s how I feel after really good sex.

A lot of people can’t stand Jon Anderson, and this song might seem to the more cynical to be sentimental and hopelessly naïve,  but then again so is falling in love.

And yet of course, the synthesisers can only crescendo for so long, and the song – like the euphoria of love – eventually comes to an end.

2011: John Farnham – You’re The Voice

Because six Swedish and German Farnham fans (pronounced farn-HAM) can’t be wrong.

2010: Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows

2010, a year marked by deceit, disappointment and false hopes – and I’m only talking about my life.

Add to that the kamikaze crawl of the Global Financial Crisis (with the global economy dissolving into shredded aluminium after bumping off the runway for a brief optimistic glimmer), the bitter end of ‘Change We Can Believe In’, and most recently the revelations from Wikileaks that governments are as nefarious – more so even – than we always secretly feared they were.

Who better to turn to in this dark hour than Leonard Cohen, the so-called ‘poet laureate of pessimism’? (*)

‘Everybody Knows’ opens with a stream of folk cynicism – clichés of powerless like ‘Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed’ and mottoes of melancholy like ‘Everybody got this broken feeling / Like their father or their dog just died’.

And its the repetition of the song’s title throughout the lyrics which makes it particularly prescient to this era where people are saturated with media, and events are covered in excruciating detail without anything actually changing, where knowledge isn’t power, but gifts only a kind of submissive cynicism.

What clangs loudest though is the way the narrator juxtaposes his weary observations of the corruption eating at society’s institutions with his own hurt and anger at a lover who has been ‘faithful, give or take a night or two’. Cohen is entirely in tune here with the fact that we always view the chaos of the outside world through the prism of our inner, personal horror.

I don’t even want to think of a song for 2011. Any ideas?

Then again, ‘Everybody Knows’ could be a song for the coming year too; after all, ‘Everybody knows that the Plague is coming / Everybody knows that it’s moving fast.

—

(*) this is a quote refracted around the internet by writers using the passive tense so I couldn’t find the source anywhere.