I am in need of something upbeat to chase away the blues on yet another dreary Beijing day... and I suddenly find myself thinking of this, She Drives Me Crazy by the Fine Young Cannibals. Why would anybody call a love song anything else??
Roland Gift's falsetto rather irritated me on most of their other stuff, but on this it seemed to fit just right. Of course, it's those fat, fuzzy chords from Andy Cox's guitar that make it so irresistible. Well, that, and the unusual snare drum sound, a bright but slightly muffled snap (I gather they engineered this by placing a loudspeaker on top of the drum, and then re-recording the original snare drum part played through the skin of the drum).
Gosh, is it really more than 20 years since this first came out? Yes, in fact, it's just over 22 years. I was still a young man. I had just started my first teaching job. Let us not dwell any further on that...
Take it away, boys.
7 comments:
I've found that songs will always bring me back to certain moments in my life. I gather we're pretty close in age because this song brings back memories of one of my last spring breaks down in the Florida Keys. Hugely popular at that moment in my life, and I really liked the song a lot back then, nowadays it is sure to prompt a changing of the station.
Of course this phenomenon, stirring memories, seems to have stopped happening this past decade. I blame the plummeting quality of music.
Interesting that you've now developed an aversion to it, HF. (You left a comment without bothering to play the video?) Have your tastes changed, or you just heard it too much back in the day and got bored with it, or it's acquired unfortunate associations for you somehow?
For me, nostalgia usually trumps all. Even songs I never liked at the time, I now sometimes enjoy for their ability to transport me in time.
I wouldn't diss recent music so much. I think it probably takes us more than a decade for our memories to become sufficiently distant from us for this effect to kick in powerfully, for us to start feeling so sentimental about them. And it's also probably true - alas - that our memories, our experiences, are not so usually intense at later stages in our life as they were in our teens or twenties - or, at any rate, not as diverse, once we've had to start working for our living and got into settled relationships and so on.
Also, I think a lot of this 'soundtrack of our lives' effect comes from unconscious choice, from our absorption of music that's around us in the environment all the time. (Most of my most vivid musical memories come from a summer during my undergraduate years ('85 or '86?) when I worked in a warehouse job where we had the radio - BBC Radio 1 - on all the time. In America, perhaps, you spend so much time driving that listening to music on the radio is a much more central feature of many people's lives. But if you're spending less time on long drives, less time in public places where they're playing contemporary hits, less time in bars or diners where they might be playing this kind of thing... if you become more of a homebody, you get cut off from this experience of being constantly subjected to the music of the moment; you're mainly listening to stuff you've chosen to buy on an album, and that might be from any era.
That's certainly the case with me now. I have just about no daily exposure to contemporary Western music - so the 'soundtrack' in my head is still what I was listening to 13 years ago when I was living in Canada, or what I was listening to 17 years ago when I was backpacking around the world, or what I was listening to 20 years ago when I was a schoolteacher, or what I was listening to 25 years ago when I was a student.
I too deplored the seeming dominance of the hip-hop/"R'n'B" sound in the mainstream over the past twenty years, and the unfortunate boy band phenomenon.
But there are still plenty of good rock bands coming along every once in a while. (I wonder if you were joking about the state of modern music?)
I find I am often very pleasantly surprised by the diversity and innovation in the scene today. There aren't any rock bands I really like at the moment, but there seems to be a lot of more poppy or folky (or country-ish) stuff that's quite interesting, and a strong singer-songwriter field. My blog-friend JES frequently turns up interesting new bands for his Midweek Music Break posts each Wednesday.
After posting, I immediately thought about how I said the song would now prompt a changing of the station juxtaposed with my comment about musical quality plummeting in recent years. Could it be that I had just become more picky?
No, there are just some songs that one grows tired of and this is one of them. If it came out new today, I would like it immensely more than the standard fare that is out there now. As I said, I did like it when it came out, and by the by, I did click on the video and reminisce for a bit.
I too will watch old videos of songs I didn't really care for because they bring back some memories.
Going to disagree with you on this being a case of time lag. I think it is a combination of factors, one of which being the terrible quality of mainstream music, which after all, is the soundtrack of our lives for the most part. It also has to do with... options. We don't share those soundtracks that would did prior to the turn of the century, and it really is those shared experiences which lay down the soundtrack of our lives.
Aside from everything else, name the two biggest acts from the previous decades and compare the quality of music they produce. Start with, in my opinion, the decade which modern rock was born, the 60's.. you had The Beatles and Stones, 70's Zeppelin and Queen, 80's Jacko and Madonna, 90's Nirvana and Radiohead... this decade... Bieber and Gaga.
The prosecution rests.
I think it's a bit too early to say if Lady Gaga and Sir Justin will dominate the coming decade and achieve lasting fame in the way that those earlier artists you cite did, HF. And they've only really emerged in the last couple of years, haven't they? They're not really Noughties artists, so there's a whole decade you've missed there. I've missed it too, because I've been living in China for most of it, but it seems to me as though there have been quite a lot of worthwhile bands active in the last 10 years or so - The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Kaiser Chiefs, Vampire Weekend??
Also, I think The Beatles were kind of unique in achieving such an enormous rock/pop crossover popularity. Rock has become progressively less mainstream since the '60s. Madonna and Michael Jackson might have been the biggest recording artists of the '80s, but there were plenty of great bands in that decade too: Dire Straits, The Clash, The Pogues, U2, Talking Heads.
I think the music scene of the '60s and early '70s probably was better - and the quality went deeper - than we're likely to see again; partly because the genre was new, and people were free to try whatever they liked without the pressure of precedent and expectation; and partly because it was fed by a genuinely revolutionary counter-culture that we just don't have any more.
But I don't think that means that declining standards will be progressive and irreversible, that the prospects for this kind of music are hopeless. Each new generation will throw up a handful of bands that will last through the ages (but maybe just a handful, rather than the dozens that emerged from the 1960s).
The NME has some interesting selections of Top 100 Albums of the Noughties and Top 100 Tracks of the Noughties.
You make a lot of great points Froog, and certainly there is still plenty of great music being made. I always try and run a check on myself before making comments like these, fearing it might be the time honored tradition of history repeating itself and I have become just another old man telling kids how much their stuff sucks. I suppose I may be off target a bit, it isn't that there is a dearth of good music now, it really is that you have to dig harder than ever to find it.
Your right, Bieber and Gaga are more of a recent phenomenon, but for the life of me I couldn't name the two biggest acts of the noughties and I was amazed at how much of the music in those NMW links I was never exposed to. For the past few years, I worked where there was a shared radio and every one of us voted for the classic rock stations. Every once in a while we would try out the modern stations and invariably we always found ourselves saying, early on, "ugh, I hate this song" and turning back to the classic rock.
Music doesn't suck these days, but mainstream music does and mainstream music is the soundtrack of our lives. The classic rock songs we all voted to listen to, they are already tied to different memories.
I have so many musical memories from those other decades. The noughties though, it feels like a gaping black hole and I don't think time is going to rectify that. It may not be a bad thing, it's just different. On the plus side, due to the crap mainstream music, I found myself going back and listening to a lot of great jazz that I missed out on when MTV used to routinely find itself on my tele (geesh, its probably been 15 years since MTV has even been on my tv).
As always, enjoyed talking music with you.
Yes, indeed, HF. Always good to hear from you.
I'd be interested to know what you made of the post on "father of Chinese rock" Cui Jian, which followed this one.
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