A Film Canon - Pop Music

Pet Shop Boys: Behavior (1991)

Behavior stands as pop music's answer to Proust's madeleine, justifying the Pet Shop Boys' claim to be the quintessential modernist act of the 1980s and 1990s. As such, it deals more with mnemosexuality than homosexuality; that is, sexuality as the search for sexuality, a journey limited by its own vocabulary, and so only accessible in terms of more general, ostensibly asexual, expressions of yearning. It feels as if the Boys only invoke betrayal - and, more generally, the confessional mode - as a pretext for wider reflections on the passage and betrayal of time; or, alternatively, that any desire for sexual consummation is a thinly veiled desire for mnemonic consummation, the kind of total access to the past that would render personality complete. Nowhere is this clearer than in "Being Boring", which describes three different forms of remembrance - personal, familial, and communal - and conflates them in such a way as to characterise Neil Tennant's subjectivity as a mere function of his inescapable memory, and love as a mere memory in the making. In the same way, "My October Symphony", explicates Tennant's fascination with Russian history in terms of its drastic, disorienting changes, conducive to an emotional cityscape as haunting as the London apartments described in "Jealousy", in which the past is almost architectural, so concrete is its presence. The only low point is "So Hard" which, while catchy on its own terms, feels like it was placed on the record to ensure a single, taking up space more worthy of "Miserabilism" or "It Must Be Obvious", two of the other contenders.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Cocteau Twins: Heaven Or Las Vegas (1990)

The masterpiece of Dream Pop, Heaven Or Las Vegas perfects the Cocteau Twins' evocation of the moment at which language evaporates, moving beyond the incomprehensibility of Treasure to present a texture that coalesces around words as if by accident; or, rather, characterises them as little more than the accidental by-products of a sonic fractal, whose infinite reiterations are merely opened, rather than contained, by the band. The result is a vision of the world immediately before it is bracketed by language; a sensory bombardment that imbues everything with the everlasting, pyrotechnic sunset of Las Vegas, gesturing towards the sublimity - and ambiguity - of consciousness. Even more beautifully, it is a vision of language just before it is bracketed by language, of words as a sensory, rather than semiotic, phenomenon - the lurid maraschino cherry that vocalist Elizabeth Fraser rolls around her mouth, with insatiable delight. From this perspective, the band's decision to name themselves after the French surrealist may have less to do with his shared taste for dream states than with the irreducible, inexplicable beauty of his name, while their ultimate gesture is to explicate music as the attempt to give colour to the blind.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Pet Shop Boys: Please (1986)

The Pet Shop Boys fulfil the Beatles' prophetic "A Day In The Life", which envisages a supreme avant-garde voice, distinguished by its quintessentially English combination of the quotidian and the visionary, and capable of generating a sublime conversation between singer and listener. This is partly due to an idiosyncratic - and penetrating - take on 1980s sexual politics, in which the oppositional stance of Boy George or Soft Cell, and its requisite musical 'outing', is replaced by a more nuanced vision of partial integration, such that homosexuality takes on the quality of an open secret - present everywhere, visible nowhere. This imbues even the most apparently innocent lyrics with a haunting resonance, opening them up to a demographic beyond their sexual orientation, and rendering any explicit reference to that orientation redundant. This is all particularly clear on Please, which tells a rough narrative of urban immigration, dislocation and, eventually, initiation, culminating with Tennant's tentative question: "Why Don't We Live Together?" In the process, it conjures up an evocative vision of 1980s London, most iconically in "West End Girls", as well as partaking of the decade's conflation of nightlife with late adolescence - a final, melancholy respite before the banalities of adulthood, working life and money kick in.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Kate Bush: Hounds Of Love (1985)

Despite featuring some of Bush's strongest moments, Hounds Of Love ultimately feels like an apology for the outstanding idiosyncrasies of The Dreaming, and an attempt to renew her standing with a public alienated from its 'weirdness'. To that end, the A-side, Hounds Of Love, features a collection of fairly accessible pop songs, including "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds Of Love" and "Cloudbusting", all of which are lyrically, instrumentally and compositionally impressive, but refrain from the vocal pyrotechnics of the earlier album, with the exception of such isolated moments as the chorus of "The Big Sky" - "You never understood me/ You never really tried" - whose reproach seems to go beyond its ostensibly romantic subject matter. The B-side, The Ninth Wave, is a collection of songs about women drowning, or lost at sea and, at first glance, would seem to represent both an experimental and vocal counterbalance to the A-side, especially since Bush's voice might best be described as a malicious fludity, threatening to overwhelm both her and the listener with its amorphous, affronting metamorphoses. However, the result is too close to an electronic soundscape to take advantage of the extent to which Bush's voice is itself such a soundscape, making her own vocals seem curiously redundant - as if the allegory were in fact of her own commodification, or transformation, into a palatable presence. That said, the horrific distortions of "Waking The Witch" shock the listener out of complacency, while the shorter tracks ("And Dream Of Sheep", "Under Ice" and "The Morning Fog") restore Bush with some qualified agency, as do isolated segments of "Hello Earth" and "Jig Of Life".

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome To The Pleasuredome (1984)

Welcome To The Pleasuredome defined an entire nightclub topography, mainly by virtue of the title track and a few iconic, if comparatively underwhelming, singles ("Relax", "Two Tribes", "The Power Of Love"); or, rather, by virtue of Trevor Horn's extraordinary production, of which this is one of the most canonical examples, rather than any particularly strong compositional, instrumental, lyrical or vocal ingenuity on the part of the band. Horn's innovation consists in conflating Coleridge's lush, exotic, mysterious topography with that of the nightclub, such that its co-ordinates become ciphers for a sublime, cosmic ejaculation (light-rays are shooting stars, smoke-machines supernovas), or the perversions that enable it: "Hit me with your laser-beam!" Even the "message" numbers expand this ejaculatory panorama, as if to reinforce that the celebration of hedonism can itself be form of social protest, as evinced in the cover of "War", which reduces all battles to "love...and a man's pride". That said, Pleasuredome is ultimately about experiencing, rather than interrogating, pleasure, and its sheer sonic variety and discrimination comes closer to articulating a specifically sexual wonder than anything I have heard to date, as if the synthesiser were a giant body discovering an unbelievable wealth of pleasure points and erogenous zones, with Horn as caressing, masterful teacher.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Bob Dylan: Infidels (1983)

As Dylan's first emergence from orthodox Christianity, Infidels is suffused with his rediscovery of the Bible as a figurative, rather than evangelical, tool; that is, his rediscovery of himself. Concomitantly, the New Testament imagery that preoccupies Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot Of Love is replaced by a more prophetic register, as evinced in the most panoramic, penetrating eye since The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Not only do Dylan's critiques take on an uncharacteristically global quality (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in "Neighbourhood Bully", globalisation itself in "Union Sundown"), but the surface of the moon, and the Universe beyond, is frequently used as a co-ordinate: "From Broadway to the Milky Way/That's alot of territory indeed." However, the central statement is undoubtedly a trio of soft rock numbers - "Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight", "Sweetheart Like You" and, above all, the magnificent "Jokerman", one of Dylan's most extraordinary, under-rated works. Not only do these lend themselves most fruitfully to Mark Knopfler's textured production, but they both subvert and complete soft rock's tendency to etherealise romance, if only by clarifying Dylan's project as romancing the ethereal; a love affair with the Bible, whose "shadowy world" is opened up by "Jokerman"'s midrashic intertextuality.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Kate Bush: The Dreaming (1982)

The Dreaming is Kate Bush's masterpiece, uniquely tapping her extraordinarily Protean voice, whose distortive, disruptive potential is thematised by her unprecedented prospopoeia, which ensures that virtually every song is sung from the perspective of an unusual persona - from a Vietnam fighter ("Pull Out The Pin"), to a petty thief ("There Goes A Tenner"), to a criminal-smuggling pilot ("Night Of The Swallow"). Yet the penultimate track, "Houdini", suggests that prosopopoeia may in fact be possession - that is, that Bush is inhabited by these voices, rather than inhabiting them - explaining their pervasive association with criminal violation and, more generally, transgression. But the album's double sleight of hand comes with the final track, "Get Out Of My House", which reinstates Bush with some qualified agency, construing all these possessive voices as so many manifestations of an artistic voice that is so original, so affronting, that it remains foreign even to the artist herself; a multi-faceted beast inhabiting body and mind. For this reason, the track's various motivating factors - sexual defensiveness, invasive reporters, Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining - all ultimately give way to an exorcism aimed at that voice, which is reduced to so many hallucinatory shrieks, grunts and groans, but simultaneously liberated, as if its irreducible weirdness were somehow beyond articulation itself. Hence the nearly incomprehensible vocals of "Leave It Open", as well as the most magnificent track, "Sat In Your Lap", which describes self-knowledge as something akin to religious experience ("A jet to Mecca/Tibet or Jedda..."), with all the ineffability that entails.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

David Bowie: Low (1977)

The first - and strongest - installment in David Bowie's 'Berlin Trilogy', Low is conspicuously divided into two halves. The first side is a series of pop songs, two of which are entirely instrumental, and several of which only feature Bowie's voice in a truncated or fragmented fashion. This evokes a gradual recovery of language and consciousness, perhaps from the severe cocaine addiction that left him unable to recall the recording sessions for Station To Station, and finds most poetic expression in "Sound And Vision", whose lengthy introduction and colourful, minimal lyrics narrow this awakening to the sensory organs. The second side features four ambient pieces, all of which evoke Cold War Berlin on the verge of losing consciousness - whether that be figured in terms of its geographical boundaries ("Warszawa"), subdivisions ('"Weeping Wall" evokes the edifice that was visible from Bowie's studio window, and which could itself be used as a pretext for the apparent incommensurability of the two halves of the album), or history ("Subterraneans"' references the halycon days of the Weimar Republic with the aid of evocative saxophone fragments, while "Art Decade" fuses the false hope of the 1920s and 1970s). The result is an uneasy identification between Bowie and Berlin, perhaps explaining his brief flirtation with Nazism as the product of a topographical, rather than ideological, imperative, and finding supreme expression in "A New Career In A New Town", the final track on the A -side, whose plaintive harmonica evokes melancholy conclusion, rather than a fresh start.

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (1971)

This magnificent album presents fraternity as theology, with sympathetic, impassioned conversation as its central text. Virtually all the songs offer some impetus or incentive to talk, while friendship is characterised as the most important form of human interaction, capable of achieving a sublimity encapsulated in Gaye's central admission that "God is my friend", which might be just as accurately rearranged as "friendship is my God". This tends to militate against the more pessimistic, prophetic elements, producing a contradictory tone resolved in the seamlessness with which one track blends into another, as if the continuity between picket line and afterparty were translated into musical terms. In particular, the title song haunts all the others, albeit in an increasingly echoed, distorted form, until the melancholy impossibility of its promise closes the album as an epilogue to "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)", itself a magnificent evocation and critique of the increasingly decentred, ghettoised cityscape of the early 1970s. Yet this final melancholy belies the extent to which Gaye attempts to conflate art and (political) life, evident in his extensive use of actual speech - particularly slang, street talk, and African-Americanisms - ensuring that the album finally instantiates the very conversational contributions that it advocates.

Posted on Monday, October 15, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Simon & Garfunkel: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme (1966)

A late masterpiece of American Romanticism, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme recalls The Great Gatsby in its desire to re-imbue the continent with the wondrous gaze of the first settlers, transforming New York City into a semi-English, semi-pastoral landscape, in which lamp-posts grow flowers, streets are paved with cobblestones, and "cathedral bells" go "tripping down the alleyways". More pervasively, every urban phenomenon, however banal, or bleak, is transformed into the pretext for a refinement of sensory experience. Although the songs are frequently visual in nature, this is only for the purpose of stressing the limits of visuality, two of the strongest ("Patterns", "The Dangling Conversation") describing the sensory reorientation that comes with dimming light, and the onset of night. This involves a movement from the tactile (crinoline, cambric, organdy) to the olfactory (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme), as if the duo's ambition were to shroud themselves in the nocturnal city, translate it directly into a perfume, or, ultimately, find some new language for its ineffable "hush", or "shadow", best approximated by their own harmonising. As with The Sounds Of Silence, this nocturnal journey culminates with the subway, but presents its anonymous messages in a poetic, rather than prophetic, register, perhaps explaining the relative lack of extroversion, or even enunciatory ambition, as most of the songs exhibit a fragmentary quality that ensures that the album works more as a single statement than any other in the duo's career. This self-sufficiency may, in turn, explain the curious lack of love songs, whose import tends to be deflected into a ceaseless, generalised wandering, epitomised by the haunting "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her."

Posted on Monday, October 15, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |

Post a Comment

Bob Dylan: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

Before I heard this album, I thought that to describe popular music as prophecy was hyperbole, or pretension. But the two most striking tracks - "Masters Of War" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" - prove my mistake, respectively recalling the finely honed rage of Jeremiah and the visionary transportations of Ezekiel, while "Blowin' In The Wind" tempers them with the melancholy worldiness of Ecclesiastes. There's an extraordinary power to these songs, best encapsulated in the penetrative agency Dylan grants to his eyes, most concisely articulated at the conclusion of "Down The Highway", an otherwise fairly casual song, in which he conflates the ambit of his panoramic gaze with that of the road itself, stretching "from the Golden Gate Bridge all the way to the Statue of Liberty." Similarly, "Masters Of War" sees him insisting that he can see through a system of bureaucratic barriers encompassing walls, desks, masks and, finally, the blank stare of indifference returning his own, which he surpasses to gaze upon the government's very brain. But the most spectacular ocular gesture occurs in "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", in which Dylan takes the stuff of Middle America - highways, forests, poor towns, mines - and transforms it into a surreal, biblical landscape, positioning himself on a mountain at its centre, from which he promises to reflect its meaning. Apart from this central prophetic statement, there's an engagement with more traditional folk and blues, in the vein of Ramblin' Jack Elliott, as well as a series of melancholy, personal numbers, including "Girl From The North Country" and "Bob Dylan's Dream", that sit well with the restraint of "Blowin' In The Wind", and constitute a collective elegy for all the people and places vanished down the highway.

Posted on Monday, October 15, 2007 by

Billy Stevenson |