a single song I love

By the time I left primary school in 1995, there were six Mariah Carey albums available. That’s if you include the Merry Christmas album (which I do) and the VH1 Unplugged album (which I obviously bloody do – it’s a masterpiece).

I had all six of those albums on cassette. But my Mariah Carey collection didn’t end there. 

For a start, I had an extra copy of Music Box. I had it for reasons that seemed perfectly logical at the time, but that in retrospect (depending how generous you are feeling) seem either quite creepy or extremely creepy.

You see, I needed the extra copy in order to make decorations.

Or, to be more specific, I needed the extra copy so I could painstakingly cut out every Mariah Carey head from the liner notes and stick them to the chest of drawers in my room.

I cut out the Mariah Carey heads using a pair of nail scissors.

And it’s worth noting here, that if you ever have to cut out multiple miniature Mariah Carey heads and are labouring under the belief that using nail scissors will aide you in terms of precision: you are wrong.

In fact, in my experience, that particular combination of task and tool leads fairly reliably to an unnerving collage of wobbly-edged Mariah Carey heads.

Looking back, I don’t know why the adults in my life chose not to intervene. Perhaps they were worried I might behead them with my nail scissors.

Or perhaps more likely, they just didn’t notice.

After all, there were only four small Mariah Carey heads in total.

Which, when I come to think of it, makes it all seem so much weirder.  

I mean, It’s one thing to spend your pocket money on a duplicate Mariah Carey album in order to fuel your auteur-like desire to construct the world’s largest and most beautiful collage of Mariah Carey heads...

But it’s quite another to spend your pocket money on something that yields just four tiny Mariah Carey heads that end up bobbing desolately about on an Argos bedroom set.

Thankfully, the whole SparseMariahCareyHeadCollage thing came to an abrupt end when my first girlfriend, Kerry, got angry about the four Mariah Carey heads and unceremoniously tore them off the chest of drawers.

They’d been on there a few months by that point, and I can remember scratching at the tiny marks the deposed Mariah Carey heads had left on the MDF.

In the moment, I’d pretended that I didn’t mind. I stoically maintained the heads were just a remnant of 10 year old me, and that the far more mature 11 year old version of me had progressed beyond such petty concerns.

But I did mind really. I was pretty sad about it.

And I remembered it every time I played that record. Which was a lot.

Because I loved that record, and I loved Without You in particular.

I think I knew even then that it was a bit of a silly song. 

It’s extremely melodramatic, and moany and self-pitying.  And the vocals on it are impressive in the same way that a really really really big ASDA is impressive.

But I didn’t care much. I was a sad kid and I liked that the song was bombastic and unapologetic in its yearning. And I liked that it was a song that seemed to confirm that it was OK to want to stuff and OK to be upset when you didn’t get the stuff you wanted or when the stuff you wanted didn’t want you in return.

Years later, when I was at University, I heard the Harry Nilsson version of the song. Which is not a silly song. It’s brittle and dejected and weary and devastating and beautiful and hard to listen to.  

It was around then that I also learnt that Pete Ham and Tom Evans, who originally wrote Without You, both ended up killing themselves following separate disputes about publishing royalties. Suffice to say that their version is hard to listen to as well.

But it has always been Mariah’s ridiculous (and ridiculously popular – Music Box sold 30m copies) version, that has stayed with me most of all.

Because the silliness of the Mariah Carey version is sort of the point. And its mewling vibrato petulance is why I still love it even now.

Because desire is supposed to unreasonable and absolute.

And if we desire something – a person, a better world, four Mariah Carey heads – then why shouldn’t we grieve for their loss in a five octave range and with a string arrangement so sweet that it rots our teeth?

Bear in mind that the song doesn’t say that it would be hard to live without you, it says that it would be impossible to live without you –  and that’s quite a different thing.

On the one hand you could read it simply as childish attachment, or as a refusal to see past one’s own needs.

But on the other, you could read is an example of pure refusal, and of pure defiance.

Do you, or have you ever, possessed ears?

If so, you will likely be bored of the word “innovation”.

And rightly so.

Because more often that not, innovation is a meaningless term beloved of servile, dead-eyed, point-missers.

But let it be known that there are occasional exceptions, such as when it is preceded by the word “coterminous”.

Coterminous innovation (sometimes called multiple discovery), wrestles the concept of innovation away from being something that exists only as a by-product of market competition.

Instead, it allows us to ask more interesting questions about memetics, the collective unconscious, weird revelations, sexy mind-reading and so on.

There are lots of famous instances of coterminous innovation; the radio, the steam engine, the telephone and the big bang theory, for example.

But sadly, there are other cases that remain both under-reported and under-theorised.

It is in the spirit of redressing that historical imbalance, that I outline the following:

At some point in 1994, both I and Oldham-based dance band N-TRANCE simultaneously discovered that ( in fact, all things considered), only love could set you free.

This is how it felt to live through that moment in history ... 

It felt like a true triumph of the body.

A body, that while it didn’t belong to me quite yet, certainly didn’t belong to anyone else.

It was an unquantified, unmeasured and untracked body.

There were no wearables and no numbers, and yet still it triumphed.

It felt like expecting and remembering all at once.

It made a tense future feel like the future tense - ( I will, I will )

(I will figure this stuff out, I will love what I love, I will love THAT I love WHAT I love)

It made the future feel like something that gets born.

It made carrying things feel like a choice.

It made dropping things feel like a choice.

It felt like leaving.

It felt like expecting and remembering all at once.

It felt like a pure fucking leap of a pure fucking soul.

It felt like the sound of a future I had already put behind me.

It felt like expecting and remembering all at once.

It felt like I was plural

It felt like leaving. 

It felt like I was made and unmade.

It felt like expecting and remembering all at once.

It felt like you don’t get real seasons these days.

It felt like you don’t get real seasons these days. 

It felt like expecting and remembering all at once

It felt like you don’t get real seasons these days. 

It felt like expecting and remembering all at once

It felt like leaving.

It felt like leaving.

“The song did well, and that boosted his confidence….”

So runs the Wikipedia page of Erick Morillo, the brains behind Reel 2 Real.

I’m not a monster, and Erick seems like a nice lad, so I’m clearly pleased that his confidence got a boost.

But it did get me thinking …

We have to acknowledge that Erick wrote that himself, right?

(Obviously he did. Erick obviously wrote that about Erick.)

Erick sat down, opened his laptop and wrote those words about his own confidence on his own Wikipedia page.

Erick probably did that at least two decades after the fact.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. I like my encyclopaedias with a personal touch.

But why did Erick do it?

Rather than speculate, I sat down with Erick and I asked him.

INTERVIEW WITH ERICK MORILLO OF REEL 2 REAL - SEPTEMBER 2018

Interviewer: Erick, just to start things off. Predictable question, but do you like to move it?

Erick:  Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

Interviewer:  Thanks Erick. Just to build on that for a second, do you like to move it MOVE it?

Erick: Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

You see, my insistance on moving it has always struck me as a sort of primal demand, or as a minimal statement of resistance.

Wherever something is, be that a lost love, a sublimated desire, a revolution, or even just an arse… I like to move it.

My wanting to move it is a persistent insult aimed at the present.

Doesn’t matter where something is, I like to move it.

No future: Utopia now. 

I like to move it.

Interviewer: Cheers. Sounds like you really do like to move it?

Erick: Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

You see, I am fearful of things staying where they are.

So in that respect I certainly do like to move it.

I’m also quite interested in memory, and specifically my memories of having forgotten.

So memory-wise, I like to move it.

And also, I sometimes feel like I am watching myself living.

It’s utterly terrifying.

The past keeps folding itself into my fist.

And my memory has no stable dominion.

So I like to move it.

These days, I could fit a universe in a matchbox

So I like to move it.

Interviewer: Makes sense, ta! Do you reckon you’ll always like to move it, Erick?

Erick: Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

Look, I have some sympathy for an intergenerational rationale for moving it.

But mostly I like to move it because I want it to be free now, because I want it to be elsewhere before I die.

I want to move it over there

Where it has never been

And see that nothing has changed from how it wasn’t.

I like to move it.

Interviewer: Last question. Do you write your own Wikipedia page, Erick?

Erick: Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

I like to move it, move it.

Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

I like to move it, move it.

Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

I like to move it, move it.

Yes. On balance, I suppose I do.

I like to move it, move it.

It should come as no surprise that one of the best songs ever written about loss was made by children.

But I’m slow off the mark sometimes, so it took me a little while to figure it out.

This is how it dawned on me, roughly…

ZAC HANSON WAS 11 YEARS OLD

A couple of years ago, I met someone who liked to the use the word alterity.

A lot.

The context in which she used it eventually made it clear to me what it meant:

It was a fancy word for ‘experiencing otherness’

You see, I thought I already knew that word, but it turns out I didn’t.

I thought the word was ‘alteriority’ …

Which is not really a word at all.

Ulteriority is, though.

And it was this that probably caused my confusion.

Looking back, my brain (and my ear) were constantly slipping between the two words.

Between the fancy word meaning the experience of otherness …

And the less fancy word meaning deliberately hidden.

But the first time I heard MMMbop after learning this new word I realised:

My brain (and my ear) were just being protective of me.

And in an MMMbop they're gone / In an MMMbop they're not there …

ISSAC HANSON WAS 16 YEARS OLD

There’s a difference between permanent and infinite, right?

Or it at least feels as though there is.

Nothing can be permanent …

But some things can take on the quality of the infinite.

Some things are radically uncountable.

Some can resist the flattening effects of quantification.

Some things are simply not to be ‘weighed up’

These infinite things can remain a site of otherness

They can hold, shape and reproduce desire.

They can resist need.

They have a utopian function.

The infinite is a perpetual critique of the now.

Looking back, my brain (and my ear) were constantly slipping between the two words.

Between the satisfaction of the permanent and the transformation of the infinite.

But the first time I heard MMMbop after learning the difference I realised:

My brain (and my ear) were just being protective of me.

And in an MMMbop they're gone / In an MMMbop they're not there …

TAYLOR HANSON WAS 13 YEARS OLD

Love isn’t usually destroyed by the presence of another, is it?

But by the lack of anything other.

By mistaking sameness for solidarity.

These days, all of my fantasies involve me.

They are ulterior and permanent.

I found out recently that during the recording of MMMbop, Taylor’s voice was breaking

There are notes in there that they had to fake in post-production.

The recording I can hear is the last time it was ever sung in that key.

Looking forward, my brain (and my ear) will never stop hearing the cracks in that voice.

I will hear the way the song was made

But also the way the song would have to be re-made, forever.

And now my voice is breaking too.

I am writing this on my birthday.

And like most things that force us to acknowledge the steady beat of our lives ebbing away, birthdays can be pretty desolate.

(Watches, treadmills, footballers retiring, and the music of Jamiroquai also fit neatly into this category)

Anyway.

In order to mark this momentous  non-occasion I would like to say a few words about the 1997 song Never Ever by the phenomenally under-rated girl band, All Saints.

If you’re over 25, you’ll know this song well. As girl band singles go only Wanabee by The Spice Girls has ever sold more copies.

You know the one! 

It’s the one that starts with the strange spoken word intro and ends with the cryptic, beautiful, and slightly menacing refrain:

You can write it in a letter, babe/You can write it in a letter, babe.

I’m more than happy to take the hint.

Dear Never Ever by All Saints,

I am sorry that I made fun of the opening lyric of your song.

In 1997 I thought it was funny that you said:

A few questions that I need to know/ How you could ever hurt me so …

I was all like: er, no All Saints! you DUMMIES! I think you mean ANSWERS! not QUESTIONS!

I can see now that I was the stupid one.

The questions are the important things, especially when you are in pain.

The answers are for babies, they don’t help one bit.

Better a question you can’t answer than an answer you can’t question, eh?

Soz.

Dear Never Ever by All Saints,

I am sorry that I made fun of the bit of your song when you are weirdly specific about your ablutions.

In 1997 I thought it was funny that you said:

Take a shower/ I will scour/ I will rub …

I was all like, er, All Saints?! Hello?! this is way too much incidental detail and also really tangential! and also really unerotic! and also who wrote this?!

I can see now that I was the stupid one.

Rituals are rituals because they give us something to do when there is nothing else left to do.

One right act. Get out of bed. Take a shower …

After great pain, a formal feeling comes.

Soz.

Dear Never Ever by All Saints,

I am sorry I made fun of the really expedient and inconsistent way you used rhyme.

In 1997 I thought it was funny when you said:

Sometimes vocabulary runs right through me/ The alphabet runs right from A-Zee

but then later said:

Sometimes vocabulary runs through my head/ The alphabet runs right from A-Zed

I was all like: er, that’s very bloody convenient All Saints! you lazy bastards!

I can see now that I was the stupid one.

There are certain things that crack the earth right out from under you.

Times when none of the words really work.

When that happens, you might as well make whatever sounds you like with your face.

Try all the sounds.

Why not?

Soz.

Dear Never Ever by All Saints,

I am sorry I made fun of how much your song sounded like Amazing Grace.

In 1997 I thought that was the only reason it was successful.

I was all like: er, WTF All Saints?! this is just Amazing Grace but with additional scouring and cargo pants!

I can see now that I was the stupid one.

I didn’t know back then that you are called All Saints because of All Saints Day. 

The day we celebrate those who have had direct communion with the transcendent. 

The day we celebrate those who have known a love that bypasses faith and is unmediated by scripture.

I didn’t know back then that there is no better song than Amazing Grace.

I didn’t know back then that there is no better lyric than: “ … that saved a wretch like me “

I didn’t know back then that I was a wretch.

I didn’t know back then that every year Amazing Grace gets performed about 20 million times.

I didn’t know back then that doesn’t even include all the people who sing it to their children, or to themselves, sometimes out loud, but often under their breath or by making no sound at all.

I didn’t know back then what questions I would need to know

or how much or how little can be scoured away

or how few of the right sounds I knew.

Soz All Saints.

THE SPELL

This Is How We Do It has incantatory powers.

It makes people brave and sure-footed.

These powers are written into its very DNA.

Stay proximate to this song, and you will live a less fearful life …

THE NAUTILUS

In 1962, a university student called Bob James entered a talent show for jazz musicians.

The judge was Quincy Jones.

Quincy didn’t hesitate.

He signed James on the spot, and produced a number of his early albums.

It was a good call.

James’ records become hugely influential in the formation of hip-hop.

Nautilus, in particular, ended up being sampled by Erik B & Rakim, Run D.M.C, Ghostface Killah, and Slick Rick.

And then later, the bassline from Nautilus turns up in This is How We Do It.

The prophecy was written.

THE OUTFIT

In 1995 I was still at primary school, just about.

I had a favourite outfit.

It was my only outfit, I suppose.  

My first.

Before then, I just had ‘clothes’.

The top half of the outfit was a black, oversized, long-sleeved t-shirt.

It had a picture of the Definitely Maybe album cover on the front.

It had the OASIS logo on the back.

I can remember buying that shirt. It came from ‘The market’ in Birmingham town centre.

From that same market, I bought the bottom half of my outfit.

The bottom half was a pair of quite obviously fake Karl Kani jeans. In white.

The were extremely baggy, and had KANI written in red down the leg.

I loved those jeans. Mostly because they were name-checked in one of my favourite songs …

I’d poured over the Lyrics to This Is How We Do It, decoded the Kani reference and matched it up to the relevant counterfeit denim product.

I was pretty pleased with my detective work. And pretty damn pleased with my outfit, too.

For the avoidance of all doubt, this outfit was a farce, aesthetically speaking.

But I’d also venture it had a certain purity of spirit.

I loved Oasis, so on went the top.

And I loved Montell Jordan, so on went the jeans.

No self-doubt. No messing about.

THE FALL

Soon after This is How We Do It becomes a massive hit, Montell Jordan goes on tour with the (always reliably strange) Boyz II Men.

During a performance in Canada, Jordan was temporarily blinded by the light of a malfunctioning stage flare.

He fell from the seven foot stage, landing on his head. 

He was rushed to hospital but sustained no injuries.

Jordan called this event “ a turning point - a modern day miracle”

Montell had seen the light in more ways than one.

THE CONGREGATION

Some time later Montell Jordan left the music industry. He now leads worship in a Georgia Mega Church.

THE CALLING

In 2010, Jordan was planning a comeback album.

THE FAST

However, during a religious fast, Jordan claims that he was visited by God.

God calmly told Jordan that he should abandon his plan and probably not bother making any more music.

“When God speaks, I listen”, said Jordan.

The plans were shelved.

No self-doubt. No Messing about.

The story of why I love this song is very simple.

It is a story with three parts.

1989 I’m about five years old. I’m in a car. I presume the car is not particularly fast.

The car is travelling over spaghetti junction, which if you don’t know it, is a concrete knot of roads tied around the heart of Birmingham.

There is a song on the radio which is also about being in a car, that much I’m pretty clear about.

I’m also clear that the song is telling a sad story, and has a sad tune.

I’m unclear exactly what the story is, but I am pretty sure someone is trying to escape their mean parents.

In my head, I think their fast car breaks down while they are trying to escape and that is why they are so sad.

By the end of the song, I am crying in the backseat.

My mom turns around and sees me crying. She asks me why I am upset.

I tell her. It’s the sad song. It just made me a bit sad.

She doesn’t believe me.

A few nights later I overhear her telling my aunty that I must be being bullied at school.

I’m not being bullied at school.

It feels like I don’t hear this song again for years and years.

When I finally do I have absorbed enough shame to know that I shouldn’t like Tracy Chapman.

(And that I shouldn’t cry in response to pop songs I hear on the radio.)

Instead, I pretend to like other songs about cars and escaping.

(I pretend to like Bruce Springsteen, basically )

I don’t cry any less, but I do it less publicly.

1994

Dreams sounds an awful lot like Fast Car.

I mean, it’s really very very similar.

Which is probably why, when I first hear it, aged nine or ten, it feels like a man with a giant hand is punching me in my heart.

It gave me the exact feeling I had in the back of that not-particularly-fast-car.

I had my own radio by then, and had written down the lyrics to Dreams on some printer paper.

Doing this meant that I knew the song wasn’t really about leaving.

What I couldn’t understand back then was why it sounded like it was.

I think I might know now.

Here’s the theory: there are two voices in each verse of the song, someone leaving and someone holding on.

I’ve got no proof of this, obviously. It’s just a shit theory.

But tell me adding brackets to this verse doesn’t change things?

I’m not making plans for tomorrow Let's live for tonight I know I want you baby So hold me so tight [Put your arms around me You make me feel so safe Then you whisper in my ear That you're here to stay…]

Also, it turns out the original single actually had a Fast Car sample in it, which had to be removed at the last minute due to copyright infringement.

So it might just be that, come to think of it.

2017

I am 33 years old.

I have no children.

Despite being a fan of The Rock, I have not seen the Disney film, Moana.

I spend a fair amount of time thinking, both professionally and personally, about what it means to be from somewhere, what it means to leave, what it is wise to take with you when you do, and what you might usefully bring back if you ever return.

I am 33 years old.

I don’t like cars at all.

Looking at them, being in them, talking about them … all shit.

I am 33 years old and now when I think about leaving I don’t think about cars, I think about crossing oceans.

I hear the song How Far I’ll Go, taken from the Moana soundtrack.

I am 33 years old and I am five again.

(I’m still not being bullied in school )

It’s the best song I’ve heard in ages.

If I’d have heard it at five I would have cried in the car.

If I’d heard it at ten I would have written the lyrics on printer paper.

As it is, I listen to it over and over again, and then I listen to Dreams over and over again.

Just those two songs, back and forth for about an hour.

I couldn’t care less where I cry these days.

I know full well that boats are better than cars.

I’m 33 years old…

Dreams can come true!

Throw off the fucking bowline!

I know the word mizzenmast!

There’s a trade wind!

Look at that bloody sail billow!

A once revered playwright, Tennessee Williams is now mostly remembered because he attended the same high school as Missouri’s greatest literary export…Nelly.

For decades Nelly scholars have treated Williams as little more than a footnote. That is, until now.

A recently discovered cache of Nelly’s correspondence has radically re-centred the forgotten dramatist.

Acquired by the St Louis Museum of Arts and Culture, the letters reveal Williams to have been a surprising influence on one of Nelly’s greatest works - Dilemma.

This 2001 letter, addressed to eventual collaborator Kelly Rowland is particularly illuminating on the matter, and is reproduced here in full.

“ Dear Kelly,

I hope this finds you well?

So,here’s a thing…

There was this shit writer who used to go to the same school as me. 

I think I’ve mentioned him before?

Anyway, it turns out not everything he wrote was shit.

For example, I found out that he once wrote  ‘the name of the person you love is more than language’

And he was right about that.

I know it.

I know it because I have loved someone and because the person I loved had a name and because I have held that name and weighed it against every other sound I know and because when I weighed that one name against all those sounds the scales of my hands never balanced.

So yeah, anyway, he was right about that.

All of which got me thinking, and then got me writing.

The song is called Dilemma. 

Here’s the hook so far, I’d love you to sing it:

No matter what I do, all I think about is …

Fundamentally, what governs us? Must we clamber through this rubble?

And even when I’m with my boo, all I think about is …

Can some light really be kindled in this darkness?

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Speak soon

Love, Nelly.”

Additional highlights from the collection include Nelly’s reflections on such topics as:

How he feels about having one of the top 5 biggest selling rap albums of all time:

“Great”

How he feels about the success of his soft drink PIMP JUICE:

“Really great “

How he feels about being the progenitor of Drake’s soppy sing-speak-drawl-rap:

“Not so great”

How he feels about the internet being obsessed with the fact that in the video for Dilemma Kelly Rowland seems to text him using Microsoft Excel:

“Dispirited. The hyper-inflated attention economy of the internet seems to be jointly fuelled by the pendant’s desire to highlight error and the priest’s lust to condemn those judged to have erred.”

I’ve wanted to write some nonsense about The Sign for a while now.

For three main reasons.

The first is because it is a great, great song.  

The second is because the song is called The Sign, and I think signs are interesting.

And third is because I recently found out why Ace of Base are called Ace of Base and the story really made me laugh.

Until it really didn’t.

So, in honour of basic mathematics, let’s run through these things in order.

It is a great, great song.

The music is a sort of europop-reggae hybrid … it’s the EXACT sound that over-serious people pretend they don’t like.

(But they like it really. The boring bastards.)

Also, and I’m not musical enough to know this for sure, but I think the song keeps moving back and forth between major and minor keys, that’s nice too.

Nice enough, in fact, that by the time this bit happens, toward the end of the song, I am usually feeling sufficiently emotional to find it quite moving:

“I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign

No one's gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong …”

No? just me?

Hello??

Fine. Fuck you.

Signs are interesting though, you’ve got to concede that, at least?

The sign in the video for this song, for example, is the ankh, or looped cross.

We don’t know many definitive things about the ankh. 

The scholarly debate has raged for bloody ages.

The OUP Compendium to the Scholarship of Symbol, for example, characterised it, thus:

SCHOLAR 1: It’s a bull spine, with a farmer’s rod across its back. You know?  as seen from above

SCHOLAR 2: Pssh, it’s a sandal, or some other type of open-toed shoe. Though I grant you, fellow scholar, it’s as if viewed from above.

SCHOLAR 3 : Nah! I think it is the belt loop of Isis! viewed from the front.

SCHOLAR 4:  Lads, it’s the sacral knot, on top of an axe. Dummies.

IN UNISON :  We can all agree though! it probably symbolises life, and sort of death, and sort of rebirth!

It’s into these contested interpretative waters that Ace of Base boldly waded.

The story goes that, as a group, they were a bit pissed off about the critical consensus regarding the interpretation of the ankh and decided to intervene.

A spokesperson for the band, speaking inn1994 said:

All I’m asking is: what if the ankh was actually a tennis racket?  or a thai-boxing headband? or a twisted up paperclip?  … our fans should keep an open mind.

Yes, well …

On to the name.

After a succession of shit names, including the hilariously bad Tech-Noir, Ace of Base found inspiration in the following way.

Sitting around watching television one day, the band come across the video for Ace of Spades by Motörhead.

The story goes that one band member shouts …

Ace of Spades?!  Look at Lemmy play that bass! 

Ace of Bass more like!  

Amirite?

A misspelling later, and there we are.

I really liked that story.

And then I found this out.

So, you know Lemmy liked all that Nazi memorabilia, right? and how that was a bit troubling?

Well, it turns out the founding member of Ace of Base didn’t just like Nazi memorabilia, he was an actual Nazi.

He was a member of a far-right political party.

And he played in a white power band called Commit Suiside.

The cover of their record is him, giving a Nazi salute. 

Now, I’m not some tedious edgelord who’s going to reproduce this sort of speech … 

But trust me,  however bad you think the lyrics of a white power band might be, these are worse.

They are genuinely horrifying.  They are also shit, obviously.

Insult to injury, this guy now works for a German think tank with some fairly dodgy political links, so that’s hardly reassuring either.

Point is, I now find it really hard to like this song.

Impossible, in fact.

Especially now.

The Motörhead story now seems horrible.

Singing about signs now seems horrible.

This whole thing now seems horrible. 

Nazis ruin everything, don’t they?

Nothing sensible has ever been said about human nature.

Possibly because human nature is mostly a made up concept.

I say mostly, because the exception to this is the song Human Nature by Michael Jackson.

Which is about human nature. Obviously

And also brilliant. Obviously.

( So often the exception that proved the rule, was our Michael…)

Speaking of which, I’d like to honour Michael’s memory in the following way:

By expressing only the second sensible thing ever said about human nature.

A human is never truer to their nature than when listening to Right Here-The Human Nature Remix while simultaneously considering how Human Nature by Michael Jackson was up until this very moment the only sensible thing ever said about human nature.

R.I.P MJ

King of Pop.

Actually, fuck it. I’ll give over the rest of this entry to Michael Jackson himself, who as well as being an untouchable pop icon, was an astute critic of New Jack Swing and the mid-period production of Teddy Riley more generally.

Speaking about Right Here - The Human Nature Remix, Jackson said:

“ Compared to this song, everything I have ever done is complete shit.

“ You see, even in my best songs, I never truly threw off pop music’s obsession with want.

“ In my songs, people want to be somewhere they are not. Be people they are not. Have the people they don’t currently have. My songs want a past that has gone. They want a future they can’t possibly know.

“It’s bothered me ever since I began studying Heidegger’s Metaphysics of Presence, which was around the time I did the Free Willy soundtrack.

“ SWV got it though, fully and thoroughly.

“ Which is why I can honestly say that having my song sampled on Right Here was the proudest moment of my career.

“ Oh, and you know that bit where someone is chanting…  S...The double...The U...The V …?

“ That’s the earliest known recording of Pharrell Williams, who was about 18 at the time.

“What most people don’t know is that I’m on that bit too. I’m just so quiet you can’t really hear me.

“Also, I’m only there on the S bit.

“ I remember that day so clearly. I spent hours in the studio quietly whispering S, S, S, S, S, S ... over and over again.

“ I’ve never been happier than at that exact moment.

“ Nothing else existed for me. No monkey, no little hat, no white socks, no duet with Paul McCartney.

“ Just the hiss of life itself. There. Being lived. Exploding out of me. Through me.

“ S. S. S. S. S.

“ I suppose here is where you go when you finally run out of theres.

“ SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

1999 was a great year for optimism gone bad.

Techno-nihilists around the world were left disappointed that the Millennium Bug didn’t bring about a digital apocalypse.

It turned out computers *could* count to 2000 after all. The clever bastards.

There was the Dome, too

At the time, pinko-pessimists hoped the Dome would end up as a white elephant.

They sniggered under their berets. (Collectively, obviously, the commie worms)

They joked that the Dome would spend the remainder of its days as a pallid folly commemorating the political arrogance of top-down economic regeneration enacted through heavy-handed and uncomfortably nationalistic pomp and ceremony …

Pah!

Little did those sniggering Trots know…

They must feel pretty silly now.

How must they feel knowing that this ugly plastic bowl, funded mostly by the sales of lottery tickets to the working class, now hosts glorious and record-breaking runs of Bon Jovi shows available exclusively to people with 02 mobile phone contracts?

(A perfect example of the market’s invisible hand sticking its invisible middle finger up to the invisible idiots who invisibly doubted its invisible ability to invisibly deliver its invisibly moral invisible outcomes.)

Also, Lance Armstrong won his first Tour De France.

That ended well.

As did the collective delusion that American Beauty was anything other than a really embarrassing film.

Point is, looked at from a distance, it is hard to argue with the accepted historical orthodoxy that No Scrubs by TLC was the only non-disappointing event of 1999.

Scratch a little deeper though, and there are some exceptions.

Steal my Sunshine by Len, for example.

At first glance, it looks likes your typical 1999 fuck up.

For a start, it is from an album called You Can’t Stop The Bum Rush, which promptly, erm, stopped the bum rush. For Len at least.

They never had another hit.

It was also conceived as contemporary re-working of Don’t You Want Me? by the Human League.

And while Len made a brilliant, brilliant song, if you brought it on the basis of it being as good as the Human League, you’d be a bit pissed off.

Beyond that though, it’s an era-defying triumph.

And yes,1999 counts as an entire era.

It’s a sleepy, sloppy ode to missing someone.

To missing them in the way that’s only possible after a long night has drifted into a long morning and you’ve got no intention of ending things quite yet.

And they are still, relentlessly, somewhere else. 

It’s a song that rescues its really short loop-sample of disco classic More, More, More, from sounding repetitive by virtue of adding comically growly, ugly, stoned vocals.

And the video is utterly stupid. In a good way.

And also, the recording of the song has got some solid trivia attached to it.

For example, the initial demo was recorded at the house of Brendan Canning, of Broken Social Scene.

Granting the song some unlikely indie credentials.

Oh! and the tiny singer from Sum 41 was there too!

It’s hard to understand things.

At least in part, that’s because thinking is hard.

And because things tend to get more complicated the harder you look at them.

Oh, and the looking is hard too.

It’s not impossible though, to understand things, and that’s probably an important thing.

Because relativism is a thing, but it’s a boring thing.

And nihilism is a thing, but it’s an empty thing.

So you start somewhere.

Historically speaking, suffering is real has been a popular choice.

And it does the job.

Or a job.

So, once you’ve got your thing, the thing you are reasonably sure is true, then you can start.

With your life and what not.

Here’s my thing, the thing in the world that I am most sure is true.

Ben Affleck will never have a greater, more powerful, or more iconic moment in his career than the time he played Ben Affleck in the Jenny From the Block video.

Incredibly, as if to prove beyond doubt the existence of satanic idiocy, Ben disagrees:

“ It was a real low point, I lost all credibility, it almost ruined me. “

Come on now, Son. No It didn’t. It made you.

For a start, Gigli was the low point of your career.

( Which I admit, may still compare favourably to having this imaginary conversation with Ben Affleck )

But come on. One of the biggest box-office flops ever? that still holds the record for the lowest scored film in the history of The Times?

It was shit, mate.

And you dragged Jennifer Lopez into it.

So don’t get lippy about one of the great singles of the last twenty years.

That beat!  The hook! It is played by a fucking flute!

Yeah yeah, your Oscars …

But the hook is played by a flute!

To be fair to him, Ben is not the only one to consistently underestimate quite how brilliant Jennifer Lopez is.

There’s a multi-volume book to be written about how singular her career has been, but as a starter for ten, consider the following.

She is the only woman to ever simultaneously have a number one film and a number one album.

A decade later, she released one of the biggest selling singles of all time.

And it featured Pitbull. Which is always a bonus.

Also, you know Google Images? the thing the entire planet uses to look at stuff. That was invented because of Jennifer Lopez.

I’m not joking.

She wore a dress that was so hot, tens of millions of people searched for pictures of it online.

Google took note. And then got to work.

(A flute! )

So, like I was saying.

It’s hard to understand things.

For example, I used to feel a bit weird about loving Jenny From the Block.

I think it was something to do with class consciousness, or appropriation.

And then I found out that J-LO voiced the character of worker ant Azteca in the Dreamwork’s 1998 animated masterpiece, ANTZ.

Which was, I remember thinking aged 14, a powerful allegory for the life of Christ and the inevitability of a proletariat-led overthrow of capitalist oppression.

So there you go.  

That made things a bit easier to understand.

I love Jenny From The Block.

And I proceed from there.

Because it’s a start.

I’m know I’m not alone in this... 

I secretly think I’m incredibly good at pool.

At the very least, I think I’m considerably better than I am.

It’s one of the thousands of relatively harmless delusions that have somehow crept into my psyche over the years.

Others include being quite good at drawing, football and dancing.

And, if I’m being entirely honest, I also suspect I would have been an excellent rapper and am a bit sad that the ship seems to have sailed.

As well as being delusions, the above have something else in common. I can roughly pinpoint the time I started to believe them.

Pool…

I’m fifteen. I’m drunk, I beat five people in a row, including someone who is actually good at pool. Actually, everyone is drunk, probably drunker than I am.

Talent and skill differentials are flattened out, accidents happen.

Also, I probably care more than most about winning and am taking it seriously while everyone else is fucking about.

Pool! Ha! Yes mate! Can of Hooch Lemon for me …  can you bring it over? I’m busy being amazing at pool!

Drawing…

I’m nine years old. For some reason drawing has assumed cultural cache in the primary school I attend.

I’m OK at drawing, but not as good as this other boy called Ryan. He challenges me to a ‘drawing competition’. We both have to draw something and the class will vote on which is best.

He goes first. He draws a monster face. I copy his exactly but … crucially… I add some rudimentary shading to my version.

Originality be damned! I score a narrow victory and am crowned the best drawer in the class.

Drawing! Ha! Fuck you Ryan! Where’s my pencil sharpener? 

Football…

Basically, I’m a man-child. Six foot and 14 stone at twelve years old.

Parents complain that the team have enlisted an actual adult, or maybe an older child with severe learning difficulties.

I am made captain. When the other kids finally begin to catch up to me physically, revealing my lack of talent, I high-handedly quit.  

Football! - Ha! ! I’m more into books and … you know … ideas and stuff… and also postcards of paintings…. I’m really into postcards of paintings.   I’m great though, used to be captain of the school team.

Dancing…

I’m about 19. University forces me to go to clubs that are actually fun. That play music you can actually dance to.

Prior to this, I went to clubs where a Pulp song was about as sexy as things got.

I hear songs that not only make you want to dance, but are actually ABOUT dancing. And that’s all, they are about dancing, and then after the dancing, the sex.

They aren’t about despair, or Salvador Dali films, or the Cold War. Thank God.

1,2 Step was maybe the best of the bunch. 

At the time I didn’t realise that it was the tail-end of mainstream crunk, or that Ciara would later suffer from a criminal lack of acknowledgement for her clutch of brilliant songs.

What I did realise was that it was impossible not to dance to this song, and that just giving in and doing it was pretty much all it took.

Dancing! Ha! Just dancing is what makes you good at dancing! also The Who are shiiiiiiiiiiit!  Ha!

As an aside, if producer Jazze Pha’s cameo doesn’t convince you that just giving things a go is what matters, I don’t know know what will:

This is a Jazze Phizal  … product …shizzle

One last thing.

Rapping…

I’m 19. I realise I know all of Missy Elliott’s verse from 1, 2 Step.

And I realise I love it.

It’s 1999. But it’s nothing like the Prince song promised.

I have precisely zero lions in my pocket. Ready to roar or otherwise.

Shame really, because I probably had room for them. You see, I’m wearing CARGO PANTS.

It’s a baffling picture.  

There I am, a 14 year old fool. My giant, lion-less pockets wafting pointlessly in the wind.

To make things worse, I have just learned the word ‘ambient’.  

I am enjoying this word very much and am deploying it in conversation whenever I can.

“ Weather is a bit ambient today, isn’t it? ”

“ How am I?  pretty good mate, ambient mostly ”

“ My girlfriend? yeah, you don’t know her, I met her on holiday in Rhyl, her name is …erm ... Ambient ”

Since then I have been steadily getting a bit more of a handle on what ambient really means.

I know that it is derived from the word ‘encircle’, which I find beautiful.

I know that conversations about Brian Eno and early Aphex Twin are always, always, boring.

I also know that people who like ambient music react very badly when you misappropriate the term.

They would have hated me at 14.

Luckily, I’ve grown up since.

So, in that spirit …

Pure Shores by All Saints is the greatest piece of ambient music ever recorded.

Just kidding.

It is great though, and sort of ambient.

It is one of many William Orbit produced tracks from that era that still sound pretty distinctive today.

He’s sort of an odd fish, is William.

For a while he added spacey synths and bleeps to massive hits by Madonna and Britney and Beck and Blur and loads of other seemingly disparate artists.

In the space of a decade his productions sold upwards of 200 million copies. 

For a time there, it became really hard not to make orbit puns.

So, it’s 1999 and William Orbit is the reason I can’t stop saying the word ambient.

Well, that and the fact that I am hastily trying to construct a functional identity out of KNOWING LOTS OF WORDS.

The cargo pants thing though, that isn’t William’s fault. 

That was All Saints. 

They have made them incredibly, irrationally fashionable, so you can buy them cheaply from the market.

Also, the school I go to has buckled under the pressure and pretty much decided that, provided they are dark enough, they can be worn as part of the uniform.

They are also worn by goths, and whatever people who were into Nu Metal were called.

This turns out to be a real boon for me, because I am, at that point, pretending to be heavily into Nu Metal.

Secretly though, I don’t like Nu Metal much, but I utterly love Pure Shores and it makes me want to cry when I hear it on the radio.

And sometimes it does.

About 15 years ago, I briefly went out with a girl who was really good at playing the violin.

Obviously, it ended terribly.

Actually, full disclosure, it began terribly too. And the middle bit was also quite shit.

I was pretty young, and pretty stupid, so I didn’t learn much from the (my) failure. At least not about any of the important stuff, like relationships, or love, or sex, or how to maintain your dignity when a girl who is good at playing the violin dumps you via MSN Messenger.

A/ S / L?

17/ M / The Abyss…

I did learn a little something, though.

One night, I went to watch her play in a youth orchestra. I’d never been to a classical music concert before. I was ready for it though.

In some sense that was obscure to me at the time, I found the idea thrilling.  A sort of future vision of what my adult life might be like. You know … cultured, refined, all those other bullshit notions that exist to make you feel worse about the way your life actually is.

That vision lasted about six seconds.

As soon as I sat down, Spread Your Love by The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club invaded my head.

And it never left.

That brainless three-chord stomp played on repeat for the whole three hours. I paid precisely zero attention to the concert.

At the time, I suspected it was some sort of sign. Culture wasn’t for me, I preferred pop songs about vague sexual longing. That was my lot.

I can see now that this is an utterly nonsense (and destructive) distinction, but recently I was reminded of it, nonetheless.

I was re-reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. It’s a breathtaking, brilliant book about bodies and self-hood and boundaries and transformation. The title comes from from a recurring image in Roland Barthes’ sort-of-autobiography:

“the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or form”

Now, I seriously love Maggie Nelson’s work. I even quite like Roland Barthes. If you don’t take his posturing too seriously he has plenty of good stuff to say about stories and photographs, and he also wore a piece of rope instead of a belt because he thought it made him look more working-class. Which is funny no matter how you feel about post-structuralism.

Despite all of its philosophical and literary qualities though, re-reading Nelson’s book made me think most of all about the Sugababes, British pop’s very own version of the Argo.

When this single was released, they had only one original member left, and would later continue for a time without any.

Over time they became an entirely new ship.

They were never anything less than brilliant, but this song is still their high watermark. For me, it’s all in the bridge. It ascends, then it ascends, then it ascends some more. It’s like an Abba song in that way, melodically coercive to a point that is almost (but never fully) ridiculous.

Also, “ I’ve been waiting patiently…”  is a hilariously polite way to admonish someone’s lack of sexual dominance.

ALSO, one of the great Sugababes fissures was apparently caused by a long argument about the merits of Toxic by Britney Spears.

That’s EXACTLY how I want my pop bands to roll.

So, yeah … I like this song as much as I like pretty much anything.

A/ S/ L?

Have a life-hack!

Or as they used to be called, a tip …

Never go drinking with someone who doesn’t think Creep is one of Radiohead’s best songs.

They are likely to be relatively tedious.

I mean, I (sort of) enjoy Weird Fishes/Arpeggi too.

But there is a reason school choirs don’t sing it. And a reason Prince never covered it. And a reason I had to look up how to spell Arpeggi.

Radiohead are good. But Creep is great.

It is much better than the shit Stone Temple Pilots song also called Creep that came out around the same time.

But it is nowhere near as good as the TLC song ALSO called Creep that came out a few months later.

You see, some things are really, really great.

And some things are far better than that.

For a start, there’s the fact that the TLC version was written and produced by Dallas Austin.

Austin has written and produced at least twenty brilliant songs.

On the other hand, he also claimed ...

“ I wrote Creep while cruising in my Chevrolet Blazer.”

Which is funny.

There’s the confrontational sexual politics of the song, which can be roughly summarised as:

“Pay maximum attention to me at all times or I’ll cheat on you with your mate and it’ll be your fault. You idiot.”

There’s the fact that Lisa Left-Eye Lopez hated the message of the song so much she wanted to appear in the video with black tape over her mouth…

But that Chilli liked it more and decided to have a child with Dallas Austin.

(It was probably his Chevrolet Blazer that swung it…)

There’s the fact that Creep is an absolute quantum leap on from their (brilliantly named) debut album Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip, which was decent boom-bap-swing, but not much more.

There’s that genius Slick Rick sample, that slightly strange jazz trumpet, that incredible, contained vocal and that hook big enough to ensure the album that carried it became one of the biggest selling of all time.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there are those oversized silk pyjamas… Those pyjamas were stylish, provocative, singular, iconic.

For a while there, the sexiest song I knew was by a man whose real name was Elgin Lumpkin. Elgin. Lumpkin.

At that point in my life I also thought a pony was a baby horse.  

Confusing times.

I was about twelve years old. I’d (just about) started kissing girls and like a good schoolboy, I was looking for instruction wherever I could find it.

Luckily, RnB in the mid-1990s was a goldmine of sexual pedagogy … Dru Hill, Keith Sweat, Jodeci  …  R-Kelly before he got extremely weird and extremely brilliant.

And then there was Lumpkin.

Lumpkin was something else altogether. He had the best leather trousers, the most baby oil and a talent for body-roll he presumably acquired by cutting a Faustian deal with a tremendously horny snake.  

All of which was hugely comforting.

At a point in life when sex seemed simultaneously like the most freighting and the most exciting thing in the world, songs like Pony just seemed so sure of themselves… so… grown up.

In its absurd, cartoonish performance of hyper-sexuality I was able to seek a kind of solace.  

Ignorant? Scared?  A VIRGIN?  Me?!  ME?!! You must be joking mate!   I KNOW ALL THE WORDS TO PONY!

Looking back, I feel the same about my adolescent love for Pony as I do about my adolescent  love of Nu-Metal.

I was a kid, so of course I didn’t really understand sex, just like I didn’t really understand sadness or anger.  

But I really wanted to feel like I did. And more than that, I really really really wanted other people to feel like I did.

The solution was simple. I’d seek out the most brash, gaudy, cocksure representations of what scared me and bury my doubt in there until I was a real grown up and could afford leather trousers of my own.  

And now I am a real grown up.

Allegedly.  

And I’ve learnt loads of things.

Here are some of them:

Timbaland is a complete genius and Pony was the first time that fact became undeniable.

Stretching equine/jockey imagery so thinly is extremely funny and not very sexy.  

Threatening to “Lurk all over you”  is possibly the least erotic lyric ever written.

Now I’m finally old enough, I’m too scared to buy the leather trousers, after all.