Can I write a post in five minutes or less? Sure, if it's something I've heard on the radio an untold number of times, lyrics I can decipher, and that makes me feel a modicum of emotion or memory. Can inequity be addressed in a pop song? Sure, give it to rootsy-meets-Billy-Joel-future-Dead-hired-hand Bruce Hornsby (and the Range--I forgot he had a band!).
Would an office worker ca. 1987 pause their word processing, look into the middle distance, over the shoulder holder on their phone receiver, and think about the d*ck in the silk suit, and the larger issue at hand? Maybe.
What the hell do you do when, suddenly, tomorrow is presenting itself to you as a reality? And you can be done with certain ways of being, thinking, and words (bubbledropletcasespreadrestrictionmandatory) at a time within reasonable expectation? When you can have expectations?
Shit, there is real freedom in not expecting anything to happen. But when you're doing it for so long that, maybe, anything may not actually make you happy any more (if it did at all), what does make you happy?
What happens when you can't connect to that cellular-level feeling that, yup, something good is going to happen, I am going to go to X dance or walk by Y's locker and they or the events are going to respond in kind. The kind of feeling that makes someone say, I'm going to surprise you or be surprised by what happens, but I will like it?
Around 86, it was always all about longing for the Big Moments. And they happened. And if they didn't, you at least had the longing to caress and nurture with the wails of multi-tracked guitars and gooey lyrics, until another song or Y to long for replaced it.
But now is now, and there are no lockers to linger-while-you're-walking by, and you can't conceive of events because you've been in an event horizon for months. Is tomorrow too late?
You used to not run from the winter blues, scanning bright screens all the livelong day, watching TV show after TV show at your leisure and not that of the head of A/N/BC/CBS.
No, you got right down IN it, trudging through it. But a haunting soundtrack, synth songs without resolution got you through it.
Doldrums of February 86, good grief, what moody, white-sky, lachrymose glories! Nos. 15-18 alone could wrap you in pensive cashmere as you trudge, snow bits pricking your face between the tears. February 86, the shoulder-padded and Roland-ed evolutionary phase of rock bands that had once straddled, stages with guitars--Erectus. 86: Big Neanderthalic sounds, hair, sadness!
I was dipping into the internet vacuum, emotions sucked up by others' dusty stories.
Since I don’t really live there any more, when I'm sucked in, it really, um, sucks.
I’d rather live in a dark November of another time, when I was busily preparing for one creative thing or another, planning travel, planning shopping. Going out or making strategies for when I am out. Or immersed in school, people.
Or walking shimmering Loop sidewalks in the early evening with a list in mind. Most of those walks were the function of moving through that list, completing that list, a blur of dashes and things to buy inscribed on a work post-it. Detergent, replacement earrings (again), and the beginnings of gifts, since it's early December or late November.
The walks I remember are when I was--let myself be spontaneously sidetracked. Dip into this hotel lobby, lean way back and take in the Christmas Tree, where ever it was before Millennium Park existed, or --yes! the Puppet Bike!
Whether I took it in or not, there was life all around.
Today, where I walked, I looked at dead trees and dead leaves. Only the water moving, and a deer casually chawing, but always alert.
This doesn't have much to do with this song, other than I remember it was November dark and life was moving a lot when it was out.
The soft rock radio hit by Clapton that gets me the most isn't "Tears in Heaven" (though it's a eye-weller when you think about it) but this movie theme song.
And not because I loved the movie (or the song) that much, but because I think it was a first or second date.
We may not want to right now, but we do. So, let's just think of this place as a place that can give us the grief and turmoil of today, and James Brown. Hand to hand, across the nay-chun.
There are better, bigger, deeper cuts to choose today, but going back to the mid-80s, when everything from who your enemies were to your shoes was clear.
And this is a YGP in, like, triplicate, since the men behind the music in The System created the synth arrangement and programming for somebighits circa 1983-85. I submit (with absolutely no authority) that, without these guys, we wouldn't have had Tony! Toni! Tone!
I've always loved this song (a familiar refrain); I remember hearing it while in a swimming pool at a family and friends-of-family bbq party in somewhere out in the country on the way to Richmond from Lexington. The lush synths, the detail (which is why they were called in by the big guns), the...groove.
I love how the video (or its initial scene) was clearly inspired by the metaphor of hanging a Do Not Disturb sign. Yeah, let's have the guys playing the song in a hotel room, just set them up with a microphone and whatever that keyboard/stick thing is.
Oh, 1986, you were so simple. You were, too 1990
And the feeling's so real.
(Also: this video and song makes me want to totally 1986 my hair one day for the hell of it, now that I have bangs again for the first time since then. I think with enough product I can get them to make that cascade I was always trying to get them to do.)
I played the hell out of this cassette, I'm quite sure, but I don't think it survived a early/mid-90s This-is-not-cool-enough-to-remain-in-my-collection purge, or perhaps the purge prior to the big move to Chicago.
God, this is such a fall album (and reminds me of one fall in particular). But it's kind of overproduced, sadly so. The songs are great and I think they would survive a Let's-take-out-the-80s-flattening-production-effects revival today. I wonder if she ever plays these songs. Seriously, I'd love a re-recording of this.
Not, however, the first track off the album. This one--ah, I love its synthesized grandeur, the how it's haunting, but that is manufactured. Also, it just reminds me of both "What's Love Got to Do With It" and The Motels.
I feel like back then, her voice still sounded so, I don't know, contained. Definitely like she'd just gotten out of music school (which she pretty much had). I haven't encountered much Aimee Mann since then, or really tried, to, so I don't know how her voice has persisted or prospered over the years. I suppose I could go find out next month.
Or maybe that I ultimately like things that are a little rough, that kind of "college rock" or indie or what-have-you that sprang from the grubby punk impulse. Aimee Mann: she writes and sings about rough times, but she was never a little rough.
Sorry, I just cannot find a more expressive word for it than contained.
Still, I do love these two songs, and our Brave New Digital World makes it possible for me to have them. Well, technically, the BNDW has for the last ten years, but TT and this song didn't come back on my radar until I started listening to this latest in my hunt for the best and cheeziest classic-rock Internet radio station iTunes can offer me.
*Update: Um, yeah. I'm listening to the whole thing on Spotify
and it gets progressively worse, and when you get to this track, you
realize this should be faintly heard in Marshalls while you are shopping at the absolutely depressing one on Clark across from Century Mall for you-have-no-idea-what, you actually entered the building to go to the Cost Plus World Market that you thought was there but isn't so while you are in the building, why not just into
Marshalls and see if they have knee socks or some kind of utility
blazer and ohmygod these shirts are ugly as hell and, wait, that sounds like Aimee Mann faintly crooning above this rack of Misses tops and I should not have even gone into Misses anyway.
Now I know why I really purged it--if less than two songs make me happy, you're out.
