Fooled by now, we mystify the past

Some might think (or just the animal in my head does) that every opportunity to make something outta this blog and its/my online, er, presence, was missed, from the first blog revolution to being deemed "comedy cognoscenti" by all the Twits to doing I-don't-know-what-the-hell on TickTock or whatever, has been missed.

Right. Well, there isn't an audience for soft-rock treatises and record player reminisces, with a side of trips to back to Turfland Mall and Landsdowne pool

But this is the way I am trying to tell you (you, or just the animal in my head) that I am am alive, I am living. I know all the moments these songs vibrated the chain of tiny bones in my ears. I remember them all. I remember this one (Clybourn Avenue, rain), this one (San Diego County), here (outside of North/Clybourn Red line), and here (moving and moving on). 

It all happened. It all happens, every time. 

Here is when my bike ride to the lake would time out exactly for me to fly down the hill at the northern end of Lincoln Memorial with this song on the tape player. The water-sky line, the sun, the wind, the speed, the water on the rocks, cars climbing toward Kenwood Avenue, all of it, mine and mine forever. 

I'll pretend my ship's not sinking

I didn't know the bright plastic soul-y sound out of mid-80s to early 90s was a genre until the almighty algorithm served it to me. (Do I classify that delivery/discovery as random also? Stay tuned to find out. I gotta think about that one.) 

Sophistipop was just a moment, but god, it was a delicious champagne punch that rose from the we-can't-play-and-we-don't-care, cynically jangly, darkly synthy, New Romantic-ruffled, and, reaching further back, blue-eyed soul ethos of 70s and 80s British pop. Maybe it emerged because the rich got richer and yuppies ran the joint in Thatcher's England, and they needed a soundtrack at their drinks parties.

Or, and this is what I think, they needed some purposely well-made and goddammit, happier music. Like we (I mean, me) do now. 

This is frankly a low-ranking sophistipop entry, but I'll take it all these days. All of it. I want to feel better, and this is the power suited, spandexed elixir to get me there.

***

God, I just realized that I posted their other Big Hit a week ago. I completely forgot.

That's how it goes when most of your week is spent in here. 

Coda: why in the hell am I also not gainfully employed by remaking music videos shot-for-shot? This is my calling.

It's too late to change events

Something comforting about this song to me today, beyond that it reminds me of any ordinary day during my summer stay in France, drinking hot chocolate in the morning out of a big bowl while pop radio blared overhead in the windowless self.



I think 1990 is becoming another musical It Year for me. Something to think about, especially these moments these days when all I wanna do is go back, not forward.

Hanging on to hope.

I've posted about this song before, but some five years ago, it was about a moment, not the song. Shuffle got me that December night, and the moon.

I guess those are two things that are and have been constant over the last five years: music being moving, and the moon, too. 

They probably will continue to be, as the new year begins. George's music will be. When you think about it, he had every reason in the world to continue to write merry pop songs about love and longing after 1985-87. He was pretty, the songs were pretty. But there was something deeper going on under that face and physique, something that the later leather-jacketed, all-model videos and exploding jukeboxes couldn't cover up. A thoughtful, timeless soul who got well down into the thorns of relationships and love and sought to remind us of having faith in yourself.

I'd put this song on par with any 70s Lennon ills-of-the-earth shouter.

I wouldn't have listened to it the last few days of this exceptional year, had he not passed. But he did, and here I am, and here it is.

I'll keep looking for the moon in the trees, and hoping.



These are the days of the open hand
They will not be the last
Look around now
These are the days of the beggars and the choosers

This is the year of the hungry man
Whose place is in the past
Hand in hand with ignorance
And legitimate excuses

The rich declare themselves poor
And most of us are not sure
If we have too much
But we'll take our chances
Because god's stopped keeping score
I guess somewhere along the way
He must have let us all out to play
Turned his back and all god's children
Crept out the back door

And it's hard to love, there's so much to hate
Hanging on to hope
When there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it's much too late
Well maybe we should all be praying for time

These are the days of the empty hand
Oh you hold on to what you can
And charity is a coat you wear twice a year

This is the year of the guilty man
Your television takes a stand
And you find that what was over there is over here

So you scream from behind your door
Say "what's mine is mine and not yours"
I may have too much but i'll take my chances
Because god's stopped keeping score
And you cling to the things they sold you
Did you cover your eyes when they told you

That he can't come back
Because he has no children to come back for

It's hard to love there's so much to hate
Hanging on to hope when there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it's much too late
So maybe we should all be praying for time

French Kiss

I've been watching this history of house music documentary in fits and starts over the last couple of weeks, to enliven chores that must be done during pre-bedtime brain-deadening hours on weeknights, which seems appropriate given the repetitive but enlivening nature of the form itself.

I've gotten to late 80s London thus far; the music has moved from Chicago to acid house nights at The Hacienda in "Madchester" to raves in undisclosed London locations.

Then, as if was shot back in time some twenty-four (!) years, my attention snapped to while performing some drudgery (probably laundry) when this track began to accompany the documentary's talking-head remembrances about loads of E and something Paul Oakenfold did.

I'm 90% sure that I heard this for the first time in "the boîte" (club--there was a dude I worked with there who'd ask nearly every week, "Arrrh you goeeeng to the BOITE tonight, mademoiselle?") in France during the summer of 1990. The timing would be right. And the title.



I definitely heard it later, back in Milwaukee in a club (not a "boite," but probably Esoteria). Oh, it moves you around like an insistent, hypnotic sonofabitch--until it becomes a sonofabitch to dance to around the six-minute mark, for reasons that are clear--as well as definite reprise of an earlier, ground-breaking (shaking?) effect that was more integrated into the track itself.

Cause times change, I know