Exist Yesterday.

somesongsconsidered:

“I Melt With You” – Modern English
(Words/music: Modern English, available on After the Snow, 4AD 1982)

… Love isn’t boring, but rather makes the common moments uncommonly special, and that’s what I hear in this song.  It’s a sentiment worth glorifying in a sonnet or, in this case, a lovely synth-pop song.

Synth-pop? This is jangle-pop, surely.

Petra, “Onward Christian Soldiers”

There’s something undeniably kitschy about this, as about all 80s Christian pop, but it was thrilling when I was twelve years old. The soaring guitar riffs, John Schlitt’s heavy-metal wail, the portentous keyboards… but the fact that it’s a century-old hymn (associated with the Salvation Army, I believe) makes the lyric somewhat less embarrassing than their original material. Only somewhat; the theology of that movement was deeply misguided and eventually harmful to the Republic — but hymns are codified and I struggle to think of them as being written, rather than just being.

When I was a child, Petra represented the outer limit of acceptable music; but they were too loud and hard-rock (“angry,” said my mother) to even have in the house, so I never heard them until I was in my teens. There was a brief window in between exposure to them and my discovery of pop radio when they were very important to me, as a measure of defining myself as a separate person from my parents, with pleasures they could not share. It’s been a very long time since glossy 80s inspirational rock was a defining pleasure for me (even U2 and the Call are pushing it), but I can’t help but regard the person I was fondly. Clueless little bugger.

U2, “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” [acoustic version]

If I were the kind of writer who preferred to tie everything into history, this would be my 9/11 song in my list of the 2000s. But being so intimately tied to that moment — or rather, to its aftermath, as it is in my memory — keeps the song from having any wider resonance; I can’t use it for anything but melancholic, vaguely politicized reflection.

I still think it’s the best thing they’ve done since Joshua Tree, which is almost entirely down to the Edge’s slightly desperate falsetto in the last verse. The album version is overloaded, sentimental blah: this stark guitar-and-vocal version goes some way towards redeeming the long-lost promise of folkie authenticity.

Panjabi MC ft. Jay-Z, “Mundian To Bach Ke (Beware Of The Boys)”

I’m not sure where I found out about this — probably Pitchfork, back before keeping up with their track reviews became too onerous a task for someone unwilling to visit the site daily. (Two redesigns ago, I think I’m right in saying.) Jay was supposed to be the path into the song, but as it turned out the song was my path into Jay; I haven’t really explored bhangra, in either traditional or hiphoppified form since, but I’ve gotten a lot out of Hova since then.

I’ve got too many Jay-Z guest spots on my (forthcoming) 2000s list as it is; and since the original was released in 1998, it’s disqualified. Still a banger, though.

Petey Pablo, “Raise Up”

Another song that won’t quite make my top hundred of the 2000s list; I remember it mostly as a fantastic party song, but recent listens leave everything but the chorus to be desired. It’s Timbaland-by-numbers, which isn’t exactly a bad thing, but a massive stomping hook needs some support in the rest of the song in order to last.

Still, I’ll always remember its summer (2001, sez tha discography) with great fondness.

Dire Straits, “Tunnel Of Love”

My relationship with Dire Straits is as follows:

1) Confusing them with Depeche Mode and Dexys Midnight Runners as 80s bands (i.e. quaint historical curiosities) that start with D.

2) Hearing them on classic-rock and 80s radio and reading So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and thinking well obviously they must have been one of the most important bands of their time.

3) Getting a couple of albums — a greatest hits, Making Movies, and I think maybe Brothers In Arms — and listening to them not non-stop but with the regularity that someone who has less than a hundred albums listens to the ones he has; and then even getting a couple of Knopfler solo albums, I’m so in thrall to their sound.

4) Upon delving deeper into the British music of the late 70s and early 80s and coming to love much of the punk, post-punk, new wave, New Romantic, New Pop, whatever, realizing that Dire Straits were actually one of the least important bands of their era, a bland 70s guitar-hero holdout in the startling shiny new pop world of the Wow Decade.

5) Based largely on other people’s running them down (in comparison with their preferred music of the period or whatever) and a critic-fed sense that the straight folk-and-blues-based rock music that dominated the 60s and 70s has had nothing say after 1977, largely ignoring them for several years.

6) Listening to Making Movies again last night, just because, and everything clicking: just because they were the sound of aspirational middle age in the 1980s doesn’t mean they were bad! Springsteen was that sound too, and if Dire Straits are anything they’re the British Springsteen, telling trad-pop tales of low-rent relationships in impossibly classy musical settings. They don’t have the Boss’s fire, but as an American I always think of the British as more buttoned-up anyway, so that’s not really a problem.

I just tagged them as “Soft Rock” in iTunes, and that seems to clear a critical space in my head where they can be appreciated. Which is nice; I always prefer liking stuff to not.

Susan Cadogan, “Nice And Easy”

An utterly gorgeous sound to walk home to, her 1975 album Hurt So Good was Lee “Scratch” Perry’s attempt to be a straight pop producer/svengali like Shadow Morton or Richard Perry. He was too weird for that (thank God), which just means that Cadogan’s thin, sweet voice, run through his layers and effects, is one of the most unique sounds in all of pop history.