Fluxblog #194: Billy Joel, My Chemical Romance, Tune-Yards, Annie Lennox
January 13th, 2019
More Than I Hoped For
Billy Joel “The Longest Time”
Billy Joel’s music was so omnipresent through my childhood that it took me a very long time to understand that his primary mode as a songwriter was pastiche. It’s pretty obvious! But you know, it’s easy to lose context when something is so foundational for you. With this in mind, it occurs to me that the contemporary artist with the most in common with Joel is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. Like Joel, Murdoch is skilled in adapting his natural gift for classic melody to a variety of pop modes from the past, but keeping it all within an immediately apparent personal aesthetic. But whereas Billy Joel’s music is rooted in bitterness and cynicism, Murdoch consistently writes from an empathetic and optimistic point of view.
“The Longest Time” is from An Innocent Man, the Billy Joel album most overtly based in pastiche. Each song on the record was written to evoke a different major influence from Joel’s youth, and this song in particular was a tribute to doo-wop. Joel is very well suited to the style, and the song is built around one of his loveliest and most elegant set of melodies. The most interesting thing about “The Longest Time” is that it’s written in the style of songs that were intended to express very sweet and naive sentiments about romance for an audience of teenagers, but he’s approaching that subject matter from the perspective of a man in his mid-30s. The guy in this song has fallen in love, but is surprised that this has happened – he’s been burned before, he’s had his defenses up for a while. But somehow he’s met someone who truly inspires him and shakes him out of a cynical, self-defeating rut. Joel’s lyrics are sincerely romantic, but cautious in its optimism. He’s absolutely smitten, and just trying extremely hard not to screw up a good thing.
Buy it from Amazon.
Billy Joel “Captain Jack”
The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are written in the second person, a technique that is almost always going to result in a creepy, uncomfortable feeling for the listener. You can hear this two ways: Billy Joel is either putting you in the experience of a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie, or he’s putting you in the mind of someone observing a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie and harshly judging them from a distance. Either way, the lyrics hijack your own perspective, so the seedy details and pathetic behavior come off a little more unsettling than they would if they were sung in either the first or third person. There’s an itchy feeling to the song – “ugh, get me out of here, this is gross” alternating with “ugh, get this voice out of my head.”
“Captain Jack” is a fairly early Billy Joel composition that sets the tone for a lot of the songs he would write as he progressed through his career. Musically, he’s merging the aesthetics of ’60s rock with the drama and grandeur of musical theater, and is basically on the same page as his contemporaries Andrew Lloyd Webber and Pete Townshend, and several years ahead of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf. Lyrically, he’s 23 years old and already revealing himself to be a major curmudgeon with a defensive contempt for “cool” guys of every kind. The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are hectoring and pitiless, and seem to be written deliberately to humiliate his subjects and reveal them as pretentious frauds who are merely dabbling with a down-and-out lifestyle. In this song, and in many Joel hits, the implication is that he’s watching some guy and seething: “Oh, you think you’re better than me? YOU think you’re better than ME? Well, fuck you, buddy!”
Buy it from Amazon.
January 15th, 2019
Strike A Violent Pose
My Chemical Romance “Teenagers”
I would have loved this song when it came out in the mid-00s, but I didn’t ever listen to it because I’d decided that My Chemical Romance and most of their mainstream emo MySpace rock peers were not worth my attention. I was in my mid-20s, was distancing myself from most rock music, and incredibly dismissive of the tastes of white suburban American kids. In other words, at the time “Teenagers” was released, teenagers scared the living shit out of me. But I hear it now, and I just think about what a fool I was to ignore this. This is exactly the sort of vibrant, catchy rock song I have loved at every stage of my life. Whoops.
“Teenagers” is a glam metal song in goth drag. Reduced to an elevator pitch, it’s Mötley Cüre. Gerard Way sings the song with an exuberant clarity but his lyrics are incredibly ambivalent, shifting back and forth between fear and empathy. It’s mostly the latter – Way is acutely aware of how awful being a teen can be, and his terror is mostly rooted in knowing that it only seems to get worse on kids and the kids seem to just get worse in turn. This is a song about teens in which the constant threat of mass murder is a major factor in growing up, and how the classic psychological tortures of adolescence seem quaint in that context. In Way’s mind, these kids are hardened, desensitized, and ready to snap at any moment. Who wouldn’t be scared of ‘em, even when they’re your target audience?
Buy it from Amazon.
January 15th, 2019
Suburban Sprawl
Tune-Yards “Fiya”
What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?
What if my own flesh is suburban sprawl?
What happened between us makes sense
If I am nothing, you’re all
If I’m nothing at all
Those lyrics resonate with me so deeply that it can be hard for me to listen when Merrill Garbus sings it. I know so many songs, and almost none of them express this feeling, and it’s a feeling that is so common. For a long time, I just figured “Fiya” was a rare and special song. But now it seems more like a song that should be common but is not because the music industry has done such a great job of keeping anyone remotely fat out of the spotlight. The few fat people who do make it through are either the type of people who possess a superhuman level of confidence – not exactly common among fat people – or are like me, and do everything they possibly can in life to misdirect your attention and not address this fact of their existence.
But here’s Merrill Garbus actually singing about it, and all the deep-rooted shame and insecurity that goes with it, and the way people – even good, kind people – will (often unknowingly) reduce your value and humanity because you are fat. She’s giving voice to the feeling that bothers me the most: The notion that someone could only want you out of convenience, and that every good thing about you can be cancelled out by your fatness. She’s singing about the cynicism and fear that grows inside you, the entirely justifiable suspicion that everyone you meet thinks you are disgusting unless they prove otherwise. And even then, can you really trust them? But all of that is really just the outside layer of the song. The core of it is a gnawing feeling of loneliness and yearning for affection. It’s disappointment, and resignation to the belief that you’ll never get what you need the way you are.
Buy it from Amazon.
January 16th, 2019
It Might Have Been Blessed
Annie Lennox “Little Bird”
“Little Bird” is all endorphins and adrenaline, with Annie Lennox singing about finding a newfound strength and courage in escaping a relationship that had gone sour over an up-tempo track that’s a little bit house and a little bit rock, and sung like a gospel song. Lennox sounds excited and unencumbered, but also rather nervous. Freedom has high stakes, and every note of triumph in this song is shaded by suppressed fear and doubt.
The line in “Little Bird” that resonates most deeply is at the start of the chorus: “They always said that you knew best.” That’s the crucial bit of context, the bit that shows you that this isn’t just about breaking free, it’s about getting out of a cycle of deferring to someone else. This other person doesn’t even need to be a villain, and doesn’t need to have been wrong about everything. The point is that Lennox is singing from the point of view who’s finally decided to trust themselves, and to follow their own path. Lennox’s voice soars on this part – her confidence is rising, but not quite as high as she’d like it to get. But there she is, trying. She makes you want to try too.
Buy it from Amazon.