Fluxblog 515: the greatest debut single of all time
New posts about old classics by Mariah Carey, The Cranberries, and The Field
Sweet Destiny
Mariah Carey “Vision of Love”
“Vision of Love” may be the best debut single of all time. It introduces Mariah Carey as a fully-formed artist – a vocal powerhouse who can sing with a lot of nuance, a songwriter with an exceptional gift for melody, a lyricist with a distinct intelligence and clever vocabulary. It’s one of the most consequential songs in pop history, not simply for launching one of the most successful singers in history, but in how it established melisma and multi-octave range as the dominant vocal style of mainstream pop. Whitney Houston put this trend in motion, but it was Carey who set the bar for pop singers at “superhuman.”
Many singers have tried to emulate her, but most have failed. That’s mostly because Carey’s remarkable vocal prowess is always just a means to achieving her ends as a songwriter. A mediocre singer only hears the theatricality, and the flex of hitting the whistle register. It becomes an athletic thing, or an equivalent of how amateur guitarists could get obsessed with Eddie Van Halen’s finger-tapping technique without ever picking up on his skill for writing hooky riffs.
“Vision of Love” isn’t ground breaking in form. It’s a ballad rooted in soul and gospel, somewhat old-fashioned in the context of pop at the dawn of the 1990s. But it’s a masterful composition, dialed-in at every level. Carey wrote the song around the time she was 18 with her early collaborator Ben Margulies, and I can’t imagine they had any idea they were writing something that could become a massive hit at the time. It reaches multiple bombastic crescendoes but is nevertheless a slow burner, and it’s far more musically ambitious than a majority of what was crushing the charts in 1989. Carey and Margulies were nobodies, but were approaching songwriting like they were making luxury products.
“Vision of Love” is a love song, but that aspect of the lyrics is almost secondary to how it expresses Carey’s will to triumph over her difficult and largely unhappy youth. The lyrics are very direct, but also noticeably wordy. Not in the sense that it ever sounds clumsy, but in that you can find yourself surprised by how smooth the phrase “now I know I’ve succeeded in finding the place I conceived” can sound in a song. This is one of the most charming aspects of Carey as an artist – she’s a woman who hears the melodic possibilities in prosaic words like “eventually,” “desperation,” “visualized,” and “alienation.” Pop songs typically land on universality with vague language, but Carey gets there with precision.
Buy it from Amazon.
You Know I’m Such A Fool For You
The Cranberries “Linger”
I’ve heard “Linger” countless times since I was 14 years old, and though I’ve always liked the song a lot, I’ve passively heard it out in the world far more often than I’ve deliberately put it on. It’s the kind of song that’s always out there in cafes, bars, and shops, and it while you can always feel it shift the air in the room, it sits very comfortably in the background. It’s a song that’s very easy to take for granted. But it’s also the kind of song that will hit you very hard when you’re raw, especially if you’re not expecting it. And it will open up when you listen closely.
The thing about “Linger” is that while the bones of the song are incredibly strong, there is a precise balance of elements in the studio recording produced by Stephen Street that elevates the song from “very good alt-folk ballad” to something that elegantly captures an extremely specific feeling, or more accurately, swirl of conflicting emotions. The studio version renders the drama with remarkable nuance, and creates an atmosphere that immediately conveys a distinctive mix of melancholy and anguish that most anyone will recognize from some moment in their life.
The Cranberries have released many recordings of “Linger” through the years – an early demo, radio sessions, alternative mixes, live performances, acoustic iterations. All of them reach a certain threshold of quality just because it’s “Linger,” but none of them feel right. Mostly, they sound sort of clumsy. The acoustic guitar strum is too loud, parts get shortened or removed, the rhythm feels off. The song is good, but the magic isn’t there.
So what is it about the version produced by Street, the version we’ve mostly been hearing for all this time? There’s something about how delicate and bright the opening guitar notes sound, somehow signaling both fragility and youth. The string arrangement is dynamic; gentle and nearly subliminal in some moments, and overwhelming in others. I like that it’s hard to tell whether particular parts of that arrangement are an actual orchestra or a keyboard setting – it varies the tonality and keeps it from sounding too stuffy. There’s the slide guitar solo, so understated but vaguely heroic. There’s also some tremolo guitar a little low in the mix, adding a subtle shimmer to the piece. Everything is calibrated perfectly; every instrument serving its purpose and disappearing when that purpose is served so the full composition moves through moments of lightness and density.
And then there’s Dolores O’Riordan. She was very young when she wrote this, and only a little older when The Cranberries recorded the song with Stephen Street. She’s captured on tape at a moment when she’s honed her craft to an impressive degree, but she still sounds very raw. She’s singing incredibly direct lyrics, but she sounds so genuinely wounded that even the most banal phrase is saturated with feeling. It’s a stunning combination of instinct and emotional intelligence, rooted in Irish vocal tradition.
“Linger” is a song about a girl knowing her boyfriend is cheating on her and deeply resenting his betrayal, but still feeling hopelessly infatuated with him and invested in their fledgling relationship. You hear the angst so clearly, but also that undiluted affection, which comes through so evocatively in the chorus that you could mistake it for a straight-ahead love song. But ultimately, this is a song about a hurt, humiliated, and lovelorn girl begging for this guy to end things with her because she doesn’t have the strength to end it herself.
It’s very much from the point of view of a young girl who’s experiencing this sort of thing for the first time, and confronting her passivity and disillusionment, but it’s a scenario that can happen at any point in your life. There are plenty of songs that approach these feelings, but it could be that no one could nail this feeling better than a sensitive teenager who can’t grasp the scale of their experience so it all seems overwhelming and massive. You can still feel this way as an adult, but the song gives you direct access to that powerful young emotion.
Buy it from Amazon.
They All Disappear From View
The Field “From Here We Go Sublime”
Axel Willner isn’t the only electronic music producer who has messed around with glitchy samples, but I think he’s the only one who’s ever made the sound of a CD skipping feel like a symphony. “From Here We Go Sublime” is mostly comprised of choppy, staccato sounds that somehow feel soft and hazy rather than sharp and thudding. Willner focuses on tone and texture, giving you the sound of a voice but no indication of what’s being sung, and extends brief quiet moments into lingering ambient hums.
The amazing magic trick of this song, aside from making a simulation of the sound of malfunctioning playback feel incredibly romantic, is in how Willner reveals the source of that romanticism. Halfway through the track the song builds to a moment when you finally hear a bit of the unobstructed source material: The Flamingos’ 1959 recording of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” one of the most distinct-sounding pop hits of all time.
The moment at 2:14 when you finally hear that heavily reverbed “sha-bop sha-bop” gives me goosebumps every time I play it; it’s like clouds suddenly parting in the night sky so you can get a clear shot of a bright full moon. Willner only gives you a few moments of the original song before altering it again, bringing in the “sha-bop sha-bop” a little faster than your ear expects it, and then slowly pushes the composition back into abstraction before it seems to dissolve in your headphones. The title is accurate – the sound is truly sublime.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• And Introducing… is back with a new episode about the tremendous weirdness of Will Smith featuring Todd in the Shadows.
• The Vinyl Emergency podcast has a new episode featuring Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy talking about their latest tour as a R.E.M. tribute band.
• Nick Sylvester wrote a new piece about, among other things, the beauty of music as an “inefficient” medium and industry.
• Margaret Welsh interviewed the dancer Sara Roche about “stripper music.”
• I enjoyed Lana Schwartz’s essay about her complicated feelings about Saturday Night Live.
• Gabi Belle’s latest YouTube video is a deep on how bad Ticketmaster has been for soooo long.
• I generally avoid writing about music by people I actually know because I find it tremendously awkward, but I want you to know my friend Lane Moore has a new album called Final Girl with her band It Was Romance and I think if you’re a fan of, say, Chvrches or Paramore, you’ll like it a lot.
Great write up. If someone was to search out the second best version of "Linger," where would you point them?
The song has had its hooks in me since minute one--my mom had the cassingle before I had ever heard it on the radio. I practically thought she imported the band.