Crushing On

35-for-35: 1984 – “When Doves Cry” by Prince

November 4, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]1984 was a year that included a Madonna record – one of my favorite records of all time, actually – Like a Virgin. I could go on and on about that album. Yet, as with yesterday, I have to pluck out a different song to highlight. Unlike yesterday, this song as quite a pedigree.

Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry

“When Doves Cry” may have been the first time I noticed that songs imitated life. I was on the verge of my Madonna obsession that came the following year with endless spins of “Dress You Up” b/w “Shoo-BeeDoo” but it was also the period where my parents were moving towards their separation.

I don’t have a lot of memories from when they were together and together in the same place. There are only two that I can recall clearly, and one was standing on the landing of our staircase listening to them scream at each other.

I always wonder, is that memory so singular because it was the only time they fought in front of me, or because it was frequent?

(Please, mom and dad, don’t comment and ruin the mystery.)

(Due to Prince’s curious vendetta against any of his music appearing online, there are no embeds of the video of “When Doves Cry” to share! Instead, have this early rehearsal footage of him learning the song with his band.)

Despite the dirty electric guitar riffing in the intro and the jaunty piano chords of the refrain, “When Doves Cry” is a sparse song. Prince is singing to an unnamed partner, but to me the song plays out in a locked white room (“a world that’s so cold”) with several Princes, drums, a piano, and some phase effects. There is no bass. Nothing else will enter or depart.

Maybe it is the inside of Prince’s mind, him arguing maybes back and forth, the drum an echo of his heart beating from just below.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that’s so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I’m just too demanding
Maybe I’m just like my father too bold
Maybe you’re just like my mother
She’s never satisfied (She’s never satisfied)

I think it says something about me that for over 30 years “When Doves Cry” has always been a song about parents when that amounts to only four lines alone in the context of the bottled lust of the rest of the song.

I have to consciously check in to hear anything else in the song as words other than noises. Like “animals strike curious poses” – I could recite the phrase to you phonetically, but every time I remind myself of the lyrics I quickly forget.

E said a thing to me last night to the effect of, “we’re all just machines executing code we wrote when we were eight years old.” We weren’t talking about “When Doves Cry,” but that’s absolutely what the song is about. At a point, all of the lust and heat in world can’t change your programming. You either add new functions to help correct the old code at the core, or you just keep executing the same mistakes again and again – either the mistakes of your parents or the mistakes you make in reaction to their actions.

All of that meaning is packaged in this hermetically sealed white room of a song with its sparse arrangement, three stanzas, and a chorus. Prince was a genius of both music and the human condition, and also of efficiency. Lines of musical code.

If he could have said it in any fewer words or notes he would have.

35-for-35: 1983 – “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” by Culture Club

November 3, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] culture-club-kissing-to-be-clever 1983 was an obscenely good year of the music I love. Seriously, check out this list of releases at the top of my personal iTunes charts:

David Bowie – Let’s Dance, Billy Joel – An Innocent Man, Cyndi Lauper – She’s So Unusual, Madonna s/t, The Police – Synchronicity, U2 – War, plus singles like “1999,” “Sweet Dreams,” and “Flashdance What A Feeling” – plus, the music video of “Thriller”!

(Sadly, they were all shut out at the Grammys by Thriller, which arrived on November 30, 1982, after the end of the 1982 Grammys eligibility period.)

How to choose? As much as my heart lies with Madonna when it comes to 1983, I’ve already done a lot of writing about her best songs. Cyndi Lauper’s album is an all-time classic, but I didn’t have ears for it until after I met Lindsay. I love the singles from An Innocent Man, but in 1983 we were still spinning Glass Houses.

After agonizing over the decision, I realize I was making the mistake of looking for songs that I love now, when really I should be searching my earliest memories for songs I loved then. And, after “Thriller,” the great love of my three-year-old life was “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya.”

Yes, by Culture Club. I was so addicted to that song as a kid. It was the earliest example of my childhood choreography, as I’d launch into a series of somersaults during the chorus.

But, what is this monstrosity? It begins with mariachi horns and castanets, it briefly turns into a sort of lounge song, before turning into queer calypso elevator music on the chorus. And, check out the lyrics to the verse:

Downtown we’ll drown
We’re in our never splendour
Flowers, showers
Who’s got the new boy gender?
I’ll be your baby, I’ll be your score
I’ll run the gun for you and so much more

Holy crap, tiny Peter, was your first favorite song really an ode to blurred gender roles and sexual innuendo? And, also, how was Culture Club so deeply weird yet also so incredibly successful?

I cannot answer any of those questions, so I turned to the next closest source of information: my mother. Yes, my beloved readers, you about to witness a Crushing Krisis first: A BLOG POST FROM MOTHER OF KRISIS.

Take it away, Mom:

I first heard and saw Culture Club on MTV, which was new at the time. We didn’t have a big income, but we did have cable TV. There was something about their sound that grabbed me.

You were a music lover from a very early age. You definitely had your favorites and I can safely say “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” was one of them. You would become a little animated dancer when it came on. You were a little young for a full fledged somersault, but you gave it your best try.

We lived in South Philly, and I used to take you to the playground off of 13th & Oregon and push you on the swings while I sang you my newest favorite song, like “Electric Avenue” and “I Can’t Go For That.” Through the process of elimination, perhaps I bought Kissing To Be Clever at a record store on East Passyunk Ave? Sometimes, when the weather was nice I would take you for a walk there. [Ed Note: See, my mom was a hipster before all of y’all were hipsters, okay?]

As far as the club music I was exposed to, the most important aspects of a song were:

Does it have a good beat? and
Can you dance to it?

Calypso, Caribbean, reggae, soul, funk, etc … they generally have a beat and you can dance to them. “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” fit those parameters.

I suppose I noticed Boy George’s way of being different, but I didn’t care one way or another. I just liked the music. I guess different was ok with me. Bear in mind, I had spent a considerable part of my young life being a huge Bowie fan, so I wasn’t phased much by Boy George’s gender-bending feminine look (though, in no way did Boy George remind me of Bowie).

Not to blow my own horn, but I don’t think I was ever judgmental about how people looked or acted. Perhaps I developed a tolerant attitude as it relates to gender and sexual orientation. I mean, I was about 10 years old when my parents took me to visit my cousin D and her partner [a woman]. This was 1965. Also my cousin W was gay. The family just accepted it. Even my parents.

(I am the same person who bought you no less than two baby dolls, Care Bears, Jem, and both He-Man and She-Ra.)

That was… actually pretty awesome. Thanks, mom! Perhaps we can tempt her into another guest appearance as the month presses on. I love that last little aside, in case any of you ever doubt me saying I was all about inclusivity right down to the toys I played with as a toddler.

35-for-35: 1982 – “Maneater” by Hall & Oates

November 2, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]When I was slightly older than EV I still did not have my own record player (I know – the injustice), so my mother was in charge of pulling out my favorite songs on vinyl and then dropping the needle into the groove.

One of my earliest musical memories is of her playing “Maneater” on repeat for us as we sat in our rocking chair. I know this was an early memory because the turntable was on a set of ramshackle shelves built by my father before my parents separated, rather than its later home on the other side of our living room.

Here’s what I understood about “Maneater” at the time: it was about a creature, like “Thriller.” She ate people! It had a throbbing bass line that was good for bopping along to. Also, it was on an LP called H20, which meant water but also meant Hall & Oates. Basically, it was the most clever thing anyone had ever thought of.

As a toddler, I may have missed a few entendres.

As with a lot of my early-in-life vinyl favorites, I completely lost touch with Hall & Oates as I grew older and amassed my own record (and, later, CD) collection. In fact, unlike Madonna and MJ, who I began spinning again in college, Hall & Oates didn’t make their return to my collection until 2010 inspired by the requests of my communications-buddy and cube neighbor, MK.

I was even listening to The Bird and The Bee’s H&O cover LP before I was listening to H&O again!

Revisiting “Maneater” as an adult and a musician, a whole new set of elements stick out for me.

The intro is a familiar Hall & Oates gimmick – a long minor-key instrumental that gradually adds additional instruments (bass, keyboards, a trickling water effect, and smarmy saxophone) and then pops into the relative major key for the verse.

The lyrics are as lurid as those of my other childhood favorite with an awesome bassline, “Billy Jean.” Here, H&O are unsubtly describing falling in love with a sex worker – or, at least a woman who is ready to devour any high-roller who enters her life.

What makes the song interesting to me today is this line: “If you’re in it for love you ain’t gonna get too far.” Who exactly is pursuing the Maneater, in the context of the song? Is it another rich boy, unware that he’s about to be drained dry? Or, is it someone who is genuinely falling for her.

If the latter, who are H&O to warn him off? Maybe he’s the true love that has been missing from all of Maneater’s conquests.

We’re not meant to know. Hall & Oates wrote fantastic songs, but they weren’t ever especially known for the complete narratives of their lyrics. If you don’t believe me, please share – what is the “That” for which “I Can’t Go For”?

Even without a coherent story, there’s no doubt that “Maneater” is one of Hall & Oates’ stone cold early-80s classics.

35-for-35: 1981 – “Message of Love” by The Pretenders

November 1, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]In the vast expanse of my music library, I have curiously few songs from the year of my birth.

I can’t imagine what 1981 must have been like for a music fan of the time. Disco was over and 80s hair metal had yet to arrive. The top LPs were mostly 70s rock holdovers, with songs like Olivia Newton John’s #1 single “Physical” and Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” hinting at the future of 80s synth pop and New Wave.

The Pretenders didn’t exactly fit into either paradigm. Though bandleader Chrissie Hynde was heavily influenced by British Invasion bands like The Kinks, their debut didn’t hit until 1980 – and it was relatively synth-free. It was also a big hit, which lead the band to rush out a second LP the next year.

I tend to think of Pretenders II as the weakest point of The Pretenders stunning initial three-LP sprint (so: still stunning). It’s hard to be charitable to a record less singular than their debut and less hit-laden than Learning To Crawl. Really, “I Go To Sleep” and “Talk of the Town” would be the only two memorable tracks on it, if not for the bomb blast of “Message of Love” – one of the Pretenders’ best and most sparse songs.

As with many listeners of my generation, I was turned on to this song much later in life by a commercial in the 90s (though the internet seems to have no recollection of such a thing). It was the tipping point that finally sent me out to buy all three of the Pretenders first records at HMV in Center City on New Year’s Eve 1999 (the CD purchase was pretty memorable, yet also the least of all the reasons that day was memorable).

The song opens with two guitars competing for attention, shouting a pair of chords back and forth over a bounding tom drum rhythm from Martin Chambers stolen from an old swing tune (I’m a sucker for any big tom drum fill reminiscent of Gene Krupa). Chrissie Hynde inserts herself between the guitars like she’s breaking up a fight, reminding them “The reason we’re here, as man and woman” (literally, as it’s she and original guitarist dueling), sending the second guitar off into hiding.

When Chrissie Hynde croons, “When love walks into the room, everybody stand up! Oh, it’s good good good … like Brigdet Bardot!” all of those “o” and “oo” sounds just pour out of the speakers like syrup. I humbly submit that it is the best she has ever sounded on any song. She winks playfully through the second verse, casually tossing in a famous Oscar Wilde quote as James Honeyman-Scott finally sneaks back in to break up the guitar shouting match with a riff that duets with the vocal: “We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

All of the pieces are disconnected in the seemingly endless two-chord verse that stretches to the 1:25 mark – nearly halfway through the song. Guitars arrive in stabs and quickly evacuate; the bass quickly jaunts across the stage while the rest of the band is tacit.

Finally, the band comes together at once, all the prior elements pasted together with a churning electric guitar riff spinning past like a card in the spokes of a bike and underpinned by an unusually kittenish Hynde oo-ing and ah-ing beneath the band.

Is this a chorus? Again, it almost goes for a minute before dissolving back into the disparate parts of the verse, nearly verbatim to the first. Yet, this time we feel something different as listeners: anticipation. We know everything will come back together … or, we think we do. We never get another one of those choruses. Instead, all the musical elements circle, swinging past each other like flotsam spinning around the drain of the fade-out.

And then it’s over.

Enjoy this beautiful live version from ABC’s live music show Fridays, with the added bonus of it being introduced by Andy Kaufman: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1981 – “Message of Love” by The Pretenders

Music Monday: “Thriller” – Michael Jackson

October 31, 2016 by krisis

I am raising a third-generation Michael Jackson fan.

My mother loved Michael from his Motown days, and his Off The Wall hit when she was working in a hip Philly dance club, where I’m sure it was unavoidable. She passed that love to me via many, many spins of Thriller and its videos, which I obsessed over for years after its release.

I’ve always assumed that my love for MJ was a habit I learned from my mother, but having watched EV obsess over him for over a year now with no special coaching on my part I’m beginning to think it’s a genetic predisposition. Either that, or his voice was truly so magical that it can enrapture any child’s imagination, no matter when they first hear it.

Maybe both.

For the second year in a row, I tried to teach EV the “Thriller” dance for Halloween. Last year it was more that I was trying to finally learn it and EV liked to shuffle around like a zombie. This year we both tried, but the appeal of a glowing rectangle held too much sway and EV spent more time watching the dance instructors than doing the dance. She only got as far as the head nods.

Now that I’m older and a musician, I can’t help but dissect “Thriller” in a different way.

There’s no possible way to overstate just how truly and deeply weird it was as a song on a Michael Jackson album, let alone as the title track. There’s really not anything else remotely campy on the LP, aside from perhaps “Beat It.”

In fact, the song started out its life not as “Thriller,” but as a Rod Temperton demo called “Starlight.” You can even listen to a completed version of the track with virtually the same production. Free of the creepy lyrics and the Vincent Price cameo, there’s nothing remotely ooky about the song. It sounds like more of the same disco/funk blend from Off the Wall. It’s a near neighbor to “Turn This Disco Out.” [Read more…] about Music Monday: “Thriller” – Michael Jackson