6 posts tagged “music”
He hit me and I knew he loved me.
If he didn't care for me,
I could have never made him mad,
But he hit me and I was glad.
Who can say what strange flight of fancy led the great husband and wife songwriting team, Gerry Goffin and Carole King down this particular rabbit trail? Hearing the song for the first time, like discovering a sonnet by Shakespeare devoted to lighting farts, the dissonance between form and content is mind-bogglingly absurd. According to the CD's liner notes, the song was "withdrawn by Spector before it reached the top 100 because he felt the lyrics were too sensitive for pop radio." It took some thirty-five years and a courageous young woman named Britney Spears to overcome this prejudice with her debut single "Hit Me Baby One More Time."
This is that era, you dig, when song writers got earthy, sweaty, goofy -- suburban. Life can get you down. Relationships can be painful. But so long as the hot tub stays hot and the boxed chablis don't stop, we can all make it through this veil of tears.
Bring me home B.J., my feet are getting too big for this bed...
A 1970 live performance at the Doubletree Inn in my very own home town of Seattle. The bass intro to this absolutely effing sublime jazz cover of "Hey Jude" glides in over the din of dinner conversation and light applause, which in this recording sounds exactly like sizzling bacon. That bassline is the warmest, most inviting noise I've ever heard from my speakers. That bassline is the place I want to live.
There are so many things to love about this song -- the fact that a very different song of the same name by Kraftwerk is also one of my favorites, it's prescient take on the relationship between romance, sex, and computer technology... But sometimes it's the context you hear it in that really transports you into the world of the song. "Computer Love" became one of my favorites the first time I saw the movie "Menace II Society." The Caine character just got his 5.0 back from the chop shop and takes it out for an inaugural spin. The scene starts with that nasty synth bass intro and has him gliding through the sunlit streets of the ghetto. And as the song continues it becomes clear why he had to steal that car at gunpoint -- ah, the sun, the freshly laundered clothes, the endless possibilities of a new day, the grandeur of life!
They paved paradise/put up a parking lot.
What a strange, affecting song. Yes, it do always seem to go that I don't know what I've got 'til it's gone. But this is no cause for celebration, Joni! Her chipper distance from the awful truth of the chorus makes sense for the first two verses -- I can understand sounding glib about the environment if you feel you're on the right side of the issue. But in the third verse it gets personal -- her man is leaving her and she didn't realize what she had 'til it's gone. While this awful fact is supposed to be dawning on her, Joni can be heard goofing off, giggling! Maybe it's the jarring distance between her playful, celebratory tone and the heavy shit she's speaking on that makes the song work -- or maybe it's just the anomotopeia in the hook.
