Exploring the Back Catalogue

Started by SueC, January 26, 2020, 02:58:00

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SueC

Well, I started annotating the lyrics to The Reasons Why but wasn't enjoying the process with this one, so I'm going to leave it.  I want to finish with this album so I can start listening to the two others that have arrived.

So, Freakshow.  It's not a song I particularly enjoy, but it's not the worst thing they've done either; however, it does contain one of the worst guitar sounds that ever came out of The Cure - that bit in the middle that sounds like a dentist's drill.  :1f632:

And so to the lyrics:

FREAKSHOW

I can't believe it, I must be dreaming
She turns the sound down
Says, "I am heaving
This is a freakshow"


...did someone not appreciate the narrator's musical taste / TV programme?   :winking_tongue   This is actually very funny!  Both the over-the-top comment, and the narrator's disbelief at the situation.  And while this could be a million scenarios, it's very funny to imagine it as a husband-wife interaction.  :lol:  There's this sense of throwing down the gauntlet here.

And I am screaming
She spins the world round
I want to stop
Bittersweet again
Her opening move
Down and out in black
Soft shiny and smooth
Looks like the alien
Crowd got groove
She burns her name into my arm
But I can never get through
To play the game
She's trying to lose
Her ultraviolet makes it
Harder to choose


Mmm, tealeaves again.  Opening move to what?  A metaphorical dance?  The references to ultraviolet and the alien crowd are pretty impenetrable.  Ultraviolet to me personally has connotations of danger - because it burns you and causes skin cancer, so it's a rather unfriendly part of the spectrum of light.  But, that doesn't remotely mean any such connotation was intended by the author.  All I'm really getting here is the fuzzy sense that this is some kind of murky relationship interaction / commentary.

Looks like the edge
Of the earth got moved
She blurs a way across the floor
I spin to swallow the view
And it's the same sway
Yeah, it's the same slide
It's the same stare, oh
It's the same smile
Yeah, it's the same but
It's not quite right
Oh, it's insane
She shakes like a freak
Stuck in the middle
Of the room for a week

Looks like the only way
To get on the beat
Is take her up on how to swing
But I am missing my feet
And it's the same sway
Yeah, it's the same slide
It's the same stare, oh
It's the same smile
Yeah, it's the same but
It's not quite right
I'm in a step, out
She two more steps down
For three steps up, clap
And go around, ow


Still some sort of metaphorical dance - or maybe this is some kind of preliminary courtship ritual?  :angel

It makes my head buzz
She wants to come now
I try to stop
Always infra dig her
Finishing move
Up and down in black
Soft shiny and smooth
Looks like the alien
Crowd got groove
She cuts a number out my arm
But I can never get through
To play this game
She's trying to lose
The stuff from Mars
Makes it harder to choose


I remember when I first listened to this, joking to a friend, "What is this about?  Kinky sex?  Or just walking the dog?"  Clearly not about walking the dog.  There's something rather off-balance here though.

Looks like the final frontier got moved
She blurs a way across the floor
I spin to swallow the view
And it's the same sway
Yeah, it's the same slide
It's the same strip, oh
It's the same smile
Yeah, it's the same
But it's not quite right
I can't believe it, I must be dreaming
She turns the lights up
Says she is leaving
This is a freakshow

And I am beaten
She spins the world round


So - what?  The choice of music / viewing was objected to, there was some kind of bizarre courtship ritual that may or may not have involved actual dancing, or maybe it's a metaphor, there was some kind of consummation, and then the woman says, "Wham-bam thankyou mister, I'm going now!"?  ...and it looks like she won that round, anyway.  And that the narrator kinda likes her spinning the world around.

Your guess is as good as mine.  Feel free to help me out here!

Oh heck, while I'm here I may as well address a few other songs, so I can get this over with.  Sirensong is not the kind of song I get the urge to listen to over and over; I find it musically middling, and if I had to express how much I relate to its lyrics, I would have to use negative numbers.  This time the lyrics aren't inscrutable, and I find some of the ideas in it thoroughly offputting.  It's not that I don't think men get attracted to women, and vice versa, and other combinations, but it's the bilge that goes with it in some popular songs that I don't like.  This whole "she had me in her magic spell" concept is just so cheap, to me, as if you're not a free agent, as if we've not moved on from the idea of women as temptresses or "uncovered meat" - Australians will understand the reference, famously made by a particularly daft imam - not that all imams are daft, but this one was, about women, and about men not accepting responsibility for their own sexual desires, and I'm disappointed Robert Smith is blowing out of that same old jaded horn.  "And I was tricked," my backside, unless it's a reference to sexual biochemistry, in which case I'll pass it - but not if it's another limp reiteration of, "It was Eve's fault, she offered me the apple!"

Interested people can look up the lyrics and form their own impressions.  To me though, there's nothing magical about this song, or this description of a sexual attraction / interaction; it's too stuffed with passing the buck, not accepting responsibility, poor-me-I-can't-help-myself.   And the finish of it is in the same vein: 

My whole life hanging
On a single word
To be hers evermore
Or mine alone


This is not a healthy way to think about love and partnership, this is basically codependency again - thinking that another person has that much power over you (and that you're willing to give it up to them), and that this is OK with you.  A healthy relationship doesn't have that kind of power imbalance or those kinds of power games.  And the concept of ownership - that in a relationship, the other person owns you (and/or you them) - that's just way off.  You each own your own self and share it with the other - but perhaps that's too unromantic, or not dramatic enough for some people.

You see a lot of these misconceptions about love in songs written by young people, but to see this one coming from a middle-aged person is a bit disappointing.  It really is a pity they don't do thorough relationships education in schools, since so many people have the misfortune to grow up in dysfunctional families, and then have to learn the hard way through their 20s and beyond (and some never do).  And I don't care if the author agrees with the narrator here or not, it just perpetuates stuff that I personally really think is unhelpful rubbish.  It does not particularly invite you to critique the viewpoint, it's just flat and there and not the kind of thing I want to spend my time listening to.

The Real Snow White perhaps does invite critique of attitudes (or perhaps not) - I'll deal with that next time.

SueC is time travelling

SueC

Confession time:  When I was listening to the B-sides collection, I liked most of the material from CDs 2-4, and some of the things I wasn't so keen on at first kind of grew on me, like Doing The Unstuck, despite its Playschool vibes.  I think that's something of a parallel to my acutely disliking the songs Love Cats and Why Can't I Be You as a teenager, but then actually beginning to like them in midlife, when I had unwound a bit and was starting to have fun in ways I simply didn't as a youngster.  So there you go, our tastes can change - just like I started eating avocado with relish in my mid-20s, after abhorring the taste as a kid; or giving myself a push to try sashimi when the fish had been caught and prepared that very morning by a work colleague I trusted (and I've eaten it ever since).

But the confession I have to make is that the opposite is happening for me with much of 4:13 Dream.  When I first listened to it, I was thinking, "OK, it's The Cure on holidays."  It does have a cruisy kind of vibe.  And I do really like the first three songs, that part has not changed - but after that, things are getting murky for me, and I'm actually liking a lot of the songs less the more I listen to them.  I've wondered why that is.

In part it's issues with lyrics - that with some of the songs, as I'm getting to know the lyrics, I'm finding myself objecting to viewpoints presented, whether or not actually endorsed.  Or I'm wishing that there was more clarity and less "read the tealeaves" - and that has me wondering whether Mr Smith is sometimes trying to write lyrics to go with a song-under-construction, rather than having lyrics and setting those to music - not that it's necessarily a binary thing.

The most wishy-washy of U2's early albums lyrically is October - where Bono famously lost his folder with the prepared lyrics just before they were booked into the studio, and had to recreate from memory, and in some cases just ad-lib.  So, some of the songs got a bit murky lyrically, which was not the case for the albums immediately before and after.  But in general, Bono writes above-average lyrics which reflect a wide-ranging literary diet, and an intimacy around language.  He generally writes clearly, and has a sense of the words he's using - and much as I've not liked some of his preachiness through the 90s especially, and am kind of rubbed up the wrong way a lot these days when I hear him talk, I still really respect his feel for language, and the way he often paints with words.

Mike Scott is another favourite lyricist, for similar reasons, as is Suzanne Vega, and it's nice to know they're still on the same planet as the rest of us, after all these years, which is where they have the edge on Bono (hahaha, sorry, I only just realised the pun :lol:), whose own lovely wife described him as being "unencumbered by reality" and I laughed so much when I heard that!

So Robert Smith is a funny one.  I do think he's on the same planet as the rest of us most of the time, and I don't wince when I hear him interviewed (although I don't always agree with him either).  I don't think he goes around thinking he knows vastly more than he actually does, while I do think Bono does (he has some really obvious blind spots), despite of the fact that I would also wager that Bono has read more seriously and more widely than Robert Smith over the course of his lifetime, and spent more hours in total with his nose in a book.  That's my professional hunch, from being an educator for 20 years.  I think Robert Smith possibly has less cognitive bias than Bono (we all have cognitive bias to some extent) and possibly is less invested in his working hypotheses of the world - but I obviously haven't sat down and tested them on these parameters.  It's just that I've read a lot of student essays, poetry and creative writing in my life, from students I knew reasonably well as people, and have noticed certain patterns that correlate with these parameters, so that when I'm reading someone's lyrics it's going through that same analytical machinery, and I think about it as I would student work, with the same interest in the person behind the work.

Robert Smith has written some fabulous lyrics, but also some pretty ordinary ones.  I think he's generally improved with age and experience there.  I love a lot of the music that has come from The Cure, but not all of it, and one of the occasionally repeating friction points with material from this band for me is lyrics rubbing me up the wrong way, either because murky or a bit sloppy or because not that well thought through logically.  I think Robert Smith is better at painting with his guitar than he is at painting with words - and he's exceptionally good at painting with his guitar, from my perspective - I'm often holding my breath because so blown away by that.

So yeah, on 4:13 Dream, on closer acquaintance, some of the lyrics began to grate on me, and with Sirensong to the point of not wishing to play that track again at our house, when there are so many tracks I enjoy a lot more, both by this band and others.

But in addition to that, after the first three songs, some of the music, and some of the vocal delivery style, was also grating on me.  The Cure are so very good at doing gorgeously atmospheric soundscapes, and at playing together like a bunch of string players rather than a bunch of people competing for attention, that it's kind of odd to get moments on this album where I'm actually putting my hands over my ears because the guitar is so screechy and annoying.  OK, I get it, you can't always do things the same way artistically or you become a caricature of yourself.  And aesthetics are so debatable - what is beautiful?  What sounds beautiful?  And yes, a lot of that is in the eyes and ears of the beholder.  Additionally, artists have the unalienable right to experiment with their work, and if they want to do something differently, then so they should, even if the result isn't enjoyable to the majority of people.  Heck, much of the music I listen to is alternative, and I tend not to like music that the majority likes, and to like the least, out of The Cure's catalogue, the songs that were popular hits for them (people gotta eat, musicians actually and audiences have different tastes which it is right to cater for).

And having said that, onto the next song.

THE REAL SNOW WHITE

You've got what I want

Oh yeah!
It's only for the night
And I will give it back tomorrow I swear
She can barely breathe
Don't stare
I know the dress is tight
But it was all I had to wear
Give me what I need
Please share
You know it's only right
And I would never lie to you
I wouldn't dare

I made a promise to myself
I wouldn't start with anyone else but
You know how it is with these promises
Made in the heat of the moment

They're made to be broken in two
Sometimes the only thing to do

Oh no!
It's all coming back
How I came to in a sticky three-day hole
Didn't see the sign
Go slow
Too busy tuning static on the radio
She hissed it in a song
Don't go
It always fades to black
But that's why I love the trip
It's so inevitable

I made a promise to myself
I wouldn't start with anyone else but
You know how it is with these promises
Made in the heat of the moment

They're made to be less than they seem
Whenever you've got what I need

And you've got what I need
Aaaiiieee!
For service with a smile
I have to walk in on my hands
And roll for free
You say it's all the same
Ennui
You're not the real snow white
The real snow white is on my knee
I didn't need to get ID
It's simply minimum height
And getting all dressed up
In seven ways to please

I made a promise to myself
I wouldn't start with anyone else but
You know how it is with these promises
Made in the heat of the moment

They're made to be broken one day
If there's no time to get away

Uh-oh!
She wasn't made to shine
She was really only ever made to glow
I left her in the dark
No show
Quiet svcking on a line
It was a tricky gun to load
And I didn't get to fire
Hi-ho!
She's off to work for time
I should have finished out with higher
Up than low

I made a promise to myself
I wouldn't start with anyone else but
You know how it is with these promises
Made in the heat of the moment

They're made before right becomes wrong
Whenever you've got what I want

And you've got what I want
Oh yeah!
It's only for the night
And I will give it back tomorrow
I swear


As I mentioned at the end of the last post, I have a feeling this song caricatures and exposes an attitude about relationships, and holds it up for critique.  If that's the case, it's certainly effective, because the long descriptive parts in the song especially repel me to the point of physical nausea.  This is a universe I have thankfully never visited, although I saw portals to it all around me, and this way of doing things has always personally deeply repelled me.  If that's what other people want to do, fine, but not with me (and various people did want to do that with me, unsuccessfully I might add, and it made me want to throw up).

That stuff is the complete opposite of what I actually have in my life, and what I treasure above anything.  I do have difficulty understanding what draws some people to apparently prefer a modus operandi of disposable relationships, using other people and throwing them away, running from thrill to thrill, saying whatever they need to say to get what they want (and this to me is the especially disgusting part - because that is then no longer an informed and mutually consenting transaction, but a way of deceiving another person).  It's not even as if the sex is going to be any better (and there's statistics to back this up, e.g. listen here); but I suppose some people get their kicks out of feeling powerful, and bigger and more important than another person, and/or they think that the more people they bed, the more desirable it proves they are, and they prefer operating on that shallow level to the idea of real intimacy with another human being.  Or maybe, those people are just simple stimulus-response machines without much central processing capacity.  Search me.  I'm a child of the 80s and my leaving yearbook was filled with professed aims in life like:

- To go to Paris and get laid as much as possible
- To be rich by age 25 and never have to work another day
- To drive a Ferrari and marry a supermodel

...and all the me-me-me of it all made me want to throw up; as indeed does all the me-me-me in contemporary Australian society - most recently demonstrated with the hoarding of toilet paper - congratulations, people, you now have enough toilet paper for a year, while old Mrs Jones down the road is wiping her backside with rags, are you proud of that?  ...and also amply demonstrated, during the course of "normal" Australian times, by road rage, pushing into queues, people throwing rubbish out of their car windows, scammers emailing us on a daily basis, and no longer being able to answer our telephone to unknown numbers because we're assailed by telemarketers and answering such calls only encourages them - to give but a few examples - and none of this is necessary - if only people had respect for each other, themselves and the biosphere that supports us.

So yeah, I hope The Real Snow White is intended as a critique, and I think it probably is.  Why does this song strike me as a caricature, when Sirensong didn't particularly?  Well, in part because it's even more preposterous, and because Robert Smith is definitely hamming all this up vocally, whereas the tone of Sirensong didn't seem to suggest a caricature, at least to me.  If you don't know a person from a bar of soap, it can be difficult to tell whether they're serious or being the devil's advocate.

I personally think there's clues even in the opening, which really goes like this:

You've got what I want
YOU've got what I want
You've GOT what I want
You've got WHAT I want
You've got what *I* want
You've got what I WANT

...and the whole It's only for the night / And I will give it back tomorrow, I swear is just completely ridiculous, although I have to say, it's not as if some people don't believe completely ridiculous things like this - but these follow-up lines just tip it over the edge for me:  Give me what I need / Please share / You know it's only right / And I would never lie to you / I wouldn't dare.

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is often used in senior high school classrooms to introduce the idea of satire.  Students generally get it without having to be spoonfed - that the author doesn't actually mean what he's saying, he's using it to caricature other people's attitudes he's objecting to.  In part it might be the familiarity of many with Gulliver's Travels that helps this recognition - and in part it's because it's just so over-the-top to suggest cannibalism as a means of solving a social problem.

But here's an example that used to be easily recognised by young people as satire, and now, not so much:


For quite a while after Live Aid back in 1984, young people were aware who Bob Geldof was and what his real feelings on social injustice were, so the majority of my students picked this song up as tongue-in-cheek immediately.  But, fast-forward to 2005, and I had my first class of 16-year-olds who sat like stunned mullets listening to this song, getting progressively more outraged by the perceived flippancy and nonchalance of the nasty piece of work singing it.  And then I had to calm them down and tell them something about Bob Geldof.

I was initially thinking, "Wow, was something in the water the year these people were conceived?  Not a single person wondered if this might be satire."  But, irrespective of this, I do think that if you're not familiar with the context of a piece, or with an author's actual views, then it can be very difficult to pick something as satire or not, especially since so many outrageous suggestions are made on a daily basis these days that people do actually fully mean.

So you might say to me, "Sue, the author of this Cure song has been married for umpteen years to someone he met back in high school and he seems to worship the ground she treads upon, I can cite you so many songs, so why can't you obviously pick it as satire?"

It's because I don't actually know this person, and because the subject of people's love relationships is really complicated.  You can't assume, even if someone has been married 50 years, that they actually respect their partner (and I know examples of couples like this who really, really do not), even if they actually appear to, and everyone thinks they do; or that they're monogamous (and a heck of a lot of marriages are actually not).  Some people have flings on the side and are always accepted back, some people have open marriages where it's OK with both of them, at least at the outset, that you don't always dine at home, and they never actually promised each other sexual exclusivity, but had a different arrangement, and yet if you ask them, they say they really love each other, and this might actually be the case.  And I personally don't know how that works, and how that might get compartmentalised, so therefore I can't simply infer that any song that's obviously not about monogamy but written by a married person is therefore necessarily satire.

When I was doing my final teaching practicum for my Dip.Ed. I was hosted by a Science department which was unbelievably good fun.  By pure chance, my supervising teacher turned out to be the same teacher who had taught me Biology when I was a high school student, and he introduced me to his classes rather comically as, "This is the best student above and beyond that I have ever taught in my life, and I not infrequently changed answer keys because she picked up mistakes in them, and you would do well to attend to her if you'd like the chance to achieve a fraction of what she did."  But unless you knew me, or him, you wouldn't know if that was true or not, because it sounded like such a ham.  Anyway, most of us in that department got on great; these teachers were not only science geeks, but most of them really cared about their students, and this is not always the case.

And after about a week, we all started mock insulting each other. We would say the most outrageous things to each other's faces, like, "Yeah, what would a geriatric like you know about that?" or, "It is such a misery to be forced to work with a colleague like you!" or, "OMG, are you doing this answer key?  In that case I'll have to spend hours fixing it later!" or, "I pity your poor traumatised students!"  It was super hilarious because we actually respected each other very deeply.  So the male staff would make misogynistic jokes a lot around me, and one day I just looked at them, went over to the guillotine, lifted the blade, and then slowly, pointedly lowered it down, with a meaningful look around the room, and they all crossed their legs.  I was just laughing all the time.  It's a great anti-stress strategy, if you have the right kinds of colleagues.

One day we were all in full flight like this during recess, when unbeknownst to us, a new librarian entered the room, and when we noticed her, her jaw was basically on the ground.  She thought we meant these things!  :lol:  It really can be so hard to tell, if you don't know the people - and yet so obvious, when you do.

So there you go, satire and how to tell (or not).

The Hungry Ghost next time - and discussion on any or all of this is always incredibly welcome, so long as we all play nicely!  :)
SueC is time travelling

SueC

I didn't realise just how good The Hungry Ghost is until I saw a live version:


In the studio version, I like the instrumentation, but find the vocal a bit screechy.  Live, it's not screechy at all (hooray!) - and consistently so (I've looked at a few).  He's actually singing it lower down on the scale.  (I always felt that most of the violin student pieces I had to learn sounded so much better if I took them down at least half an octave - much more resonance when you do that, and less ear-shatteringness.)

And so we come to a pattern:  How is it that so many of The Cure's songs come across extra well live?  Why is it that even songs that I don't particularly like on a CD, I will usually really enjoy live?  To make it a fair comparison, it's true for just audio, I don't have to be watching a concert (although that adds another couple of dozen dimensions).

So that's one aspect where The Cure to me are quite different from a lot of bands.  So often it's the other way around, and you get disappointed when people play live and it doesn't come off as well as it did on CD, with all the benefits of doing takes, editing etc.  It's also a major reason I've become such a fan of this band - because I've just never been disappointed sitting down watching a concert film of theirs, whether the official DVDs or music festival footage etc.

Brett also prefers a lot of The Cure's songs live - citing Apart as an example of a song that grows a mile in concert.  I usually even prefer Robert Smith's vocals live - in part because he's actually become a better singer as he's gotten older, so there's a richer tone and then the studio stuff can sound watery or nasal in comparison, especially the stuff from way back.

Brett said to me, "Well, when you practice for a few decades, you just learn to do things better."  Maybe that explains why The Forest never jumped out at me from the Best-Of I pulled out of Brett's collection after falling in love with the Bloodflowers album on his iPod over five years ago now.  Yet when I caught it on the Hyde Park film and also on the Lodz footage, I enjoyed that number tremendously.

Back to The Hungry Ghost - let's look at the lyrics:

THE HUNGRY GHOST

All the things we never know we need
Looks like we get them in the end
Measure time in leisure time and greed
And by the time we get to spend

A floating bed
A head of stone
A home plugged into every phone
Kimono coral floral print
Exclusive tint and cut reclusive

No it doesn't come for free
But it's the price
We pay for happiness

No don't talk about more to life than this
Dream a world maybe no one owns
No don't think about all the life we miss
Swallow doubt as the hunger grows

Make believe it's like no one knows
Even if we turn more to most
We'll never satisfy the hungry ghost

All the stuff we know we never want
Seems like we get it anyway
Safe to say it isn't really wrong
Not when we know we only
Throw it all away

Yeah all of this we never know we want
Its like we get it anyway
Safe to say it isn't ever wrong
Better to get than to delay

A 3d screen
A cleaner fit
A bit pulled out of every hit
Addicted latest greatest piece
Design caprice and make the headline

No it doesn't come for free
But it's the price
We pay for happiness

No don't talk about more to life than this
Dream a world maybe no one owns
No don't think about all the life we miss
Swallow doubt as the hunger grows

Make believe its like no one knows
Even if we turn more to most
We'll never satisfy the hungry ghost

And all of this
We know we never need
Well it's the price
We pay for happiness


Every song is a sort of Rorschach test, and I think this one is a critique of consumerism.

The first thing I thought of when I contemplated these lyrics was a story about Socrates in the marketplace.  Legend has it he spent the whole morning silently walking around the market looking at things, with his acolytes following him around, waiting for him to break his silence.  When he finally spoke many hours later, he said, "So many things I don't need!"

Imagine if Socrates was around today, and someone took him to a supermarket, or to K-Mart.  How many more things he doesn't need!  Seriously - if we shop at the local Woolworths, over 95% of what they sell, we'd never even contemplate buying.  Apart from the fruit and vegetable section, meat and dairy, and the deli counter, the vast majority of the stuff on all the shelves in-between isn't even food, although the packets pretend it is.  It's stuff that's making people and the planet sick; and both are sicker than ever, the former with "lifestyle diseases" and the latter with the pollution and rubbish directly resulting from our Western consumer lifestyles.

Go to K-Mart, and it's filled with largely plastic junk with a deliberately low life span, so you have to throw it away in a year and buy another one (if you buy into this mindset).  There's clothes made by what amounts to slave labour in developing countries, again designed to wear out quickly, but it's cheap so many people just buy them all over again, adding another tide of rubbish to a planet we're using as a garbage dump, while perpetuating the low social justice standards of the corporations producing this rubbish.

I wasn't a kid that long ago, from a historical perspective.  Washing machines and refrigerators were once designed to last a lifetime, with perhaps a few repairs, and to be eminently repairable.  Not anymore; the salesman, when we bought our refrigerator back in 2013, told us not to expect it to last longer than five years - and he didn't have anything designed to last longer.  (It's still working, but the problem is the lack of choice in the matter when everything in the market is like that; and that's why we need regulation instead of "market forces"... so that we'll have one refrigerator for a human life span, not 16, with 15 sitting in landfill at the time of your death, and now multiply that by many millions...)

20 years ago, if I bought a cotton T-shirt, it lasted upwards of 5 years without going out of shape.  Now, cotton T-shirts last one year maximum before they start to look ratty. I'd rather buy a decent one that was going to last at 5 times the price, than 5 shirts in 5 years; but I can't find anything like that where I live.  I'd have to take up sewing, and I'm already running a homestead (which we built ourselves because everything on offer on the market in our price range was crap, and guess what, our house isn't crap, even though it wasn't built by professional builders... frightening! - but we weren't going to do with our house what's been forced upon us with cotton T-shirts...), managing pasture and tree fodder, trimming eight sets of horse and donkey hooves every 4-6 weeks, looking after a small herd of beef cattle and our own beehives, growing our own fruit and vegetables, cooking all our food from scratch, stopping the garden from turning into a jungle, revegetating roadsides, continuing to plant in-pasture shelter belts, doing fence and other infrastructure maintenance around 62 hectares of land, and together with my husband, mosaic burning 50 hectares of Australian sclerophyll to maintain its stunning biodiversity, and relative fire safety.  Nominally we're volunteer bushfire brigade too, but our particular brigade sits on its hands; and then there's my sideline of writing articles.  If a house cow didn't make it into my Eden because I was already over-committed, then I'm not going to start sewing my own clothes anytime soon either.  You simply can't do everything.

I'm sure Socrates would be impressed by some of our technological whizz-bang compared to back in his day, but also appalled by our priorities, and by what we've done to this planet, and each other.

I'm going to come back to the song and do some annotating.

All the things we never know we need
Looks like we get them in the end


This seems to me to comment on the inevitability almost, of ending up with unnecessary stuff if you're living in the West.  It's just the way the whole society is set up.  I'm a member of the counter-cultural Grass Roots movement in Australia, which is loosely based around a sustainability / self-sufficiency / alternative magazine I write for.  We try very hard to get away from the consumerist mentality, but it took Brett and me half our statistical lifespans before we were off-grid and on renewable energy, stopped flushing 30,000 litres of drinking water a year down the toilet, stopped wasting all the nutrients that went through us by having a (very civilised and totally odourless) compost toilet and recycling those nutrients back into our organic food production system as nature intends, instead of polluting waterways and oceans with it; before our savings and superannuation were with people who hopefully don't finance military weapons and social and environmental exploitation; before all our banking business was with a community bank instead of a for-corporate-profit model, before half our groceries were grower-direct without corporate middlemen, before we could afford to get a block of rural land and demonstrate more environmentally friendly agriculture which actually increases rather than reduces biodiversity and doesn't rely on synthetic fertilisers and fossil-fuel driven machinery for its operation, stuff like that.

It's just such an uphill to get away from things like this.  You have to swim against the tide almost every step of the way, and be so careful with your resources to get out of the suburban cycle of working (typically) for the big end of town while also paying most of your income to the big end of town via rent / mortgage, electricity and other utilities, supermarket and big retailer shopping.  It's something you actively have to extract yourself from, and to do that in any major way that makes you largely independent of the big end of town is not easy.


Measure time in leisure time and greed

Nice line here - with internal rhyming as well.  :cool  Makes me think about how value is ascribed to things in Western society.  It's funny, you know, the veterinarian came by the other day to attend to some animals of ours, first time since the pandemic, and he was saying to me, "Well, I hope this is going to teach people that life is about more than toys and status symbols - that it's really about relationships and reading books and cooking your own food and getting outdoors for a walk, things like that!"  Indeed.

And by the time we get to spend

A floating bed
A head of stone
A home plugged into every phone
Kimono coral floral print
Exclusive tint and cut reclusive


I like the lampoony examples used here.  I particularly like the "A home plugged into every phone" line and how it reverses the way it's normally used, it's very astute.  We've gone from times when homes had phones, to times when phones have homes, potentially, if you buy into all that in my view excessive technology (we like to keep things simple, troglodytes that we are).  Technology goes from servant to master; the home is now just an accessory rather than a human centrepoint.  Except you still have a choice you can exercise, you don't have to be a lemming and you can actually choose to live differently, instead of accepting an externally invented blueprint.

No it doesn't come for free
But it's the price
We pay for happiness


Material stuff doesn't come for free indeed - not only is there a personal cost in time and energy either to make something, or to earn the money to be able to buy something - but there's the social and environmental cost to consider; and that's the part a lot of people consider the least in the whole equation, if at all.  That's really unfortunate, because it's killing our communities and the planet to chiefly consider what happens to our own bank balance.  It's shooting ourselves, and everyone else, in the foot.

Partly it's the brainwash - it's just so "normal" to live a consumerist lifestyle, to buy what amounts to slave labour manufactured clothing and other stuff from big corporations and their subsidiaries, to have your house built by the typical building company who gives you surface glitz and disposable trendiness instead of a passive-solar, eco-friendly, low-running-energy, comfortable, built-to-last home without unnecessary frills, to bank at the big banks who finance the arms companies and environmental destruction, to buy your electricity from big coal instead of going off-grid on solar and other renewables for yourself, to purchase mostly from big players and franchises, to aspire to the things you're told to aspire to by Screwtape's little league of advertising executives.  Monkey-see, monkey-do.

Now that so many people are off their hamster wheels and confined to their homes with time to think about stuff, let's hope that society will be more awake after this pandemic has passed.


No don't talk about more to life than this
Dream a world maybe no one owns
No don't think about all the life we miss
Swallow doubt as the hunger grows


That's like the official brainwash in a nutshell, isn't it.  That last line is very clever.  The Hungry Ghost, that's a similar entity to what religious people call the God-Shaped Hole, because there's lots of different takes on what the primary problem is that makes us do all these substitute behaviours, and seek comfort in things that can't truly comfort us.  In the West, we're encouraged to believe that buying stuff will make us feel better, especially expensive stuff which can be used to kid yourself you're somehow superior to others, if you're into that.  It doesn't actually work for very long, so people work towards the next hit, in a sort of gadget addiction.

Religious people in the West tend to say, "No, it's not stuff you need, it's God and purpose."  Well, they got the purpose part right, that's part of it, but in many ways they're creating another addiction, another brainwash.  I'm not trying to discredit all religion.  Personally I view a lot of organised religion with distaste, but really, secular organisations, in my experience, have very similar problems with being toxic and hypocritical.  In many ways, soccer hooligans aren't much different from religious fundamentalists.

I think we all have different takes on it, but my take is that much of that vacuum inside of us is to do with a lack of authenticity, and a lack of meaningful connectedness to others.  Therefore, it can be addressed directly, and dealt with directly.  If we can learn to be authentic selves (not collages of other display models), and to connect to others from that basis, then a lot of that vacuum just disappears, in my view.


Make believe it's like no one knows
Even if we turn more to most
We'll never satisfy the hungry ghost


...that's right, it's a bottomless pit.  In some ways, it's like eating junk food:  You can eat a dozen commercial Australian donuts (ring-shaped greasy things with cinnamon on), and I once did exactly that, in one sitting, when I was 23 and the wolf was at the door.  It didn't matter how many donuts I ate, it didn't stop me being hungry; I only stopped because I started to feel sick.  But if you eat something with actual nutritional value, instead of empty calories, you stop feeling hungry.  So, the way to make someone buy more and more, and consume more and more, is to sell them empty things that won't deal with their actual needs, just with "I-want."

All the stuff we know we never want
Seems like we get it anyway
Safe to say it isn't really wrong
Not when we know we only
Throw it all away


And I think this verse is just dripping with undertone.  Look at how Mr Smith delivers that verse in the live clip above.

Yeah all of this we never know we want
Its like we get it anyway
Safe to say it isn't ever wrong
Better to get than to delay


Yep, those last two lines are typical of the bilge that's fed to us in the name of consumerism.  It's the brainwash we all grew up with.  It's nice to see Robert Smith discovering his inner hippie, and making a song and dance about this.  It is eroding human relationships and killing the biosphere, after all.  No small thing.

A 3d screen
A cleaner fit
A bit pulled out of every hit
Addicted latest greatest piece
Design caprice and make the headline


Isn't that absurd?  Yet that's what underpins the sacred cow of capitalism and its mantra of economic growth.

The rest of the lyrics are repeating blocks we've heard before in the song, so I will leave it at this.  Full marks for this one - the music, the lyrics, and speaking out about something that really needs to be addressed.  ♥
SueC is time travelling

SueC

11 days later, the post on The Hungry Ghost is finally finished.  :-D  :1f637:

I'll get onto the rest of the songs on the album soonish.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Having just posted a lot of beautiful music off a playlist on the Currently Listening thread, it's a bit of a juxtaposition to be dealing with a song that is decidedly not beautiful, and probably not intended to be.  It doesn't mean I hate it - although I really, really, really dislike the guitar intro, it is like fingers down the blackboard in musical form, just the vilest sound (and coincidentally, it really goes with the album cover).  Listen for yourself:


Some of you are undoubtedly going to love it, because life is a big tapestry, no two people are the same, etc - but I'd immediately like that song a whole lot better sans that guitar intro.  I can never really understand why anybody likes heavy metal and its car crash sounds, either - although it probably has some correlation with testosterone.  Clearly not a hugely strong correlation, because not every man is a fan, but it's decidedly more popular with males than females.

So here's The Cure, a band who has a large number of beautiful tracks in their catalogue, with a song that makes my ears bleed.  It is, however, an interesting song - and I'm using that word not in the British sense, but in the German sense, where you really mean that something is actually interesting when you say it, and not the opposite - and where "interesting" is a compliment, not a backhanded insult.

Let's look at the lyrics:

SWITCH

Sometime it seems
I stopped being myself
And without a word
Turned into somebody else
Full of wishes wants dreams
And desires
For a life
Of conceit and deceit
And repeat and rewrite
Not sure who I was
Before this me and I changed
But I know this me now
Is not really the same

Friends are as strangers
And strangers as friends
And I feel like I'm wired in a why
Yeah my friends are as strangers
And strangers as friends
And I feel like I'm lost in a lie

And every day my world gets slower
And colder and smaller
And older and lower
And every day
My treat gets closer to trick
Yeah every day my world gets slower
And colder and smaller
And older and lower

And I'm tired of being alone with myself
And I'm tired of being with anyone else
Yeah I'm tired
Like I'm sick

None of my favourite things
Are quite right
To the mirror man
Screaming at me
In the spite of another
False start
Dirty worn out and used
Up and down
To the ground
Disavowed
So confused
All made up in the belief
That me is the same
As the eyes in the glass
But I see my eyes change

Friends are as strangers
And strangers as friends
And I feel like I'm wired in a why
Yeah my friends are as strangers
And strangers as friends
And I feel like I'm lost in a lie

And every night my world gets quicker
And lighter and shorter
And tighter and slicker
And every night
My truth gets closer to dare
Yeah every night my world gets quicker
And lighter and shorter
And tighter and slicker

And I'm tired of being alone with myself
And I'm tired of being with anyone else
Yeah I'm tired
Like I'm sick

Like I'm scared


I read this as basically a big spew, at the world and the self simultaneously.  Things are going downhill - and it's not so much, "Stop the world, I want to get off!" as, "I seem to be decaying somehow - and it's like a disease - and I'm afraid."  No wonder the music is un-beautiful.  Here's a protagonist who is dealing with his shadow side (the title gives us a clue) and the unhappy side of life.   The evil twin is taking over, existential woes are mounting up, etc.   Sometimes this happens on a permanent basis...

Roald Dahl happens to have written about people with an (uncomplicated) permanent evil setting in this classic tale:



If you've not read that yet, I consider it essential for understanding the human species better.  Some of the tongue-in-cheek philosophy in the book is actually onto something:



The lyrics to Switch aren't slapdash, they've been carefully constructed, and are worth just reading, since in the actual song they are rapidly paced and not necessarily clearly articulated.  Most traditional storytelling songs - such as many numbers by Suzanne Vega, Paul Kelly, Tom Petty etc - are quite slow-paced, don't rush the lines, and have pauses in the delivery so that the listener can take it all in and have a think about it at the same time.

Sort of like when you're sitting down to eat, you can have a much nicer experience when you take the time to look at your food, and to chew it slowly, and to really notice it, rather than just gobbling it rapidly.  Listening to the lyrics in Switch feels a bit like someone is holding you down and force-feeding you through a funnel.  You're not going to engage with the lyrics optimally that way; but clearly the artistic decision in this case was to prioritise having the music convey a mood over and above acting as a vehicle for the clear presentation of the words.  As is usual in thoughtfully constructed music, both languages in the song - musical language and verbal language - are saying the same thing, reinforcing each other.  The music and lyrics both convey a claustrophobia which goes with the topic.

When a "mood" song isn't mellow or reflective - when it's wound up and tight and spiralling and suffocating - it can take quite a few listens to "get" the lyrics (or you can sit down with the lyric sheet).  While you can understand a song like Paul Kelly's How To Make Gravy instantly and fully on the first listen (both languages), songs like Switch make you work harder, and usually aren't as pleasant.  But, they're not meant to be pleasant, and for conveying a mood I'll give Switch close to full marks.

I was just thinking that Pink Floyd do quite a bit of negative-mood stuff, and the way they often seem to get around the problem of audience think-time without killing the mood is to do some furious lyrics, followed by a verbal break in which they play furious music, and then they get to the next line, etc.  That way, there's thought-spaces without interrupting the mood.  But, there's more than one way to skin a cat.  The Cure usually leave space in their music; it's quite unusual for them not to, and why shouldn't they experiment in all sorts of directions.

Since a number of the songs on the second half of 4:13 Dream are comparatively grating, fast-paced and claustrophobic, that contributed to the sense I had a while back that this wasn't an album I was going to give a lot of re-visits without skipping a few tracks.  Here's an interesting thing though:  Three songs like that in close proximity to each other, or even just two back-to-back, can lead to me pulling the plug and saying, "Enough already!" - yet sandwich a number like that into a random various-artist, multi-genre playlist, and it works better, for me.

Similarly, I generally really like Big Country's music, and much of Pink Floyd's - but I will rarely sit and listen to an entire album of music by them - especially with the latter (and much to Brett's chagrin).  In both cases, the high intensity and noise levels of a lot of their tracks can regularly give me a headache after more than half an hour unless I take a break - and if I don't stop, I can actually get prolonged migraines, nausea and other highly unpleasant stuff like that - I don't like getting hangovers, from music or anything else.  In Pink Floyd's case, more than 30 minutes often becomes depressing as well, for me.  And there's nothing like getting physically ill from something to teach you not to do it again. You learn how far you can go, and where you should stop.

Mixed-artist, mixed-genre playlists don't just have a greater variety of music and voices to give you a break from too much of any one thing that might become annoying - but the diverse tracks on it seem to contextualise and offset one another, as well.  So, for example, listening to Plainsong in a mixed playlist is a different experience to listening to it on a complete run-through of Disintegration.  In the case of that song, I enjoy both of those approaches.  On Disintegration, Plainsong is an aspect of the whole, like a moon or a thundercloud or a rainbow in a landscape painting - various aspects are interrelated and part of a scenario.  In a mixed-artist, mixed-genre playlist, this is a song that tends to pop out and impress on me all over again why I like it so much, and how this band does things differently to other bands, and how this genre has a different language to other genres, and how there's different "accents" in the language of a particular genre, etc.

But because our playlists are made up of album tracks (all tracks off each album), we'll also get tracks we may not particularly enjoy on their home album, that we suddenly like better as an isolated experience sandwiched in with other music.  And in that context, I find myself engaging with a song like Switch or Freakshow more than I do on a 4:13 Dream listen-through.  Of course, there's still some songs that I will eventually choose to skip, either way (although that's not a common occurrence).

The Perfect Boy next time.  With a counterexample.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

THE PERFECT BOY

"You and me are the world"
She said
"Nothing else is real
The two of us is all there is
The rest is just a dream...
Always meant to be
I can feel it
Like a destiny thing
Written in the stars
Inescapable fate
Yeah it's out of my hands
Falling into your arms"

"And I don't want to get innocent
But I would love you to take my time
We're on the edge of a beautiful thing"
She said
"Come on...
Let's stay here for a while"

Oh girl!
He is the one for sure
Oh girl!
He is the perfect boy

"Yeah me and you are a world"
He said
"But not the only one I need
The two of us is never all there is
That doesn't happen for real
If it was meant to be us
It was meant to be now
Don't see the sense in wasting time
If you're so sure about this
Laurel kismet hardy thing
You know tonight you're mine"

"And I don't want to get obvious
But I have to be gone by three
Were on the edge of a beautiful thing"
He said
"So come on... jump with me"

Oh girl!
He's not the one for sure
Oh girl!
He's not so wonderful
Oh girl!
He's not the one for sure
Oh girl!
He's not the perfect boy at all

"You and me are the world"
She says
"Nothing else is real
The two of us is all there is
The rest is just a dream... "

And her heart may be broken
A hundred times
But the hurt will never destroy
Her hope...

The happy ever after girl
One day finds the perfect boy


There's two ways I can fathom reading this:  As a complete (and intentional) farce, or in support of the girl.  To me it's all farcical - Miss Blurry Vision meets Mr Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am.  Does she learn from that experience?  You tell me.  Does her vision sharpen at all?  Hmmmm.

A closer look at her world view on romance:

"You and me are the world"
She said
"Nothing else is real
The two of us is all there is
The rest is just a dream...


Most teenagers I worked with actually had more realistic ideas about love and romance, and considering their lack of life experience that's saying something.  This one's a bit slow on the uptake.  Nothing about this is cute, either, to me - it's looking at the world and other people with your eyes closed, and it's a recipe for disaster, even with the "right" boy who isn't just trying to get in her pants.  While our love relationships can indeed be our private Edens, we do have to engage with the world as well instead of floating off in la-la-land from henceforth.  And a private Eden is not the same thing as a private castle-in-the-air.

If you can't look at your partner, or at life, with your eyes open, you're going to live in fantasyland and not in reality, and you won't be able to truly relate to your partner, or anyone else.  You'll be in love with a projection, not with a real human being, so you'll actually never love the real human being at all.  To me personally, this means you may as well not have been born, because you're not actually really alive, you may as well be comatose with your head plugged into a matrix.

I guess to me, a good relationship isn't an escape from reality, it's a good reality.

And you have to make it happen, and work on it, and yourself, to have that.  It's not something you "fall into"...

Always meant to be
I can feel it
Like a destiny thing
Written in the stars
Inescapable fate
Yeah it's out of my hands
Falling into your arms"


A destiny thing, bwahahaha, the thing part just caps it.  Here's a bunch of clichés about life and romance that appeal to certain types of people - probably they also keep crystals around their house to infuse them with cosmic energy blah blah blah.  Always meant to be, I can feel it - that's the kind of "reasoning" you get around the happy-clappy set.  That warm fuzzy feeling inside me is the Holy Spirit! - Or the New-Agey universe telling me a truth, preferably exactly what I want to hear...

I remember reading a sermon by Martin Luther King called A Tough Mind And A Tender Heart (still in copyright but you can read a draft here) in which he talked about the problems with soft-mindedness, as opposed to soft-heartedness - with the gullibility and mental anaemia that's also a pandemic.  It's worth reading; MLK wrote well and aimed to provoke critical thinking.  I also love this quote from Charles Dickens in Great Expectations:

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!

And so, the girl in this song is reckoning the spurious coin of her own make - or perhaps the common Monopoly money - as good money...

Let's have a look at the boy - a rather egregious specimen:

"Yeah me and you are a world"
He said
"But not the only one I need
The two of us is never all there is
That doesn't happen for real
If it was meant to be us
It was meant to be now
Don't see the sense in wasting time
If you're so sure about this
Laurel kismet hardy thing
You know tonight you're mine"

"And I don't want to get obvious
But I have to be gone by three
Were on the edge of a beautiful thing"
He said
"So come on... jump with me"


The only thing more lamentable than his attitude is that people fall for it.  More stringent BS detection is required... I've no issue with two wham-bam types meeting up and doing their thing, but I do have an issue with a wham-bam type exploiting a non wham-bam type; that just doesn't sit right with me.  In this case, he's actually being honest about his viewpoint instead of telling her what she wants to hear, which is somewhat commendable - at least, if she wasn't going around with her eyes closed, she could actually take that on board and go, "Thanks but no thanks!"  But does she?

So many Cure songs about romance seem to be studies in dysfunction... social realism, maybe.

Oh girl!
He's not the one for sure
Oh girl!
He's not so wonderful
Oh girl!
He's not the one for sure
Oh girl!
He's not the perfect boy at all


...and of course there is no perfect boy, or perfect girl, or perfect hermaphrodite, or perfect none-of-the-above - we're all flawed, each and every one of us; at best we're works in progress.

This little chorus, it's sort of like a Greek chorus - and it sways in the wind; only very recently was it heard to say:

Oh girl!
He is the one for sure
Oh girl!
He is the perfect boy


And what's the girl saying now?

"You and me are the world"
She says
"Nothing else is real
The two of us is all there is
The rest is just a dream... "


We're now in the present tense - she says, not she said. It's not clear if she's still saying this to Mr Wham-Bam, or if she's continuing her modus operandi with the next bearer of Y-chromosomes - but she's not learnt a thing - at least not yet; sometimes it appears to be necessary to bang your head against the same wall repeatedly before you are finally convinced that your sample size is large enough to say without a doubt that this is a really bad idea and you do actually need to stop...

Conclusion:

And her heart may be broken
A hundred times
But the hurt will never destroy
Her hope...

The happy ever after girl
One day finds the perfect boy


Are the last two lines the girl's hope, or the writer's conclusion, sort of like Aesop's moral of the story?  If it's the latter, obviously I think differently.  Here's a really excellent thing I saw printed on a poster in a relationships counselling office I attended as a young thing during the car crash end of my first long-term relationship:

If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

I'm grateful for everyone along the road who encouraged me to think, who mirrored me back accurately, who showed me different perspectives, who let me walk a mile in their shoes - friends, counsellors, teachers, poets, writers, musicians, random people on buses, psychologists, visual artists, my husband - because without them, I'd still be stuck in the same old mire.  We need other people in order to evolve.  I've not "arrived" - I think that's like the asymptotic line, always approaching and getting closer but never actually arriving - we can only try to keep going in the right direction, and once we get to a certain point, we might actually start to enjoy our journeys.  I had a tough time as a young person, but now I love my life, and even the day I die, I won't have "arrived" yet.  Hopefully I will still have been trying.

I want to finish with an alternative take to the situation portrayed in this song, from another song:

She's got a lot of pride
You can see it when she walks into the room
But she's young
And she's unaware
Of what a brutal world can do to you
So she loves a man
He lies like a dog
Tears her little world all apart
So the walls go up
For the rest of her days
And there ain't no man can touch this girl's heart


(from John Mellencamp's Hard Times For An Honest Man)

So that's a counterexample, of what bad experiences can do to people. Hopefully, we act like neither of the ladies in these two songs - we neither go on blithely getting our hearts broken while not changing our approaches, nor do we give up after adverse experiences.

And hopefully, too, we're not like that Mr Wham-Bam, never understanding our responsibilities to one another, and never entering into actual intimacy with another person.

If it's made us think, it's worth the space.

This. Here and Now.  With You next time.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

SCENIC DETOUR ON EMOTIONAL PROCESSING

I'm throwing in a detour because an article just came up that is actually going to fit into the discussion of the next song as well.  Here's the article:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/apr/29/coronavirus-whats-your-emotional-style-how-your-responses-can-help-children-navigate-covid19

Reading something like that, we ask ourselves:  What were the emotional styles of our parents?  What are our emotional styles? ...since once you examine and identify your family of origin childhood "programming", you can start to change the things you don't like - something I'm eternally grateful for:  We don't have to repeat the patterns if they're unhelpful.  (OMG, imagine if we were automatons and we did...  :1f631:  :1f635: )

My parents' emotional styles were largely emotionally dismissive, except if the emotions mirrored their own.  If I had a feeling they didn't have, and told them about it, typically I'd be told something along the lines of, "Stop feeling that way!  That's so stupid!"  If I cried as a young child and my parents disapproved, like if I was afraid of a medical procedure, they'd threaten me with physical pain, "Stop or I'll give you something to really cry about!" and I indeed learnt to clamp down and hide my emotions from them, to the point I was jealously guarding my inner world by the time I was a mid-teen and always carrying my journal, in which I expressed all of my thoughts and feelings freely, physically with me, or else hiding it somewhere obscure in my room, because I really didn't want to let them into my inner sanctum.  It was enough that the music I listened to and identified with was routinely ridiculed (so I moved on to headphones for the really personal stuff); I didn't want people like that to read my journal - but any of my friends who expressed an interest, I had no problems with their leafing through it.

Personally I evolved into an emotional coaching style as I became an adult, learning the style from the people who emotionally coached me, like some excellent teachers along the way, friends' parents, etc (and I'm still learning, and this will always be necessary).  Because it was so sorely missing in my family life, I really appreciated it - like sunshine after an icy cold bleak winter - and saw it as a good and highly important thing I wanted to learn how to do and in turn pass on.  Once I moved from science research and teaching at tertiary level into high school, age groups 12-17, this became extra important and I got lots of opportunities for applying emotional empathy, encouraging open emotional expression, addressing emotions in our learning groups as part and parcel of the whole thing.  Obviously my sideline of teaching English and Literature was a fantastic vehicle for doing that as part of the curriculum, where expressing your thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and learning to do that in a connected and backed-up way is an important component.  But it's really possible in any classroom if you value the human beings you're working with.

I was lucky because the work environments I had for nearly two decades (before I became a tree-changing hippie type running an organic farm) encouraged human interaction on more than a surface level - pastoral care is an important component of working with teenagers, as much as academic education is, and the Catholic schools I worked for in particular generally had excellent dedicated pastoral care time in the timetable where students kept personal journals, did formal training on emotions and relationships, etc etc, which as a secular student myself I'd not been lucky enough to receive (back in the 1980s; secular schools here are doing better now) - but some fabulous teachers who thought it was important had it as part of their classroom approach, as I did myself later on.  A good classroom is a nurturing, encouraging place where people are truly seen and appreciated.

And yes, I'm a tree hugger, and here's proof!  ;)



So many people I know who've pulled out of distressingly dysfunctional upbringings with reasonable success are writers and started with free-journalling in their teens.  It gives young people who can't express their opinions and feelings in a supported way in their families of origin a private space in which to make up for this in many ways.  Of course, it's not a relationship, which is why the concept of a village raising a child is so important - that way, there can be warm and positive relationships with adults even if that's completely missing from the home.

Typically though, one of the hallmarks of emotionally (and otherwise) abusive families is that they tend to socially isolate their children/spouses/etc, and that was the case for me as well.  Very young children often make up imaginary relationships anyway, and I would guess this is more prevalent if there's an emotional vacuum in the immediate environment.  And from where I stand now, the logical extension of that for many children is to cultivate a belief in God - as an alternative, and caring, parent figure.  I've seen it lots of times, including in my own life - I was essentially something of a Christian mystic between age 14 and my late 30s (and I discussed that previously here - under the YT clips, it's a long post).  That I now see that as a construction of the psyche doesn't diminish the positive effects that had on overcoming my difficult start, and that's why I have no interest in dissuading people out of their personal beliefs in some kind of benevolent force in the universe.

I don't like fundamentalism because it reconstructs the same dysfunctions as an abusive home, and inflicts it on a wider circle.  But, fundamentalism isn't about a loving, supportive entity, it's about a controlling, to-be-feared-and-obeyed-lest-you-go-to-hell entity - it's really just perpetuating the cycle of abuse, control, brainwashing and discouragement of authenticity that you find in too many families.

If my psyche constructed that stuff, then it certainly mixed in all the best experiences I'd had along the road with people, as well as inspirational things I'd read about in books or heard as songs.  It didn't come from nowhere.  And of course, the helpfulness of music in emotional processing was referred to in the article I linked to at the start of this post:

QuoteUse the power of music

Music is a great way to help connect children with their emotions. Music taps into our emotions in a way that words alone cannot. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin's research shows that when we listen to music almost every region and neural subsystem in our brain is activated. Music helps with emotion and with brain development too which is a bonus while we are all home-schooling.

A fun music lesson to have your kids do during family lockdown is create a positive playlist of songs that boost your mood. Include songs about resilience, triumph and overcoming negative events.

Those were exactly the sorts of songs that featured heavily in my own musical choices as a teenager in a dysfunctional home.  Here's a random example that comes to mind:


And having played that one, how can I not play this one:


This kind of stuff would galvanise me.  If I'd listened primarily to "wallowing" songs, or even just lots of unrelentingly dark songs, it would have depressed me and taken away precious energy I sorely needed to get through to adulthood and independence.  I had enough sad songs in the mix to acknowledge that aspect of reality, but not an overwhelming avalanche of them.  I wanted optimism and hope, and not by closing my eyes to dark reality, but in spite of dark reality.  I always believed that light would overcome darkness.  You only have to light a candle to see it.

I'd like to connect this little detour with the main topic of this thread.  The reason it sat together in my brain with the next song on the list is because I think that songs aren't just listened to in order to help us make sense of the world and our lives and how we feel about it all, I think a lot of songs are written for those reasons, just as a lot of personal journals are.

In one of the interviews we read with Robert Smith, he was saying (I'm paraphrasing from memory but if I find it again I'll put in a link) there was this misconception amongst some people that The Cure are a bunch of sad people who sit around in the dark cultivating gloom, but that he actually was just more likely to write a song when he was dealing with difficult stuff, than when he wasn't.  He also said something about his dark songs being somehow more convincing, at least to him, than his happy songs, so he was less likely to write just about being happy.

Being happy is not a problem to solve.  It's actually grappling with difficult things that makes us grow - not coasting along happily.  Life, of course, throws enough obstacles into the road to ensure we have plenty of material for continued growth.

Next time you listen to a song you find cathartic, think about how cathartic it might have been to write it.  Music is a connector, a two-way street.  It's the same with good prose - it connects both the reader and the writer to the universe and life and other people.

So, the next song on the list of my trip through 4:13 Dream is This. Here and Now. With You.  Let's have a look at the lyrics first:


THIS. HERE AND NOW. WITH YOU.

This
Here and now
With you...

"Oh please don't ask me who I am
Or when and where my life began
Or why I ended up like this or how
Don't ask me what I was before
If I was anything at all
It's nothing you can know
About me now"

You hold my spinning head to stare
And strip me bare of memory
Your black eyes burning into me
So slow
The sounds and lights and others fade
And fall away in symmetry
Your black eyes burning hungrily
And unafraid I know...

Everything I ever dared forget is here
Too scared before I never let
Tonight be all I need
Everywhere I never tried to get is here
Too tired before to ever let
Tonight be all I feel
Every time I ever thought regret is here
Too caught before I never let
Tonight be all I dream
There isn't any yesterday
Tomorrow starts a day away
This here and now with you is how
Always should always be

This
Here and now
With you

"I can't believe its coming true
I'm so up close to kissing you
A breath away from never going home
I don't remember getting here
It seems to be sometime next year
I hope you won't be...
Leaving me alone?"

"No please don't tell me who I am
Or when and where my life began
Or why I ended up like this or how
Don't tell me what I was before
If I was anything at all
Its nothing you can know
About me now"

You pull my shaking body close
To make the most of tangency
I bite your mouth so fearfully
And slow
The taste of summers yet to shine
A perfect time to change the scene
I bite your mouth in urgency
And terrified I know...

Everything I ever dared forget is here
Too scared before I never let
Tonight be all I need
Everywhere I never tried to get is here
Too tired before to ever let
Tonight be all I feel
Every time I ever thought regret is here
Too caught before I never let
Tonight be all I dream
There isn't any yesterday
Tomorrow starts a day away
This here and now with you is how
Always should always be

This
Here and now
With you


...so, how many of you have grappled with trying to live in the present?  It's the object of mindfulness meditation, of many personal retreats, of many books.  Stop the monkey mind, smell the roses, see the bigger picture, etc etc.  Just be.  So easy for other animals, not so easy for hominids with cerebrums that can go around in circles, for minds that can live in their own constructions and preoccupations rather than in an approximation of the real world.

On a big-picture look, that's what the song seems to be about, to me - getting your head out of the past, ditto the future, so that you can be fully alive in the present moment.  That's a good skill to develop and that's not to say that it's never important to learn from your past or to be proactive about your future, it's just saying, "Don't forget the present moment, make sure you pay attention to what's important here and now..."  - because that's where you actually live your life.  We can go to ideas like, "The underexamined life is not worth living, the overexamined life is not being lived" and all that...

It's a relationship-focused song, and of course, when most people sit down and look at what's most important to them and what they would really like to put more time and energy into, relationships with people you love gets a big mention.  Really looking, really listening, really being there, more time and conversations with each other, more spontaneity, more planned adventures, etc.

Taking a closer look:

"Oh please don't ask me who I am
Or when and where my life began
Or why I ended up like this or how
Don't ask me what I was before
If I was anything at all
It's nothing you can know
About me now"


It's interesting this is in quotation marks and I've read this song a couple of different ways - with the cited stuff being what the protagonist actually says to his partner, and the rest of it narrative; and with the cited stuff being what the partner says to the protagonist, and the rest of it narrative.  Reading it as a conversation didn't make sense to me.  (For an alternative reading, just ask Brett:  "The cited stuff is from an intruder looking on from behind a screen." :rofl)

Regardless of who says it, the above verse brought to mind for me the concept of "the paralysis of analysis." :lol:  I think there's a Goldilocks zone where you're doing just the right amount of thinking, and not under- or over-thinking. 

You hold my spinning head to stare
And strip me bare of memory
Your black eyes burning into me
So slow
The sounds and lights and others fade
And fall away in symmetry
Your black eyes burning hungrily
And unafraid I know...


Isn't that lovely?  At least the way I'm reading it, which is as an encounter between two people who've known and treasured each other for a long time, and who've seen the light and the darkness in each other, and still love each other, and the more, with the rose-tinted spectacles off.  Of course, that's how I like to read stuff that can be interpreted that way.  ;)


Everything I ever dared forget is here
Too scared before I never let
Tonight be all I need
Everywhere I never tried to get is here
Too tired before to ever let
Tonight be all I feel
Every time I ever thought regret is here
Too caught before I never let
Tonight be all I dream
There isn't any yesterday
Tomorrow starts a day away
This here and now with you is how
Always should always be

This
Here and now
With you


Ah, the knack of being fully present.  :cool  I love the line, "Everything I ever dared forget is here" - because our brains can be so confounding, can get so side-tracked and distracted and trying to deal with so many different things, that we can actually temporarily forget really important stuff, like, "Oh wow, it's so amazing being intimate with you - well, I knew it was amazing, but I temporarily forgot the scale of it and the many little nuances and it's so wonderful to be here..."

And another way to read it (of lots of different ways) is, "I've seen your dark side and dared to put that to one side and believe in your light and go on, and I dared to love you even though we're neither of us perfect and we can and do hurt each other, on the road to becoming better at this stuff."  Plus of course, "When I'm with you, all of our history is present with us, and everywhere we've been together."

Those are the sorts of ideas about love we all have to grapple with if we're going to go the distance.

I also really like the line, "Everywhere I never tried to get is here" - because it hints at the many places that you can still go with each other, that you didn't realise existed before - that there's always something new to learn, that you're both always unfolding.  You could read it conversely as well; I just obviously am going to read things in the way they're going to chime with my own lived experience.


"I can't believe its coming true
I'm so up close to kissing you
A breath away from never going home
I don't remember getting here
It seems to be sometime next year
I hope you won't be...
Leaving me alone?"


This is an example of the kind of verse that Robert Smith will throw in there that can get a bit confusing.  He uses this frequently repeated motif of "never going home" and has been doing that since way back on the Disintegration album, and on songs like From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, and it puts in this kind of discordant note that says, "Ahem, where exactly are we eating?"  So you could read verses like that as describing affairs away from your "official" relationship, and if you look at commentary by fans out there in cyberspace, it does create that impression for a lot of people (there's even a thread on this forum somewhere called "This. Here and Now. With Who?" :lol:).  I think you can read it like that, but I think you can also read it other ways.  It kind of depends on what you mean by "going home" - and the rest of what's described, you can totally experience in a good relationship that's gone on for a long time anyway - it's just a question of how you look at it, and whether you've become jaded, and if you can look with new eyes and celebrate each other all over again, in both familiar and new ways.  Because the magic doesn't actually have to wear off, and because, if you take a step back, you can look at something all over again with the same sense of wonder with which you saw it the first time around, whether that's encountering your beloved or looking at the ocean or peering down a microscope or into a telescope etc etc.  And also, sometimes you can just flash back to earlier experiences you've had with each other, like when you're looking down an infinity of mirrors, and you could see this verse as a flashback to, "Remember when we started?"

The rest of the song basically repeats sections from before, except for one verse in which I thought it was interesting to observe that the narrator describes his own emotions as fearful, scared, terrified; after describing his partner as unafraid earlier.  We can all cycle through various iterations of these emotions, and sometimes they'll be opposite, and sometimes aligned.  Anyway, one person's personal song or poem or narrative is never going to mean exactly the same to another person, but something I love about life is being able to compare notes with other people, and finding similarities we have in common, as well as differences that can make life interesting.  :)
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on May 02, 2020, 04:34:15...so, how many of you have grappled with trying to live in the present?  It's the object of mindfulness meditation, of many personal retreats, of many books.  Stop the monkey mind, smell the roses, see the bigger picture, etc etc.  Just be. 

Yes, I did (or let's say I tried - sometimes it worked, sometimes I failed miserably).

This song ("This. Here and now. With you") has indeed inspired me to try (at the time when it was new, it made me think of one special person and the quality time I spent with her)!  :happy
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Well, I finally finished the post on This. Here and Now. With You.  So, I can start looking at the rest of the album today, and then hopefully get to the other two sitting on the desk waiting, soon.  I confess I have cheated and listened to the songs on KM I was already familiar with from live material, just to see what the studio versions were like, and I'm getting very impatient to finish writing about 4.13 Dream so I can finally listen properly to the next album in line...  (If I don't do it like this, I won't catch the initial responses to new material, or I'll lose the order...  it's a good thing I don't do this for all the music I listen to, or I'd sadly constrain my listening... :angel)

So, I have three songs to go.  I've got to admit that Sleep When I'm Dead really didn't do much for me either musically of lyrically.  The best thing about it to me is the decent bass line.  It would honestly help to have some ball park idea of what this song is about - sometimes it's difficult to see if something is overly cryptic, or just entirely slapdash, and sometimes you feel like you've got far better things to do than try to work that out.  I just don't want to spend time on it, much as I like puzzles - it doesn't appeal to me.  ...I wonder how it would go live; often songs I dislike on the studio version, I really warm to when this band plays them live.

In general, I will say that musically, this album isn't very representative of why I personally like The Cure.  Even the musical highlights here don't actually lift me off the ground as some of their other tracks through the years really do.   I enjoy 4:13 Dream better when I listen to it in "performance poetry" mode, rather than "amazing music" mode.  For that, it's worth revisiting, though I don't like every song on it.  But then, I don't like every song on a lot of Cure albums, and on a lot of albums from anyone - and that's OK, as long as things are generally interesting, and the majority of tracks appeal to me in some way (not everything speaks to everyone; but things that don't speak to me may well speak to others :cool).  I probably wouldn't have been particularly amenable to this album if I'd not already liked a lot of this band's prior work - it's like with authors, you'll give them more leeway after you've already enjoyed a couple of their books, and you're more likely to be interested in anything they subsequently do that's unlike what you liked before.  It becomes more of a cerebral exercise then, rather than huge enjoyment and/or being really moved by something.  All those things have their place though.

The Scream is a very good example of what I'd class as really effective performance poetry.  And while I'm at it, and just because it's the first thing I think when confronted with that title:



...I think the song, on my first impressionistic listens, creates a very similar atmosphere as that painting.  I'm not sure if that was intentional, or if it's a musical example of "parallel evolution" because of the shared human experience of stuff like this.  Of course, most of us in the West will have seen Edvard Munch's painting in some form, and because it's so arresting, and so eloquent, it would probably be hard not to be influenced by that piece subconsciously at least, when writing a song of the same name.

So let's have a look at the lyrics:


THE SCREAM

Yeah I've been this way before
But something down here changed
The spring sun hanging slower
Colder in the sky
And your voice sounds strange
Your voice sounds strange

Yeah I've been down here before
But this time
Something really isn't right
Summer sun hangs smaller
Paler in the sky
And your eyes are too bright
Your eyes are too bright

It's like everything I know
Is twisted out and wrong
The fall sun hanging flatter
Lower in the sky
And your smile is gone
Your smile is gone

It's like twisted out I know
Now I can't wake to
Break apart this dream
Winter sun hangs weaker
Older in the sky
And you start to scream
And you start to scream

Scream and you scream
This is not a dream
This is how it really is
There isn't any other this
Is not a dream
Scream and you scream
Why you have this need
Why you can't be satisfied
Always want another why
You have this need

Scream and you scream
Dare me to believe
Dare me now to show I care
One last chance to make the dare
Me to believe

Scream and you scream
How we ended here
How we got from then to now
Never really followed how
We ended here


NME might have described the The Scream as "an electro-metal descent into madness" and "a reminder of the primal horror of consciousness" (https://genius.com/The-cure-the-scream-lyrics#about) - and they're welcome to read it that way - but I don't.  I think that's a bit simplistic, plus I don't think there is such a thing as a "primal horror of consciousness" unless you're in horrific circumstances (or have been there and are going through the early phases of your PTSD coming out, and I've been both places myself so I do think I deserve a seat at the table with this topic).

Warning:  About to rant.  I'm fed up with this fashion that paints the experience of life as primarily negative, and congratulates itself for doing so, and looks down its nose at other people who don't share that point of view, and somehow imagines itself as intellectually or morally superior because of it, or somehow more sophisticated.  :evil:  I think that's the equivalent of walking around in funeral clothes all your life specifically for the purposes of setting yourself above other people, and it's very close in very uncomfortable ways to the public martyrdom face of a malignant narcissist - "Woe is me, and my pain is bigger than anyone's, and therefore I am so superior."

To me, The Scream (the song, but also the painting) isn't necessarily about a descent into madness at all.  You can feel these things and have your feet very firmly on the ground.  To me the song seems to be about grief, and grappling with really difficult things.  Just because you feel pain doesn't mean you're insane.  I'd argue that people who actually feel their emotions are far more sane than people who are cut off from them.  I think to confront reality and to become emotionally integrated is really important.

You can go insane with pain, true, but I don't think that there's any indications in the song that that's the case.  I think there's mental clarity in those words.  I like the way these lyrics are written, the structure imposed by repeating references to the sun, going through the seasons, in the first four verses, and observations on the apparent disintegration of that (but I think that's just fitting imagery for the purpose and probably metaphor as well), followed each time by observations on what could be the self, but could also be a familiar person.

The lyrics read differently depending on whether you look at the "I/you" as being the same (because sometimes people do use you when they mean one, including I), as opposed to when you look at the "you" being a different person.  In that case, it could be an interaction between a couple - one getting depressed or becoming emotionally unavailable or whatever, and the other reacting to it in pain and frustration because you can't have a mutual relationship with someone who's gone away emotionally.

Those first four verses could fit so many things:  A sense of life becoming meaner - and even from a political perspective, that works for the past four decades or so, at least where I live - if not for everything (some things have improved, like people's attitudes to LGBTIQ), then for the general trend, which is that power and resources are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, and physical and mental health are going down in much of the West, while the planet's biodiversity is being trashed.

Those verses could also sum up what it's like to live with a terminal illness - and in a wider sense, the recognition that all of us are terminal and need to actually come to terms with that.  I've heard it said, "Life is a sexually transmitted terminal illness" - and while that gives me a giggle, and aspects of that are true, it's vastly oversimplified...  It's funny actually, the difference between speaking to people with a sort of "death cult" mindset, and speaking to people with an actual terminal illness.  The former will sing you dirges, while the latter are so often really positive and life-affirming and celebrate every day they have, and see it as a gift.

The death (or near-death) of a relationship or friendship would also fit this song.  The words give enough leeway for all sorts of interpretations related to grief and pain.  It's a common experience for all of us - and of course it's also not all there is to life - but it's very important to deal with this dark stuff, to acknowledge it, to feel your feelings, cry your tears, be outraged, be angry, be sad, because that's as much a part of being alive as all that is wonderful and beautiful.

Here's a poem which explores the relationship between joy and sorrow - from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet:

 On Joy and Sorrow

    Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
    And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
    And how else can it be?
    The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
    Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
    And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
    When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
    When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

    Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
    But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
    Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
     
In this band's music, joy and sorrow are both explored - as they are in all my favourite books, music, poetry, drama etc.

The Scream is a really excellent depiction of the painful side of life - the scenarios that you wish were nightmares but aren't, the things you've got to go through that you would prefer not to, the painful confrontation with your own dark side - the horror of those things (but not of everything).  When people write about raw things like this, it gives the community springboards for examining their own lived experience.  That's a big part of why we love our favourite wordsmiths, poets, musicians, essayists, novelists etc.  ♥

The last song on the album next time.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

I can't believe it was Australia Day when I started with this topic, and was first listening to 4:13 Dream - we're just a week from the southern winter solstice now.  :1f62e:  The world has changed significantly since then and to me there's at long last a glimmer of hope in the public mood around the globe and the sense that many people aren't going to go along like sheep anymore.  It would be magnificent if that level of consciousness and connectedness and speaking out on social justice stayed with us in the long term, instead of the populace being lulled back to sleep, or just getting exhausted again from being on the hamster wheels that are a part of the problem.

Where will we be, when I've finished looking at the next album in line?  I so hope it will still be on the road to a better place...

And so to the last song, called It's Over.  I'm laughing about that title for the last track on an album, and especially because of the impression that Robert Smith once again thought that this would be the last album.  There's much to be said for living each day as if it were your last (and one day it will be).  (Can we turn that on its head for a minute - isn't there also value in living each day as if it were your first, as if you were newly arrived, as if life is not a habit?)

I suppose Robert Smith is just bringing that methodology to his music, and you can see why, even as your funny bone is tickled.  One day it will be the last, but it is actually amusing when it's been said album after album.  Amusing because of the way life can go, not because I think that this was in any way insincere.

It's Over is an ear-bleeder.  If your ears are made of teflon then perhaps it's not, but this song is so noisy that initially I just wanted to cover my ears and run.  Turning down the volume was helpful for staying with it, and then my first thought was:  It sounds like a cross between an Irish jig and hard rock!  There's elements of both.

It's crazily noisy, it's all sound and fury, but it's also signifying something.  It's almost as if someone has written a song in the spirit of Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight, you know:

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What's written about physical death you can often apply to any sort of loss.  It's Over is also about loss, and emotionally very similar to Dylan Thomas' piece.  Again, if you've read this poem it's hard to forget it and so subconsciously it may stay with you when you write about a similar topic, but there's also the "parallel evolution" of all of us confronting these things.

I'll annotate as I go, this time - it's easier in this case.


IT'S OVER

I get up
And it's over
It's always over
It's raining and I'm burned
And it's late and you're gone
And I can barely remember
Anything I did or said
Or how I lost another week
There must be something going on


I have felt exactly like that, when I was really burnt out, and that happened to me a number of times in my life, indeed sometimes became my life, and is one of the reasons we downshifted, tree-changed and ended up quasi-hippies on a little organic farm and nature reserve in the middle of nowhere (and I read downshifting stories like that all the time).

Burnout is a common experience when people are in professional roles which demand rather more hours each day than a human being is built to handle day in, day out - and especially if you have duty of care for other people, and therefore push yourself for them when you would long have stopped pushing for yourself.  Or, when you're writing an interminable thesis or other such doorstop, for months and months while days and nights flash by like a strobe light.  It's especially on the cards when you deeply care about your work, and get absorbed in it, and perhaps weren't taught as a child how to self-care effectively or that you actually have a right to breathe, etc.

Creative stuff is also very easy to get stuck in, especially if it's cathartic in some way.  I can well imagine that if you've got any sort of perfectionism, writing and recording an album could easily get you into burnout territory, instead of (or perhaps even at the same time as) being a happy adventure in doing something you love.  I find it so much easier to write here for fun, than to write an article that has an end point in which it's going to be printed and then you can't change it anymore even if better things occur to you - typing away here is gloriously pressure-free, doesn't stress me at all, and it helps that this forum has an open-edit setting, so that you can actually go back and revise what you've done later on instead of being "stuck with it"... :)

The opening verse to It's Over immediately brought to mind a song called Step In, Step Out by Weddings, Parties, Anything:



That's a song about a couple trying to stay sane and find time for each other while working shifts at opposite ends of their days.  The tension between work and family is often problematic, especially if you work long hours, and/or your work takes you away from the people you love - which is basically our norm in the industrial world, and wasn't when we were hunter-gathering or subsistence farming, as "home teams."  Of course, working with the people you love can also be a challenge!  ;)

By the way, is anyone else laughing retrospectively at this idea people had in the 70s that in the future (which is where we now are, from that frame of reference) we were all going to have so much leisure time, because of all the machines that were going to help us in our work?  Bwahahahahahaha.  :rofl

If I'm not doing literary analysis here, but talking instead about the thoughts that are brought up as I read through a set of lyrics, it's because the lyrics really lend themselves to that... and because I think that one of the best things that good art of any description can do is to make us think and reflect and feel and be human.


A nagging sense of shame
I can't explain
An acrid taste of smoke and blood
And tears and drugs
And every inch of me is raw
And it's always f*cking over
It's raining and I'm blind
And it's late and you're gone

I can't do this anymore


It's easy to read this as a postcard from an album-making process.  It's applicable to a lot of situations, though.  On a very basic level, when I'm typing on the laptop, our dog is often on the sofa sighing at me, and I think her version of the perfect life would be if we were perpetually going on long walks with her every day, in-between mealtimes and snooze time.  So part of me thinks I should be walking the dog instead.  Of course, one can timetable things to get a balance between competing priorities, but you can't always run life to timetables either.  Another thing we all grapple with.


Dreaming of adventures


Australian mountain dog!


Keep getting there
It's over
It's always over
It's raining and I'm cracked
And it's late and you're out
And I can't quite remember
Anything I did or said
Or how I lost another year
There must be something coming down


At the start of the song, the picture painted was waking up late and the partner is already getting on with their day.  "It's late and you're out" has a slightly different flavour from "It's late and you're gone" - like it's the logical corollary.  You know, Person A wakes up late while Person B is already about their day, and then Person B goes to bed at night and Person A is still out of the home, as with Step In, Step Out.  - Of course, both slightly different expressions could just be paraphrasing the same situation, waking up in the morning too late to have caught your beloved before they had things to do, and if that happens again and again it can be very frustrating, depressing and destructive to your relationship, and yourself.  Fitting all the important things in is a bit of a trick, and it would be so helpful if life were a bit more like Mary Poppins' handbag.

Of course there's a bit more to it than that here - there's a general sense of life accelerating out of control.


A sweetly sour unease
It's like a tease
A broken dream of guilt and fear
And spit and steel
And every piece of me in pain
And it's always f*cking over
It's raining and I'm cold
And it's late and you're out again


(Mummy! The man keeps saying fvck!)  I'm very impressed with the ability of this writer to capture a mood in words, here and in The Scream and in Underneath The Stars and in The Only One (perhaps unpoetically in that one, but no less effectively), etc.  It's great to see such wonderful use of imagery, symbolism, rhythm, metaphor - there's an art to effective free verse.  I wonder if this song, and its predecessor, and Underneath The Stars actually started with just the words, before the music, and became an exercise in setting that to music, making a soundtrack for the words.  Whichever way it was, the words work on their own, and they work with the music.  And once again, the words would fit a number of situations.

By the way, I know I've said before that Robert Smith is generally better at painting with his guitar (total genius ♥) than painting with words, but here he's equally excellent with the words, and I think his ability to do that with words has increased as he's gotten older.  But then, I also think he's gotten even more adept with his guitar, and he's definitely a better singer than he was as a young person.  Not surprising, because pretty much everything gets better with practise.  I've even, amazingly, learnt to hammer nails in straight and without hitting my fingers, over the last ten years!  :winking_tongue  (owner-building = do or die)


Run my head around it
Like I know I really miss her
But I always want to do it now
She told me in a whisper
I try so hard to place it
Wonder why I really feel it
When to send the pretty flowers
Maybe helps her to believe it


OK, this is a bit ambiguous.  It could be painting a picture of a person thinking about what motivates them in life, trying to untangle something in them that's contributing to a problem and impacting on their relationship with their partner.  - That's a nice note, and a bittersweet note, about sending flowers perhaps as a silent apology, an I-love-you.

Run my tongue along it
Oh the taste is something sicker
"But you know you have to do it now"
She told me in a whisper
It only takes a second
But the second lasts forever
Close your eyes
And let me take you down


OK, I'm lost here.  Not the first two lines; they go with the first two lines in the last verse and I interpret that as the unpleasantness of the necessary contemplation of one's inner workings.  The bit about the second has me lost; I'll have to come back to this sometime.

And I get up
And it's over
It's always f*cking over
It's raining and I'm wrecked
And it's late and you're...

No I can't remember
Anything I did or said
Or how I lost another life

I lost another life
Oh I can't do this anymore

No
I can't do this anymore


It's interesting that you lose a life by consistently losing smaller portions of it - and so we've gone from losing another week (first verse) to losing a life (last lines).  That is how it happens (and the related thought goes, mind the small things and the big things will take care of themselves etc).  Death by a thousand cuts.  I was just saying to my husband that the reason I actually have a lot of everyday optimism (despite my view that we're basically on the Titanic, as a species, and we've dragged other species there with us and already tipped a lot of them over the side) is because I know I can learn - and because we love each other.  While I view the long term as rather doomed, the day at hand is doable, and even if we are but a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, that little flash is one great big extraordinary gift, and the ability to come into existence and be conscious, and then interrelate in complex ways with other such beings you care about, is just so tremendously wonderful.  ♥

[PS:  Re alternative reading of this song:  With this particular ink blot, the shape of it would also seem to lend itself to the plight of a person who keeps going from relationship to relationship because they can never keep it together;  the other person tends to get fed up and the cycle starts over with someone else, and then you have a different interpretation to "losing another life" - it would be losing a life that person could have had with a particular person / losing the now-ex's life.  That wasn't my initial reading of it because I'm wired a particular way, but it might work for people wired another way.  And after all, I think most of us sometimes even deliberately and knowingly assign our own quite different meanings to songs and poems that are quite clearly about something else - just so we can relate to them / process our own ideas and feelings through the prism this makes for us.  Pure Rorschach!]  ;)


And here I am, finally done with writing about this album (not that anything is ever complete, and therein lies another conundrum).  So now, having restrained myself, I can finally go put on KMKMKM and listen from start to finish.  Phew!  :)

I've enjoyed this particular journey - and like with travel in the real world, it's always extra special if you've kept a travel journal (and you can probably imagine our travel journals :lol:).  Especially for the first time you've been to a particular place!  :cool   Do I recommend this place to others?  It depends what you like - but I'd say, give it a shot!

It's funny to think that 4:13 Dream came out the year Brett and I got married, because in some ways that's a lifetime ago, if you're a dog anyway.  I'm very much looking forward to the new album that's currently stuck in some mysterious pipeline, not having its emergence made any easier by SARS-CoV-2.  I wonder if any of the band members feel that the whole making another album thing is so, you know, jinxed...   :1f62d:  :beaming-face  :evil:  :winking_tongue

Best wishes to everyone; next chapter next time.  :)
SueC is time travelling

SueC

KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME

I have a preliminary report from our first (nearly-)all-the-way-through listen.  We didn't catch the last two tracks because we were starving and dinner was ready, but here goes - first impressions.

Because this is open-journalling (which is like writing anything you want for your own entertainment in a paper journal because you're that way inclined, except it's online and anyone can jump in and contribute if they want to so don't be shy! :yum:), I organise things by a sort of overarching topic (this thread = listening to the Cure back catalogue), with scenic side trips.  And because this writing is a personal record, I want to remember the evening we finally put this album on, months after we had it sitting there making "play me!" noises.  :angel

It was a Sunday, and we had a lovely young couple staying with us (we do a farmstay through Airbnb).  They were going out again that evening and I was bringing in a bucket of stuff from the garden for constructing dinner:  Peas, snowpeas, radishes, lemons, fennel bulbs, celery stalks, and a mass of five-colour silverbeet.  The silverbeet got dumped in a sink of cold water to soak - it removes "extra protein" as well as dirt.  ;)  I was getting some Painted Mountain (multicoloured) corn cobs out of the freezer stash and then started tending to an Ironbark pumpkin that had been pre-roasted in the oven that morning while the apple crumble we had for breakfast was cooking; meanwhile Brett was chopping up an onion (he always views that as his personal job and gets quite irate if I do one :1f62d:  :heart-eyes).  We were chatting to the young couple who were having cups of tea before heading out again, and when they left, I said, "Hey! We can have loud music now!  How about we road-test that 'new' album?"

We were both in the right kind of zone for it - and actually, I was tired, and needed something to wake me up again for the upcoming hour of toil.  And so we put on the album, and listened to it while making pumpkin soup (which turned out an amazing luminous pale yellow), gozleme (Turkish feta-spinach/silverbeet pockets), and two kinds of salad:  Waldorf (from the last of our own apples this season), and orange/fennel/radish - a Moroccan thing, except we dress it differently, just with lemon juice and olive oil - and it looks so pretty with its soft greens, oranges and pinky-reds.  :)

Throughout all this, the music was playing, and we enjoyed the vast majority of it. Excellent album - and the first thing I immediately noticed is that the sound quality is fantastic - a truckload of dynamic range, unlike many contemporary loudness-war CDs, and sadly, unlike 4:13 Dream or our copy of Disintegration.  The album opener showcases that brilliantly:


...oh wow, if I'd known back in 1987 that The Cure were making music like that, and not just what was being played on the radio, or what classmate Pauline with the black sticking-up hair played us during our music project for our Year 12 English class (guess which three songs she picked off this album, although I missed the third one because I got ignominiously turfed out of the classroom when I couldn't stop laughing sarcastically at one of them  :evil:  :angel)...

The Kiss is like all the best B-sides - and Brett was very naughty, because what he said in the short space after that track was, "And all Mary asked him to do was to take out the rubbish!"   :lol:  :beaming-face

We'd heard that one live quite a few times - and Catch actually, and for some reason I was surprised it was on this album - I imagined it came off an earlier one.  Catch is a sweet song, I've always liked it, and I do prefer it live, like a lot of Cure songs - more immediacy, and also Robert Smith's singing has evolved over time, and likewise I think the band's playing has.

Torture hit the spot musically - it's solid and driving and serious and beautifully played.  My ears sort of purr at gorgeous sound constructions like this.


Speaking of, If Only Tonight We Could Sleep is an all-time favourite of ours, and to hear the studio version just made me drool, it's so fabulous.  A song like that is a visceral thing for me - you know how when you're really hungry and you're biting into a fabulous piece of chocolate-hazelnut cake in a semi-starved condition, you can get sharp pains in your salivary glands (around your jawline) from the fire-pump hypersecretion they suddenly engage in, at the same time as the flavours are hitting your tongue, and you've got this sort of agony/ecstasy thing going on?  That kind of thing.  Music that makes you feel like you're one giant tongue and Lindt chocolate is melting into your tastebuds all over, and you're just going, "Ooooh, aaaah!"  :)


Cue, next, the song that got me into such trouble in my Year 12 English class.  I remember sitting on the classroom floor all those years ago, leaning up against the wall with the other kids, unable to stop laughing:  OMG, an ADULT is asking that question?  Oh Pauline, oh Pauline of the spiky black hair, why, why, why couldn't you have played us the song immediately before?   :1f62d:  :1f62d:  :1f62d:

These days, of course, I actually like Why Can't I Be You? - I'm no longer a super-serious cerebral teenager assessing adults for their qualifications to be suitable role models - my parents weren't, in ways that really mattered, and I wasn't interested in more examples of adult irresponsibility, and so an adult coming at me with a playschool demeanour asking a philosophically absurd question didn't gel well with my then straight-line thinking.

So I had to come out of the aftermath of a dysfunctional upbringing and learn to play as an adult, and once that happened, I was open to stuff like this.  Nowadays I love the zaniness of that song, and its childlikeness (because it's not actually particularly childish), and its hyperactivity and abundant energy.


There's an interesting pattern to the track listing.  It seems you get one or two quite dark, serious songs, and then something shiny and high-energy, rinse and repeat, all the way down the list.  It's like listening to a radio show except it's all by the same band, and I think this album is a monument to The Cure's huge musical versatility.  It really works.  The serious stuff is brought out more by the shiny stuff, and vice versa - the same way that the crunch and juiciness of good celery is a great partner for the salty, creamy solidity of cheddar cheese - each accentuating and drawing attention the other.

Personally, Brett and I both tend to prefer the musically darker, more serious songs to the lighter, shinier stuff - but it's good to have the contrast, and there's the whole smorgasbord analogy previously discussed here.

Track 6, How Beautiful You Are, is my least favourite track on the album, for reasons already explained here - I've got a large bee making chainsaw noises in my bonnet about the lyrics, and musically it really doesn't appeal to me either, it feels disjointed and monotone and nothing-much-happening to me.  I will say that I prefer the album version to the one I encountered on Join The Dots, and that the keyboards on the album version do a nice job conjuring French street music for me, which is fitting considering Paris is the setting here.

However, I very much enjoy The Snakepit.  Like the opening track, and like a lot of my favourite Cure tracks, the instrumental music is given time to weave its magic, and there's no hurry to get to the sung part - and speaking of, I love the low-register singing here.


Hey You is another change back to lightness and exuberance.  I prefer the album version to the one on Join The Dots, and have warmed to it a little.  Just Like Heaven, which so many people love, really isn't my thing - I've never really liked that kind of pop music (and yes, that's the other thing Pauline with the spiky hair played to us back in our Year 12 classroom the year that album came out).  I wonder about my reaction and I think it's more to do with the music than the words, which on their own are a perfectly acceptable piece on romantic love, and I actually think it's important as an antidote to toxic masculinity to have males write things like this instead of just shredding guitars and channelling anger in hard-rock settings.  I think I'd like the song better with the keyboards taken out, and as is so often the case, I don't have a negative reaction when The Cure play it live.

The music does actually go with the words; there's no mismatch - it's whimsical, joyful, playful, breezy.  But this is one of the songs I always disliked when I heard it on the radio as a younger person, and because it seemed to be played all the time, it became one of a few dozen pop songs over the years that I just got more and more allergic to (Friday I'm In Love is the other one from this band that always made me run and still does).  Tastes change and while I took to both the studio and live versions of Love Cats, Why Can't I Be You?, Close To You etc as a mature adult, those two I just haven't come around to.

Because this is an open-edit forum, I can add thoughts that occur to me later on:  I think the reason I don't have a negative reaction when I hear this song played live is because then there's a human being in it, if that makes any sense, and because you can have respect for someone else's heart for feeling something, at the same time that you have respect for your own heart for not feeling that thing.  That's a principle that has so much application.  So in this particular case, it goes from a song that annoys me on the radio, to a song that's being performed by a person for whom this is a piece of their own heart, and those are different propositions.  It might seem like an artificial distinction and perhaps it is, but studio music is "canned" and live music is not, even though of course when I watch a concert film, it's still canned in its own way, but it's not as separate from the people performing it.


All I Want is an interesting number and another good discovery to make.  Musically is works for me - I love the textures in it, the edginess, the hints of Eastern melody, the playing-like-you-mean-it, the seriousness I suppose.  And now I'm interrogating my use of the word serious... because I'm sure Robert Smith is equally serious about the lyrics to Just Like Heaven, so do I have the right word?  Am I somehow subscribing to the snobbery that writing about romantic love isn't a serious thing?  I don't think I am, because I don't have a problem with the words of Just Like Heaven, and with a whole bunch of songs about romantic love which I consider really well-written, including many on the topic from this band.

But I do have a problem with airheaded songs about romantic love, and wouldn't classify those as serious:  The sorts of songs that are melodramatic and like soap opera and naive and one-dimensional - "And then came the knight in shining armour and solved all my problems" etc.  Mills & Boon, versus Pride & Prejudice.  Also with obviously dysfunctional ideas and attitudes - with songs that confuse co-dependency for love, or sex for love, or infatuation for love, or need for love, or wanting to own and control someone for love, and thus perpetuate these problems.  I don't know what the solution to that is, because obviously life is a journey, and people write songs all along the various stages of their journeys.  Part of the solution, though, is songs about romantic love that are healthy and realistic, and songs that are honest and actually address common pitfalls and problems.  And maybe some lessons on the many Greek words to describe many different aspects of love...

All I Want doesn't set off my alarm bells in any way, but did make us giggle and start a word game.  This is because as we were listening on that Sunday night, I was asking Brett, "Do you get what he wants to hold her like?  A dog?  A doll? A door?"  All seemed equally unlikely, and neither of us could tell, so I tried to decipher the lyric sheet.  Yeah, hahaha - black on red, low contrast, tiny print, whose idea was that?  I couldn't do it even with glasses on, had to move under a 100W light, and was cursing the misdemeanours of graphic design (nice handwriting for the song titles though).  And it really does say "dog"!

So then it was, "OK, do you think she's the dog or he's the dog?" and then we were falling about laughing, and trying out other animals:

All I want is to hold you like a hippopotamus
All I want is to hold you like a sea urchin
All I want is to hold you like a lemming
All I want is to hold you like a warthog


Beautiful in my own way

And actually, we can't relate to wanting to hold someone like a dog, except our dog, who happens to like being held - and it's a vastly different experience to holding each other.  Perhaps Robert Smith actually wrote this song for his dog?  :winking_tongue


Brett says next time we should get a normal dog.  I tell him it's pointless; how normal are we?

But there is one animal that both of us often conjure up when holding one another, so I guess if we'd written that song, we'd have written:

All I want is to hold you like an octopus

It's like this, you see:  You're snuggling up to your beloved on a horizontal surface, and you've got your arms around each other and your bare feet tangling :heart-eyes, and you experience a sudden intense wish for a few extra limbs to do things with.  So if you were an octopus...

And so we have a game at our place which is called, "If I were an octopus."  It involves telling each other what you would do with the extra tentacles that you would then have at your disposal.  If it's my turn, usually my eighth tentacle will be tickling my husband's earlobe, or I'll be sticking it up his nose, just to make a little contrast with the plans I have for the other seven (which he is very agreeable to, but then he's outraged by what I would do with the very last tentacle :angel).  And don't forget, octopus tentacles also have suckers, which you could put to interesting uses, like just suctioning the tip of your beloved's nose, or maybe the pads of his toes (there's way enough suckers to do all of the toes with just one tentacle).  :beaming-face

I have noticed that the mock-exasperation of your spouse increases when you make little squelching noises when you talk about this, bwahahahaha.  :angel  Or when you touch the tip of his nose and then make a little suctioning sound...  :yum:

At this point we would like to thank Attenborough's film crew, who always had this knack of making molluscs look so sexy.  :lol:

And now, all talk of molluscs must cease.  This is a gorgeous song:


This is very like the "watercolour" music I admired on Join The Dots - tracks like This Twilight Garden, A Chain Of Flowers, The Big Hand - really evocative instrumentation, a dreamy sense of floating through space.  The instruments on One More Time feel as if they are played by a bunch of flower fairies who are thinking about the sweetness of life yet its fleeting nature.  I can actually see them playing their flutes and pipes by a stream deep in the forest.  Lyrics and singing are lovely too.

If you like this kind of music, you might enjoy this book:



Another highlight for me:


I really, really like this - the way they've built an intro that actually suggests the sounds of cockatoos (we've got endangered Black Cockatoos who make sounds very like that in the forest right behind our house), and the bass/drums lines that almost sound like something you'd hear on a heavy metal ballad, or in opera - and the acoustic guitar overlaid onto that, and then the string arrangements over it at the end.  It's beautifully composed, and holds your attention from start to finish.

As this is a first-impressions review, I won't look at lyrics until later, but I think there's going to be lots of interesting stuff to ponder.

I'd already met an incarnation of Icing Sugar on Join The Dots and wrote about it briefly on the thread I did for that.  The next track, The Perfect Girl, I really like:


It sort of skips hand in hand with Catch, and Caterpillar Girl, and Love Cats, and other Cure tracks like that.  The lyrics on this one I caught first time around, which is a bonus, and they're just perfect for capturing a mood, together with the music.

I also like the music on A Thousand Hours, although the vocal style on this one grates on me a bit:


Perhaps when I look at the lyrics more closely at a later stage, it will become obvious why it's sung that way and grow on me.

I didn't really like Shiver And Shake on first impressions; we'll see how that goes.  Fight has me intrigued and its lyrics are worth looking at closely:


The song, and therefore this album, literally goes out with a bang, and that made me laugh because it made me instantly remember the conversation between Salieri and Mozart in the film Amadeus... paraphrasing from memory, "You didn't even give them a big bang at the end to let them know you'd finished!" and Mozart goes, "Yeah, I should take some lessons from you!"  Meow.  :angel

While the ratio of songs I love to songs I don't is about the same on KMKMKM as on 4:13 Dream for me, most of the ones I don't love I still find worth listening to for both albums - on reflection I think there's only one or two on either of them I'd skip completely.  I think the 1987 album has a richer sound, and that's partly down to sumptuous instrumentation on much of KMKMKM, and I strongly suspect, also partly to do with the loudness wars causing a decline in the dynamic range of the more contemporary CDs - a most unfortunate thing, and I hope that this isn't going to be a problem with the upcoming release.

Next post on KMKMKM will be my favourite B-sides from that material, which I think are worth revisiting. :cool

I might come back and edit this post in future just to drop in some live versions of the featured songs as well!
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on June 13, 2020, 01:04:02... this song is so noisy that initially I just wanted to cover my ears and run.  Turning down the volume was helpful for staying with it, and then my first thought was:  It sounds like a cross between an Irish jig and hard rock!  There's elements of both.

It's crazily noisy, it's all sound and fury, but it's also signifying something.

The long "instrumental" intro sounds very good on this live version I thought - and yes, it's an intro that somehow points to it being a "dark" (angry) song about good-byes:

I got to say: I would enjoy this as a completely instrumental piece! (The album production suffers a bit from too much noise/loudness, this live version sounds pretty good though.)

Quote from: SueC on June 13, 2020, 01:04:02I have felt exactly like that, when I was really burnt out, and that happened to me a number of times in my life, indeed sometimes became my life, and is one of the reasons we downshifted, tree-changed and ended up quasi-hippies on a little organic farm and nature reserve in the middle of nowhere ...

Yeah - isn't that what often draws us to a song? When the lyrics do ring a bell? When they tell me something about my life (and not just about the life of the songwriter)? When I can relate to what he (she) sings about? When the song becomes the "soundtrack" of my life?
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Quote from: Ulrich on June 19, 2020, 13:18:41The long "instrumental" intro sounds very good on this live version I thought - and yes, it's an intro that somehow points to it being a "dark" (angry) song about good-byes...

I got to say: I would enjoy this as a completely instrumental piece! (The album production suffers a bit from too much noise/loudness, this live version sounds pretty good though.)

Many thanks for dropping in that live version, it is excellent instrumentally and I did really enjoy that (although for this song I actually preferred the studio vocal for once).  Maybe it's the lessons from the Noisiest Song thread starting to bear fruit.  ;)

I'm actually interested in finding us a copy of that Rome gig, probably on YT, to watch all the way through, as the "next" concert for when we finish listening to the Cureation gig (we're halfway through that). :cool


Quote from: Ulrich on June 19, 2020, 13:18:41
Quote from: SueC on June 13, 2020, 01:04:02I have felt exactly like that, when I was really burnt out, and that happened to me a number of times in my life, indeed sometimes became my life, and is one of the reasons we downshifted, tree-changed and ended up quasi-hippies on a little organic farm and nature reserve in the middle of nowhere ...

Yeah - isn't that what often draws us to a song? When the lyrics do ring a bell? When they tell me something about my life (and not just about the life of the songwriter)? When I can relate to what he (she) sings about? When the song becomes the "soundtrack" of my life?

Yeah, exactly - and it's like that with great literature and poetry as well - it humanises us, in a way.  It's that recognition that someone else has captured the same kind of moment, the same kind of feeling, the same kind of thought, and that you're not alone in that experience - that there's common threads that run through us, and it makes you feel a little better about belonging to our species, a little more connected, a little more at home.

From the basis of the shared similarities you then look with interest at the individual differences, and it helps us see things from different perspectives, and to walk a mile in other people's shoes - the practice of which is really valuable to get into.  It promotes an understanding of other ways of looking and doing.  It's all very cool, really - and is why the arts are so important, and why the neoliberalist machinery constantly seeks to grind them down - because if we actually understood each other better, and cared for each other more, then you couldn't divide and conquer as easily; and if we cared more about relationships and creativity than baubles and status symbols, then our inappropriate economic system might just collapse.  :angel
SueC is time travelling

SueC

...and now, as promised, my three favourite B-sides from the stuff recorded for that album:




I already wrote about these tracks here...
SueC is time travelling

SueC

ANOTHER FIRST IMPRESSION... AND A MYSTERY

Last night we said, "What the heck!" and put on The Head On The Door for a first play-through, even though I'm still busy with a deep dive into KMKMKM and not done writing about it.  It was to get a bit of an extra push for making dinner after spending the day out hiking Mt Lindesay.  We were up to our ears multi-tasking various things, so nothing in particular leapt out at us, it was just, "Oh, hello!" to the songs we already knew:  In Between Days and Close To Me, and first listens to studio versions of songs we knew well from live material:  Push and A Night Like This.

First of all, a little mystery solved, 35 years later:  I was double-taking this morning when that album was on.  Hang on a minute, I'd heard this snippet of music before in another context - this exact piece!  In fact, at the beginning of the "The Making Of The Unforgettable Fire Documentary" of which I've had a copy for decades (although it's on video and therefore doesn't get impromptu views...the video player lives under the stairs these days for occasional use but it's a hassle).

I was head-scratching, having always wondered what that musical piece in that documentary was.  It faded into other raw music takes that I recognised as the bare bones of songs U2 were developing for The Unforgettable Fire, but this particular piece never turned up on the album, or on B-sides etc etc.  And I couldn't figure out why, since it sounded very promising.

Hahahaha!  :lol:  That's because it was a section of the studio version of Push.  So now I know why it didn't turn up on a U2 album, which is one mystery solved.  This does, however, spawn another mystery:  What was a lengthy section of Push doing in a documentary about another band's album?  Was this someone's naughty Easter egg?

...a few hours later, I've solved the second mystery.  This is what happened:  It almost certainly wasn't on the video itself, but it was on an audio recording of the same programme I made on cassette when a local radio station broadcast it when it first came out as video (as a simulcast with a TV station, I think).  Anyway, I had this cassette for many years and used to listen to it a fair bit when I was driving, so I was familiar with every note.  The introduction to the broadcast documentary for some reason had a section from the studio version of Push in it.  It was probably the "spacer music" for lining up the simulcast, and I would have started recording a little early... but for many years I wondered about that little piece of instrumental music!

In case you're wondering how I could possibly not have worked that out before, given how many times I've seen Push live - the segment of the song that was on my tape was from 26 seconds in, and ended before that distinctive lead guitar theme repeated itself again.  I can tell you exactly where it ended too, just after the voice part at 1:40 which I remember very clearly.


So... in keeping with the popular 1980s idea of subliminal programming, here's another way to explain why I was bound one day, three decades later, to end up liking The Cure.  :angel


..more impressions coming later...

SueC is time travelling