I can't think of a song that would suffer more from being hailed as a classic

[koganbot]

"I can't think of a song that would suffer more from being hailed as a classic, would be more utterly destroyed by piety and reverence, fidgeting children around the world dreading its opening chord and the hush in the room that follows, listeners to the right and left being deeply moved. An alienation factory under construction, and there's nothing in the song to resist it."

But how much of that - if any - is the song's fault, or the performer's? What do you think?

Song title and commentary.

(By "song" I mean "track" here.)

Comments

Nothing Compares 2 a Pie in the Face

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think you're suggesting that Sinead's choices in the song are to some degree reflected in such a reception of it. But there is something a little ridiculous about it to me -- and not just because the first thing I thought of when I saw the title w/o reading the blurb was the mash-up of "Nothing Compares 2 U" with "What You Know" (starts at 3:40 in the clip) on the last Girl Talk album. I've always thought the song was weird more than anything else, and I like how Tom's description of its "calculated vocal choices" reminds me instead not of calculation per se, but of something more like spontaneous and uncontrollable outbursts, venom and passion bubbling over in essentially random places.

That means that the odd emphases that Sinead uses strike me a bit like WAKA! FLOCKA! BOW! -- punctuation without a sentence. That Sinead would probably mortified to think of her outpouring of emotion in this way doesn't really cause me to recontextualize it, either -- though it's clear that Sinead would never pass Lester Bangs's "pie in the face" test, it seems like she IS getting hit with pies, or maybe overwroughtly reacting to someone having weakly thrown a small cupcake toward her kisser, through the whole song. (If someone did throw a pie at Richie Havens, it would be hilarious.)

And I realize now that the vocal effect I'm describing, more precisely, is like a Doppler effect. I'm reminded of this clip from the Simpsons where Homer and Bart are stuck on an out-of-control monorail.

But I still haven't quite pinpointed what about the song makes it seem ridiculous. I also think there are weird lyrics in it, too, though not necessarily delivered to draw you in to their weirdness. "IT'S BEEN SEVEN HOURS AND FIFTEEN DAYS" (unlike, say, "Love Me for Me," I have no concept whatsoever what the hell that amount of time feels like, or what possible significance it could have!) "I COULD EAT MY DINNER IN A FANCY RESTAURANT BUT NOTHING COULD TAKE AWAY THESE BLUES." You could even eat cookies for dinner! "I WENT TO THE DOCTOR AND GUESS WHAT HE TOLD ME?" ...To put the lime in the coconut? Usually that line precedes someone taking their clothes off ("oh doctor tell me now should I remove my clothes?") or that someone needs a lovesickness potion (ooh ee ooh ah ah).

Here, you get the sense that this was her actual day: she woke up, noted the number of hours this person has been gone (crossing the appropriate day off the calendar), catches the doctor for his last appointment as the sun is setting (because she slept all day), he tells her to have more fun so she goes for a fancy dinner, and then wanders the streets hugging male strangers on the street and a-pinin' until she returns home, falls asleep, and repeats the process. And this is before she compares herself to her mother's dead flowers that wilted without care -- which makes her ex-boyfriend her mother, if I understand that metaphor correctly.

Anyway, there's lots of weirdness in the song, and her selling it so somberly "single-tear"-like is part of what makes it even more bizarre for me. But then I was too young for the target demo when it came out and the only popular culture experience I had firsthand with Sinead was her ripping up the Pope on SNL, which seemed more bratty than politically resonant, hence she's always seemed like a weirdo in my book, long before I had any clue what she was "actually" (i.e. w/ intentionality and what not) doing. And similarly, all commentarial context bracketed, this seems more silly than emotionally resonant, her voice imbuing words with weight like Mickey Rourke imbues this speech in the Expendables with weight (he might as well be reading the phone book; in fact this would be an interesting formalist experience), whether she intends it or not.

Re: Nothing Compares 2 a Pie in the Face

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

formalist *experiment*, not experience.

It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[koganbot]

Three months and a hundred days:

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Good comparison -- we immediately get that she's been counting the seconds since she's heard from him. And the next line is more of how it feels for him to be gone, like "I would walk five hundred miles" -- an arbitrary BIG NUMBER to show us how long she's felt like this. THREE MONTHS AND A HUNDRED DAYS. That's a long time, I think! Actually, it's a little over six months. But that doesn't sound as epic!

Whereas Sinead's time marker really just feels arbitrary.

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[koganbot]

Well, to confuse things - or me - a little, what it sounds like when Marion sings it at the start is, "three months, over a hundred days," perhaps to emphasize how long three months is (though revealing a deficient skill in arithmetic, or maybe she's just thinking "I haven't seen him in three months... in over three months, actually; over a hundred days, in fact"), though she could also be saying "three months or a hundred days," which makes grammatical sense but loses something in precision, and doesn't make sense otherwise (why throw uncertainty irrelevantly into an obsessively precise song?); though maybe she is saying "and a hundred days" but this is hard to discern in that round, guttural Norwegian accent of hers.

When Marit sings it in the background later on, it's definitely "three months and a hundred days."

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[koganbot]

This song is relevant as well. A more sentimental treatment of the theme, somewhat standard in its choice of metaphor but striking and extreme anyway - or I thought it was striking enough when I first heard it (I was nine years old). This is more about how people feel, while "Nothing Compares 2 U" is caught in the quotidian of what people do, and through that trying to capture what is felt (though Prince's lyrics do seem a bit more expository than they need to be). Think "The End Of The World" can better resist the masterpiece treatment (not to mention avoid getting it atltogether), because of its standard everyday sentimentality*; whereas the aridity of Sinead's musical landscape is what makes her "Nothing Compares 2 U" so vulnerable to the Art Outlook, despite its standard, everyday events. (Still haven't made the effort to revisit it to decide what my outlook is. Suspect that I'd value it more as a change of piece than any kind of pinnacle of the type of things I like.)



The singer is Skeeter Davis. Ignore the video (or anyway, ignore it when taking in this song); this was the only good rip of the song I could find on YouTube.

*But I read a history of the song, recounting how at first the songwriters had trouble placing it, the words seeming too out there. Chet Atkins finally picked it up, recorded Skeeter, though he actually had doubts about song and about the performance too, eventually releasing it. Skeeter was enthusiastic, however, and it became a huge crossover hit.

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[koganbot]

Not that I took "The End Of The World" to be extreme when I heard it; I loved it, but was too new to popular music to have any opinion on its extremity or lack of extremity. Just accepted it as the way things were, seas rushing to shore and such in defiance of cosmic unhappiness. At more or less the same time, Peter, Paul & Mary's "Blowing In The Wind" had white dove's, i.e. ships, wandering the seas for ages before being permitted to sleep in the sand. I might well have had the impression that popular music was all about the ocean. "Surfin' USA" was a hit at the time, too.

There probably need to be more seas and ships in current day music.

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[koganbot]

white dove's = white doves

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Weird, I typed out exactly the same qualifier re: Marion's use of "or" sound instead of "and," then deleted it as Marit sang "and." Perhaps the two of them had a disagreement: "Mar, I'm telling you, there are FEWER than 100 days in a month!" "Fine, you sing it YOUR way, and I'll sing it MY way!" "Fine!"

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Far fewer than 100 days in a month, of course. I meant three.

Re: It's been nine days, eight hours, forty minutes, ten seconds since you called

[koganbot]

change of piece = change of pace

I remember date and time, September 22nd, Sunday, 25 after 9:00

[koganbot]

Further obsessive temporal precision from Marion that I'd forgotten about: