Writer
This is a spin-off from an online music journal I kept for a few years, in which I mused about life and the universe while exploring the back catalogue of a band I had never liked until discovering belatedly that they had a serious, dark side. The main themes in this anecdotal piece are dating …
A Perth radio station called 6UVS-FM played alternative music, and had this request show. People who grew up in the age of music-on-tap won’t be able to fully appreciate the lure of those erstwhile request shows – back then, you were so much at the mercy of what people happened to play on the radio, and what you could afford to buy with your meagre kid budget. So request shows gave you a chance to hear again what you couldn’t afford. But 6UVS-FM also had a twist to their request show: You could call in and request that they destroy a particular record on air. This was in the dying days of vinyl, which makes such a pleasing, visceral crunch when destroyed. CDs just can’t compete here! There were a lot of requests for the destruction of Wham! records…
I’ve long meant to properly curate the accidental prequel that started the whole Exploring the Back Catalogue thing for me.
I was on an alternative music forum when we acquired Join The Dots and was participating in a Currently Listening thread. Suddenly I was mostly currently listening to Join The Dots, which there is rather a lot of – and as usual when I’m listening to music that gets me thinking, I wanted to write about it and, eternal optimist that I am, perhaps even be able to engage in comparing notes with other listeners…
I think this is a terrific album opener – heart on the sleeve, in your face, setting the tone and preparing you for what is to come.
Dickens is a master at summing up people in brief but evocative descriptions, and I think The Cure have a similar talent for summing up emotions and situations in (relatively) brief but evocative pieces of music. The Promise is a vivid portrait of deep disappointment and grief, and it instantly took me back to the last time I’d heard someone express these emotions, to the same painful extent. The fact that this was also on my iPod and in the garden probably helped to link the two; the brain does things like this…
The general vibe about this album from other people had been fairly negative – including from my husband, who sampled it in a record shop when it came out but decided he didn’t like the sound. But you know what, I’ve just given it a spin and I like it.
Just clarifying – looking at what’s been written out there, on Reddit and forums and in the music press, I get the general impression that quite a few of the original fans (or at least the most vocal ones) were never really happy again post-Wish (or some of them, post-Pornography). The extra-whiny complaining began with Wild Mood Swings, and never really ended. Sometimes I think that it’s common for people get stuck in a perceived golden musical age of their own teenage years, possibly because that’s when everything is fresh, and a lot of neural connections are being made, and people go through a lot of feelings. Once you’ve grown up, you may not be quite so easy to move or inspire again, particularly if there’s a tendency to nostalgia, and a dissatisfaction with the present in general. And the problem may actually be that, and not the music.
MANIPULATION, ANYONE? Unlike most of the other tracks on this album, Wendy Time is not a lovely track to listen to, but if you’re writing a tune about shameless manipulation and terrible pick-up lines, you probably don’t want a lovely tune – but one that reflects the nausea-inducing scenario related. And in that sense, the tune really fits, its unpleasantness and discord appropriate for the topic. Although this is not a song I’d go out of my way to listen to for its aesthetic appeal, I do applaud its inclusion on this album for thematic reasons.
There’s a whole swag of love-gone-wrong songs on Wish – and here’s one situation that could head that way but never does, because it’s nipped in the bud by the target of the manipulation, who is wise to it – which has me cheering, because so many people fall for this sort of thing.
LOVE GONE WRONG, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS (finale) Cut is a jagged sort of number, a lament for a dying relationship.
Sometimes it’s like that and there’s nothing you can do – Sensate Focus won’t fix this and psychotherapy doesn’t look good here either; along with other tools they’re better at preventing this kind of disconnection that trying to fix something that’s broken into two separate pieces. Sometimes something is just dead, and all you can do is write a dirge. The sad thing here is that the death of the thing is so lopsided, as it so often is – with one party checked out, and the other wishing it wasn’t so. All that you can do then is to remember that there’s lots of other people you can connect with – and that thinking you’re never going to feel again like you felt about the person who checked out is a bit of a grass-is-greener thing, and a bit like when you’ve had a big lunch and you can’t imagine ever feeling hungry again – because you will.
The problem is that we’re not doing enough meaningful interaction — and that our social groups have become too large for our brains. We’re evolutionarily set up for small-tribe living, and we’re actually living in complex societies with millions of people in them now. It’s impossible to have working relationships with a million other people — your brain can handle interacting regularly with a “tribe” of maybe 100-200 people in a meaningful way, at a stretch. More than that, and it gets stressful. In cities, people tend to avoid each other; and one of our modern dilemmas is that we’re the loneliest we’ve ever been, even though surrounded by an ocean of other humans — too many humans.
And many of us aren’t connecting with each other as much as we were necessarily connecting when we were hunter-gatherers, or even agricultural villagers. In recent decades, with increasing job insecurity in the West and many people forced to up and move many times to pursue the next job, we’re getting socially dislocated many times over, and a good support network necessarily becomes harder to maintain.
People who are into sports or religion generally get little plug-in communities when they relocate; but if you’re not into those things, or you’re introverted, or have social anxieties, or your daytime job puts a hundred people into your face every day and you can’t face going to choir group or Scottish Highland dancing or the photography club or whatever else you might be interested in on a weeknight after that because all you want to do is be on your own and read a book, then you may end up having few social contacts that aren’t around your work…
I’m really enjoying our new acquisition Wish, on multiple levels – musically there’s so much on there that’s lovely, and even the stuff that’s not I think is the way it is to reinforce the story told by the lyrics – e.g. Wendy Time isn’t exactly a beautiful song, but the quacking Donald-Duck type guitars and the dissonance and ner-ner-ness of the thing just goes with the portrait of an insufferable attempt at manipulation, which the narrator is wise to, which in turn makes me go, “Hooray!” because how many people fall for that, not just once but repeatedly…
It’s mostly like aromatherapy for your ears (not roses or geranium, and nothing fake with phthalates from the chemistry lab either, more like sandalwood and boronia), while the lyrics to most of the songs are written with great care, go well as stand-alone poetry, and make you think. If there’s a main theme, I think it’s interpersonal relationships and the human condition…but I would think that – it’s like, “What do you see?”