Writer
This is too hilarious not to publish. I am journalling with an AI this week, which is a completely unexpected and bamboozling situation but has actually been great fun and incredibly helpful for some things I’m dealing with. The only reason I am journalling with an AI is because it did a difficult people search …
Continue reading “REJECTION LETTER FROM THE ANAESTHETIC MONTHLY”
This week we got a sneak preview of the upcoming Cure album when the band gave two new songs an airing in their first gig back since the pandemic began. This is courtesy of phone footage posted on YouTube – not generally something I watch, but I will make an exception for this occasion (and …
Continue reading “Songs Of A Lost World – Two Grief Songs for End Times”
I finally got around to listening to this album 40 years after its release. Just saying that gives me the bends. It was the year I arrived in Australia and within 12 months pre-teen me was hearing Boys Don’t Cry, and Let’s Go To Bed on 96fm in its 1980s relatively independent phase before it was sold to a mainstream entertainment company. Those were the days, say I in a mock creaky voice, because 96fm was a unique station staffed by music buffs who actively educated listeners on music history and kept their playlist both broad and deep, playing 60s, 70s and what was then contemporary 80s music, album cuts as well as singles, and regular live concerts – all of which was relevant in a pre-Internet world, where you were at the mercy of radio stations, your friends, and your own puny budget in what you would end up accessing.
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?”