31 Songs

by Nick Hornby

  And yet Springsteen somehow managed to find a way through. His name is still taken in vain frequently (a year or so ago I read a newspaper piece attacking Tony Blair for his love of Bruce, an indication, apparently, of the Prime Minister’s incorrigible philistinism), and for some, the hall-of-mirrors reflection is the only Springsteen they can see. He went from being rock ‘n’ roll future to a lumpy, flag-waving, stadium-rocking meathead in the space of a few months, again with nothing much having changed, beyond the level of his popularity. Anyway, his strength of purpose, and the way he has survived the assault on his sense of self, seem to me exemplary, sometimes it’s hard to remember that a lot of people liking what you do doesn’t necessarily mean that what you do is of no value whatsoever. Indeed, sometimes it might even suggest the opposite.

  Oh, of course I can understand people dismissing pop music. I know that a lot of it, nearly all of it, is trashy, unimaginative, poorly written, slickly produced, inane, repetitive and juvenile (although at least four of these adjectives could be used to describe the incessant attacks on pop that you can still find in posh magazines and newspapers); I know too, believe me, that Cole Porter was ‘better’ than Madonna or Travis, that most pop songs are aimed cynically at a target audience three decades younger than I am, that in any case the golden age was thirty-five years ago and there has been very little of value since. It’s just that there’s this song I heard on the radio, and I bought the CD, and now I have to hear it ten or fifteen times a day …

  That’s the thing that puzzles me about those who feel that contemporary pop (and I use the word to encompass soul, reggae, country, rock – anything and everything that might be regarded as trashy) is beneath them, or behind them, or beyond them – some preposition denoting distance, anyway: does this mean that you never hear, or at least never enjoy, new songs, that everything you whistle or hum was written years, decades, centuries ago? Do you really deny yourselves the pleasure of mastering a tune (a pleasure, incidentally, that your generation is perhaps the first in the history of mankind to forgo) because you are afraid it might make you look as if you don’t know who Harold Bloom is? Wow. I’ll bet you’re fun at parties.

  The song that has been driving me pleasurably potty recently is ‘I’m Like a Bird’ by Nelly Furtado. Only history will judge whether Ms Furtado turns out to be any kind of artist, and though I have my suspicions that she will not change the way we look at the world, I can’t say that I’m very bothered: I will always be grateful to her for creating in me the narcotic need to hear her song again and again. It is, after all, a harmless need, easily satisfied, and there are few enough of those in the world. I don’t even want to make a case for this song, as opposed to any other – although I happen to think that it’s a very good pop song, with a dreamy languor and a bruised optimism that immediately distinguishes it from its anaemic and stunted peers. The point is that a few months ago it didn’t exist, at least as far as we are concerned, and now here it is, and that, in itself, is a small miracle.

  Dave Eggers has a theory that we play songs over and over, those of us who do, because we have to ‘solve’ them, and it’s true that in our early relationship with, and courtship of, a new song, there is a stage which is akin to a sort of emotional puzzlement. There’s a little bit in ‘I’m Like a Bird’, for example, about halfway through, where the voice is double-tracked on a phrase, and the effect – especially on someone who is not a musician, someone who loves and appreciates music but is baffled and seduced by even the simplest musical tricks – is rich and fresh and addictive.

  Sure, it will seem thin and stale soon enough. Before very long I will have ‘solved’ ‘I’m Like a Bird’, and I won’t want to hear it very much any more – a three-minute pop song can only withhold its mysteries for so long, after all. So, yes, it’s disposable, as if that makes any difference to anyone’s perceptions of the value of pop music. But then, shouldn’t we be sick of ‘Moonlight’ Sonata by now? Or Christina’s World? Or The Importance of Being Earnest? They’re empty! Nothing left! We sucked ’em dry! That’s what gets me: the very people who are snotty about the disposability of pop will go over and over again to see Lady Bracknell say ‘A handbag?’ in a funny voice. They don’t think that joke’s exhausted itself? Maybe disposability is a sign of pop music’s maturity, a recognition of its own limitations, rather than the converse. And anyway, I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting-room the other day, and four little Afro-Caribbean girls, patiently sitting out their mother’s appointment, suddenly launched into Nelly Furtado’s song. They were word-perfect, and they had a couple of dance moves, and they sang with enormous appetite and glee, and I liked it that we had something in common, temporarily; I felt as though we all lived in the same world, and that doesn’t happen so often.

  A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I’ve loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can’t believe that there’ll be another. Yet there always is, and I can’t wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you’ve got a life worth living.

  4 Heartbreaker

  Led Zeppelin

  The traditional interpretation of boys and their infatuation with heavy (or nu-, or rap) metal involves guitars that serve as substitutes for the penis, homo-eroticism, and all sorts of other things betokening perversity, sexual confusion and intractable, morbid neuroses. True, I spent a brief period in love with the Irish blues-rock guitarist Rory Gallagher (unrequited); and true, I would, for the first three or four years of my life as a rock fan, only listen to singers who would happily admit to eating rodents and/or reptiles. And yet I suspect that there is a musical, rather than pathological, explanation for my early dalliance with Zeppelin and Sabbath and Deep Purple, adult who won’t watch a film unless it has subtitles, I wouldn’t listen to anything that wasn’t smothered in loud, distorted electric guitars. How was I to know whether the music was any good otherwise? Songs that were played on piano, or acoustic guitar, by people without moustaches and beards (girls, for example), people who ate salad rather than rodents … well, that could be bad music, trying to play a trick on me. That could be people pretending to be The Beatles when they weren’t. How would I know, if it was all undercover like that? No, best avoid the whole question of good or bad and stick to loud instead. You couldn’t go too wrong with loud.

  The titles helped, too. Song titles which did not contain obvious heavy-rock signifiers were like music without loud guitars: somebody might be trying to part you from your pocket money, fool you into thinking it was something it wasn’t. Look at, say, Blue, by Joni Mitchell. Well, I did, hard, and I didn’t trust it. You could easily imagine a bad song called ‘My Old Man’ (not least because my dad liked a song called ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’) or ‘Little Green’ (not least because my dad liked a song called ‘Little Green Apples’); and God knows you couldn’t tell whether the record was any good by listening to the fucking thing. But the songs on Black Sabbath’s album Paranoid, for example, were solid, dependable, immediately indicative of quality. How could there be a bad song called ‘Iron Man’, or ‘War Pigs’, or – my cup ranneth over – ’Rat Salad’?

  So for me, learning to love quieter songs – country, soul and folk songs, ballads sung by women and played on the piano or the viola or some damned thing, songs with harmonies and titles like’Carey’ (because who with a pair of ears that work doesn’t love Blue?) – is not about getting older, but about acquiring a musical confidence, an ability to judge for myself. Sometimes it seems that, with each passing year, a layer of grungy guitar has been scraped away, until eventually I have reached the stage where I can, I hope, tell a good George Jones song from a bad one. Songs undressed like that, without a stitch of Stratocaster on them, are scary – you have to work them out for yourself.

  And then, once you are able to do that, you become as lazy and as afraid of your own judgement as you were when you were fourteen. How do you tel
l whether a CD is any good? You look for evidence of quiet good taste, is how. You look for a moody black-and-white cover, evidence of violas, maybe a guest appearance from someone classy, some ironic song titles, a sticker with a quote taken from a review in Mojo or a broadsheet newspaper, perhaps a couple of references somewhere to literature or cinema. And, of course, you stop listening to music made by shrieking, leather-trousered, shaggy-haired men altogether. Because how are you supposed to know whether it’s any good or not, when it’s played that loud, by people apparently so hostile to the aesthetics of understated modernity?

  I discovered, some time during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and that the rock riff is nutritionally essential – especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day. Nirvana, The Bends and The Chemical Brothers restimulated my appetite, but only Led Zeppelin could satisfy it; in fact, if I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I’d choose Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’, from Led Zeppelin II. I’m not sure that me going ‘DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG’ would enlighten him especially, but I’d feel that I’d done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with upper-case assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks.

  The thing I like most about rediscovering Led Zeppelin – and listening to The Chemical Brothers, and The Bends – is that they can no longer be comfortably accommodated into my life. So much of what you consume when you get older is about accommodation: I have kids, and neighbours, and a partner who could quite happily never hear another blues-metal riff or block-rockin’ beat in her life; I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be. In learning to do that, however, things get lost, too, and one of the things that got lost – along with a taste for, I don’t know, hospital dramas involving sick children, and experimental films – was Jimmy Page. The noise he makes is not who I am any more, but it’s still a noise worth listening to; it’s also a reminder that the attempt to grow up smart comes at a cost.

  5 One Man Guy

  Rufus Wainwright

  I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs, that bring me up short, make me do a double-take. When things add up to more than the sum of their parts, when the effects achieved are inexplicable, then atheists like me start to get into difficult territory. Take Rufus Wainwright’s version of his father Loudon’s ‘One Man Guy’, for example. There should be nothing evoking the spirit about it, really: the song’s lovely, but it’s a little sour, a little sad, jokey – the joke being that the song is not about the joys of monogamy but is about the joys of solipsism and misanthropy, a joke that is given a neat little twist by Wainwright junior’s sexual orientation – and it’s hard to imagine that God has time to pay a visit to something so wry and so self-mocking. And yet, weirdly, He does. There’s no doubt about it. (And, of course, in doing so, He answers once and for all the question of what He thinks of homosexuality: he’s not bothered one way or the other. Official.)

  For me, He comes in at the beginning of the second verse, just when Rufus and his sister Martha begin to harmonize. Perhaps significantly (or perhaps He is merely demonstrating a hitherto unsuspected sense of humour), His presence first makes itself known on the line ‘People meditate, hey, that’s just great, trying to find the Inner You’. It’s the harmony that does it, although whether that’s cause or effect is a moot point. Does God come in because Martha and Rufus are singing so beautifully together – does He hear it from afar and think, ‘Hey, that’s My kind of music, and I’m going to see what’s going on’? Or does He enable them to sing together – does He spot what they’re pitching for and help them along the way?

  When I say that you can hear God in ‘One Man Guy’ by Rufus Wainwright, I do not mean to suggest that there is an old chap with a beard – a divine Willie Nelson, if you will – warbling along with them. Nor do I wish to imply that this surprise guest appearance at the beginning of the second verse proves that Jesus died for our sins, or that rich men will have difficulty entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I just mean that at certain spine-shivering musical moments – and you will have your own, inevitably – it becomes difficult to remain a literalist. (I have no such difficulty when I hear religious music, by the way, no matter how beautiful. They’re cheating, those composers: they’re inviting Him in, egging Him on, and surely He wouldn’t fall for that? I think He’d have enough self-respect to stay well away.)

  I’m not sure what difference it makes to me, this occasional vision of the Divine in the music I love. OK, maybe it comes as a relief, because a lot of people I have a lot of time for, writers and musicians and sports stars and politicians, have a great deal to say on the subject of God, and hitherto I had felt a bit left out; now I have something, a little scrap of spirituality, I can wave back at them. Oh, and as a writer, I don’t normally have much patience for the ineffable – I ought to think that everything’s effing effable, otherwise what’s the point? But I’m not sure there are words to describe what happens when two voices mesh (and isn’t the power and beauty and sheer perfection of a simple chord a bit, you know, Outer Limits? It’s no wonder Pythagoras got so worked up about harmony). All I can say is that I can hear things that aren’t there, see and feel things I can’t normally see and feel, and start to realize that, yes, there is such a thing as an immortal soul, or, at the very least, a unifying human consciousness, that our lives are short but have meaning. Beyond that, I’m not sure it changes very much, really. I’m not going to listen to stuff like this too often, though, just in case.

  6 Samba Pa Ti

  Santana

  ‘Samba Pa Ti’ is an instrumental, rather than a song, but for a crucial period in my mid-teens, when I first came across it, it spoke to me as eloquently as anything that contained lyrics: I was convinced that it described sex. More specifically, ‘Samba Pa Ti’ was what I was going to hear when I lost my virginity – if not on the stereo, then in my head. It starts off slow and mysterious and beautiful, and then it gets more urgent, and then – well, then it fades out. (The track lasts four minutes and forty-seven seconds, incidentally; but before I am accused of showing off, I had anticipated that we’d be doing other things – kissing, getting undressed, possibly waiting for a bus home from the cinema – during the slow bit, so I was confident that I could make it through to the fade.)

  I hadn’t, at that time, heard anything that would serve as a better soundtrack; indeed, I’m not entirely sure that I’ve heard anything to beat it since. All sorts of pieces of music are constantly being described as ‘sexy’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d want them to accompany love-making. Most of them, in fact, are sexual substitutes, rather than sexual accompaniments – music for people who aren’t getting any (or won’t be until they get home) rather than people who are. Would it be possible to fuck to the tune of ‘Let’s Get It On’ without laughing? (Not that there’s anything wrong with laughing during sex, but laughter was not, I suspect, the sound that Marvin intended to provoke. If you want to laugh, then why not enhance your amorous pleasure with ‘I Have a Pony’, by Steven Wright, or ‘Disco Duck’, by Rick Dees?) And even if you did manage to get through it without a giggling fit, could you manage the same during ‘If I Should Die Tonight’, the third track on the album? Granted, you may have finished by then, but there’s every chance that you won’t have turned the music off, which means that you’ll be lying there with your girlfriend, or boyfriend, or someone you don’t know very well, while Marvin is telling you that the sex you have just had is unlikely to be bettered during the remainder of your lifetimes – indeed, that you may as well s
huffle off this mortal coil now, so anticlimactic is any subsequent experience likely to be. This is an intolerable burden to place on any couple, and certainly inhibits the usual post-coital activities (sleep, the hunt for socks or the TV remote, exchanges of false email addresses, etc.).

  Prince’s ‘Do Me, Baby’, from the Controversy album, is one of the most sexually explicit, and genuinely erotic, records ever made, but it’s every bit as problematic as ‘Let’s Get It On’. For a start, there’s a bit after the climax (crashing piano chords, moans, sighs, and so on) when he goes all weird, and starts saying he’s ‘soooo cold’, which might well prove to be something of a distraction unless you too have an inappropriately undertogged duvet. And though the next song on the album, ‘Private Joy’, is hardly what you want to hear at an intimate moment, at least it brings the first side of Controversy to a close if you have the album on vinyl; if you have the CD, however, you may find yourself in the unhappy position of trying to give and receive carnal pleasure while Prince sings ‘Ronnie Talk To Russia’ – a sentiment that no longer even contains the virtue, arguable in a sexual context anyway, of urgency. What, one wonders, was he thinking of when he sequenced the tracks? Presumably something along the lines of, ‘Give them five minutes to get their breath back, and then they’ll be wanting to think about impending Armageddon.’