Editor’s Letter: Read Your Lines So Cleverly
Madeleine JacobI can understand our contributing editor’s desire to reserve the music that moves her for herself. As a child, each time I heard Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, I cried. It was the closing song of a dance show I’d taken part in. That Freddie Mercury’s lyrics described my feelings accurately was emotionally toppling (‘cause I’m having a good time’). Hearing them vividly recalled the frenetic joy of dancing without routine, and a dreadful awareness of the lowering curtain.
I find myself moved easily, though, and trying to move other people is harder. I once attempted to let a guy know I liked him by playing the most depraved of Jarvis Cocker’s discography as background music to our chaste late-night conversations. My naivety has led to some hard losses: I’ve given over Grace Jones’ Nightclubbing, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, Corinne Bailey Rae’s ‘Breathless’, and ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to some all-too-specific associations. My exes, relatives, old friends and past selves stake their claims to my back-catalogue.
The venomous lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’ will always recall a lecture I attended last year. Our lecturer Sophie Ratcliffe played the song to artfully compliment her diagnosis of the post-9/11 novel. She explained that Zadie Smith’s heavily stylised writing confesses its own writerly conceit, even when it appears to reach for the real. In ‘Love is a Bourgeois Construct’, synthesised seventeenth-century chamber music underscores lyrics dismissing ‘love’ in favour of ‘reality’: ‘When you walked out, you did me a favour / You made me see reality / That love is a bourgeois construct / It’s a blatant fallacy.’ The song’s ersatz-marxist attitude, however, unravels in the final lyric: ‘Love is just a bourgeois construct / So I’m giving up the bourgeoisie / Until you come back to me.’
For my great literary love E.M. Forster, to ‘connect the prose and the passion’ is to link the facts of the Big World to the emotional world that thrums invisibly inside us. In her 1990s britpop hit, Justine Frischmann of Elastica reassures us that, between lovers, ‘somehow the vital connection is made.’ Mick Jagger ‘just can’t make no connection.’ Is he continually frustrated, or does the double negative imply that he just can’t resist making connections? And Elvis Presley laughs through the spoken-word bridge of a live ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, inarticulate at the song’s usual ultimatum: ‘And if you won’t come back to me / Then make them bring the curtain down.’ He’s cut-up. Priscillia is sleeping with her dance instructor; his career is stagnating; the song is too real. The recording’s final seconds reiterate his fatal connection: ‘That’s it, man. Fourteen years right down the drain.’