Samstag, 19. Aug 2006, 7:43
It seems that the whole world is loving emo music at the moment. The whiny bands which feature guys who wear black eyeliner moaning about why they hate their parents and want to cut their wrists are very popular right now, but I hate them! Anyway, I have decided to use my obsession with lists to make a list of great songs which take the emo part out of emotional.
1. Death Disco
John Lydon wrote this about his dying mother, and his screaming, aguished vocals mkae this song a haunting listen.
2. Decades
The last track on Joy Division's last proper album, this sounds like a fitting suicide note for Ian Curtis.
3. Maggot Brain
Eddie Hazel was told to play the guitar on this song like his mother had just died. He did, and created a guitar performance that sounds more emotional than words can express.
This song sounds like a nervous breakdown as it happens, chugging along slowly until it becomes a mess of detuned synthesisers and chaotic noise. The Idiot was on Ian Curtis' turntable when he committed suicide, so this was possibly the last song he heard. It seems right, somehow.
This is the ultimate unrequited love song, and one of the few songs which can convey the wretched feeling of being rejected. The amazing thing about it is how it rises above moaning about the whole horrible thing, but instead shows the rollercoaster of emotions unrequited love can provoke in it's music. The strings show hope, but then the whole thing becomes gloomy again. It is one of the finest songs I have ever heard, and I urge you to buy Blue Lines if you don't already have it.
This is the last track on Low and by far the most mysterious. The lyrics are pure nonesense, but they sound like a failure to understand anything, maybe a form of cultural isolation from the rest of the world. At this time, David Bowie was living in West Berlin which (at the time) was surrounded by a hostile East Germany, an enclave of West Germany 100 miles from it's border. Naturally, this made the city appear very isolated from the rest of the world. In the garbled information given in these lyrics, the frustration and solitude of the people of West Berlin (and maybe East Berlin who weren't allowed to even visit the other half of their city) is reflected. It's strange how this song sounds so meaningless and pointless on one level, yet so meaningful on another. Oh, and the downbeat musical backing (with a fantatstic Bowie saxophone part) is possibly the finest ambient track he and Brian Eno made.
7. Auf Asche
On Franz Ferdinand's debut album, this is the track which really stood out for me. Going back to unrequited love again, this song is another near-perfect evocation of it. The song features keyboards more heavily than guitar, unusually for them, but still underpinned by a slightly disco-sounding beat. The lyrics are outstanding, and they are what makes this song. From lines like "You see her, you can't touch her" followed by by the chorus of "She's not so special so look what you've done boy!" it sounds like the song is not being sung from the perspective of an outsider, looking in upon somebody hopelessly in love with somebody who doesn't love them in return. The outsider is trying to show this person that their love will come to nothing, but he sees the object of his desire as everything in his life. I'll just add a personal bit to this to say that I think my friends have played the outsider in this song quite often!
I don't want to over-do this list as it is my first journal entry here, so I'll leave it at that.