Monday, January 28, 2019
When Pop Goes Meta #1
B-side of "When love breaks down"
attacking an obscure to 97% of his listeners country singer - never quite figured out the point.
another one whose point I never quite saw - Paddy here is attacking Springsteen for his supposedly constricted range of songwriting topics (erm, hello - Nebraska? Born in the USA?) - "some things hurt much more than cars and girls".... well, you have written your fair share of songs about girls Paddy man, haven't you? ... Also - what does actually hurt more than "girls" (meaning, love, heartbreak, unrequited etc?) or is a better subject for pop? There's death, but yeah the travails of the heart seem like pretty high up there on the list.
About Abba and the appeal of Agnetha
There's several other songs on Jordan that are about music, pop, specific artists (Elvis, if I recall right), including one where Paddy says - on the subject of music for dancing - "I'd rather be the Fred Astaire of words". Which is quite witty admittedly.
Wasn't there a whole unreleased, or written but un-rerecorded concept album about Michael Jackson?
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3 comments:
Simon, was it you who wrote in Melody Maker years ago that Paddy McAloon was "the man who put the nancy into poignancy"> May have been someone else but just wondering.
It might have been me who wrote that or words to that effect, but i would have been riposting to a viewpoint of others on Melody Maker - the Stud Bros, mostly, but other hardheads on the paper - who thought Prefab, Lloyd Cole, Morrissey, etc were music by and for sissies. I would have been defending poignancy (and gentler music) as a different kind of power that was just as lacerating in its own than e.g. Skinny Puppy, Big Black etc. (both of whom i liked of course). The gist of it would be: no noise or industrial band has ever made me cry, had as devastating effect on me as e.g. "There Is Light that Never Goes Out" - so who is say what is the harder music?
Ah right, thanks for the explanation. A great and very clever line either way if you did write it! Just that a friend of mine mentioned a couple of years back that it was something you wrote.
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