| Tom Tom Club – Genius of Love Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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This song so rocks!! One of the reasons I love it so much is that it's more than catchy, it's infectious. Once it gets in your brain it will never leave, it will just set up a little home there and always be there to cheer you up. With references to the rough underbelly of a musician's life, the female voices are just so incredibly upbeat and delightful, emitting a giddiness at the level of Japanese high-school girl. The stacatto scratching of the name "Bohannan" and the other riffs thrown in make it an homage to the "evolution of funk", as someone briliiantly stated, in the same vein as "Groove is in the Heart" and presumably out of the same musical milieu. I really love the way the normal rhythm of the phrase "gen-i-us of love" is completely distorted, making "genius" trisyllabic followed by the two beats "of love", creating an asymmetrical 3/2 metric as the flow of syllables come to an abrupt stop. This refrain reflects the theme of the whole piece, the boyfriend is the genius coming and going, the girlfriend is static, delirious when he's around, lonely when he's not. The boyfriend represents not only this particular musician, but every funk artist, the music itself, drugs, and yes, sex. The plaintive "If you see him, please remind him..." at the end pulls the focus back from the artist onto the "lady who waits" herself. It recalls that wonderfully bittersweet song from the musical HAIR "Frank Mills" where the persona bewails the absence of her (one night) lover: "If you see him, tell him... What's so deep is not some sort of physical measurement here, which would make no sense in relation to a male, but how deeply funk artistry has been able to penetrate down through the layers of civilization to renew that primitive rhythm of life, sex, and dance. How can you not want to move your feet when you hear it? GENIUS!! |
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| Camera Obscura – Let Me Go Home Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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Wow! What a beautifully written, haunting song. It has a mesmerizing quality which brings you straight into its deliciously intoxicated state where "nobody cares". They play it nearly every weekend at the hip coffee shop Naidre's in my Brooklyn Waterfront neighbourhood and nothing could be more perfect for starting a lazy summer afternoon. Everything described contributes to this mood of sensual, teenage abandon to dancing, drinking, and sex at a late-night party. What better than drinking too much, getting into a brawl, breaking a few records, and makin' out on the floor at someone else's house! When the narrator starts "we're going somewhere tonight" it's not about travelling anywhere it's about consummating sex, duh. "Hurry up, baby", the exhortation to get down as quickly as possible, conveys all the energy and urgency of youthful desire. The "four walls" colliding compactly evokes the distorted perceptions during a drunken tryst. There is a lot of brilliant compaction in the word-play at work: an entire floor strewn with 45's back in the sixties is conjured up with the phrase "vinyl is crushed". This was the era where liquor was kept in a low cabinet, often locked, and perhaps in very same console where records and the record player was spinning. Other sixties referents include the term for a popular dance back then, the Twist, and two of the most popular groups, the Temptations and the Supremes. These are worked into the lyrics in a subtle, dream-like, hallucinatory manner, appropriate to the drunken state of the narrator. There is one more subtle reference back to the sixties: the use of the word "obscene" and "Supremes" in the same stanza clearly alludes to the famous Supreme Court obscenity rulings throughout that period. This also has the effect of conveying the necessary expression of guilt and trespass without which the experience would not be complete. Finally, there is a little trick here to throw you off track as to where the party is actually being held. If the narrator is somewhat ingenuously pleading at the end to "let me go home" then, duh, it obviously cannot be his own house but that of the eponymous host. But doesn't he say "Host plays A Ghost in My House"? Well it turns out that is not a location at all but the title of an obscure Motown hit again from the sixties by the songwriter R. DeanTaylor, who also by the way wrote some of the most popular hits for both The Supremes and The Temptations. If I haven't demonstrated by now how brilliantly the lyrics to this song were crafted then just enjoy it for what it is, a cool lazy afternoon tune spinning on the background at your favorite waterfront cafe! |
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