submissions
| The Specials – Blank Expression Lyrics
| 8 months ago
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The great difference between Traditional Ska and that of the Two-Tone era is the influence of Punk: not simply in speeding-up the tempo, but unconsciously introducing the theme of alienation. In Traditional Ska, the artist and the listener inhabit the same universe, there is the possibility of communication and shared experience. In Two-Tone Ska, and the music of The Specials in particular, the world is a colder and lonelier place. That may have as much to do with an inherited memory within the music, of having formerly been a creation of the warm Caribbean, with its sense of community and togetherness, and of now inhabiting an alien land, full of cold attitudes and Thatcherism as well as stinking weather. "Blank Expression" is a novelty Christmas single with all its warmth and cheer hollowed out: the narrator leaves his street on foot, because the roads are impassable to traffic, and goes in search of conviviality; but all he finds in the bar he enters is a feeling of trepidation and of being unwanted, and the girl he tries to talk to looks back at him as if to a brick wall, "as if I were a, a total stranger". They must already be acquainted, but she shuts him out and refuses to interact. Back home, "all the, the lights are out", no welcome there. |
submissions
| The Specials – Blank Expression Lyrics
| 8 months ago
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@[hajmola:53588]: In the way the blind street in winter is described as sombre and lonely? But the girl in "Araby" does acknowledge the boy, does speak to him in a friendly way, and not staring through him as if he were an alien thing. |
submissions
| The Specials – Blank Expression Lyrics
| 8 months ago
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@[Romatron:53587]: Except that, the song's authorship is credited to all the members of The Specials and Jerry Dammers, not to any individual songwriter. |
submissions
| The Damned – Jet Boy, Jet Girl Lyrics
| 11 months ago
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"you don't consider heterosexuality to strip a man of his masculinity"
Surely you mean "you don't consider *homosexuality* to strip a man of his masculinity". |
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