(6) Kate Bush, "This Woman's Work"
Uh, wait, what? You say Kate Bush wrote the song specifically for a scene in a John Hughes movie? Well, that doesn’t add to the sadness quotient of this song exactly, but it does up its awesome quotient. For instance, navigate to around the halfway point of this helpful cut of the scene for the montage set to song (she apparently wrote the lyrics to the content of the montage: is that horrible or is it great?). More videos should have montages, really, and the official video version kind of does, as it turns out, though in a super Kate Bushy way. Or really, just watch the first simply awesome minutes of the 1979 Kate Bush Christmas Special. Just two minutes, and either you're going to vote for Kate Bush or vote against Kate Bush based on that. Either choice is fine. Honestly, if you added the weird diaphanous bat cape from the first scene of the Christmas special to this song or video you'd have a winner and I'd vote it all the way to the finals based on that. But the more I watch these clips the more I end up talking myself either out of or into this song. I really can't be sure which. But I'm feeling a lot more of something for this song and for Bush. As you know Maxwell does a pretty great cover of this song, which you can look up for yourself, though we have a hard time imagining it'll affect what you think of it in the way that the Johnny Cash version did of "Hurt." I don't know what else to tell you about the song.
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(11) Sisters of Mercy, "Some Kind of Stranger"
Goth is a tricky thing to navigate vis-à-vis sadness: the whole genre is a downer, though it rarely seems particularly sad. I would have guessed in the early stages of selecting songs that the tournament would be seeded with goth, but it hasn’t worked out that way. That’s because, while punk essentially says (I’m paraphrasing the introductions to the Joy Division box set, I think, and not super well, like I'm trying to Brian Blanchfield this up and not resort to actually looking up sources) “fuck you,” goth says “I’m fucked,” or in some cases “we’re fucked: we might as well take amphetamines and try to find someone or something beautiful.” Well, the Sisters of Mercy tend toward the political (not always to their credit) they're best when they're a little more danceable (not to say dancy), but this track, a selection from First and Last and Always, arguably their best album (personally this committee member will always take Floodland, but he understands what was lost when Andrew Eldritch fired the rest of the band and took things in a new direction, and it’s increasingly obvious that First is a peerless album), is sheer desperation, total sadness. It should also be pointed out that this particular member of the committee finds it impossible to separate himself from his longtime love of this band to be in any way objective about this choice. As far as he's concerned, you should be picking Sisters of Mercy here for the upset. Really, if it's Sisters of Mercy or John Hughes movie song, what choice do you have? Sisters of Mercy would definitely bring the bat cape to the video if they had one.
Which is sadder? Vote by 3/8 at 9am
Lord Jesus, keep me near the cross...
ReplyDeleteMan, I love some of the matchups today, particularly this one and the Depeche Mode / Gary Jules one. Both are a little random but feel like there's art in the pairing.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me how many early match ups ultimately pit private-sphere sadness versus public-sphere treatments of sadness often along gender lines. LP/Radiohead was maybe the best example that isn't this one.
ReplyDeleteThat's true. Since women are underrepresented here (as they were in "college rock"—and we didn't feel like it was the committee's place to be wholly revisionist), the committee tried to distribute the women more or less equally in the bracket and also tried to avoid pitting women against each other in first-round matchups, to keep more of these conversations going further into the tournament. Don't know how successful that was or will be. I'm also very interested in the conversation about private and public sphere sadnesses, as well as how closely the I of the song seems to fit the identity of the singer: in this way I think we're talking about concerns of poetry and the confessional.
ReplyDeleteIf wanting to take a razor blade to my wrists makes Sisters "sad" then so be it. Actually, I guess I'm not 17 anymore...
ReplyDeleteAfter hearing "Some Girls Wander by Mistake" T-Town summed up the Sisters thusly: "Great music, but what the hell's up with those vocals?" When I first listened to them as a teenager I loved the vocals--such desperation, such anguish. Now they just seem over-the-top and ludicrous to me on First and Last and Always. That's why I like Floodland better now--the vocals are understated in comparison on most songs. Lucretia will always be my favorite Sisters song.
ReplyDeleteConcur, though I still seem to hold a fond place for that melodrama in my life. I relistened to Vision Thing recently, and its weird irony and super-overt politics haven't dated very well. Complaining about the first Bush presidency seems bizarrely quaint now. Plus the turn to full on rock opera must have been incredibly alienating for their old school goth fans. That was, of course, the first album of theirs I discovered, so I always liked it, and I still do, but it's harder to take now.
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