Pop music
Weeds and wets
Marcus Berkmann
What makes you cry? I hesitate to ask this question in The Spectator, some of whose readers will not knowingly have blubbed since Mafeking. But having spent much of the past few weeks weeping over my Ashes DVDs, I marvel yet again at the ability of the middle-class English male to remain dry of eye in the face of genuine hurt or tragedy, while crying copiously over sport, soppy films or notably resonant pop tunes. Last week it was ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd, which popped up on Radio Two while I was doing the washingup. Within a beat I had turned the volume to full, was singing along with Roger Waters’s astoundingly gloomy lyrics and scrubbing a particularly recalcitrant saucepan as it had rarely been scrubbed before. And sobbing my eyes out, naturally.
Admittedly, ‘Comfortably Numb’ is well suited for the purpose. I hadn’t heard it for years, having never upgraded from my original vinyl copy of The Wall or even listened to it very often. The album as a whole is such hard work that by the time you arrive at ‘Comfortably Numb’ on the end of side three you are exhausted and close to defeat. But it’s a wonderful song, with its dark, threatening, powerful verse and amazingly uplifting chorus, and superb contrasting David Gilmour guitar solos based around each. Like only the best pop songs it sounds like nothing else; it is only of itself. I was playing air guitar with a wok by the time Johnnie Walker faded it out. He then put on Coldplay’s ‘Speed of Sound’, which killed the mood immediately.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare ‘Comfortably Numb’ with the feeblest single yet from Britain’s weediest band, but radio throws up these comparisons all the time, and Coldplay is supposed to be the biggest band in the world right now. ‘Speed of Sound’s breathtaking lack of ambition, not to mention its utterly wet lyrics, reminded me instantly of fotherington-tomas skipping weedily through the flowers singing ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky’ which for Chris Martin would probably be a line worth writing down and saving up for the next song. In the now accepted scheme of things Martin sings every song as though about to burst into tears: you almost expect to hear him blowing his nose between tracks.
This emotional openness, if that’s what it is, seems to be unavoidable in pop music at the moment. Coachloads of glum singer-songwriters are opening their hearts and pouring out their feelings, for there can be no singer-songwriter at the moment for whom life is anything but a desperate struggle. Poor old James Blunt: he obviously likes a good cry, in the very rare moments when he is not taking off his shirt. All the Tom McRaes and Damien Rices: my, they suffer for their art, and, having bought albums by both of them, I have suffered for it, too. The problem is that despair provides rather a limited emotional palette. Depressed people, as we all know, make very bad company; after 20 seconds or so, you feel like talking to someone else. But it’s so easy to write miserable lyrics, and people take you uncommonly seriously for writing them, too. And the alternative carries considerable risks. Chris Martin is no longer the gloomy sixthform poet of his early lyrics: he is now rich and happy and making babies with his swan-necked lovely. He has nothing to moan about and, it turns out, nothing else to say. This, not surprisingly, has reduced the emotional impact of his work to zero. Weeds and wets have long been drawn to a career in pop music. grabber ma would have gone into the city, but fotherington-tomas might well have formed a band to get the girls. It’s not actually that difficult to pick up a guitar, if you take a big deep breath first. Most of the great Sixties bands were small and puny, and most of my favourite Seventies and Eighties bands tended towards the geeky. But they all transcended their physical limitations to make music for everyone. (Indeed, some of it was over-compensatingly tough and hard, but we can hardly blame them for that.) Nowadays, though, the weeds and geeks confine themselves to making weedy, geeky music aimed at a huge market of other weeds and geeks. I’m sure they’re all very happy with this; personally, it’s enough to make me want to burst into tears.
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