Saturday 11 November 2017

100 Awesome Things - Part 27 - From the Vault 2013

The latest 100 Awesome Things is perhaps more 'mortifying' than 'awesome' but it's honest, at least...

~~~2013~~~


When I was six years old, I fell in love for the very first time.

He was a musician, of course. He had a leather jacket, of course. He had long hair, of course. He was gorgeous, of course.

Who was this great artiste, the first person that an already-picky creature such as I had dedicated myself to?


Erm, this guy...

I was six, ya'll. I'd love to say this is a good excuse, but given that I was already a Buddy Holly fan then, I'm not sure what it was.

Creatively, there is nothing about the song linked above that doesn't suck. The hollow drum machine sounds are the musical equivalent of bad CGI in movies (That Scorpion King at the end of The Mummy Returns springs to mind...). The lyrics are almost good but mired in cheap cliche and designed entirely to tug on the heartstrings of impressionable little girls who don't know any better yet. The guitar work is perfunctory and processed.

And there's that mullet. Again, I was six. I couldn't yet see the difference between this and this. I learned pretty quick, though.

Jason Donovan was the Twilight of 1989, the 1D of the 80s/90s cusp... *shudder* There's not enough bath bubbles in the world to clean this off my soul. Mind you, at least it's not Rick Astley (Warning: This is a link to Rick Astley.) I was six but I had some standards, you know.

You see, I thought then, and maintain, that Jason Donovan is a fairly decent singer. Is he Robert Plant or Steve Marriott? Hell to the no. However, he was able to do Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. One has to have some ability to keep up with an ALW musical. The problem with Jase (as we used to call him, natch) was in the music itself. The cheap-ass Stock Aitken and Satan tunes and production, the notion that music for little girls didn't need to be good because they'll listen to anything as long as the guy singing is cute but unthreatening. Romantic but not sexual.

You might call it the Bieber Effect these days. It's been around for decades. Remember the Bay City Rollers? David Cassidy? The Osmonds? Fabian and Pat fraking Boone?  Pop is littered with these quality-vacuums. They serve a purpose, but does the music have to suck so badly?

There's nothing inherently wrong with creating music designed for little girls. The problem comes when the producers of said music assume those little girls don't deserve quality music. I was six and recognised quality - Buddy Holly, people - but for Donovan and the need to fall in love with someone and fit in with my peers, I accepted sub-par music, and that's what bothers me.

Part of me knew it even at the time. Part of me knew it for years after, and it's the reason I feel guilty now. I don't feel guilty for liking it, I feel guilty for being part of the musical sausage machine.  Guilty for giving my pocket money to Pete bloody Waterman... for accepting music videos featuring a guy 'playing' an electric guitar on the side of a mountain.

All these years later, with Morrison, Bowie, Lynott, Gallagher, Dylan, the Beatles and the rest cluttering up my brain in ways both simple and complicated, to return to something I loved in an uncomplicated way is kinda refreshing.

I found a Donovan song that doesn't suck. it's the one I loved best at the time. It is a cover of a song from the early 1960s.



Jason Donovan - "Sealed With a Kiss"

Even when I was six, even when I thought Jason Donovan was suitable affection bait, I loved the old songs the best. I don't say it's a particularly brilliant song, though I do feel it puts across that feeling one has as a teenager that anything slightly bad is the worst thing in the world ever. The idea that actually, romances don't always endure a few weeks of separation when sun and sand and callow youth are involved.

Even when i was six, I got this song. My cynicism was pretty well formed by then. I knew that he was right to be a-feared, right to be wistful already. I knew that this song was really a tragedy, not a romance. The production isn't (to my nostalgic ears) as heinous as on a lot of his other songs of the time, and it being a cover at least means it's bubblegum but it's had decades to establish itself as a bit better than a lot of the crap in 1962 (and there was so much).

I'm not doing a very good job of selling this as actually Awesome. It isn't, not really... but there's a little kid in the back of my head that really does love it still... and who misses being able to love without complications or reality or cynicism. That little kid doesn't know that Donovan grew up to sue a magazine for suggesting he might be gay, nor that he developed a ginormous gak habit, nor that he went on a reality show, nor that he did adverts for a cheap-ass frozen food store...

That little kid still loves this song, and so do I, in truth. There are sometimes good moments to be found in the stinking sewer of manufactured pop music. One day, twenty years from now, I imagine someone not so very different to me will be sat in a FuturePod of Utopia with Bowie hair and a worn old Morrison t-shirt, and will admit that she loved Harry Styles once.

There's nothing wrong with that stuff necessarily, nor with the reality talent show stuff. The problem is that it seems to be the entirety of mainstream music at the moment. To find the decent stuff, you have to really dig deep and that's not fair on our cultural souls.

Now be honest: you didn't expect to see something like this on here, did you?

Post-script: searching for JD videos and the like on YouTube has really skewed the links offered on the sidebar. Lynott and Bowie are strange bedfellows with SAW 'artistes'... Off to clear my search history then...


C 2013.


100 Awesome Musical Things

Part Two - Octopus Jig - The Dubliners
Part Three - Got To Give It Up - Marvin Gaye
Part Four - Who Cares What The Question Is? - The Bees
Part Five - Doctor Who Cold Open - Craig Ferguson
Part Six - Monster Mash - The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
Part Seven -Don't Believe A Word - Thin Lizzy
Part Eight -These Are The Days of Our Lives - Queen
Part Nine - Who Do You Love? - The Doors
Part Ten - The Mooche - The Duke Ellington Orchestra
Part Eleven - I'm Happy Just To Dance With You - The Beatles
Part Twelve - Rabbit - Chas n Dave
Part Thirteen - The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie - Rambling Syd Rumpo
Part Fourteen - I Found a Dream - Marilyn Monroe
Part Fifteen - FBI - The Shadows
Part Sixteen - A Million Miles Away - Rory Gallagher
Part Seventeen - Mr Cole Won't Rock and Roll - Nat King Cole
Part Eighteen - The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy
Part Nineteen - Rock Me Baby - Willie Mae Thornton
Part Twenty - Paint It, Black - The Rolling Stones
Part Twenty-One - The Ghost Song - The Doors

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