the great songs (xiii) - the winner takes it all

There was a time when I would never have admitted to having a song like this in amongst my favourite tracks...but no longer. August 1980 was a halcyon month in the charts - ABBA and David Bowie vying for the number 1 slot with this song and Ashes to Ashes respectively before The Jam took over in early September with Start! Heady days, if we had but known it.

The Winner Takes It All famously documents the marriage breakdowns within the band (although they denied it was quite so explicit). In doing so, they crafted the perfect pop song: great melodies (as ever), perfect singing, lyrics that resonate with people like us, a video that laid bare the emotional traumas being sung and the final, desperate vulnerability in the singing of the lines,

I apologise if it makes you feel bad,
seeing me so tense, no self-confidence
but, you see, the winner takes it all.

ABBA were a great gift in the 70s and early days of the 80s.

the great songs (xii) - raise the roof

I could have populated this list with a number of songs by Everything But The Girl (possibly Apron Strings or maybe Mirrorball or Flipside) but I'm going to go for one of Tracey Thorn's solo offerings, Raise The Roof (off her 2007 album Out Of The Woods). Again, she could have featured more than once on this list - I have an intense love for Too Happy, the song that closed her short-but-sweet debut solo 1982 album A Distant Shore.

But I've chosen this one because of its instantaneous impact, the infectious beat and the (as always) gorgeous singing - it's got it all really. A song that guarantees I'll be dancing round the kitchen. Play it loud!

Put the music on
put the music on
put the music on
they all wanna dance....

And you do it with love!

I guess I ought to apologise to the kitchen.

Mary Oliver: Ocean

I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each one of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.


(from Red Bird, p.15)

dilemma

if a poem
is a
work
of art

and i write
a poem
but don't
work

on it,
shaping, sieving, splicing;

does that mean
it is simply

art?

the great songs (xi) - tears in heaven

It's only recently that I've come to appreciate Eric Clapton - in particular, his albums Slowhand and 461 Ocean Boulevard are hugely enjoyable and full of class. This song is not his usual milieu but is worthy of any list.

The background to the song is well-known (the death of his young son in an accident) and it may well be that such a harrowing genesis puts the listener in a difficult position: to dismiss the song could be thought heartless, and to enjoy it, macabre. In that way it bears some resemblance to Yoko Ono's work Season Of Glass.

Well, it isn't enjoyable and it ought not to be dismissed. It is harrowing and painful. It asks profoundly difficult questions. Isn't that what music ought to do, if it is being honest? This is not art as artifice; it is the expression of life on fetid ground, within a stained cosmos and in search of genuine hope.

The question, 'Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?' is heavy with pathos; how could a parent bear an answer that was negative? And his observation, 'I know I don't belong here in heaven', is searing. Why not? Because your life is not yet ended? Or because it is a place of innocence and innocents and you know you're neither? It is a comment that ought to compell all gospel servants to stand alongside the broken and lost.

Too profound for a list like this.

Too important not to be on it.

two new books

I know, this seems to go against what I blogged a few weeks back - I'd only buy a new book when I'd finished three old ones. But who's to say I haven't just finished six books that were already on my shelf? Prove me wrong if you can....

Anyway, I'm 'fessin up to the following new books and will try to write mini-reviews in due course.

Darkness is my only companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight (subtitled: A Christian Response To Mental Illness)

The God I Don't Understand - Christopher J h Wright

Worth checking out, methinks.

thhe great songs (x) - thrasher

Agricultural mechanisation as metaphor for the challenge of time and change in personal relationships? It could only be Neil Young.

His 1979 offering, Rust Never Sleeps, marries one side of acoustic material with one side of full-out rock. It opens and closes with the same track, giving the album its thematic cohesion but the two tracks that ultimately define the album and corral its essence are Thrasher (acoustic) and Powderfinger (electric). Both are worthy of appearing in this list (and checking-out on Spotify) but the former will have to suffice.

Many have seen references in the song to Young's relationship with the other members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and it's hard not to see their shadows in its lines:

I searched out my companions
who were lost in crystal canyons,
when the aimless blade of science
slashed the pearly gates.
It was then that I knew I'd had enough
burned my credit card for fuel;
headed-out to where the pavement turns to sand.
With a one-way ticket to the land of truth
and my suitcase in my hand
how I lost my friends
I still don't understand.
They had the best selection;
they were poisoned with protection.
There was nothing that they needed,
nothing left to find.
They were lost in rock formations
or became park bench mutations;
on the sidewalks and in the stations
they were waiting, waiting.
So I got bored and left them there;
they were just dead weight to me.
Bbetter down the road
without that load.

And yet the song is not merely personal; the metaphors work well and burrow deep. Time works ravages - for persons and societies. Not all progress is really so. And a day will come when hands will be raised, no longer in resistance and yet not in surrender; rather, they will be raised one final time to herald the end with dignity:

And when the thrasher comes
I'll be stuck in the sun,
like the dinosaurs in shrines.
But I'll know the time has come
to give what's mine.

A long, rambling song, fit for a long and rambling life. Long may you run, Neil.

again: Mam

Mam

mary oliver: red bird

Red bird came all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Of course I love the sparrows,
those dun-coloured darlings,
so hungry and so many.

I am a God-fearing feeder of birds,
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.

Still, for whatever reason -
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,

or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens -
I am grateful

that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do.


(Mary Oliver, Red Bird, p.1, Bloodaxe Books 2008)

becoming real

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I supose you are Real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

extract from The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjery Williams

Ferguson on Calvin on Jesus' humanity

From this interview, these words:

In my own view probably no theologian has understood the deep humanity of the Lord Jesus better than Calvin, and it seems to me that is often the measure not only of a man's mind, but also of his heart.

the great songs (ix) - pressing on

This great song is off the much-vilified Bob Dylan album, Saved. Because of his declared Christian faith, many people disliked the previous album Slow Train Coming but it seemed to fare better in the review-stakes than its successor did. But I've always had a soft spot for it and this song in particular (I ought to add that I only came to know it much later than when it first appeared in about 1980).

What I like is the intensity of the song and the way it builds & builds. I also love the observation,

Temptation's not an easy thing,
Adam given the devil rein;
cos he sinned I got no choice,
it run in my veins...
but 'm pressing on.

That's what I want to do, too.

84

was your mother's number
and now you've made it
yours,
but not by
choice or design -
too early
and far
too soon.


(for Mam)

r s thomas: a marriage

We met
       under a shower
of bird-notes.
       Fifty years passed,
love's moment
       in a world in
servitude to time.
       She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
       closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
       'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
       partner for
the last dance. And she,
       who in life
had done everything
       with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
       for the shedding
of one sigh no
       heavier than a feather.

spotification

Just wanted to say what a great thing Spotify is - ok, so the free version means you get a 15-second or so advert now & again (roughly once during an album's worth of music) but it's definitely worth it.

Been listening to the new U2 album on Spotify this weekend (No Line On The Horizon) - it's certainly a grower. Looking forward to turning-up the lyrics somewhere to find out what it's all about. They were playing on the Jonathan Ross show last night and I went to bed listening to Zooropa on headphones - it's a far better album than I ever realised; perfect late-night listening.

Alongside U2 I've been listening to Bob Dylan's aged Shot Of Love album from yonks ago - now that's really worth a listen too. Surprisingly so.

So thumbs-up to Spotify from this corner of the room.

formed by the form

Commenting on the form that is the Gospel (of Mark, in this case), Eugene Peterson makes these observations:

"Gospel story" is a verbal way of accounting for reality that, like the incarnation that is its subject, is simultaneously divine and human. It reveals, that is, it shows us something we could never come up with on our own by observation, experiment or guess; and at the same time it engages, brings us into the action as recipients and participants, but without dumping the responsibility on us for making it turn out right.

This has enormous implications for the way we live, for the form itself protects us against two of the major ways in which we go off the rails: becoming frivolous spectators who clamour for new and exotic entertainment out of heaven; or becoming anxious moralists who put our shoulders to the wheel and take on the burdens of the world. The very form of the text shapes responses in us that make it hard to become a mere spectator or a mere moralist. This is not a text that we master, it is one that we are mastered by.

Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, p.182

the great songs (viii) - a man is in love

For years, all I knew of The Waterboys was the monumental Whole Of The Moon and that they employed a big music sound.

Things move on. People change. They grow. So here is A Man Is In Love from their album, Room To Roam.

A delightful song, showcasing how great Irish folk music can be but, more than anything, I'm posting this one as a very, very fine example of that overlooked yet necessary genre: the love song.

Here is writing that displays great craft and music of joy and vibrancy. I don't think any more needs to be said.

the great songs (vii) - walking on thin ice

I've held back a little from this one but it had to come at some point. Yoko Ono's Walking On Thin Ice is an achievement that it has never been possible to dispassionately assess or appreciate separately from the circumstances in which it appeared.

This is the song John & Yoko were working on the night that Lennon was murdered. The value he placed on the song is seen in the comments about it that formed part of Yoko's statement that filled the back-cover of the single sleeve.

When John and Yoko said in the summer of 1980 that their new work was dance-oriented, some of us (me especially) lamented the impact of the disco genre on their work. What we didn't know was that the dance club scene of New York in those days was anything but disco. This is dance music of a different order.

There is so much that can and ought to be said, somewhere, about the musical art of Yoko Ono. This is undoubtedly not that place...but I'll happily add a little grist to that particular mill.

The title is resonant of a deep stream of imagery in Yoko's musical work. The images of glass and ice recur regularly and stand as metaphors of pain and of a suffocating quiesence, a use made all the more startling by the anger that often surfaces with its own jagged edges. The pairing of 'knife' and 'life' is also the expected one; only the bleeding is absent here.

Yoko's winter milieu may be due to being raised in Japan (one assumes it cold there) but, whatever the origin, it's the dominant season in her work - Winter Song; Is Winter Here To Stay? and Looking Over From My Hotel Window on the album Approximately Infinite Universe all trade in its currency.

And so it's no surprise that this girl is walking on thin ice. There is danger - imminent danger. There is freedom - but it is fragile and threatened. There is death - and it is inevitable and irreversible.

It's a long track and benefits from a return (in the middle & closing sections) to some of the non-verbal vocal expression that marked Yoko's earlier work (one reviewer of the album that followed that summer, Season of Glass, asked where the primal screaming was when we needed it most - a rather lame grasp of the nature of her grief, and of her art).

The guitar work on this song by John (the last he would ever record) has been celebrated and it is certainly in keeping with the song's vehement fragility. The song would never have fitted on either Double Fantasy, nor what would become the posthumous release Milk & Honey. It was always intended to be a single in its own right, with Yoko both A and B-side*. Rightly so.

They say the lake is as big as the ocean.
I wonder if she knew about it?

Its dimensions and depths were only just to be discovered.

I may cry some day
but the tears will dry, whichever way;
and when our hearts return to ashes
it'll be just a story
it'll be just a story.

*The actual B-side is an older song of Yoko's - It Happened opens here with dialogue recorded between John and Yoko on a stroll through Central Park. The song is both sweet and sad and carries, along with its A-side, an almost prophetic quality ("It happened at a time of my life when I least expected...and I know there's no return, no way").

nb: Happily, but unintentionally, this has been posted on Yoko's 76th birthday.

begotten

no part
of my life
has been lived without
you; separation is not
isolation nor dislocation.
always present in
time, always, in the
breathed air of
chromosomic attachment
and loving, maternal embrace.

facing now a future
of severance,
i plunge
in chaos.