Let's talk about "Sixty-Five Thousand." What's the story there? It's so goofy and cartoonish that there just has to be an explanation. The internet didn't make it easy for me, but I'm getting the sense that this song was inspired by the old Glenn Miller jazz standard "Pennsylvania 6-5000." I mean, Erasure literally yells "Pennsylvania 6-5000" at the beginning of the song, but I more meant like, do the songs sound alike? If you squint, I guess they do? Maybe it's more of an inspiration than anything approaching a cover (or maybe Erasure are just big Abe Simpson fans). In any case, it's a bizarre connection to draw.
"Sixty-Five Thousand" is the least important song on The Innocents, but it's the most indicative of how I feel about this kind of music general—mostly, I'm just confused and confounded by its mysteries. I'm talking about the so-called "'80s music." It's a made-up genre that anyone can immediately pinpoint when they hear it. Why do we group all this music together under the umbrella of an entire decade? The 1980s saw integral releases from such wide-ranging artists as the Clash, Nine Inch Nails, Run D.M.C., Bruce Springsteen, and so on, and yet something like "Sixty-Five Thousand" is immediately pegged as "so fucking '80s that it's almost comical." Why?
(I blame the boomers for being so lazy with canonizing music in the decade after they all came of age, and started to lose their grip on pop culture. "I don't understand this whole music thing anymore, so let's just call any music with a synthesizer '1980s music' and call it a day.")
Lost in all the hubbub is the fact that this music is kind of awesome. My immediate reflex is always going to be "Ha, so '80s," but after listening to Erasure for an entire week, I can't help but be enthralled with this shit. The arena-ready synths, the soaring baritone, the relentlessly thudding bass drum, all of it is of a time and a place, but we're still listening to this shit four decades later because it's actually timeless. There's a reason Judd Nelson pumps his fist in the air at the end of The Breakfast Club, and it isn't because he's about to bone the most popular girl in school—it's because he knows that the music blaring over the football stadium speakers (in this case, Simple Minds, but it easily could've been Erasure) is so goddamn good.
In many ways, this album pairs well with previous Record Club album Kick by INXS. They are two different bands, but they are two sides to the same coin. Many of the tropes that we all spoke of for Kick—the drums, the production, the aura of teased hair and tight pants—are here on The Innocents as well.
Maybe Erasure are taking themselves a little more seriously than INXS, though. Even though I will defend The Innocents as a great album, I think that its complete lack of self-awareness can occasionally be to its detriment. Pick out any lyric on this thing, for an example. I'll go with the opening to "Phantom Bride": "She was a shy girl from the lonely streets / She had no job to do, no friends to meet..." Come to think of it, this kind of reminds me of the Killers too, just completely overwrought lyrics set to a moving soundtrack. I don't know why I'm not giving Andy Bell the same benefit of the doubt that I do Brandon Flowers. It's probably just better that I go along for the ride.
And that's what I did, and what I need to continue to do when it comes to "genres" of music I just don't know anything about (oh god, here he goes again with that shit). It's hard not to talk about the '80s trope employed up and down The Innocents, but it's also lazy as fuck.
That's why I wanted to learn more about "Sixty-Five Thousand." It seems like a weird outlier, its 1980s-ness cranked to 11, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised to hear it soundtrack some shitty 1980s-themed SNL skit. What is that about? I couldn't just leave it at that. I needed to know more. And that goes for all of Erasure. Is it enough for me to just say that I enjoy 1980s-style music and not even know what the fuck that means? Is that lazy? I don't know.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment