Easterns, Westerns and Musical Cracksmoke

What, I ask myself, will I write about now? Music.

Now I haven't written much, if at all about music. It has not been a conscious choice, or avoidance. I actually didn't write much about movies (which is surprising, since film is my specialty!) over the course of my blog. Except for recently, or course.

Anyway, tonight I'll write about two groups who are vastly different, but about whom I feel strange, or kind of ironic, or contradictory about loving or liking. Some of you might find it strange when I name the two groups. Particularly, well, The Mamas and Papas. Why would I feel funny, or guilty? No, not for any obvious reasons. It's not even guilt. Guilt is the wrong word. But when I listen to their music, particularly a real favourite of mine, California Dreaming (which Wong Kar-Wai used in his intensely nostalgic film, Chungking Express). Oddly enough, my feelings don't even originate from that film, which is kind of happy, nostalgic, lingering-with-pathos...

So, what is it then?

Well, the fact is that (and I often put the song on deliberately, and I still feel that way, sort of like when you hear "Singing in the Rain" you want to dress up like a droog and do some crazy home invasion and do a bit of the old in-out... Okay, if you don't know the reference, don't ask. It's racy, passé, and risqué. Not passé if you are a film student or scholar, but if you are just a regular bloke. If you get it, you get it. But actually, there is so much activity with that reference, that you mainly just feel like watching the movie, or just perform lines in that English accent he has...

No, well, I still haven't explained yet. I keep going off on diversions... So here it is... Whenever I hear "California Dreaming" sung by the Mamas and the Papas, I want to really slum and smoke crack simultaneously while listening to it! Why? Heck, I don't know! But, I do? If someone offered me some, would I take it, smoke it... Probably not. But it's just there's something very perverse about that music. It makes me feel real different. I want to do something really trashy, something just like the worst. Like be one of the characters in a Ryu Murakami novel. Maybe it's the brown leaves reference. Maybe it's one of the Papas members' infamous free love tendencies or the oozy hippy-dippy lyrics he wrote. I don't know. I find the biography (written up in a recent Atlantic Monthly issue shortly following his death) of the Canadian member of the group fascinating. Man, oh man, this post, and this blog is revealing way to much about myself. Naked past the bone!!!

Next up: The Pet Shop Boys. Some of you may be shocked and go, are you secretly gay? Or something along similar lines. But to me, this is irrelevant. Or maybe it isn't. But I don't really care. I love their cheesy electronic background "instrumentals" (which are the same ones I hate underneath Céline Dion songs!). I love the main singers Eric Idle-ish singing voice. I love the gay-sounding resonance, pathos, etc. I want to turn gay at the point I hear their music. Like some South Park cartoon gone totally real and totally fuzzy and warm... I want to dance with a million gay men and totally take drugs and go totally promiscuous when I hear their music. Maybe this isn't really me, but neither am I one-hundred percent straight. But then who is. Maybe this is the only way I can exercise/exorcise my gay side, or my inner-gay without actually literally completely going gay, since I just can't see giving up my straight life. And really, it wouldn't suit me, going to those clubs all the time, anyway, plucking my leg hairs, bumping and grinding to disco music! If you can't understand the big words I've been using, then eff-you, because, quite honestly, the words aint that big, and if you think I'm actually a "homo," not only is that not the point, you're just stupid. I enjoy listening to myself talk and and watching myself dance!

I love that song, "Send Me An Angel," with its dreamy synth and ridiculous utopia of this always present angel to accompany one on every journey!

Most of all, I love the song, "Can You Forgive Her" because of it's outer space impossibility, it's hatred, it's robotic scorn! I love it's intensity which is so unreal. I, myself, like the "singer' of the song, have so, so frequently felt the same horrible sense of rejection, unrequited love, and loneliness, but this song is soooooooooo soooooooooo soooooooooo sooooooooo soooooooo OVER THE TOP that I just can't HELP being bowled over by the lyrics and tune of this song. There's just something, the lyrics, "too much truth" "ask yourself" the puncutation by ridiculous homicidal off-beats from an almost retro, high-pitched drum-beat, etc. It's just incredible how this song makes me feel. Like I could commit suicide listening to this song. I think if either my life was too good or too bad, I would commit suicide, and to this kind of song. Probably if I was feeling too good. If you feel too bad, the energy and the will and the sheer genius and lack of compunction isn't there. Not that I would do that, but at least the excuse would be far better than just someone feeling revengful or depressed.

Finally, but not least importantly, there is that pivotal song, "Go West" which I played so much, just before I came back to Montreal from Taiwan (the Far East!) back in January, becaused I missed the West, which is what our North America and Europe and so forth is! Ridiculous I know, but entirely not so, at the same time.

Once again, you have that Eric Idle voice (I know it's not actually Eric Idle, but have you ever heard Eric Idle sing "Remember When You're Feeling Down" from the "Organ Donor" section of The Meaning of Life? I feel similar feelings listening to that as I do when I listen to the PSBs.

And anyway, the song is perfect, it is all about "flying high" "going away" leaving our friends behind, "going where the open air is." It"s all about "change the pace of life" and learn and teach." Everything is there that is in my own life. All the references to my own life. And I think I might have listened to that song when I moved from here in Montreal, two years ago, to the East, to Taiwan. So, it's not only about travelling but about changing things, changing the world, doing things "together, where there's so much space."

What else, well, in addition, this latter song, well, let me tell you... This is a blog, so I am allowed to take more liberties with usage, grammar, etc., since it is a little more imitative of speech. Most Taiwanese, I think, are completely unaware of most Western music. Sure, they known The Black Eyed Peas, Madonna, Gwen Stefani, and Céline Dion. But I don't think most Taiwanese are even aware of The Pet Shop Boys. Which brings me to an ad I saw on television which used that very same tune over a pixellated cartoonish Western (cowboy-Western, I mean) setting. Wha? Is this a reference to Brokeback Mountain. The thing is though, they changed a couple of insignificant notes, or the arrangement, or something, so that, well, who knows, but probably so they don't have to pay copyright charges. But so many things are like that in Taiwan, incidental, bizarre, out of context, and strange charming in their complete naivete while creating themselves. This sense of copying something but not copying it, well...the writer Jorge Luis Borges would have loved Taiwan. I miss Taiwan. I really miss Sharon, too. I hope she can be with me here in Montreal soon!