I am a bird now

Pop music can be lots of things. Sometimes it is for dancing, sometimes the soundtrack for sex. Sometimes it conveys a political message, sometimes it reflects the sweet nothings of young love. Sometimes it is something wonderful, a thing that reaches beyond its medium and touches you, setting off a resonance that enervates you and invigorates you at the same time, renewing your faith that someone, somewhere, sometimes feels the way you feel, hurts the way you hurt, loves the way you love.

A lot of popular art is glib. While enjoyable enough, it is simply an exercise in an idiom, a means of having fun or simply passing time. I can enjoy that and I’m up for the shouty, singalong pop of bands such as the Kaiser Chiefs, although a whole album is a bit like eating a whole packet of biscuits – you wish you’d shown the sense to stop after one or two. But it can be a great deal more. It can try (and sometimes succeed, sometimes gloriously fail) to express far more than the everyday, to do so with insight and depth.

When it works, it brings on shivers. I don’t need to tell anyone who owns I am a bird now and loves music what I mean. They need only play Hope there’s someone and they know. Music of that level of emotionality, that sophisticated – that satisfying – is rare. Its existence is the reason I love popular music above any other artform, and always will. (Of course, it’s possible to be moved by other forms of music, but there is something about the perfect marriage of voice, word and note that makes pop more lovely for me than Bach, more compelling than Beethoven. Perhaps it is the intimacy, the personality; perhaps I am just not broadly musically educated enough.)

Antony has been compared with Nina Simone, but where Nina delivered her material with a sense of theatricality, at least one eye always on her audience, you could believe Antony wrote these songs to sing on lonely nights in his bedroom. They are direct from the heart, the sound of yearning, the sound of desires you know cannot ever be fulfilled. Some have called them torch songs, but I think of them as boudoir songs. They are not the outward flash of desperate love; they are the sound of a man allowing you to look behind the flash, beckoning you inwards, not forcing himself outwards.

It’s not music you put on in the background while you do the ironing. You try that and you find you are stopping what you are doing, engrossed in the richness of Antony’s voice (what a voice! Like chocolate sauce on peaches, like a velvet pussy wrapped around your cock, like a warm hand on your face... ).

I have seen it suggested that these are songs begging for pity, because they are in the main about Antony’s transsexuality and gender confusion, but they do not strike me that way. Far from pity, they are songs of defiant hope for those of us who still believe that there will come a day when we will have become beautiful, that where we are stunted, we can still hope to bloom, to become what we feel we are, whatever that is.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:22 pm