I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #36:
I can just picture it. A vision of me in the future, chasing off the ne’er-do-well riff-raff rapscallions in my neighborhood — yelling “You kids get off my lawn!” — waving aloft a copy of Singles Going Steady instead of a cane.
Why this different kind of tension? Could be because I’m suddenly feeling old, due in no small part to current TV commercials for the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), being breezily run to a new kind of tune - that specifically being an old kind of tune, the Buzzcock’s seemingly chipper single-gone-steady “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” from 1979.
A sentiment that is possible, I guess, if you ignore the bulk of the song's tongue-in-cheek lyrics, which cheerfully chatter away about “Always wanting something you never can get,” while accentuating the positive affirmation that “Life's an illusion, love is a dream / Life's an illusion love, is a dream…”
I hope the old folks at home have a modern hi-fi that can play one of those new-fangled 33 1/3 RPM phonograph records, because they should get, initially, a real kick out of A Different Kind Of Tension. Oh sure, they can turn up the hearing aids to eleven and enjoy the hook-heavy and manic punk-pop frenetic thrill - especially if they tune out the caustic and aching lyrics.
Such economically infectious songs as “Paradise,” “You Say You Don’t Love Me,” and “I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life” center around everyday frustrations, romantic hopes, and inevitable heartbreak - but they don’t really ask for much. “I'm not expecting things to be perfect / But a high success rate would be nice,” sings mainstay and chief songwriter Pete Shelley in “I Don’t Know.” It’s the expression of a man with more than a little once-bitten wariness: “Though I've got this special feelin' I'd be wrong to call it love / For the word entails a few things that I would be well rid of” (“You Say You Don’t Love Me”).
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