Some music takes on emotional qualities outside the bounds of the music itself. What it may represent in different stages of our lives can carry forward as visceral recollections. (Image courtesy The English Beat/ IRS Records / DaveWakeling.com All Rights Reserved)
This is a story about autonomic physiology: mine.
But first, listen to this. (Well, actually listen to it after you read the blog, OK?)
I know, I know. It’s a boppy bit of disposable dance club groove, from the last century no less. Nothing to see here, right?
Hang on and give me a minute.
That song, Tears of a Clown, was written, perhaps unexpectedly, by Smoky Robinson, which may or may not matter much to the conversation. His version is okay, but in my estimation the song achieves its zenith in the version linked above. That one is by The English Beat. Why do I care so much about a clever bit of pop-inflected doggerel about a fella in a busted relationship trying to get back on track?
The English Beat plays a kind of pop music called “ska”. It’s got a rich history that influenced countless musicians in many genres, to say nothing of providing an un-sit-still-able rhythm for countless college parties.
I’m old enough to say that I was born in the last millennium, along with the song. Not quite an ancient crone yet, I’m nonetheless old enough to recall a different era for media, for music, and for social reactions to both.
It’s always a risk when a person who ought to know better reaches back to his or her adolescent musical preferences and tries to sound hip. It dangerously limns pretense, to say nothing of inadvertent comedy. It also perilously implies a desire to pursue time’s arrow backward. But music from everyone’s youth always holds a special sway. Sensations of all sorts are new in everyone’s adolescence, no matter where or with whom you lived at the time, and the geologic pressure of successive years piling up fossilizes memory. Intense moments of sensual, visceral pleasure become reinforced with subsequent mental recollection, which is why we can conjure our teenage years in sparkling detail and cannot recall what we made for breakfast this morning.
The last twenty percent of the twentieth century still hadn’t fully delivered the emerging global economy, but in the final few decades the dawning golden light of change had started to crest the horizon. We could feel it coming. With the World Wide Web still a few years away, the fastest bridges among cultures remained music and movies and books. Music, of course, is the wellspring of youthful passion, and mixed with nascent political awareness propelled by an infectious beat, music can present an irresistible gravitational pull to millions around the world.
That takes us back to The English Beat.
I grew up in a high school and a town that hardly knew much about history or geography. Musical tastes among my peers rarely left Top 40 playlists, and political and social awareness were not subjects worthy of any attention.
That wasn’t true in my home (I’m deeply grateful to declare that it was a great place), which inevitably meant I didn’t always fit in when I went to school. My personal interests diverged from what was cool among peers, and I couldn’t wait to venture outward, to travel beyond. Occasionally I’d find a way to discover something that felt as if it had been smuggled in from enlightened, more worldly cognocenti. After being captured by The English Beat’s infectious, eponymous sound, I discovered they were also a multi-racial band slyly poking critique at the stratified British class structure, a socially conscious spoonful of sugar for the dance floor. In their song Stand Down Margaret, I remember mistakenly believing that title and repeated lyric was a plea for Margaret Thatcher to find a way to avoid war in the Falkland Islands. Ironically, that error could very well have been an appropriate interpretation of the song, but the song turns out to have be broader in its goals. In it, the lead singer Ranking Roger actual asks the Iron Lady to simply step down from power, claiming she was largely unmoved about the social circumstances of working class people, while simultaneously maintaining a belligerent cold war stance on the global stage.
The English Beat didn’t rack up a huge shelf of records, but Roger and the band’s other co-lead Dave Wakeling had a huge influence, not least of which was on me.
I’m a not collector of Beat memorabilia, nor some sort of discographic completist, or even a super-fan who’s followed them closely. But here in the 21st century, it’s inevitable: when summertime sets the calendar aglow with sun, and I encounter a tune from The English Beat, propelled by their irresistible rhythms fused with sprightly voices and a brassy back line, I’m transported as if by a musical madeleine. I’m young again, full of promise, full of hope. Without fail, even after just a few notes, I spontaneously want to believe there’s a shiny world of joy just beyond my reach, with creative, optimistic artists determined to get people to dance without abandoning a desire to influence the world well beyond the dance floor.