needs wants acts omissions

Gavin pointed out recently that the first verse of 'pretty woman' by troglodyte orbison contains the lyric, 'you are not the truth'. As someone who has based their life around finding moments of profundity and intellectual perfection in pop music, I'd never noticed this but it does merit some consideration. What it means, either semantically or philosophically, we are unsure.



Pretty Woman is a crazy song, though. At the start, it's just about seeing a fitty on the street and that's that. But by the last verse, we're suddenly talking about needs and his eternal loneliness. Wild extrapolations.

"A need can mean nothing but should be held higher."
-Hot Chip.

A lot of music from around then is good like this. I like songs about unrequited affection, and there surely must be more songs about that than any other subject. But a lot of the songs from the early 60s were about love that was TOTALLY unrequited. I like that. The Chiffons were, of course, the masters of this. Beatles songs were always about having someone, then losing them, or someone being a tease, and you get somewhere but they're never properly yours. 'I want to hold your hand' carries with it the prospect that it could actually happen. Whereas Chiffons songs were always about having NO CONNECTION whatsoever to the person of your dreams. They're just about staring and admiring, never speaking, always dreaming. My dad once dismissed Ys by Newsom as 'Dear Diary music' which is kinda accurate but the chiffons are teenage girl Dear Diary music and it's just wonderful.


"Sooner or later,
....I hope it's not later."

"If I were a queen"


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I remember when there were lynx adverts when I was 17 that featured a guy spraying lynx on his torso and then going out with this clicker thing that had a dial on it. Every time a woman looked at him in any vaguely positive way he'd click it. And people at my schools bought these clicker things and would click away all day. It was, so obviously, a physical manifestation of everything I have ever despised. A competitive element very quickly entered it between the guys, and this quantity not quality principle wasn't helped by the fact that they felt any glance was a sign that the woman felt he was an adonis and all she could hear was 'sweat' by inner circle' going round and round in her head non-stop. So they'd always have improbably high numbers at the end of the day, I mean in the seventies and so on. Cunts, deluded cunts.


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"Why do I always fall in love with any woman who shows the slightest bit of interest in me?"

-That guy from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

"Men always think that whenever women say anything to them it means they want them. We're really just saying things."

-My mum.

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If Roy Orbison had one of those counter things it'd just have one click but he'd have done it so hard the button would be snapped off.

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I mean here's another example of how early 60s american pop always seemed to about distance and walls between people much more than it is now. 'You don't know how I love you' is a really common lyric from that time. You'd never get a popstar singing that these days. It's all about being a prick and imperfection. Which I like too, of course. I'm just saying.



I thought the singer of this song was a girl for a very long time. Nice and androgynous, that's how we like it.


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Incidentally there's a chiffons lyric, "I don't know what I don't know."

Which is much better than Karen O's "I know what I know" if you ask me.


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Check out that. One theme, successfully carried through the whole blog. Bang.