Day 21 – The 30 Day Song Challenge – A Song that you listen to when you’re happy...

Song 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy...  – ‘I still remember’ – Bloc Party



Bloc Party

I only just noticed that I’ve followed a song called ‘Remember me’ with one called ‘I still remember’.  Amateur psychologists might want to read something into ‘remember me’ being the angry song and ‘I still remember’ being the happy song.  There’s maybe some significance there.  Hmmm!  Of course the ‘song I like to dance to’ was also called ‘remember me’ and that doesn’t fit the pattern so who knows.

Happy seems a much more straightforward and uncomplicated emotion than angry.  Perhaps there’s something in that Tolstoy quote ‘Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.   Maybe we don’t dwell on happiness in the way we dwell and brood on anger or sadness.  If you’re happy you can just get on with your life.  Misery demands dissection.

Bloc Party - I still remember

Bloc Party are a band that have written a few songs that I absolutely love, but albums that I rarely seem to make it all the way through.  This song, from their ‘Weekend in the City’ album of 2007, isn’t supposed to be particularly happy, more to do with fond memories.  I love the melody, the way the bass carries the song forwards, the almost ‘call and response’ of the singer and backing singers, the chiming guitar.  The lyric doesn’t particularly speak to me but there are some great lines in there that really strike a chord.  It does sum up a feeling of giddy new love, when you’re not quite sure about how the other person feels, when you’re full of that scary nervous excitement. 

It’s a feeling that I’m sure I thought would leave with age, but it hasn’t yet and I don’t suppose that it ever will.  There’s a great line in ‘High Fidelity’ (the book) from the narrator when he talks about meeting a new woman he really fancies and how he’s hoping to bump into her, hoping she’ll call, contriving reasons to talk.  ‘I’m nearly 40, when will I just grow up.’  That’s a total misquote but, as I lent the book to someone, I can’t look it up.  I was reading through some Thomas Hardy poems a couple of months ago looking for a good wedding reading.  I read a number of the love poems he wrote when he was in late middle age and they’re devastating good.  Love is not the province of the young.  And I much prefer Hardy the poet to Hardy the novelist.

Here’s one of them...

I LOOK into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then, I, undistrest	5
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;	10
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide. Thomas Hardy.

Just a quick word about the video.  The lyric to me seems pretty transparently the story of a crush between two teenage boys.  And yet the video doesn’t allude to this at all.  It would have been nice if it could have done, although I do accept this song is about relationships rather than gay or straight relationships.

David Millington

21^st April 2011

Nottingham