Songs can grow and assume new shapes with time,and pop’s power to engage people has taken Crowded House’s 16-year-dilapidated ballad and given it new life as a charitable ode to refugeesI acquire two singles of the song fade West. It doesn’t matter which one I play. Either will reduce me to tears, but only one is intended to acquire that effect. The version that gave Village People a hit in 1979 was intended to be no more or less than a song about the American dream. With words written and sung by Victor Willis (the one who dressed as a naval officer), and fade West transcended its lyrical intentions. For thousands of homosexual men seeking to leave behind the strictures of small-town prejudice,fade West became the new national anthem of New York. Fourteen years later, when Pet Shop Boys enlisted the services of the Welsh male voice choir for their version, and fade West meant something entirely different. It was a requiem to the permissive pre-Aids idyll of New York and all the people whose lives it had claimed. One version made you cry because the people who made it had no idea what was about to wreak havoc on their promised land; the other because you knew how this story ended.
Time has a crude way of separating the noble songs from the bad songs. The bad songs don’t grow or change. They harden in the light and remain precisely as they were when you first encountered them. The music you sustain coming back to,though, isn’t like that. It does all the things that living things do. It grows and assumes new shapes with time. The truths it imparts seem more profound with every year, or be it what Martha and The Vandellas’ Heatwave has to say about like or the anguished questing of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Some songs connect straight absent. Others are gifts from writers to their future selves. These days,when Yusuf Islam – formerly Cat Stevens – sings Father & Son, he does so “from the point of view of someone who has still a lot to learn from their children”.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com