The Magnetic Fields released a new album recently. Or maybe not. It says on their website it is a March release, yet everyone is talking about it as though they hold it already. Love At The Bottom Of The Sea it’s called, and from all reports it’s a winner. That’s good news. I should buy a copy if they’re already out there; wait until March and buy if not. It has synthesizers again. As long as it’s somewhat still juvenescent and not for theatre and culture nerds.
This another drama song. From Shut Up: Flower Boy Band. This time, however, it’s a drama about a band, this being their song, so… it’s different. Maybe. It’s not music merely soundtracking moments and the emotions bound to them but also music as outward, in-story expressions of those moments and emotions. Oh what this simple song stirs.
Like all portrayals of bands on TV shows there is so much that irks me, so much i wish i could change about Flower Boy Band. There is this bland, restrictive perception of music – how it should be done, who should do it, who shouldn’t do it, what it should aspire to – that is concomitantly promoted by so many fictional (and of course so many real) bands and this show is no exception. It turned me off at first, but it turns out this show is not so much about the music as it is about social class and friendship, supremely and heart-squishingly depicting both, and now i cannot live without it.
And in turn i can’t live without this song. It’s funny how much a song and a band becomes that much more agreeable when other avenues open up to know them. It’s not a terrible song to begin with but now with the show behind it it has been raised so high for me. If i could get to know every bland boy indie rock band as well as i do Eye Candy – indeed, if every bland boy indie rock band had as great a story as do Eye Candy, were as overwhelmingly decent people as are Eye Candy – i’d like a lot of boring music. There is some guitar stuff that i could do with out and of course it’s there, but when you know the significance that lead guitar part plays in the show it is inseparable. This show is great. Great! The best depiction of male friendship on television since Freaks and Geeks.
There never was an episode of Quantum Leap where we saw how those left behind yet affected by Sam Beckett carried on with their lives. There might have been. I don’t think i’ve seen every episode. I really want to watch it again. I’ve picked a great time to decide, now that the summer’s past and school is in at last. Yup. Back to school today. I’m not looking forward to it.
I am coming to think of this band as the Dr. Samuel Beckett of punk: Coming from another time to ours (or at least from another country to ours) for the briefest yet most vital moment, setting everything right, saving me. Then a week later they jump and we never see them again, and i’m left only with their album, the memory of seeing them and a space forever in my heart for de Høje Hæle. Oh boy. I wonder if we will ever see them again. I wonder if they’re still a band.
Oh how i wish i was young again. Edwyn Collins was 20 years old when this song came out. I remember wishing the same thing at 20. This is a weird song. It starts of expectedly sweet but then descends into some dark discordant where’d-the-song-go part with freeform poetry over it. It was 1980 after all. Orange Juice hadn’t settled yet – hadn’t had the pulp taken out yet, to labour an obvious metaphor. I liked the pulp. I have this record. The diecut brown sleeve version. How the heck did i manage that?
What i want to do is rewatch every Hong sisters drama, and watch and then rewatch those few i haven’t yet seen. That’s some life goal i have there. It would make me very happy, though. IU wrote this song herself. Scratch one up for the artistic-merit-and-worth-through-ability-to-create crowd.
Again. I asked a friend of mine about her and learned that she was considered extremely pretty, had chart and fan rivalry with another singer, Kang Soo Ji, and there were a lot of rumours surrounding her such as she having a secret baby with an African king. The person i got this information from was 7 years old at the time.
It goes back further, and probably further still. This is from 1992, and i may be wrong in my narrow, nascent scope of things, but she really seems like the cataclysmic first of her kind. Or on a wave with similar firsts of their kinds. Very young, popular and touring outside of Korea, songwriting help from overseas (Tommy Page). That’s all i could get. There is little information about her in English. There was at one stage little information about Lio in English, but you can run French through google translate a whole lot more easily than Korean. I think she might become my Korean Lio.
So i have these songs, and despite wanting to put everything in some context, maybe that’s enough. She seems like the IU of her day. That’s probably a fair estimation to the image she put out and the love she received. Her singing career only seems to have lasted two years though, until 2010 when she made a comeback with an album that is really good and that, if it weren’t so proficiently and orthodoxly produced and steered away from punk in that way all Korean indie music seems to be, could join Club 8, Sambassadeur or Tiny Fireflies in what they do.
And of course all information i’ve uncovered on her is in relation to this current promotion, with only a mention that she happened to be pretty famous in the early 90′s. I don’t mean to in my way hamper her present efforts, but it’s the early 90′s that i want.
Every Vacaciones song i’ve posed bar one has been from Sonreir, and that one was a cover. It figures. It probably is one of my favourite albums of all time, but that favour has come at the expense of everything else they have done, including their other album Emmaboda. I heard it and in some reactive, comparative distaste i don’t think i’ve listened to it all the way through more than once. It no doubt is perfectly fine – great even. Just not as great as Sonreir. The songs are longer, the band sounds older, something has been lost. But i’m sure not too much. Sonreir is just so good and captures Vacaciones at just their right time. It’s hard to tear myself from it. Here’s a song from it. The first.
