I decided to not save the best for last. This is conclusively my favorite Stephin Merritt song, because it’s exceptional in several ways. Of course, it’s just a very simple progression with several bits of bridge and the title is used many times as a tag-line in the Tin Pan Alley style (consider how many times you hear the name of the song in a Richard Rodgers tune; it surely exceeds the much troped-about self-referentiality in hip-hop songs). This song really makes a case for shoegaze not as a genre but rather as something you DO to a song…it is probably the closest Merritt could come to My Bloody Valentine without pissing off the neighbors in his Village studio apartment, since the creation of that effect generally depends on a maximum of volume. But, certainly, he’s captured the same woozy-feeling created by noise that made Loveless so appealing to me when I was on meds after getting my wisdom teeth out. Pianos crash together.
Of course, in trad Meritt style, we don’t hear anything concrete about the lover in the song, just metaphor, and even that doesn’t give us a feeling of who we are…we wouldn’t know the boy if we saw him. Previously, I heard the lyric as “there are whole new kinds of leather” (it’s “weather”), which led me to declare this the most effectively, comfortably gay song I knew, but without that modernism, I like to imagine the singer as, say, Nero, what with all the dramatic and spinning imagery (Busby Berkeley?), I can’t actually stop thinking of Fellini’s Satyricon, which deals with boylove in such a grand style.
0 Responses to “When My Boy Walks Down The Street”