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Happy new year! Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing. I’m delighted to be kicking off a second year of “Keeping Up” with the first of what I’m aiming to be weekly bulletins—no promises, of course! Anyway, as ABBA once admonished, with surprising sternness, in a song that was originally titled “Daddy Don’t Get Drunk on Christmas Day”: “Happy new year, happy new year / May we all have our hopes, our will to try / If we don't we might as well lay down and die.”
I was sad to read this week of the passing, at the age of 64, of Alan Rankine, the co-founder/guitarist/keyboard player of the Scottish post-punk band The Associates. The band’s singer and other co-founder, Billy Mackenzie, died from suicide in 1997. My introduction to The Associates, whose star burned brightly and briefly in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, was courtesy of Simon Reynolds’s classic 2005 book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978—1984. Reynolds’ impassioned description of the band’s idiosyncratic style prompted me to seek out their music, and the first song of theirs I heard was the one I’ll share now as this week’s quick rec, 1982 single “Party Fears Two”.
The song crashes in like a glitter-encrusted steam train, with a rubbery, hyperactive bassline high in the mix, skipping drums, and itchy rhythm guitar underpinning an attenuated, almost ABBA (them again!)-esque piano riff that we’ll later discover also functions as the song’s chorus.
Then, Mackenzie’s baroquely operatic vocals enter the fray: “I’ll have a shower / And then phone my brother up / Within the hour / I’ll smash another cup!” I burst out laughing when I heard this for the first time—the banal domestic distress of the lyrics is afforded such high, cinematic drama by the musical accompaniment and vocal delivery.
The song barrels forward relentlessly from here, the lyrics get darker, and McKenzie’s multi-octave wail gets increasingly frantic until, just past the three-minute mark, he questions—barely coherently—of an offscreen lover:
Have I done something wrong?
What’s wrong’s the wrong that’s always in wrong?
At the end of that final “wrong”, Mackenzie’s voice flies upwards into a ludicrously high pitch, as if he’s been sucked into a wind tunnel mid-performance. He’s suddenly replaced by a multi-tracked chant of ghost Billy Mackenzies, who “whoa-oh, whoa-oh” us to the song’s conclusion. The effect is funny, silly, surprising, spectacular, and genuinely haunting: a description that suits much of The Associates’ music.
The Rankine-Mackenzie era of The Associates (Rankine left the band in 1982) only produced two full-length LPs—1980’s The Affectionate Punch, 1982’s Sulk—and a singles collection, 1981’s Fourth Drawer Down. They’re all excellent, and it’s very sad that now both men responsible for this innovative work are no longer with us.
Before I go, I wanted to give a shout-out to a truly excellent piece of longform writing, over at the website Bright Wall/Dark Room, by the critic Nicholas Russell on James Gray’s Armageddon Time, one of last year’s most perilously underrated (and sadly under-seen) movies.
I saw Armageddon Time at Cannes, and it struck me as one of the most blunt, layered, and appropriately downbeat films I’d ever seen about intra-ethnic dynamics and the way racism operates in America. Russell, unlike a number of critics who chose to interpret Gray’s film as a simplistic white guilt manifesto, agrees, and dives in with great depth, clarity and rigor. Here’s a very brief and illuminating excerpt, but I certainly recommend reading the whole thing:
Often, such suburban dramas present a blurred line between greed and the achievement of the dreams of past generations, a devil’s bargain made worthwhile in the name of family. Often, the whiteness—or non-whiteness—of the characters involved is not put into question. In Armageddon Time, Gray recollects a Jewish American transition into whiteness and reiterates the harmful degree to which some sought that whiteness at the expense of anti-Black and -brown bigotry. Most notable is the way that this bigotry is offensive rather than defensive. Which is to say, nothing particularly untoward happens to Paul or the Graffs. Rather, it’s through Paul’s proximity to the supposedly amoral influence of Johnny that his parents dig in, parroting NIMBY alarmist concerns about crime and the other, the implication being that their family has worked too hard and too long to let undeserving lowlifes take their status away from them.
Until next week!
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