THE RULES OF ATTRACTION
February 27, 2004 | 12:00am
Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled," Harlan Ellison once quipped. He should know, given that he’s been married five times (four of them he describes as being "shitty") and written an entire book on the subject. But this constant blurring of distinctions has really made the world the interesting place it is today.
How many pubescent boys have felt the stirrings of first love not from their chests but from beneath their trousers? How many teenage girls have been coaxed to give head to their boyfriends in the name of Cupid and the wish to preserve their maidenhead? It isn’t such a big crime really, only awkward as an inopportune erection and as messy as Kleenex on a moist lip. And what with all the wars being fought in the name of… But that’s another story.
Ultimately, it’s about the oft-repeated formula of "boy-meets-girl" (feel free to rearrange and insert your own sexual-preference), which manages to be the most pleasurable of all clichés. Whether it’s true love or meaningless sex, we can’t help but be enthralled by this oldest of plot lines. Are there any maps to the human heart or any manuals to secure its capture? (Or more importantly, if you have the right car or say the right remembered quotation, will you get laid?)
In cases like these, all bets are off.
Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Rough Trade
There’s a fine-line between homage and outright stealing, a tightrope that only the skilled may traverse. Scottish pop experiment Belle and Sebastian has proven over the years to be quite capable of pulling the feat off with enough grace and verve. It’s an apt compliment given that the group has always been portrayed as fey musical gypsies, but rarely does it get credit for having balls. No doubt anyone who has the temerity to take the piss out of record company agent Seymour Stein, crib lines from sorely missed Nick Drake and borrow musically from everyone from Sandie Shaw, The Smiths and Felt has something going for it than just an adamantium-laced scrotum. Funny thing that it all hangs well, indeed.
On the new album, the superbly titled "Dear Catastrophe Waitress," it’s quite a balancing act the group achieves. From managing to rhyme Tokyo with "Thin Lizzy-oh" (on the appropriately titled I’m a Cuckoo that echoes the classic The Boys Are Back in Town) to the sense of pop history the group brings to each opus, the Glasgow group isn’t afraid to fall on its face and look foolish. With the assured production of Trevor Horn – notorious for his work with lesbo-chic sensation t.A.T.u. and the S&M carnival of Frankie Goes to Hollywood – the group’s songs are given an ABBA pop sheen but nonetheless serve the inherent qualities of the music. Witness how the album shifts gears from the lush instrumentation of the wonderful If She Wants Me to a lone acoustic guitar to accompany Stuart Murdoch’s moving vocal on Piazza, New York Catcher.
Besides the lilting pop textures, the delights of Belle & Sebastian lie in the lyrical content. Oblique but genuinely affecting, the songs capture the zeitgeist of the sexual politics of our generation – from the adolescent dalliances chronicled in past albums, to the mating rituals of grownups as they scramble through clinics, board-rooms and imitation French cafes with their prescriptions for that elusive pill called love.
First single Step Into My Office, Baby is particularly spiky using the language of the office cubicle to offer up a satire on modern romance. The song serves up lines as clever as "She gave me some dictation/ But my strength is in administration/ I took down all she said/ I even took down her little red dress…" that even Nick Hornby would be hard-pressed to think up.
Poignant but always with a wry sense of humor, the album is as simple a pleasure as the sight of an Alka-Seltzer dissolving in a glass of water or the warmness of a moist hand.
Truly for the sickly romantic.
Body Language
EMI
In the book The End of Everything: Postmodernism and the Vanishing of the Human, Stuart Sim writes: "The easier it is to communicate, the more we become divorced from meaningful human contact." Technology, he posits, robs us of our individuality and thus effectively stunts the growth of truly genuine relationships amongst ourselves. In this "post-humanist" world, neither emotion nor sensation can have any place.
Obviously, he’s never heard Kylie Minogue. Reinventing herself once again, this time as a Bridget Bardot-styled Idoru, Minogue sings about the rules of attraction albeit in an age where "love" viruses abound and the phrase "making Mr. Right" is a genetic and technological possibility. On Chocolate, she sings, "If love were human it would know me…" while on Sweet Music she exalts that her love won’t be consummated on a "feather bed," this is no "exotic affair." Instead, she’s got "samples and scratches…" and "every mad effect must be sent to get me high." Ms. Minogue clearly isn’t a Luddite.
And she isn’t subtle either. It’s not only that the lines aren’t plain enough (well, it doesn’t get more forward than "let’s do it right here, baby…"), but it’s the way she delivers each word. Hot to trot, she repeated that one word "come" from her last album with the invitation to do so on her stomach. She isn’t bashful and, unlike someone like Madonna (who is a baby step away from menopause), doesn’t look awkward in being so. And with not an acoustic guitar to be heard, Minogue emerges as the avatar of "modem love."
Not that this is all groundbreaking; pundits will leave that achievement to Björk. However, this is pop music that will keep the bodies in your party moving – especially if its location is a fur-lined spaceship wherein all the occupants are cavorting naked in zero gravity.
No dogs allowed, though. (Sorry, Laika.)
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