April 05, 2009
Rght Here, Right Now (Introduction)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
Looking across the career of the London band Jesus Jones throws into exacting relief one of the great mysteries: how it is that undistinguished figures can, in a given instant, leap beyond the possible and make something entirely true. Recorded in spring of 1990 but not released until 1991, “Right Here, Right Now” is one of the two songs most identified with the Fall of the Wall, at least in the Anglophone West. It is, more or less, perfect. It was as if they had been waiting for the moment all their lives.
That is what the song is about, of course: “I was alive and I waited, waited,” sings Mike Edwards, reaching for an exultant, befuddled falsetto. “I was alive and I waited for this.” This is the events of 1989, the sudden collapse of the global arrangements and antagonisms known as the Cold War. Behind the lead vocal, in the push-pull of instruments and microchips that organizes the musical track, a fanfare swells as it follows the melody into the chorus, the uplift of “Right here, right now, there is no other place I wanna be — right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.” Apparently Edwards and Fukuyama had been reading the same books, though the singer has perhaps dog-eared as well a page of Joyce’s Ulysses.
It’s a compact track, almost exactly the fabled three minutes that define the classic pop song; two brief verses, lots of chorus. The mix of analog and digital sounds is itself a mini-essay of the state of Anglo pop just then, the balance of rock tradition and the insurgent forms of hip-hop and electronic dance musics. Appropriately, the lyric takes the world-historical convulsion not as a general wonderment, but as a specific problem for pop music. “Woman on the radio talks about a revolution,” begins the vocal, “but it’s already passed her by.” The line targets Tracy Chapman, the folk singer whose self-titled debut had reached Number One in both the U.S. and U.K. in 1988 — and particularly sets its sights on “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution,” which encapsulated Chapman’s plaintive blend of progressive liberalism and acoustic guitar that would launch eight million discs. The second verse in its entirety aims its charge at Prince’s 1987 single “Sign O’ The Times” and that song’s catalog of hints that the end times are near. In “Right Here, Right Now,” Prince’s social Armageddon, like Chapman’s “revolution,” is a visionary leap lacking a real occasion, and so disingenuous. “I saw the decade end when it seemed the world could change at the blink of an eye,” runs the Jesus Jones report from 1990, “and if anything, then there’s your sign — of the times.”
That accounts for almost the entirety of the song’s two verses, but not quite. If Edwards seemingly hasn’t the chutzpah to name names as he fires shots across the bow of political pop, he screws his courage to the sticking place in the only remaining line of the song, the end of the first verse: “Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about — you know it feels good to be alive.” Fanfare, chorus.
It is easy enough to poke fun at the utopian whispers and creeping apocalypticism of the gloomy artistes, and the song doesn’t pass the opportunity by. But behind this there is an unspoken question that makes the song finally haunting: what does pop music do when it does have this to sing about? Pop music as we understand it: something not much older than the Berlin Wall, something which could be the Soviet Union’s grand-daughter. Having turned its 200-second attentions on a fairly regular basis to politics, to social change, to revolution, what does pop music do when confronted with an overwhelming surfeit of same?