September 14, 2009
feeling like you're spellbound (chapter four excerpt)
sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September
The Swedish songcraft that would migrate toward the market’s imperial core, and eventually come to sound more American than American pop, has an elaborate genealogy flowing from the seventies and eventually becoming the cataract of what might be described as the Cheiron School of Pop which dominated the millennial moment. The most successful Swedish group in history, after ABBA, falls between those two points — and, inevitably, has their greatest success in the United States between 1989-1991, when they produced a two platinum discs and four Number One singles in the United States alone, en route to 45 million units combined sales.
If there is a pop single that in its form and content reaches jubilantly after life beyond care, beyond prohibition, beyond event — reaches after the entire congealed affect of the era — surely it is the last of these singles, which peaked in May of 1991: a kind of realization, found at the end of the time that concerns this book. Farewell to an idea, or to a few; the song is in several regards a synthesis of elements already seen, a demonstration of the ways of understanding the passage coming to an end, a nightcap for the new morning. Summoning first the light psychedelia of sixties counter-pop (especially “Magical Mystery Tour,” from the intro’s hubbub and tour guide through the video’s requisite enigmatic tour bus), the song’s milieu is regardless of its own moment — the moment of Deee-lite, the Da.I.S.Y. Age, Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold.” Per Gessle’s melody — surely having learned as much from Lennon-McCartney as any song of the period — is in turn pure 1991.
Except more so. Within 100 seconds the song has generated five or six separate melodic parts, each one a hook (Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!, they titled one hits collection) which it proceeds to snap together in varying configurations before arriving at an instrumental break which leads into another bridge and a chorus fade — all in a bit more than four minutes. The profligacy is dizzying, perhaps even exhausting, an aerobatic inventiveness insisting that anything’s possible. The order of the parts doesn’t matter; this is the meaning of the song’s form, the endlessly reconfigurable hooks. Pleasure, mobility, infinitude. Feels like flying. The song is called “Joyride” — how could it be anything else? — and horizonless transit is everything. Cars, trains, planes, balloons, and no particular place to go, but everybody’s going there: “Hello you fool I love you: come on join the joyride.” Things get more imperative: “Be a joyrider!” Promises come easy: “I’ll take you on a sky ride, feeling like you’re spellbound.” Yes, that’s it exactly; the spell, the inexhaustible glide, “sunshine is a lady, rocks you like a baby,” whatever. There will be no coming down; the trance that never comes up hard against anything is the very sign of freedom, “it all begins where it ends” and that’s the good news, every straight line — time’s arrow, space’s borders — having been vanquished. This is Roxette’s second most historically charged song.