January 08, 2010
top 25 songs of 2009: song 1
"I'm Not Your Toy," La Roux. So melodies this good come along a lot less than once a year, which doesn't entirely get at what's so compelling about the song (though it goes a long way).
There's something seductive about how easily it wears its borrowed clothes, like the Oscar Wilde reference that Chryssie Hynde quoted long ago but which returns here changed, the scene moved from a gutter to a rooftop, the stars now just sky — the distances are a bit closer, but the chasm no less grand. Indeed, the opening simile is supernally romantic: "love, love is like a stubborn youth that you'd rather just deny." But it doesn't overplay the gesture: one doesn't quite notice the song's lace shirtcuffs at first, peeking out from beneath its angular jacket.
Meanwhile the skipping electropop track contrives any number of dry sounds without sounding the least bit dry overall; indeed, it seems like a sort of experiment in how much romantic effulgence one can suggest in such spare quarters.
The voice is the special effect, finally: for all of the music's plonking itself down in generic (albeit superb) Eighties British synthpop with indications tilting toward Yazoo, Elly Jackson has little of Alison Moyet's belt. It's perhaps even a little vexatious how assertively she sounds like Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat and Communards, one of the divine voices of the Eighties, great enough that he eventually had to challenge himself with Sylvester covers. There's something...off...about a woman capturing male falsetto, even when the woman has committed herself to an androgynous Tilda Swinton-plays-Tin Tin kind of look. It lacks the abandonment, the distortion and simulation — finally, Jackson's quite remarkable voice can't lay claim to the queer pathos of Somerville, of "Smalltown Boy" or "Don't Leave Me This Way."
But then, what did it mean for Somerville to cover that song, bringing forth the longstanding gay iconicity of Diana Ross? It may be that La Roux stands on the far side of that precise act of revelation — not restraightening it, but trying to recapture the particular and fierce vulnerability of late disco. For beneath the bubbly motion of the song and beyond its historical fillips is a kind of vulnerability that has few points of comparison in the current pop landscape, but seems exactly right for the moment: humanly, economically, politically. New Romanticism and queer pathos as precarité you can dance to, that's it. But it is not a maudlin vulnerability, puddling on the floor. Something like a warning, a broken rooftop dance party in preparation for a struggle to come. This year's gonna be like that. Better go and get your armor.
Posted by jane at January 8, 2010 01:35 AM | TrackBack