Pop is disposable by nature. Once, long ago, Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker
Street” was inescapable. And then it practically vanished. A few years later, Soft
Cell’s “Tainted Love” seemed to be everywhere, and then it was similarly gone. More
recently, the same thing with Weezer’s “Beverly Hills.” There were okay for a
summer, but I don’t miss them.
Hits are so often so ephemeral that even the people skilled
at churning out one after another sometimes treat pop as something disposable. Take
a look at Kelly Clarkson’s handlers – they hire the producers that are hot that day,
come up with a couple decent hooks, and it’s off to the mid-teens on the
Billboard charts. Sixteen months later, after the tour, the process starts all
over again.
But that in no way invalidates the extreme durability of
some of the best pop. Durability is no small thing – it speaks to a confluence
of talent, craft, and opportunity. There’s most of The Beatles’ catalog,
Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors,” Fountains of Wayne’s career, much of the output of
the New Pornographers… The list is fairly long, long enough to give anyone at
least some faith in pop music.
But a Perfect Pop Song? Lightning has to strike, and it
doesn’t always happen to even the most talented artists.
“There She Goes” came from a band that has been together, on
and off, for decades, but still eked out but a single studio album, in 1990.
The La’s eponymous major label debut did okay in their native U.K., but it sold
only about 50,000 copies in the U.S. (I accounted for two of those sales. I bought
it on cassette because I wasn’t sure those newfangled CDs would catch on. I
bought a CD player a month later, and replaced my cassette with a disk).
The album is a minor pop masterpiece, but with “There She
Goes,” the band achieves the sublime with a song that perfectly encapsulates
that first rush of attraction.
The classic pop song goes verse-chorus-verse. “There She Goes” blows up the map. It’s chorus-chorus-chorus, there's an irresistible hook, and the bridge is only long enough to get you back to the chorus again. The structure brilliantly embodies the giddy exhilaration of infatuation. It’s all chorus, all the time.
The song starts with a ringing electric guitar picking a wistful
descending line, like the girl you’ve got a crush on skipping down a short
flight of stairs and away from you.
An acoustic guitar comes strumming, the rhythm section
punches in, and then the vocal enters with a yearning falsetto – “There she
goes / There she goes again.” And after she’s gone the singer drops to a lower
register, deflated, but his heart still swollen with desire and hope – “and I
just can’t contain / this feeling that remains.”
The thing about Lee Mavers’ vocal performance is that it perfectly embellishes the sentiment
merely outlined in a lyric that barely rises above moon-spoon-June mundanity,
filling in all the emotional details – the giddy rush, the lingering high, and
back again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That performance goes a long way to elevating “There
She Goes” to the height it reaches. Listen to Sixpence None The Richer’s take on it. The hook is so catchy it’s almost impossible to stick to the blueprint
and blow it, and Leigh Nash has a pleasant enough voice. But she merely sings
the song, and that makes Sixpence’s rendition adequate at best.
I live for Perfect Pop Songs –2½ to 3-minute aural gems that
make everything all right – at least for 2½ to 3 minutes. Often that’s all anyone
needs. That definition requires the song lift your spirits, but there are
always exceptions, and the exceptions are often where interesting things happen.
You can dance to “Tears of A Clown” – in fact, it’s hard not
to. It sounds like a happy song, but it’s anything but. It’s a man trying to “appear
to be care-free,” but he’s only covering up the hurt of losing you. The melody
itself becomes part of the cover-up, part of the camouflage for Smokey’s sadness.
Creating tension between melody and lyrics is hardly unique, but it is rare, and while you might come up with an example of someone who did it as well, nobody did it better than Smokey in this cut.
There’s so much in “Tears of A Clown” to admire. There’s the
opening riff suggesting a circus calliope – send in the clown. The internal rhyming
scheme pulls you along. And in the bridge, Smokey amplifies his pop lament to
the level of tragedy, by proclaiming himself heir to Pagliacci, the ultimate tragic
clown.
Perfect Pop Songs
·
That Thing You Do – the Wonders
·
Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen (here's the version done with Jimmy Fallon & the Roots)
·
Still the Night -- The BoDeans (live version, from KINK-FM)
· Trouble Times – Fountains of Wayne
·
Sing Me Spanish Techno – New Pornographers
· Try A Little Tenderness – Otis Redding
·
Gang of Rhythm – Walk Off The Earth
