30 Day Music Challenge: Day 22

‘A song you listen to when you’re sad.’

I should, by rights, be writing about what happens when I have a good wallow. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ or Tom Waits’ ‘Raindogs’ or Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ - brilliant songs, all of them, and heartbreaking and just the thing when I’m feeling sad and just need to luxuriate in the feeling a bit, like the girl from Francoise Sagan’s novel, Bonjour Tristesse.

But I’m feeling a bit sad anyway these days, and I want (no, need!) the feeling to lift. Thomas Hardy has been busy, as always, with the pathetic fallacy, and since that other bank holiday weekend at the start of this exhausting month, summer has turned to autumn. That’s right. In May. They’re forecasting better things on Countryfile though, and maybe that will bring about better things too in terms of metaphor.

So I’m going to write about two songs which are just so terrible, so cheesy, so unremittingly cheerful, that they actually do cheer me up and make me smile, just a little bit, even when things are very bleak.

The first is ‘What I Am’ performed by Will.i.am with the cast of Sesame Street. I know. I know. I don’t like Will.i.am and even when I was a child I didn’t like Sesame Street: I think, back then, it was because how they pronounced the letter z as ‘zee’ scared me. Anyway: look. Here it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyVzjoj96vs . It amuses me to see Will.i.am (and what exactly is with the over-punctuation of his name anyway?) with a backing group of puppets instead of with the Black-Eyed Peas or trying to make a move on Cheryl Cole. I also like how much the puppets are enjoying it. A bit too much, you say? But that’s the very point. They’re puppets. They can’t be enjoying it. I mean, they’re inanimate stuffed creatures, many of them without much anatomical verisimilitude, and they can express emotion only in so far as those animating them make their movements seem expressive. And that’s just it, really, isn’t it? Music, like anything, can animate our emotions just like puppets whose strings are pulled; perhaps that’s why this song can lighten my mood even though I really should, by rights, hate every single thing about it. Puppets - puppets personifying human qualities - puppets there to hammer home the morals of stories. Will.i.am - a man so full of ego that he makes his own name spell it out. Yet somehow it works; somehow the manipulation is so evident and unapologetic that it can manipulate even me out of feeling sad.

Usually, I can’t abide that kind of thing. Usually, it’d make me even more determined in my grouchiness, drawing at best a raised eyebrow or sarcastic retort. Usually I’d feel nothing but mockery for how each puppet is used so blatantly to represent a quality which a child might have: I might respond with reference to my favourite fridge magnet in my kitchen, the one which bears the legend: ‘Remember. You are unique: just like everybody else.’ Usually I’d draw the blinds down around my sadness and withdraw into it, as though drawing a thick dark coat around myself on a winter afternoon. It scares me a bit that this isn’t the case… am I being conditioned? Are my strings being pulled? Maybe it’s just because the puppets upstage Will.i.am and his punctuated ego: maybe it’s a question of who’s doing the manipulating rather than whether it’s happening at all?

The other song is an even more recent discovery. It’s a true atrocity: the world’s most banal lyrics, the world’s most autotuned performance in the world’s most cheesy cover-version. Somehow it works in a way it shouldn’t. It’s ‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black as covered by the cast of Glee in the Prom Queen episode from Season 2. Here it is, in case this defies imagination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6r4dTek49Q . There’s something contagiously cheering about the whole scene here: that great set piece, the American High School prom. This being Glee, we have, of course, all the minorities: the Jew, the kid in the wheelchair, the stupid kid, the gay kids, the fat girl, the cheerleader who used to be the fat girl, the jock… and so it goes on. And on. And on and on, far too much - but still. Autotune addiction aside, it has its moments as a TV phenomenon, and this is definitely one of them. Friday was one of those internet sensations, a ‘viral’, a music video made by a teenage girl of a song she’d written: poorly performed and spectacularly badly written. The music is cliched and the lyrics… as American teenagers are so fond of saying, OMG. Oh my, like, actual God. The whole thing is simply laughable, and maybe that’s why it’s a good song for when you’re sad, because it’s just so terrible it might make you laugh. Even smile. Even just think about smiling.

But maybe there’s more to it than that? Viewed more carefully, maybe the lyrics are meant to be read ironically? Consider this:

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after…wards
I don’t want this weekend to end’

I mean. It’s quite deep, when you think about it. Not for Rebecca Black the obliqueness of TS Eliot’s metaphor about ‘measur[ing] [one’s] life in coffee spoons.’ She just gets right to the point with her recitation of the days of the week. And she’s right, isn’t she? No matter what time zone you live in, you have Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday. Even in a leap year, it never changes. Elsewhere in the song she writes about getting up in the morning and having breakfast then going to school, or the dilemma of deciding whether to sit in the front seat or the back seat. Of such details is life made. We have the ‘big’ decisions to make only a few times in our entire lifetimes: choosing a career, choosing a partner, choosing a home… most times the decisions are between tea and coffee or a scone and a muffin or whether to wear the black top or the blue one. Not exactly important, and definitely not life-changing, but we can get very hung up on the small details. When I’m stressed out about major decisions, I get very uptight about the small things, and can find myself standing transfixed staring at work outfits of an evening. So perhaps Rebecca Black has a wisdom beyond her years (not to mention beyond her musical ability!) - that of such stuff is life made. And there’s also the factor in her song that life goes on. No matter how awful Monday is for you, Tuesday will come, then Wednesday, then Thursday and then it’s the weekend… as she so joyfully exclaims and as the Glee cast proclaim in their cover version, to cheers from their audience of assembled prom-goers. The optimism of youth allows her to ignore the fact that, after the weekend, the whole cycle will start all over again with Monday morning, but perhaps that’s what’s so contagious about the song. It’s more a case of not facing the bad stuff until you have to than blatant denial. Shakespeare put it rather more poetically in Macbeth:

‘Come what come may,

Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’

Granted he was talking about a murder here, but the principle is one that makes that couplet echo in my mind when things are hard. Or when I’m sad.

And as for the cast of Glee? Well: when I see that I do feel just a tiny bit sad that I didn’t go to my own sixth form Formal all those years ago, or various Balls on offer at university. It makes me a bit sad, years later, that I had such strong feminist principles that I saw the whole ‘double ticket’ thing as demeaning to women - perhaps, in my rage against being admitted only if I was half of a pair, I missed out on some fun, or perhaps the truth was really that I just wasn’t asked by anyone. I’m sure the Formal and the Balls weren’t as perfect as all that: the American High School Prom is usually idealised on screen (that is if it’s not being incorporated into the plot of a horror film, such as Stephen King’s Carrie), and it just couldn’t remain on that pedestal in reality. In reality, I’d have been there with people whose company I didn’t always seek out - and who certainly were very slow to seek out mine. I’d have been that misfit in the corner, in the black dress and the DMs and the eye-liner… people would have thought me strange and threatening and maybe even sad…

Sad. ‘That strain again. It had a dying fall…’

Music, and poetry, and films, and stories, will always lift us from one mood to another and change our reactions and pull the strings of our emotions. If that makes me a puppet, then I don’t really think I mind all that much. And if that surprises you, as you’re reading this, then maybe I’m manipulating your reactions in turn, because it astonishes me as well.