Necessity is the mother of re-invention
More than a year ago, when I momentarily quit the job that I was doing for a very different one, I was chatting with my new-old boss K. in her room when she startled me by stopping in mid-sentence and suddenly opening her drawer and pulling out two Bon Jovi CDs. I think we were talking about organisational change (as is the usual case with her).
She (squealing):
"See! This is what I call re-invention!!"
Me (caught off-guard and never really having been a Bon Jovi fan):
"Wah!".
She (gushing slightly, but somehow still able to draw a corporate lesson):
"Don't you just love Bon Jovi? Oh my God, wasn't he just so cute? Anyway, see how they released interpretations of their old songs, so that they are old yet new? It's not always about new material, new stuff you know. Sometimes the great stuff is already there and we just need to find a way to polish it, to renew it, to reinvent it..."
Me (pretending to study the CD covers):
"Yeah... I see what you mean!"
She: "Do you want to borrow them?"
Fast forward to today. When I go up to London, one of the things that I always do is look for concerts that I can go to. And I always find something on that I like. Not this time, despite careful scrutiny of hundreds of listings at least 3 issues of Time Out, the only names I could really recognise that I would consider going to were Goldfrapp, Sigur Ros and ABC's Martin Fry (performing at the Hard Rock Cafe no less). Then it struck me. I'm ancient. I can't tell The Kaiser Chiefs and Interpol apart (or can really bother to). I can use band names like Coldplay and My Chemical Romance intelligently enough in a sentence but I don't really have any feel for these bands. I came back from London with just one CD purchase -- a boxed set of remastered Eurythmics CDs. Sigh...
And now, back from a trip to HMV at lunchtime, I have bought "Union Street" -- a new album by Erasure featuring acoustic versions of you guessed it... old Erasure songs. Putting it into the car CD changer, I was shocked at how much I loved it. And appalled - yet proud - that I knew exactly how the new acoustic version of "Stay With Me" differed from the 1996 acoustic version, and how both differed from the bleepy album version.
Is this re-invention, or simply a failure to move on?
I try hard to put you out of my mind
Every night alone I'm thinking 'bout you
How can I avoid this pain without you
I won't cry, I won't be sorry no more
I know that this is something I'll get over
Maybe I can learn to love another
It's just a matter of time
A matter of time
Just because I lock myself in my room
It doesn't mean that I'm afraid to talk to
Those people I know that might have seen you
No return, I keep reminding myself
I won't look back
Won't regret a single moment
I gonna mend this heart inside you've broken
It's just a matter of time
A matter of time
"Spiralling", Erasure (1987)
"The Circus" / "Union Street"
She (squealing):
"See! This is what I call re-invention!!"
Me (caught off-guard and never really having been a Bon Jovi fan):
"Wah!".
She (gushing slightly, but somehow still able to draw a corporate lesson):
"Don't you just love Bon Jovi? Oh my God, wasn't he just so cute? Anyway, see how they released interpretations of their old songs, so that they are old yet new? It's not always about new material, new stuff you know. Sometimes the great stuff is already there and we just need to find a way to polish it, to renew it, to reinvent it..."
Me (pretending to study the CD covers):
"Yeah... I see what you mean!"
She: "Do you want to borrow them?"
Fast forward to today. When I go up to London, one of the things that I always do is look for concerts that I can go to. And I always find something on that I like. Not this time, despite careful scrutiny of hundreds of listings at least 3 issues of Time Out, the only names I could really recognise that I would consider going to were Goldfrapp, Sigur Ros and ABC's Martin Fry (performing at the Hard Rock Cafe no less). Then it struck me. I'm ancient. I can't tell The Kaiser Chiefs and Interpol apart (or can really bother to). I can use band names like Coldplay and My Chemical Romance intelligently enough in a sentence but I don't really have any feel for these bands. I came back from London with just one CD purchase -- a boxed set of remastered Eurythmics CDs. Sigh...
And now, back from a trip to HMV at lunchtime, I have bought "Union Street" -- a new album by Erasure featuring acoustic versions of you guessed it... old Erasure songs. Putting it into the car CD changer, I was shocked at how much I loved it. And appalled - yet proud - that I knew exactly how the new acoustic version of "Stay With Me" differed from the 1996 acoustic version, and how both differed from the bleepy album version.
Is this re-invention, or simply a failure to move on?
I try hard to put you out of my mind
Every night alone I'm thinking 'bout you
How can I avoid this pain without you
I won't cry, I won't be sorry no more
I know that this is something I'll get over
Maybe I can learn to love another
It's just a matter of time
A matter of time
Just because I lock myself in my room
It doesn't mean that I'm afraid to talk to
Those people I know that might have seen you
No return, I keep reminding myself
I won't look back
Won't regret a single moment
I gonna mend this heart inside you've broken
It's just a matter of time
A matter of time
"Spiralling", Erasure (1987)
"The Circus" / "Union Street"
posted by rookcub at
3:40 PM
1 Comments:
it's nostalgia. no one moves on from nostalgia, because then nostalgia would just... well... not exist.
everything eventually becomes sentimental memory. it's just a matter of time.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home