musical interlude: dissapointed in the sun (dEUS)

When I was a teenager, I didn’t try much to rebel with music at first. As a young teenager I kinda liked the music my parents were listening (a CD collection that included U2 and Bob Dylan) and I always tried to find decent music on the radio, which was harder than it seemed, since the commercial radio here in Belgium in the nineties seemed to mostly play euro-house and boysbands at that time. every rocksong, every song with  real instruments even, was a pearl between the trash for me…

Later on I got more interested in ‘alternative’ music, and one of the biggest names in althernative music at the moment here in Belgium was dEUS, a then quite weird band from Antwerp. Rock’n roll and arty-fart weirdness went together with strange sounds and a lot of different musical styles that were mangled together. Their biggest hits are songs like suds and soda, roses, and theme from turnpike, which are very unlikely hits, but even now they still have 4 songs of that era in the timeless list of stubru, the alternative radio station. The first albums ‘worst case scenario’ and ‘in a bar, under the sea’ remain unique and unlike anything I’ve ever heard before or afterwards.

They still make music, but for me thy lost most of the vibe around the time of their third album, and became a more regular band afterwards. Which does not mean that their later hit ‘nothing really ends‘ is not a good candidate for the best slow ever written in Belgium.

Todays song is a title-song in disguise, for their second album ‘in a bar, under the sea’. Unlike most songs on the album it’s not experimental or weird, and neither are the lyrics completely weird and cryptic. It’s a song about escapism, running away from all life’s problems in a bar under the sea.  It is alleged to be inspired by Captain Beefheart who commented after visiting an exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh, remarked that he was disappointed in the sun.

dissapointed in the sun (written by Tom Barman and Piet Jorens)

Who could tell the story better
About the things that I went through
Some were great but most were terrifying
And so spooky too

Had to get out of there, to hide away
Had to get out of there, to find my way
I troubled everything too soon
Now where I want to be is…

Need I say my only wish was
To escape my earthly life
High skies were no option whereas
Diving deep in oceans wide

Was the way for me, to hide away
A possibility, to leave today
I troubled everything too soon
Now where I want to be is…

Under the sea, is where I’ll be
No talking ’bout the rain no more
I wonder what thunder will mean, when only in my dream
The lightning comes before the roar

Circumstancial situations, now I know what people meant
Beware of the implications, God I’ve had enough of them

Decided to be brave and hide away
Just picking out a wave and slide away
I troubled everything too soon
Now where I want to be is…

Maybe taking it another hour then taking away the pain
I troubled everything too soon, now where I want to be is…

Under the sea, is where I’ll be
No talking ’bout the rain no more
I wonder what thunder will mean, when only in my dream
The lightning comes before the roar
Under the sea, down here with me I find I’m not the only one
Who ponders what life would mean if we hadn’t been
So disappointed in the sun

And that’s why we’re thinking,
That’s why we’re drinking in a bar under the sea

enjoy

Bram

PS: more about Belgian music can be found here, in this post about the Gorky song ‘Mia’ which some have considered the best song ever.

Mia, or the all-time greatest timeless classic song in Flanders

Let’s go on with the country I’m living in: Belgium, and more specifically speaking Flanders, since there’s not that much cultural exchange with the parts that speak other languages.

Today I want to take a look at the all-time greatest timeless classic song in Flanders, which is called ‘Mia’, by the dutch-singing rock band Gorky (they made only one CD under that name, and then singer Luc Devos started the band Gorki with other musicians, wikipedia mingles the 2 bands together in english) who sings in dutch.

Like I said, we are not very patriotic here in Belgium, and as a matter of fact, we don’t seem to like music in our language that much. We have a lot of rock bands, but most of them do sing in English, and a lot of rock-minded people don’t tend to like music sung in dutch, since English is the proper language for rock ‘n roll (as Tom Barman, singer of dEUS, would put it)

So which are the Belgian rock bands? Bands like dEUS, Arid, Millionaire, soulwax, absynthe minded, and K’s choice… In older days we had TC Matic, and Ferre Grignard. In other genres we also have a lot of electronic dance music: from front 242 to praga khan, the pop of hooverphonic (they started out more triphoppish, but alas, that didn’t last) and a lot of commercial stuff like Milk inc.

So if you have the list with timeless classics called ‘de tijdloze’ (the timeless one’) at new year on the alternative radio studio brussel, you won’t find much songs in dutch in there. As a matter of fact, since I’ve been a teenager in the nineties, there have been 4 songs in dutch that happened to find themselves there, while mostly all the others are English, with one occasional instrumental… (Look up the 2010 list here)

Believe me or not, Mia by Gorky being on #5 last year, this song has been the #1 in the list for years, before smells like teen spirit, creep, stairway to heaven, one; … And it has also had very high places on other radio stations. (all other belgian songs in the list are english, or instrumental)

The funny thing is that it hasn’t even been a hit, it was a B-side for another single… They never had big hits, but debut hit ‘Anja’, Lieve kleine Piranha’ (sweet little piranha) and ‘soms vraagt een mens zich af’(sometimes a man does wonder) were at least singles… One of the other songs has a sing-along chorus which translated says ‘sweet little piranha, sweet little piranha, sweet little piranha, devour me’…

Strange lyrics, and a voice that always forms the same minimalistic melodies are also the recipe for lots of later Gorki-albums, but he never really had any big hits afterwards. But for some reason people voted the song into the timeless list, and it kept on getting higher with the year, until it finally kicked nirvana off the first place. No-one understood, not even Luc Devos himself, who found it funny but never seemed very impressed, I think he just wanted to have more of his recenter songs to become classics…

So let’s listen to that great song, and look at the lyrics.

When I was hungry, I came to you
you said you can eat, if you wash the dishes
people like you shouldn’t behave difficult
give them a chance before they do stupid things

the middleclass rules the country, better than ever before
Mia has seen the light, she says nobody gets lost

currently we’re still going on, on the lighted path, the wrong track
people like me can be found anywhere,
on the market of labor in this valley of tears

stars come, stars go, only Elvis keeps existing
Mia never suffered, she asks can you still dream

What does the english wikipedia say about the impact of this song:

After ‘Anja’, several other singles were released from the debute album ‘Gorky’. Among them was ‘Soms vraagt een mens zich af’ (Sometimes a man wonders), the b-side of which was ‘Mia’. By making number one in the ‘Tijdloze’ (the Timeless), the ‘best of all times’ charts in Flanders by the music station Studio Brussel, for three consecutive years, ‘Mia’ became known as their largest hit. Likewise, it made number 1 in a similar chart of Radio 1 in Flanders, and best Belgian song in the chart by Radio Donna (in 2005). In 2006, it was elected the best song about girls on a TV-show on the public network ‘één‘. In 2008, the early music consort Capilla Flamenca issued ‘Rosa (Mia)’, a polyphonic adaptation of ‘Mia’ sung in Latin.

In 2008 a new award show was founded called “de Mia’s” (the Mias). It was named after the best Flemish song of all times, and officially stands for the Music Industry Awards..

I had almost forgotten that the MIA awards were named after this song…

Do I like this song? Yes!

Do I find it the best song ever written? No!

Are there better songs in my own language? definitely…

What do you think?

peace

Bram

personality types I: ‘hard’ music

Once I came up with a theory about personality types and certain types of music. It is just a personal theory, and not complete in any way, so don’t take it too seriously… If it is valid it will be only in part, but it may be interesting.

I noticed about different people having different ways of looking at the world. There are lots of ways to describe people and divide them into personality types (like Myers-Briggs; DISC, enneagram,…) but I’m not going into that for now. I just noticed that some people seem to think in straight lines, and other more in chaotic associative thinking. I clearly am in the second category, and I guess a lot of people would be at the middle, and no way to describe and pigeonhole people and their personality will ever do judgment to the uniqueness of every person, but let’s just go on with the simplified model in which people can be divided into ‘straigh thinkers’ and ‘chaotic thinkers’.

What I also noticed it that a lot of music can be applied to certain personality types, and I saw clearly that some styles of music can be easily put into my 2 categories. Lots of classical music (lik Bach and Mozart) are totally in the ‘straight thinking’ camp, as well as a lot of metal. On the side of the chaotic thinkers you’ll get more alternative rock, noise and lo-fi for example.

Let’s just take Iron Maiden and Radiohead for two examples. Iron maiden has a very structured way of composing, and technical qualities that can be easily recognized by people who are known with the craft of music making. The same with the lyrics: the have a certain structure and a certain meaning, which can be known. And it is quite fun.

Radiohead on the other hand, especially in later albums, can be anti-rational and purely intuitive sometimes. It is totally unpredictable. Even though some songs may be more or less ‘traditionally’ tonal in composition, others are pure chaos and dischord, or repetitive atmosphere more than composition and melody. And for the lyrics, God may know what some of them mean, but even Thom and co don’t, and they don’t care about it either…

Okay it’s not exactly hard music, this particular, especially not this one song, but it’s pretty intense if you get into it. And if you don’t get into it there’s no way you can understand what it is about. You cannot analyse the structure or the techniques, it’s purely intuitive… Another good example of the ‘chaotic’ thinking in music is this dEUS-classic, which is very big in Belgium…(it actually was #11 in the timeless 100 list on national radio ‘studio brussel’) :

I don’t mean that people who like Iron Maiden will never live radiohead and vice versa, but there still is a barrier between those 2 kinds of people sometimes. I’ve noticed that some musicians just cannot cope with anything that isn’t in their musical system on the one hand, and I’ve met others who are suspicious of anything that could be conventional. And I think that this has everything to do with what I’ve described. But I do like both, even though I take iron maiden as being just theater…

Also part of my theory, that I found interesting, was where the extremes go bad. Straight thinking goes to extremes in one direction, like extremism, fundamentalism, of Satanism. A lot of satanic music is blackmetal, but I’ve never heard of truly satanic noise or lo-fi… On the other had, the chaotic side will fall into nihilism, disbelief and ‘nothing makes sense’. There is a totally different danger here… Maybe you could call ‘straight-thinking’ right and ‘chaotic-thinking’ left, but I don’t think that would be entirely correct either…

The funny thing is, being on the chaotic side myself. I feel that there is a strong connection to my ‘postmodern thought’ and my chaotic thinking, my ADHD divergent thinking.

But that’s for the second post

Enjoy the music

Bram