39: LF SYSTEM
“Afraid To Feel”
from the single “Afraid To Feel”
Released: May 2022
People my age seem to luxuriate in sneering at the way pop music is now – in some cases, has been for more than three decades. It all sounds the same! It’s bits of other records glued together! There’s no “song.” It makes no sense. It’s noisy. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how these same people, or their ancestors, would have coped in the fifties. This rock and roll! It’s the one beat! All the songs sound the same – if you can call them “songs”! It’s bits of rhythm and blues and country ingloriously glued together. The “words” are just nonsense, unjust gibberish. It makes no sense. It’s noisy enough to give me headaches. IT ISN’T LIKE THE POP MUSIC I KNEW AND LOVED WHEN I WAS THE RIGHT AGE TO CARE ABOUT IT.
Great dance records in particular, though, be they “Rock Around The Clock” (originally described on its label as constituting a “Novelty Foxtrot”) or “Da Funk,” depend on maintaining a very canny balance between tension and release. In the late spring of 2022 I was very struck by how unlike anything else in the chart “Afraid To Feel” sounded. It might ostensibly consist of nothing more than a long sample from an old soul song that bounces between end-of-the-night smoocher and right royal rave-up. But usually that’s most of what you need to make a great pop record. When Pete Ham wrote “No Matter What,” it was because he thought the song good enough for the Beatles. He didn’t sit down with thirty Atlantic and Stax LPs, minutely documenting all the shifts and turns in that music. Kids danced to it at school discos and I expect used the record as an excuse to get close to that classroom neighbour they’d mutually fancied the whole year through.
In that instinctive tradition (a contradiction, I know), I will not go into an exhausting breakdown of how two guys from somewhere around Edinburgh found some old record in a shop on Leith Walk and knew they could purposively play with it. It is not the intention of this book to be a sodden encyclopaedia or curdling catacomb of recycled Wikipedia entries. It’s all about – or SHOULD be all about - how it makes me, the author, feel. Most music writers proceed on the assumption that both they and their readers are “afraid to feel” because feeling things are somehow common. “Afraid To Feel,” on the threshold of the first summer we’d been allowed to enjoy in two years, made me feel better.
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