Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Changing the world with music


Picking favourite bands when you're young is a little like betting on a horse race without even knowing it. Pick someone like the Eurogliders, and the horse doesn't even make it out of the gates. I loved the Thompson Twins and figured they would be around for a long time--I remember some music magazine calling them the future--but they barely stumbled into the 1990s. If you backed U2, you never stopped counting your winnings. Whitney? It's still up in the air.

Then there was Prefab Sprout, a band with an obscure name that never charted very high, never broke into America despite the exuberance efforts of 1988's From Langley Park to Memphis to take the world by storm. That single-filled album, with a candy-store of production tricks by Thomas Dolby, was their best bet and, still, they remained a cult act. Under pressure from the record company, they had even shelved Protest Songs, the more forlorn album they had recorded before it, in order to break into the charts. Their last release was a 2001 concept album about cowboys, though not country music, except a reworked version of the "Streets of Laredo." Which is all to say that Prefab Sprout are an unlikely endurance runner. To cite them as one of my favourite bands has been to invite a scrunched face and a "Who?" It is to end a conversation about music. I wouldn't have guessed that would change in the late noughts.

If great philosophy is untimely, so is great music. It's been funny over the last few years to hear younger bands like Stars cite Prefab Sprout as an influence, to have them name checked in the New Yorker and The Guardian. It's the world that's changed, moved itself a few degrees closer to the sensibility of the Paddy McAloon, the man at the heart of the Sprouts. The release this month of Let's Change the World With Music, an album slated for release in 1992 and then shelved, is the ultimate vindication. Its contents were placed in a time capsule, let sit for 17 years and, voila, it's something fans of Beirut might enjoy.

It's easy, from the commercial point of view, to see why this album was not released. Each of the songs touch on the idea of music, which seems indulgent, and God, even more so. With its Irving Berlin and Ira Gershwin flourishes, its grandiosity and genre-less-ness would have seemed out of place in the era of grunge. But while the definition of hit music has narrowed--aren't a handful of producers responsible for most of the songs that chart nowadays?--the definition of pop music has relaxed. Even the 1990s production values of this reworked demo don't come off poorly compared to, say, Cut Copy or Lily Allan.

At the core of Let's Change the World With Music is McAloon's song-writing skills, which produce melodies which worm their way into your head after only a few spins. "I Love Music" sounds at first like a half-hearted Frank Sinatra parody, but gets you with its genuineness, its coy phrasing, those little pauses in lines like, "Who's my hero? The unnerving, unswerving Irving Berlin." In another homage to tunefulness he yearns for sweet gospel music to "carry this boy away from danger." If movies about movies aim to show us how our visual landscape is created, then music about music shows us how our emotional landscape is renewed and regenerated.

McAloon has gotten flack for the pomposity of some of his themes; one UK critic said the album title was worthy of U2. And though he he's not being sarcastic with songs like "Earth: The Story so Far" there is a humility that's inherent in the Prefab Sprout enterprise, which started at as definitively anti-romantic with a faux-blues song like "Cruel," which always struck me as a celebration and critique of feminism ("Cruel is the gospel that sets us all free, then takes you away from me"). McAloon has matured since then, realized that celebrating love without deconstructing it is part of what music does. But no matter how much he wants to change the world with music, he's well aware of his own limitations and that of art. It's not a choice between self-aggrandizement and irony, it's a choice between giving up and pressing on. And if digging through their vaults for these gems is pressing on, I figure I've backed the right horse.

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