Thoughts on the Associates' Party Fears Two
Life is short. There’s so much to experience in such little time. There’s so much joy to be had. And fun. And celebration. But play your cards a certain way and life can seem overlong. The days, weeks, months, years, decades can fan out endlessly, emptied of anything of note, every minute spent dead before you’re finally planted.
Everything they say about a life lived full-arsed, with a mind that’s open to all it has to offer, not overly concerned about the thoughts of the ghair is true. Everything they say about those who want to change what’s fundamental about you (and isn’t evil) is true: in one ear and out the other. The purple-haired can code, the pot-bellied can lead and the big-laughed can win, and don’t let lego-haired, lego-bodied and lego-minded dummies tell you otherwise.
I say this to you, dear reader, because I say this to myself today. For far too long lego-type corporate-types have reigned while extracting the best of me from within the chest of me. For far too long the ironed collars have cornered every domain of our consciousness, while the rest of us have been the best of us. No more, I say. No longer shall they convince us monotonically that khushdili is weakness and that the aim of life is to experience every up and every down with the placidity of a table. No longer shall they convince us that emotions are the domain only of actors, with the rest of us condemned to a life half-lived, our thoughts and feelings only deserving of partial expression. No longer shall we allow them to say that in the everyday there is no space for melancholia, for joie de vivre, for all that makes us human. OK, I guess, computer, we will say.
On Party Fears Two, the Associates’ Billy Mackenzie makes one odd vocal choice after another; he takes chances that would be recommended by neither vocal coach nor armchair music nerd. But it’s because of these weird choices that today, more than 40 years after it was released, when I try to describe the sound of the single, I think not to say early new wave, or minimally arranged proto-eighties, or melodic synth-based post-punk, or any of these genre signifiers. I only think to talk about how truly idiosyncratic Billy Mackenzie’s vocal choices are: the unexpected turns the melodic line takes, the pitch range his voice covers, the ever-present modulation. It’s the weirdness of it that makes this single truly memorable, singular.
