Synapse to the Beat: Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year"

The briefest of high school flashbacks: I and three other students are locked into a smallish room in the library. We're required to record our voices for some reason or another, and one of the students - John was his name - has a cassette tape for the purpose.

Thing is, it's not blank. We're to tape over the music that his mother had recorded on the tape for her own personal use.

It was Frank Sinatra, music as foreign to us as a Gamelan orchestra. I'd certainly never heard Frank Sinatra before, or if I had I wasn't especially aware or having done so. Background noise, I guess.

In that tiny room, desperate to seem hip, we were amused by the swelling strings of this growing-old classic. "When I was seventeen," Frank slowly intoned, "it was a very good year." He sounded pitifully uncool, with his deep morose voice, heavy with the bittersweet retrospect of a man growing old, something again completely alien to us kids. John snickered and pressed FFWD. I'm not sure if it was merely a morbid curiosity about the dreadful Frank Sinatra or an admonition not to tape over the Frank song that had us searching for its end on the cassette. But through sheer luck, when John pressed play, the tape had fast forwarded through the first verse and the first instrumental between-verse melody. "When I was twenty-one," Frank intoned immediately, in that same grave voice, "it was a very good year."

This was hilarious to us, an old man running down his life, seemingly year by year. Another fast-forward, and as luck would have it John timed it exactly so that, through sheer coincidence, he pressed play just as the third verse was starting. Third verse, third age: he was now on about when he was thirty-five.

Now that I'm a year older than Frank Sinatra's era of dalliances with blue-blooded girls (and have yet ot ride in a chauffeur-driven limousine), I admit I truly love the song. A bit wiser, maybe - better able to appreciate its wistful sense of not-quite-regretful nostalgia. But back then, far younger than seventeen, I couldn't have imagined anything more ridiculous and hilariously uncool that some old guy singing in an old-guys' genre about growing old.

Synapse to the Beat: Loverboy's "Turn Me Loose"

So I'm about to confess something to you, something a bit strange and geeky, something that has next to nothing to do with Canadian poodle-rockers Loverboy and their ridiculous guitar-and-synth screeching epic. So sorry Mike Reno fans.

I have a feeling that it started with my father. With his collection of 45s going back to his own 'glory days' in the 1960s, back when he was probably a teenager sitting alone in his bedroom listening to the Beatles or the Ronettes or whever else. He seemed to have bought a lot of singles in the 1960s and seemed to have had pretty good taste in music.

By 1981, he wasn't buying music so voraciously, but those 45s were still kicking around. A lot of them he had kept in little boxes, the kind of boxes that Smashing Pumpkins would emulate one day for their singles collection whose name I can't be bothered to Wikipedia right now. They were messy, and it was tough to find certain songs. He, I guess, or my mother, or at least somebody got the idea to bring order to this mess, and so he started his own system, which involved sticking a numbered label on each single and drawing up an 'index' on card stock with a typewriter.

It was a pretty mammoth project.

Loverboy released 'Turn Me Loose' in 1981. That might not seem relevant now, but it will be soon. So this means that I was likely to have been five years old when my father was doing this. What's strange is that I took an interest in his project, worked (somehow) with him on it, and still have memories of it. No Smurfs for me, what got this five-year-old excited was a typewritten database of 1960s records.

The end result was that I developed a fascination not only for music but for the compilation of songs into lists. Years before the 'High Fidelity' era vogue of music lists, years before iPod playlists, before even the existence of MTV, I had developed a fascination that has stuck with me througout my life.

It must have been my instigation. It must have been my good-natured father merely following his geekish son's lead, but there was a stretch of time when the CHUM Chart, that particular legacy of music history on Toronto, held my interest. It was a weekly run-down of the top thirty songs on the Toronto radio station CHUM-AM, and it was published in the Saturday edition of whichever Toronto newspaper my grandparents subscribed to. Not only did I follow the chart every week, getting pleasure from watching the rises and falls of certain songs among their ranks, but for some reason I insisted on having my father retype the list. It's comical thinking about it now, but after watching my father produce his master list of 45s, I guess that's what I thought one did with a typewriter, and I guess it didn't seem like that strange an idea to me at the time.

My father might have had the same interest in music lists, or he might just have been a very indulgent father. For whatever reason, he would do it for me, or rather we'd do it together. A certain week that Loverboy's 'Turn Me Loose' was on the list, he managed two typos in one: typing the song as 'Torn Me Loose' and the artist as 'Leverboy'. He found this hysterically funny, and has referenced it over and over again in the intervening 30 years. To be honest, I'm not even sure if he knows why he uses an exaggeratedly mispronounced 'Torn me loose' as a punchline every now and then. But he does.

From those simple origins come a lifelong interest in what songs look like compiled in lists. A few years after that, in 1984 if I recall correctly, I got a rather expensive book by Joel Whitburn listing all the songs ever to charted in the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 since its inception. I thumbed through that book, and a Rolling Stone Album Guide as well, so many times that the binding was hopelessly split and most of the pages now lie loose. But I still have the book, and I must confess I still leaf through it from time to time. Habitually ever since, I've done things like compile my own lists or countdowns, programme imaginary compilations or even make up tracklists for imaginary albums released by imaginary bands. It's more than a little ridiculous, I acknowledge, but it's something I've always had. Apparently Jack Kerouac, all throughout his life and even once he'd become the poster boy for 'cool', kept an imaginary baseball league, with imaginary teams with imaginary star players, pencilling yearly statistics and even 'press releases' about one imaginary team or another. And never showed anyone in his whole life (this was all found after his death) - probably because he knew it was an incredibly geeky thing to do. It is geeky, if no doubt endearing. I could care about baseball, but music is my thing.

This being my blog, I've decided I'm going to include some of this kind of stuff. I've already posted a few imaginary compilation tracklists and some other music lists, but I'm going to carry on, unworried by how geeky it truly is. After all, if a grown man of 35 making imaginary CD compilations and whatnot strikes you as a bit, well, arrested-development... blame my father.

Synapse to the Beat: Coven's "One Tin Soldier"

I wonder what high school and elementary school is like today.

I went to school in the 1980s, taught by teachers who came of age in the 1960s. They were idealists who couldn't get over the hippie dream, I guess. When contemporaries were 'selling out' and reaping in the cash in the greed-filled 1980s, they chose the more altruistic route. With their second-hand Hondas and threadbare corduroy slacks, they probably couldn't help being a bit resentful.

But in classes, they were able to be as radical as they wanted to be. Memories fade; I can't point to too many examples, but I know that I was schooled almost entirely by pacifist neo-Marxists. I was too young to know that, but it's infused me to a degree that I think a lot of 'conservative' tastemakers would find horribly offensive.

An interesting sidebar, though: in grade four or five, I can't remember which, we had a music teacher. Whatever path in life led her to employment in an elementary school I cannot know, but she was religious. This in istelf was a novely, but not one I took to too kindly. I can recall her playing Stryper for us (Christian poodle-rockers who wore bee costumes, I kid you not) and talking about Jesus. I and two of my friends, who would have been nine or ten at the time, went to the principal's office entirely of our own accord to complain that the teacher was proselytising in class. In retrospect I'm incredibly proud of that.

Anyway, I was less offended by songs like 'One Tin Soldier'. Quite the opposite: when we got to grade six or seven, i can't remember which, we had a music teacher who seemed intent on instilling hippie values in all of us. 'One Tin Soldier' seemed to take up an inordinate percentage of our class. As I recall it, she made us sing the song countless times. I actually loved the song (I was a kid; I didn't have the best critical faculties) and got no small amount of pleasure from singing it in class. But it's really quite radical a song: not just pacifistic in nature but also quite anti-religious as I see it ('Do it in the name of Heaven; you can justify it in the end') - a topic we might as well spend a minute looking at.

Although the song is Canadian and was recorded originally by a band called the original Caste (Ooh! Hinduism!), it's best known in a version by a band called Coven (Ooh! Wicca! - wait...) Coven, whose début album was called 'Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls' and included songs with titles such as 'Pact with Lucifer' and 'Satanic Mass'. Wikipedia also, though, says that the song is popular as a Christian camp song. Which makes little sense to me. But what do I know?

Anyway, it strikes me as a pretty controversial song, one that certain people might find offensive, might consider propaganda. It wasn't the only one. There were other pacifist songs, ecologist songs, songs I can't quite remember. I do remember the same teacher introducing us to Bruce Cockburn's 'If I Had a Rocket Launcher' - and that, in retrospect, is a pretty radical thing for a teacher to do: to play for 12-year-olds a song that says, 'If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch would die'.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining. I'm actually thankful that somehow my educators were able to carry on 'indoctrinating' us without anyone, seemingly, stopping them. I'd like to think it created a generation of progressives.

But according to polls, 31.5% of people aged 25-44 support the Conservatives, scarcely below the overall nationwide number of 35.4%.

So like everything else the children of the 60s did, it hardly mattered in the long run.

Synapse to the Beat: Radiohead's "OK Computer"

I don't want to do the grumpy-old-man-bitches-about-today's-music thing. It is true that the majority of the music I listen to on any given day was recorded before the year 2000, but I'd like to think that reflects more on my than it does on the music that's out there today. To a certain extent, I think people have a finite amount of 'music that moves them' available to them, and after a certain point, what moves other people just ceases to move you. But that reflects little on what's out there and a lot on you yourself.

Except this. I was reading something about OK Computer, and I noticed a rather mundane fact that struck me: it was released in 1997. Yeah, so what, right? Well, it's 2011 right now, and that means this album was released 14 years ago. Now here's where it gets a bit funky: sure, the world has changed in the past 14 years. Music has changed. There are new things out there, different things out there. Importantly, how we consume music is completely different - the 'digital revolution' has changed the behaviours involved in music consumption in a way that in 1997, when there was an internet after there was MP3 technology, remember, we couldn't have predicted.

But... consider the world now and the world into which OK Computer was born. Now, go 14 years before that: 1983, and Duran Duran and Michael Jackson. MTV, synths, those horribly OTT eighties drums and saxophones every-bloody-where. Madonna is traipsing about with her bra on over her clothing and Cyndi Lauper is wearing bright plastic 'spangle' bracelets.

The world of 1983 seems hopelessly 'retro' today, but it did in 1997, too. We listened to 1983 music with ironic distance in 1997, amazed at how different everything had become. Those were great days, but they were very different days. There's no way to confuse 1983 and 1997; they were two entirely different beasts.

Now repeat the exercise and go back 14 years before that: 1969, the year of Woodstock. Long-haired hippies, denim, peace-and-love and Charles Manson. Jimi Hendrix was alive and the Beatles were still together. This is a world I know nothing about (I was born in 1975) and it's a world that has always seemed as far away as William Shakespeare or Christopher Columbus to me.

Now that's just my perspective, of course, one that people even just a half-generation older than me would laugh at. But the point remains: 1969 was nothing like 1983. If you could teleport a 1969 hippie to 1983 and play the radio for him, he'd find it completely alien. And probably hate it.

14 years before that and you've got 'year zero': 1955. The year of Elvismania, of "Rock Around the Clock". The year accepted as the 'birth of rock and roll', whether or not you buy that particular fiction. 'Sock hops' and Beaver Cleaver, Little Richard and soda shops. Again, light years away.

Isn't this the speed at which popular cutire, including music, is supposed to progress? I know I'm not a teenager now so I don't really 'get' it, and I'd love to think that there are still revolutions happening out there today, ones that maybe I'm unaware of but that in time will be seen as as game-changing as Elvis in 1955, Hendrix in '69, Michael Jackson in '83 and, yes, Radiohead in 1997. But it's tough to avoid the conclusion that momentum has somehow been lost, that somehow progress in music is 'slowing down'. Is there nothing left to do? Has everything already been done? I can't believe that. But where are today's revolutionaries?

Synapse to the Beat: Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby"

So it's a math class, I think. I'm not sure. Our teacher is a middle-aged woman (by middle-aged I probably mean 'as old as I am now'), and she's more than a little irascible. We're... er, 14ish or something like that. I could calculate the exact age rather easity but I can't really be bothered. It's high school, though, and we're being, well, more than a little boisterous.

Everyone is seated in class - it's not that people are running around or anything - but there's a dozen conversations going on: loud, laughing, not conducive at to learning about integrals or whatever it was we were meant to be doing.

The teacher's been subtly trying to get our attention  for a while, calling out 'okay, folks, come on now, let's stop talking, let's get down to work, etc. etc. etc.' It's a completel failure and her blood pressure is reaching critical mass. Suddenly the rage boils over, and she absolutely shrieks, "All right, stop!"

The dead silence of the class is immediate. Her bellow completely silences us to pin-drop levels. This all happens in the single beat necessary for me to risk my educational career and possibly my health by deadpanning, into that charged silence, with perfect timing: "...collaborate and listen".

You gotta be the right age to get it. Those are the opening lyrics to "Ice Ice Baby", the biggest hit of history's most preposterous 'rapper' Vanilla Ice. It's actually not that bad a song really. It's easy, and entirely appropriate, to diss Vanilla Ice. But this song still stands.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is how in that split second I weighed the possible consequences of making my math teacher really pissed off at me for giving her cheek.Ultimately, of course, a good musical joke is a worthy endeavour. I'd like to imagine at the end of the day, when she was at home with a brandy in her hand, she said to herself, "you know, that was a decent joke." Probably not, because she probably didn't get the reference. Anyway, I got detentions but I also got a room full of laughter.

The thing about audacity is sometimes it has to be done. There's no shame is being a smartass, really. A smartass is someone who knows that a clever joke needs to be made, damn the consequences.

Synapse to the Beat: Mariah Carey's "Dreamlover"

Have you ever heard Cannibal Corpse? Horrible, ugly stuff. Or, let's put it in a kinder way: it's an approach to music that is really radically different from approaches that I prefer. To be dead honest, I can't really envision how someone can stand to listen to more than a minute of it of his own free will.

I have listened to much more than a minute of Cannibal Corpse, and not through my own free will (well, you couold argue that not cutting off my ears was a free-will decision). My second year of university, I shared a house with a handful of people, one of whom was what you might call a 'heavy metal aficionado'. He was a great guy, but he blared the heaviest of heavy metal music pretty much night and day.

I can remember looking through his CDs. This was, when I was of university age, a perfectly reasonable sign of cameraderie and not a violation of privacy. Now safely in my mid-thirties, the act of looking through someone's music collection seems akin to snooping through their medicine cabinet, but I guess things were different then. I can't remember all of the names there, but I do remember Metallica, I do remember Pantera. I remember Slayer. Megadeth. Sepultura, who did some Brazilian things every now and then. Cannibal Corpse, as mentioned above, the worst of the lot. And... Mariah Carey.

And not just one random CD, either, but a whack-load of Mariah Carey CDs. And not merely 'some CDs left over from a previous era of musical taste'. Mariah Carey was the only non-metal stuff he owned. The juxtaposition was comical, but I'd seen weirder. Another person I was living with at the time had all kinds of cool 'positivity' hip-hop like the Digable Planets but for some reason also owned a bunch of Allman Brothers CDs. That's probably even weirder.

No, what makes this guy memorable is his response when I asked him why he had the Mariah Carey CDs: "Are you kidding? She's hot!" I couldn't really argue with that: I don't know if she's the hottest woman in the world or not, but she's certainly pleasant to look at. But... look at. Not listen to. Wait... I'd sooner listen to Mariah Carey than Cannibal Corpse, but (a) neither are to my taste, and (b) thinking a girl is 'hot' is no reason I can think of to listen to her music. And listen he did - if the CDs were merely expensive eye candy for ogling purposes, I guess I could understand it. I'd find it weird (this was pre-internet but certainly a "Playboy" could be had for less money than a major label CD, and certainly Sears catalogues were easy to come by), but I could understand it. But he really did listen to those CDs. It would be something like this:

1. "Under the Rotted Flesh" by Cannibal Corpse
2. "Spill the Blood" by Slayer
3. "Slaves of Pain" by Sepultura
4. "Message in Blood" by Pantera
5. "Dreamlover" by Mariah Carey
6. "Vomit the Soul" by Cannibal Corpse

It was about as bizarre as it gets.

Synapse to the Beat: Love and Rockets' "Ball of Confusion"

I wasn't yet born in 1970 when Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote "Ball of Confusion", so they couldn't have called me for advice. Pity. I could have helped. Turns out Whitfield and Strong wrote the following:

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
Vote for me, and I'll set you free.

Which is ultimately a non-sequitur, a religious line and a political one stuck together. A series of slogans spray-painted over top of each other by different people on the same wall.

I was able to grow up believing those lines were entirely different. I spent years of my life mistakenly believing they were the much superior:

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
Both for me, and I'll set you free.

Which might not make much literal sense but is evocative and sinister in an artsy way. It is, in my humble opinion, way superior. Like everyone else, I have my share of Mondegreens. Perhaps more than many, because I never really had any presumption that music lyrics had to make any kind of sense at all. I was just listening to "House of the Rising Sun" right now, the Animals version. I realised that what he says is the very logical:

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy,
And, God, I know I'm one.

I alwyas presumed there was a religious message stuck in there apropos of nothing:

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy,
In God I know I've won.

Of course, why would a song about prostitution and/or gambling (and/or new blue jeans) suddenly go all born again? Well, it wouldn't. But that never mattered to me. Song lyrics were just, well, nonsense that rhymed. I still kind of feel that way. Just sometimes the nonsense... well, it's less nonsense if you actually sit and look at it.

Only one of these two groups included the 'rap on, brother, rap on' line.

Synapse to the Beat: Arcadia's "Election Day"

I adored my 64. I was a Commodore 64 kid. I had one and I absolutely worshipped it. I had floppy disks and floppy disks full of... er, without exception commercially-released original versions of software. There's no way I would ever trade video games with my friends.

Those disks were indeed floppy - huge and floppy, like a clown's shoes. And sometimes they had a label on them that dutifully annotated what was in them - but more often someone had merely scrawled some mysterious message on the label, and it required a good ol' LOAD "*",8,1 to figure out what was on it.

One of those disks had 'Re-Election Day' written on it. It turned out to be just a single program, a massive file that took up the whole disk and took ages to load. Nothing promising, really - I was an impatient kid. If it wasn't a game, I was going to be mad...

It wasn't a game. It was nothing more than ten or fifteen seconds of "Election Day", an eminently forgettable song from a 1985 Duran Duran side project called Arcadia. Just ten or fifteen seconds of music, nothing else. Payoff for, I don't know, maybe five minutes of loading time? What a rip-off.

Ah, but no... The Commodore 64 had a revolutionary soundchip. The bleeps and bloops that made up its computer music was way more sophisticated than the bleeps and bloops of ots competitors. And somehow programmers goet it to (badly) simulate a real human voice! It could say "Another visitor! Stay awhile! Stay forever!" It could also, in the scratchiest of voices, say "Hey taxi! Platform five, please!".

But this... This was entirely different. This was, somehow coming from inside that computer, the actual recording, with Simon Le Bon's voice and all. The sound quality was beyond primitive, but there it was... the computer not merely playing a song but actually playing a recording.

It's a quarter of a century later now, and nothing could be more banal. By now our computers are the main way we listen to recorded music. Music barely even exists anymore as a 'physical' medium: those zeroes and ones are all we have left. Who cares, right? The thing is, though, that one long-dead generation had Thomas Edison reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb", and my generation - or at least I - had Simon Le Bon. Same thing. Same primitive beginnings of a revolution. From there to here...

Synapse to the Beat: Sting's "Russians"

Twenty-five years ago, but it seems much, much longer than that - almost like a different century (okay, technically it is). I'm sitting at home listening to the radio. Sting is, in his own inimitable warble, wondering aloud if 'the Russians love their children too'. Ten years old, I say to my father, 'That's quite a thing to say. Of course they love their children.' My father answers by saying, 'I think it's a good question.'

Two decades later, I still remember that. I still remember being surprised at the attitudes of my father and of Sting. I had a sudden image of a Russian child talking to his parent about whether or not Westerners loved their children.

Of course, it's all ancient history. One ideological wall fell, another one was built, and we have new enemies whose love for their children we can question... A lot has changed, and nothing has changed.

We find it easier to fight monsters than to fight humans. It's not that difficult to kill a monster with a gun, a tank or a bomb, but it's much more difficult to do the same to a human.

So we demonise; we dehumanise. We make monsters.

If a child of ten can understand it, an adult should also be able to realise that there are no monsters in this world to fight. There are only people. No enemy was ever hatched from a pod. Hitler's mother once held her son to her breast to feed him. Stalin's mother once powdered her son's bottom and changed his diaper. Osama Bin Laden used to run into his parents' room begging to sleep between them after a nightmare. George W. Bush used to scrape his knees while playing and run teary-eyed to his mother for a Band-Aid.

Nobody is born a megalomaniac. What we do when we perceive these people as monsters is to deny ourselves our most important weapon and our most important lesson. We deny the fact that whatever causes people to become ruthless tyrants exists within us. We deny ourselves the chance to consider and explore what it is that causes a helpless child to later become a heartless mass-murderer. And we forget the basic medical truth that within every sickness lies its cure - when we forget that the evil are human too, we deny ourselves the best weapons we have at fighting evil.

Sting says in the same song that 'there's no such thing as a winnable war' - he's speaking from a perspective of Cold War paranoia, but in a sense he's right - right, in any case, that individual skirmishes are not winnable until we realise that they are not different wars but merely different faces of the same grand war - a war of human perspective, of human belief.

A war between those who can justify killing other humans and those who cannot. A war between those who believe the enemy are monsters and those who see the human faces behind the frontlines.

I didn't know it at the time, but Sting was essentially saying the same thing, and his question about the Russians loving their children was largely rhetorical. 'We share the same biology,' he says, 'regardless of ideology.'

And so we do. From humans are all of us born and to humans do all of us return. From humans do all disputes arise and by humans are all disputes settled. From humans comes war and from humans, and only from humans, can come peace.

You cannot make peace with a monster. It's not in their nature.

Good thing we don't have to.