Berrycakeness

We all have that one song. The song that stops you in your tracks and makes you either run to the dancefloor, sing out loud, or do both. It could be a song from your party days, rose-tinted club nights that we all miss, but ultimately didn’t need. It could also be from a very specific time; people who know things say the music you listened to when you were 16 will forever be your banging tunes.

Imagine that feeling, but scale it to a whole decade.

I still have music to uncover, but from a (currently paused) project, I’ve listened to albums from 1990-1992, so I’m one-fifth of the way to being great at a ’90s music round at a pub quiz.

I’d still get it all wrong.

That’s the thing: I don’t study music; I simply consume it and don’t know who has sung it, what the correct lyrics are, or what the song title is, but I’m familiar with it and can usually give a good guess at the year of release.

It’s a symptom of how I consume music these days – streaming – en masse in the shower, on a commute, on a quiet work day, and I’m listening, but not paying attention. I feel like this could be a very different situation if I sat down with a CD or an LP. Even when I had CDs, I put them all in a case to take to school with me, sans insert. Still impressed that our blazers could fit a CD Walkman in the inside pocket. They were, of course, banned at our school, but #musicwozlyf and god forbid we couldn’t listen to the latest Kerrang! album during lunch break.

I’m not sure when the fascination with 90’s music truly began, but I think it has something to do with watching music channels for most of my life.

Take, for instance, “It’s All Coming Back To Me – Celine Dion”. Written by Jim Steinman, not presented to Meatloaf as it was deemed to be best suited to a female voice (much to some legal battle later on), and released in 1989 by the composer’s band Pandora’s Box as a rock opera to no avail (but what an album).

Celine’s video starts with an epic intro, and her lover riding off into a storm. She’s in bed, lightning strikes a tree, he slams into it, and a fireball descends. Then she starts to sing, a whole 1 minute into the video. The next 6 minutes are Celine singing, battling with curtains, her dressing gown and seeing visions of her now dead lover in the mirror when she’s trying to brush her damn hair. We also see some heavy petting, her running through a hallway to more big doors and windows, 90’s CGI and of course, she’s changed into a suave pirate dress. Then there is the verse that isn’t often played on the radio edit, which honestly feels weird if you haven’t listened to the full version often.

But the most interesting and potentially illegal lyric is: “There were nights of endless pleasure, it was more than all your laws allowed.”

If we now take the Pandora’s Box video into question, we start with a woman lying on the floor, as if she just dropped out of space. It also seems that whichever world she has landed in is full of leather-clad men from Soho who are indeed touching her. The start of some sort of alien orgy. It then makes the above lyric make SO much more sense.

So I suggest that to make Celine’s version less beastiality sounding, we should rewrite:

“There were nights of endless pleasure; it was more than I had ever known.”

What do you think? Comment with your revision, if you so care to do so.

Music videos are weird, and I love them all for it.

Peace out xoxo