NI was recently in a bar that has a jukebox, 50 cents a song. It might have been the time or the beer-steamy atmosphere, but it all struck me as uplifting: the importance each song choice was charged with in this place; how the regulars discussed taste in music; like everyone who had already left sacks with 50 cent pieces here, negotiated about interpretations. A 24-year-old singer who became known on Tiktok mingled with the rock classics that the alcohol experts wanted. 50 Cent: “I want real estate, I want dollars, I want to fly like Marvel.” Nina Chuba.
And then, ten minutes later, when the next night owl, far removed from the Tiktok generation, staggered over from the counter: Nina Chuba again. “I want purple that piles up, I want Nina on posters / I want all my friends to live with me on the street.” Okay, I thought deeply, someone is reconciling the generations. Then we ran out of coins.
The music journalist Michael Behrendt writes books about “the biggest song misunderstandings” and “songs that cause explosives”. Most recently, he has dealt with pop music in which “the laws of physics and language are overridden”. By which he means lyrics that somehow sound weird, involuntarily create funny language images or absurd associations. Language is material in songs, it is stretched, picked apart, manipulated. Behrendt has picked many songs himself, hits and hits from times when singers were called Costa and Bata, but also some for the jukebox, “Horse With No Name” for example, the song from which the legendary phrase “The heat was hot “ originates. And, as Behrendt lovingly writes, provocatively imprecise scenery: “There were plants and birds and rocks and things.”
I don’t believe. Behrendt admits how much we forgive when harmonies and melodies are right. With Nina Chuba, everything is association: the street with the houses for friends, the canapés, a painted sky. That’s what a smoky bar is all about: looking back at missed opportunities and getting inspiration for new ones. And elsewhere too.
Elena Witzeck writes about pop here every four weeks. Send your questions to [email protected]
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