25/100, Pop songs and the secret to desire

The thing with desire is it’s a conundrum. You can only want something for as long as you don’t have it. It’s why I write short books without distinct endings, keep the reader wanting more.

It’s true etymologically too. Desire is a verb. It’s something you do, it’s something you wish for, it’s something you long for. It’s not something you have. It’s future tense, not present.

Marketers know this, desire very literally makes capitalism go round. For a while I thought about writing a longer essay about this, but you don’t write about desire. Who wants to read about desire? No, you want to read desire. You want to be in it, not over it, you don’t want the reader to watch you want, you want the reader to want.

The best way of evoking desire and that strange longing feeling of it is a song. The thing that can’t be named and surely will work out badly in the end because that’s how it all ends, eventually, in tears. Call me a nihilist if you want but think about it, tears eventually. You just work out if the pay off is worth it.

It’s a song not for the lyrics but because the perfect pop song never ever gives you enough. That’s the rule. Recently I have been playing a pop song, 2 minutes and 12 seconds long. It’s nothing really. But what it does, is it leaves me wanting more. I suspect it’s a bad song. It’s by a band who really are not cool. But that 132 seconds are perfect and gone before you know it, it’s a holiday romance, it’s your boyfriend when you were sixteen, it’s the summer you fell in love and then he went home and that was it.

Bill Ryder-Jones knows this and plays with it the whole length of lechyd Da, where there isn’t a song over 4.30, and hardly any of them either. The stand out track for me is still If Tomorrow Starts Without Me, because it never quite gives the listener what they want and so you have to listen to it over and over. He does it with Christinha too. It shouldn’t be a surprise, he does it earlier in his career too, but with this album, he’s really perfected it.

A minute longer, a final more satisfying chorus and it would be too much. It would be finished. And you can only ever really want what’s not finished.

I’ve thought this all before, but it struck me again this week when I kept listening to the 2.12 song on repeat. Fucking perfect. And listen to lechyd Da, it’s beautiful.