Portishead ~ Sour Times
(written: 24 February 2004)
What is a ratpony? Much like a mule, or beefalo, it is born crossbred, but cannot birth.
What comparison am I trying to swing here? I have no idea. Just that there is a new format. I was going to go all stupid and say that musical genes are thrown into cakemixes of song... and as such a 'ratpony' is a truly innovative aural piece of art.
But that's folly. That's just a jargony way of me saying this site has a new format. No one reads here, so we are going to indulge, and not in vicodin. I can't afford any just yet.
Here we will induct songs into our own personal hall of fames. Halls of fame. Whatever. And someday when I am famous, you can burn compilations of these songs, and sell them outside my electrified gates to slack-jawed tourists.
My first induction is surprising. It is as follows.
Back in school I took an English degree. One fundamental aspect of art I learned was context. About how one can take the same words, and throw them in a different environment of context, and draw different meanings out of them.
This is what a good cover artist does. Well... Portishead, they made a career to us hardcore music losers by covering themselves. Usually a band will record a song, and slop it on our pallets like undercooked pasta, giving it no second look unless Dre wants to steal a riff.
Portishead, in my opinion, does something that I only have ever seen Trent Reznor do; that being reap what they have sown in their own music.
Portishead carefully covered their own 'Sour Times', even though the original was an acid-lounge masterpiece, conjuring images in my mind of cabaret dancers taking the microphone after the bomb.
I am currently listening to a live version where Beth Gibbons transforms the lyrical anchor ("nobody loves me... it's true") from a quiet longing in the original, to an intense lament. Not to mention the 'Airbus Reconstruction' self-cover where the refrain is sung by what sounds to be a jilted group of men.
It was that 'Airbus Reconstruction' I once put on a CD for Kim. And I never gave Portishead another shot until just this year whilst in India when 'nobody loves me, it's true! not like you...' appeared in my head like a neon marquee.
The sentiment was all there... no matter how I wanted to interpret it. Luckily for me, though, if I had any trouble, or if I got lazy, Portishead did at least three different versions for me to piggyback on.
Now if only I could be assed to appreciate their other interpretations... hell... even their other originals. But based on sheer catchiness in my brain alone, 'Sour Times' is a worthy first induction into my musical hall of fame.
No photography. No smoking. No dogs. Nobody loves me.
photo by kam