Sometimes you listen to songs on your iPod that no one else has ever heard of (or at least no one in your immediate social circle; maybe the people in far-off corners of the indie-alternative music world have heard the same song you’re listening to, but they’re too cool to admit it). But sometimes, for every Neutral Milk Hotel and Belle and Sebastian song that you claim as your own, your very own…you listen to an anthem beloved by millions. The kind of song that gets used in commercials, say, or blasted at stadiums when a team scores a touchdown or avoids getting embarrassed. Such songs are clichés, overplayed and devoid of any personal import you can bring to them as a fan, right?
“Under Pressure” is one of those songs that I’m sure anyone reading this has heard, and not just heard but over-heard (as in “heard over and over and over and over ad nauseum”). It’s so familiar because it’s got a distinctive bass line (just ask Vanilla Ice how distinctive it is sometime), it’s got two of the all-time greatest ambiguous-sexuality singers in duet form (well, there was nothing ambiguous about Freddie Mercury, even before the Village People-style moustache, but I think it’s safe to say that David Bowie was bisexual because it was trendy to be so in the early Seventies if you were in rock music), and it’s an advertiser’s dream: plenty of bombast and quotable lines that can be isolated for identification with your product. Even if, somehow, you’re a space alien just arrived on this planet from millions of galaxies to the west of Tucson
It would be easy to hate this song, really easy, and yet…
I think something that my fellow self-styled music “experts” and “critics” tend to ignore when they get “serious” about music is the fact that it’s supposed to be fun to listen to. Chuck Klosterman gets it (why else would he devote an entire book to heavy metal, the most maligned form of rock music outside of, say, dance music?), but try getting Greil Marcus to wax poetic about anything the Black-Eyed Peas have done and you’re barking up the wrong tree. Music doesn’t have to have a “message,” it can be big and dumb and loud and stupid and fun and about Fridays or telephone numbers or girls dating some guy named Jesse. Because a lot of the time, the songs that supposedly have a “message” just don’t work. When was the last time you voluntarily listened to “We Are the World?” Exactly.
In the Eighties, rock music suddenly became About Something. It didn’t matter if it was aid to starving Africans or AIDS awareness, so long as it was About Something. Not that music wasn’t About Something before; the Vietnam War did a toll on the young men able to avoid service in the armed forces but physically incapable of not forming a band during the peak period of 1966 to 1971. Message songs about the war (most against but some, like the bizarre “Ballad of the Green Berets,” pro-war) were serious (except when they were funny, like “Fixin’ To Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish), and that’s why when you hear them today, they seem silly and outdated. Sometimes when art tackles a serious subject head-on, it ends up looking ridiculous in retrospect.
So is “Under Pressure” a serious message song? If it is, the subject it’s addressing seems to be…I don’t know, be kind to people? It was the Eighties, and the bizarre confluence of Reagan-era “optimism” and conservative “get it your own damn self” made for a Up-With-People approach to social problems, like “we’d sure cure that pesky gay disease if we just made a song about how important it is to love Jesus, and turn it into a Broadway show.” Live Aid, noble as it was, was less about the cause than the chance for celebs to look like they Gave a Damn, that it was all About Something. You could say the current bumper crop of reality-TV shows, for which shame is not an emotion you could feel regarding your status as a font of ridicule by the public at large, got its start when Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie said “hey, people are dying in Africa . Wouldn’t it look good if we wrote a song and got Bob Dylan, Springsteen, *and* Dan Aykroyd to sing on this?” I remember a P.J. O’Rourke essay about the “We Are the World” video and how satisfied the people involved were with themselves, that they were showing that they cared. You could transpose that to any second of any broadcast of any episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and the words would still apply.
So after all that, do I like the song? Yes, of course: it’s awesome. Never mind the odd and frankly hard-to-decipher “message” of the song (I’m still leaning towards “random acts of kindness” or “pay attention to depressed people, they need love too”), the song itself actually seems to be About Something, but that’s more about what you bring to it (or, in keeping with the theme, What You Bring To It). Yes, it’s over-used by commercials (the one where the Muppets sang it was pretty funny, but still). Yes, it’s a relic of a time when superstar collaborations were a rarity, not a weekly occurrence (and when the word “superstar” actually meant something, Nicki Minaj. It meant something that you will never, ever qualify as). But it moves me, and I can’t say that about “Eve of Destruction” or “Do They Know It’s Christmas” or whatever the title was of that dumbass British Christmas-themed song. I like it, I guess, and I hope you don’t mind but I don’t give a damn if you do (now see, *that’s* Eighties).
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