Wild Light Decade #13: PRISMS - fresh approach (Patreon)

This week's drop is a Wild Light heavyweight: Prisms.

Long time 65LABS supporters might remember that at some point early in the Wreckage Systems project, we unearthed an ancient video that had been made for some long-forgotten reason that showed some early prototypes of Prisms. (It's still up HERE if you missed it first time around.)

Today, we present to you two versions. The one embedded at the top, Prisms - fresh approach is quite different to the version that ended up on the record. Additionally, at the bottom of this post we've included Prisms - Studio Demo. The studio in question presumably being 2fly, Sheffield.

NICOLE

Of all the pop songs that have ever been written, the example that comes to mind now as we come to analyse Prisms - fresh approach is, somewhat unhelpfully, When I Grow Up by The Pussycat Dolls. You remember The Pussycat Dolls. The girl band that was put together as a vehicle to speed run Nicole Scherzinger into brief super stardom. Or perhaps continued superstardom (?) 65LABS has not been paying close attention to Nicole Scherzinger's plight. Hope she's doing ok.

When I Grow Up is simultaneously a great and ridiculous song. A high/low point of the 2008 corporate pop industrial complex. For the first couple of minutes it bounces along with the energy of a hyperactive teenager full of artificial sweeteners. It cycles impatiently between its verse and chorus over and over again, smoothing off all the edges of the fantastic early 2000s hyperpop it's taken its inspiration from. But THEN, at 02:27 (or 02:37 in the video link above), out of the blue, something amazing happens. Eight bars of sublime melodrama. Prior to this the song is mostly sticking stubbornly to its Eminor root, but then it suddenly drops down to C. A distorted trance-y synth starts a curious, wandering melody. Scherzinger, for her part, drops the attitude and suddenly sounds like she really means it. Nice one, Schezzer. And then... out. Eight bars and done. Like it never happened. Back to the dumb, confident strut of carefully calibrated, MTV-approved raunchiness.

This tactic: Eminor to Cmajor, followed by a couple more chords going up or down... It is hard to go wrong when employing this particular jump between notes in a pop song. It is the gift that keeps on giving. We've not done the maths, but you can probably hear some version of this shape in approx 80% of all pop songs. Loads of 65daysofstatic songs.

You know how the first Godspeed You! Black Emperor album is called F# A# infinity? Jumping between those notes, F# and A#: it's the same shape, just reversed and in a different key. Although we have no definitive proof of this, surely that title is a small tribute to the power of the space between those two particular notes in a Western chromatic scale? Or, knowing Godspeed, perhaps it is a futile lament that all pop music is trapped inside the same factory of socially constructed musical combinations that will forever constrain the nature of what 'popular' music is allowed to be. And perhaps The Pussycat Dolls too, saw the truth about the belly of this terrible machine they were forced to make pop music inside of and, unable to call their own album 'Emin C Infinity', instead smuggled this small, powerful artistic statement inside of their lead single? All we can say for sure is that this is just one of the many ways Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Pussycat Dolls are alike. We will not be taking further questions at this time.

TAYLOR

To restate the initial point that just got obliterated by the above musical comparison: the nugget of magic found in When I Grow Up works because of its brevity, juxtaposition and shamelessly romantic chord movements. Perhaps a more ambitious example of this kind of songwriting, which we could call 'smuggling in some Jim Steinman bombast through the back door' is Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift. When you take a look at this song through the appropriate lense, it is almost its own mini-opera. A rollercoaster of hyperpop intentionality. The part we are most concerned with is foreshadowed in the song's overture, but we don't get the full-throated instrumentation of it until 00:45 (00:50 in the video above). Then, we hear the vocals repeating the same melodic phrase, as the sawtooth bass descends through some cool roots, while the piano chords straddle both the descent and the holding tension notes at the same time... this is magical! Nice one, Taylor. (Although as good as this is, it doesn't quite make up for all the flying about in your private plane you do. Maybe have a think about that, yeah?)

Again, it is not just the melodic frission that makes this part so good, it is also how concise it manages to make itself and the careful, deliberate dissonance as it wedges itself inside the rest of the song. There's some hard angles here. It's like a sonic jumpcut.

65

The question you might be beginning to ask yourself is - what does any of this have to do with Prisms? Look What You Made Me Do came out five years after Wild Light, so while it is clear that Taylor herself was massively influenced by Wild Light, she had no direct influence on the writing of Prisms. When I Grow Up was released five years before Wild Light though. And although the influence might not be particuarly obvious, perhaps it is in there somewhere? After all, that song, and specifically those magical eight bars, appeared in one of the many 65 Changeover mixes full of unsanctioned 65 remixes and cut-ups of pop songs made around the time the band were working on Wild Light. (Perhaps a kind, more-organised-than-us patron could link to a bootleg version of the relevant bootleg mp3 below, should others be interested in hearing it).

It is hard to draw a neat and tidy conclusion to these thoughts. But they are not new thoughts hastily typed out to fulfil weekly Patreon content. They are thoughts that have been kicking about for more than a decade (as the When I Grow Up 65 cutup will hopefully attest). Perhaps the best way to explain the similarities between Prisms and When I Grow Up is to look at the songs' dispositions. Forget the reductive quiet-LOUD-quiet-LOUD dynamic usually used to describe 'post rock'. The contrast we are talking about here is between a determined, utilitarian, perhaps even somewhat repressed (?) mode of musicality, juxtaposed with a more vunerable, open, unfurling or blooming of music. Control versus tasty chaos. Bottling things up versus daring to talk about your feelings. It is precisely the dead-eyed, corporate, sanitised opening two minutes of When I Grow Up that makes the desperate, 8 bar slippage into actual emotions come across like a desperate, heartfelt rupture. And the fact that it so quickly regains control makes the reveal seem even more authentic.

In the album version of Prisms, it is the skeletal, angular, somewhat cold opening and middle sequences that (hopefully) heighten the effect/affect of the blooming of guitar melodies and synth pads that happen briefly in the first half of the song and more fully toward the end. Because of the way these prettier sounds and movements are situated amongst the bruising sub bass thumps and angular slabs of authoritative noise, it feels more like those sounds are escaping some kind of high security sonic prison.

Prisms - fresh approach is a curious moment in time that shows these elements in a different, still interesting, but ultimately not quite as effective context. We hadn't yet understood that the way for all these elements to make sense was through horizontal sequencing rather than vertical layering and so this version is a blend of everything rather than strictly organised sounds.

So there you have it. The 65daysofstatic-Pussycat Dolls comparison essay you never knew you needed. And a somewhat impressionistic attempt to explain why 65 might have, once upon a time, put certain sounds in a certain order. In short, PRISMS: Weirder than you ever guessed.

See you next week, friends!

65.x