Quirk Your Enthusiasm (5)

By: Elina Shatkin
August 5, 2016

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite New Wave songs from c. 1977–1982. Josh Glenn’s series introduction is here, and you can listen to the QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM playlist here. Enjoy!

“BROKEN ENGLISH” | MARIANNE FAITHFULL | 1979

On “Broken English,” Marianne Faithfull is the anti-pop star, a tarnished muse with a voice like an unmade bed. No longer the pop tart of “As Tears Go By” or the writer of “Sister Morphine,” a song that hints at her future path, Faithfull drove a stake through the heart of her image as groupie and resurrected herself as bard and savior.

Her voice had become a story in itself, loaded with yearning and doom and as recognizable as a rusty hinge. On “Broken English,” the album’s first and titular track, Faithfull croaks out her weariness with the “old war” — an excoriation of all ideologies or a plea for understanding across the frontlines of an incendiary romance? Were you to listen to Thriller and Born in the U.S.A. alongside Broken English, you’d learn as much about the United States during the 1980s as any history book. To paraphrase Godard, over time every album becomes a documentary. Broken English feels like it was born one.

At only eight tracks and 36 minutes, the album includes a joyous pagan ode, an anthem for soul-crushed housewives, and a song that may as well be a vat of acid splashed in the face of a cheating lover. That’s what happens when the social upheaval, pseudo-revolution, and sexual hedonism of the late 1960s distills into the rich, oily stew of Reaganomics. While so many “counterculture” icons molted to become self-congratulatory capitalists (Jerry Garcia necktie, anyone?), that was never Faithfull’s reality. Disrespected and left for dead by the gatekeepers of culture, this quavering chanteuse picked up the pieces and sang them back, not in Russian or German, but in her native tongue, a language of outsiders, shattered but reclaimed.

***

QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Mark Kingwell on Soft Cell’s TAINTED LOVE | Joanne McNeil on Gary Numan’s METAL | Devin McKinney on Suicide’s FRANKIE TEARDROP | Douglas Wolk on Family Fodder’s SAVOIR FAIRE | Elina Shatkin on Marianne Faithfull’s BROKEN ENGLISH | Steph Burt on Altered Images’ HAPPY BIRTHDAY | Greg Rowland on Jilted John’s JILTED JOHN | Gordon Dahlquist on XTC’s RESPECTABLE STREET | Adrienne Crew on D-Day’s TOO YOUNG TO DATE | Jonathan Lethem on The Blue Nile’s I LOVE THIS LIFE | Josh Glenn on Tim Curry’s I DO THE ROCK | Molly Wright Steenson on Missing Persons’ WORDS | Anthony Miller on The Nails’ 88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN | Luc Sante on The Normal’s WARM LEATHERETTE | Mimi Lipson on Dolly Mixture’s HOW COME YOU’RE SUCH A HIT WITH THE BOYS, JANE? | Tim Carmody on Talking Heads’ LIFE DURING WARTIME | Ingrid Schorr on Ian Dury’s CLEVOR TREVER | Adam McGovern on Lene Lovich’s LUCKY NUMBER | Deb Chachra on Rough Trade’s HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL | Tor Aarestad on Oingo Boingo’s LITTLE GIRLS | David Smay on The B-52’s’ DANCE THIS MESS AROUND | Jessamyn West on Blondie’s HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE | Drew Daniel on The Human League’s MARIANNE | Erik Davis on Tuxedomoon’s TIME TO LOSE | Dan Fox on Thomas Dolby’s EUROPA & THE PIRATE TWINS.

MORE ENTHUSIASM SERIES at HILOBROW

Quirk Your Enthusiasm (5)

Categories

Tags