CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

By: Deb Chachra
August 6, 2020

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite punk songs, c. 1974–1983.

“EVER FALLEN IN LOVE (WITH SOMEONE YOU SHOULDNT’VE?)” | THE BUZZCOCKS | 1978

“What came first, the music or the misery?” asks the pop music-obsessed protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and pain and misery and loss.”

Pop music might be wall-to-wall heartbreak and unrequited love, but it’s a punk song that captures it best.

Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with?

In 1977, on an early Buzzcocks tour, Pete Shelley was watching Guys and Dolls on TV in a hotel room in Edinburgh, and was struck by this line — he describes himself as going through ‘self-discovery, shall we say’ and was thinking about his friend Francis, on the tour with them. He worked out the lyrics the next day while in waiting in their van, making the decision to be vague about the ‘someone’ in question. (Four years later, Shelley would first come to my attention, as a kid in Canada, with his top ten solo hit, “Homosapien”; it was banned by the BBC because of what they described as its explicitly gay content.)

Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with?

Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, argues that as images become more and more simplified, photographs to icons, they not only shift from the concrete to the abstract, but also from the the specific to the universal. From a photorealistic image to two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, the simpler the face, the more people it can be said to describe.

And if I start a commotion
I’ll only end up losing you, and that’s worse.

I spent nearly all of my formative years — from when I was ten until I was in my twenties – in academic environments that were mostly male. By the time I got to engineering school, most of my friends were men, and I fell in love with my share of them.

Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with?

‘Unrequited’ doesn’t cover the range of possibilities. A close friend I was worried about losing if I shared my true feelings. Someone who was already in a committed relationship. Someone else when I was already in a committed relationship. Someone that I knew was a jerk. Someone who turned out to be a jerk. Someone that I knew wasn’t interested in me. Someone that I knew was interested in another woman. Someone who wasn’t interested in women. Someone I thought was dating a friend of mine, and by the time I realised they weren’t, they were already dating someone else.

Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with?

Most pop songs about unrequited love dwell closely on the specifics of one individual. But not this song: it’s driving, catchy, and, above all, repetitive.

Ever fallen in love, in love with someone, ever fallen in love, in love with someone, you shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with?

Yes. Again and again and again. And the genius of this song is that it speaks to and captures them all. As Shelley said about his lyrics, “The only people they exclude are people who don’t know anything about love.”

***

CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2020): Series introduction by Josh Glenn | Mimi Lipson on Flipper’s “Sex Bomb” | James Parker on The Jam’s “Going Underground” | Dan Fox on The Cramps’ “Human Fly” | Adrienne Crew on Bad Brains’ “I and I Survive” | Devin McKinney on Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never” | Deb Chachra on The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” | Mark Kingwell on The Demics’ “New York City” | Jessamyn West on Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor” | Douglas Wolk on The Homosexuals’ “Soft South Africans” | Josh Glenn on The Freeze’s “This is Boston, Not L.A.” | Stephanie Burt on Sorry’s “Imaginary Friend” | Luc Sante on Public Image Ltd.’s “Public Image” | Miranda Mellis on X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” | Adam McGovern on The Clash’s “Washington Bullets” | Mandy Keifetz on Germs’ “Forming” | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sex Pistols’ “Problems” | Anthony Miller on The Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” | Deborah Wassertzug on The Mekons’ “Where Were You?” | Tor Aarestad on Gang of Four’s “Return the Gift” | Marc Weidenbaum on The Pop Rivets’ “Dream of ’63” | David Smay on The Rezillos’ “(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures” | Vanessa Berry on The Cure’s “So What” | Chelsey Johnson on The Slits’ “Typical Girls” | Lynn Peril on Crass’s “Smother Love” | Mike Watt on The Dils’ “You’re Not Blank”.

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

Categories

Tags