Better Things: Pretty in Pink

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

It's not impossible that a re-recording would be better than the original - I can't think of any cases where a band re-did a song and made it better, but I might be forgetting something, and I will admit it's possible. But it's definitely not the way to bet: the first one is going to be the best one.

Case in point: the crunchy, jangly Pretty in Pink, the most famous song by the Psychedelic Furs, famously re-recorded not-quite-as-well for the movie named after it. Shame about that, really, but the original is still out there.

This is the iconic Furs song, and most of the time my favorite Furs song, but I have to give some love to the Furs' awesome, uncompromising first, self-titled record. In some other world, I might have picked India for this list.

(In some other, even quirkier world, I picked the entirely awesome Aeroplane (Dance Mix), which has been my favorite Furs song almost as often and almost as long as Pretty.)

But I'm here to talk about Pretty in Pink. It's a darker, sadder song than it sounds - darker than the remake, definitely. It's about a woman seen from outside, who's trying to be part of something, maybe to be loved, and is getting only disdain from the men she sleeps with. And it's not clear if she knows it, or cares.

That could be the positive spin, if you want: Caroline doesn't care that the men she sleeps with all

Talk of her notes and the
Flowers that they never sent

There's no sign in the song that this touches her. 

When I first heard this song, I took the title exclusively: these men are saying she's Pretty in Pink - i.e., she's attractive when she's naked, but only when she's naked. I'm not sure that's the only interpretation, but I still lean that way; the men's causal cruelty is central. This is a song of the male gaze, if you want to be reductive.

But, most of all, it's a loud, thoughtful, gnarly, crunchy song - one you can let wash over you or listen to closely, depending on your mood. Either way, she's still pretty in pink. And the men who walk through in their coats might disdain that, but it's not nothing.

She doesn't have anything
You want to steal
Well, nothing you can touch