This Year: 1985

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

The songs you love the best are the ones that send a shiver through you from the first few notes - you hear that distinctive electronic drum beat, and it washes over you immediately.

That particular song might not affect anyone else in the world - maybe it does; I don't know everyone in the world - but it's that way for you, and that's important, and no one can take it from you.

For 1985, that song for me was E = MC2 by Big Audio Dynamite.

It's a song with a distinctive sound, that starts from the first synth-y drumbeat, from the first instant. A jerky soft-hard drumbeat, that builds up through repurposed audio into the actual song - which I have to admit that I've never even tried to explicate.

I learn, today, writing this, that it's a pretty transparent tribute to the filmmaker Nicolas Roeg - the verses describe specific Roeg films; the samples are all from his 1970 movie Performance. That doesn't matter, of course - a song is as much about the feeling and the beat and the images it makes in your head as what the songwriter meant it to be about - but it's an interesting thing to note. Songs often are about something, and that can be important, or not, to any specific listener.

This is a song that was all sound and feeling and ambiance for me, on a record full of random samples, snippets of repurposed movie dialogue. This is the one that hit that booming drum and grabbed my attention and kept me chanting along with the refrain that I still, frankly, think of as poetry rather than meaning anything specific:

Ritual ideas relativity

Only buildings no people prophecy

Time slide place to hide nudge reality

Foresight minds wide magic imagery