"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.
If there was anyone out there who cared enough to think it through, this one would have been obvious.
Yes, The Clash, of course - given my age and my musical tastes, I of course had a Clash phase.
And Lost in the Supermarket as well, because I'm also clearly a fan of the emotional song over the agitprop. Sure, I really like London's Burning and I Fought the Law and Something About England and Safe European Home and London Calling, but the song that almost edged this out was Somebody Got Murdered.
This is that cliched thing, the song of suburban ennui - but that's what's neat about music, clichés in songs can work a lot of the time if done well. A song often is a cliché, since it needs to be simplified and focused.
I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see
It's full of specifics, not vagueness. This room, these neighbors, this hedge. A kettle, a bottle. The furniture of one normal life, and the gnawing feeling that it's not enough, that there must be more than this.
I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality
I'll fully admit the time I loved this song most was my teenage years: that time when all of us are at our most cliched and disheartened and alienated. But it still strikes a chord, forty years later, as I live out my own suburban life. There are many days I still feel lost in the supermarket; maybe you do as well.
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