Depress yourself
Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...
This post was published more than 14 years ago
I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.
I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 14 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and wrote about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.
So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:
- My views may well have changed in the last 14 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
- This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
- Factual information might be outdated.
- Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.
Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...
I must thank Tom Reynolds for his Guardian piece which reunited me with the almost fatally depressing ‘Brick’ by Ben Folds Five. I can’t think why I’ve come across it before, but I have, and it still retains the same sense of hopeless tragedy that it did the first time I heard it. But then, I guess it’s difficult to write a cheery song about getting an abortion.
Here’s what Mr Reynolds had to say about it (complete with corrections presumably added after he wrote the original):
(NB: Many listeners, including me, first assumed Brick was about a relationship ending. We discovered later that it’s about a couple getting an abortion. The following is based on the first scenario. Therefore it’s all wrong.) A gloomy piano-and-voice song about a couple breaking up (wrong), Brick tells of a guy who picks up his girlfriend, bitches, takes her someplace, bitches, waits for her, bitches, then brings her back home, referring to her as a “brick” (this is true). We never learn what’s transpired in between (this is wrong). All that’s certain is the couple wants to split up (this is wrong). Brick offers the same pleasure that comes with dropping one on your foot (this is really true).
He only rates it as number 13 in the most depressing songs ever. I think it’s far worse than that.
This 633rd post was filed under: Headliner.