The Paris Match

Just as a reminder, these biographical/retrospective posts all began upon hearing the Atlanta bands Tantrum and Hello Ocho cover the Tom Tom Club's 1981 song Wordy Rappinghood, which reminded him of what he was listening to back then, which led to a fond remembrance of the female-fronted post-punk bands like The Slits and The Au Pairs he had liked back in the day, which then led to this current chronological review of what he was listening to between then and now and how he got to be where he is now, musically speaking.  The personal and autobiographical portions of these posts are included only to help explain the context of his musical preferences. Also, "he" is discussed in the third person only because the current author considers "him" to be past incarnations of whatever it is that he now regards as a "self."

In 1985, despite his limited success and upward mobility (trust me, he still had a long way to go), he couldn't quite shake the melancholy that had taken hold of him the year before.  He listened to The Style Council a lot that year and appreciated Paul Weller's diversity of musical styles and willingness to let the mood of the song take precedent over his own role in the band, sometimes even handing the vocals over to others, or letting the band take over and play an instrumental.  Paul Weller, incidentally, would go on to later save his life, but we'll get to that in due time.

He would mail mix tapes to Denver - literally tapes - cassettes containing a mix of Style Council songs (You're The Best Thing That Ever Happened and My Ever Changing Moods) as well as other music - and she would reply with mix tapes of her own, which he would search over and over again for possible hidden clues as to what was really going on in her heart and if she was really ever going to return to Georgia as they had discussed.  She even wrote little cryptic snippets of poetry on the cassette labels, the meaning of which he could never quite fathom:

The heart is a beach, there is no shore to its opening.

Thirty years later, he still has no idea what that means but it still brings tears to his eyes.

It had occurred to him that her leaving to take a job in Denver was the exact and precise karmic retribution he deserved for leaving the former girlfriend behind in Boston in order to take a job in Atlanta, but that didn't make it hurt any less.  Ambition and its consequences were the root cause of his suffering.

It was only midway through the 1980s but he already needed a change.