Thursday, 21 August 2008
"End of the Century" by Blur
Blur’s album “Parklife” was released in 1994, when I was in high school. I remember I used to listen to it all the time in the car in the morning on my way to school. I remember that since the journey only took about 20 minutes, the listening experience only lasted till the end of the title track or the middle bit of “The Debt Collector”. To my ears at least, “Parklife” is a great pop album, filled with hooks and catchy tunes. But to some other people (in this case, my erstwhile driver, Pak Akub) it’s just too annoyingly weird.
I listened to it for weeks (I still do, though less frequently nowadays), and by the second week, even Pak Akup’s resistance to anything weirder than Elvi Sukaesih and Bang Oma proved futile. He was tapping his fingers and nodding his head along to it, especially the third track, “End of The Century”.
Now this is undeniably a superb song, Damon said in interviews that it was his favorite Blur songs for a long while. Even his nemesis Noel Gallagher grudgingly admitted that it’s ace. The melodies are delicious, and Graham’s guitar playing is fantastic as always. But if you listen to it on headphones or a very high volume, you realize the subtler touches : the “ooooh-aaaaah” backing vocals (still spine-tingling after all these years), the choir-like bridge, and the horns at the end.
It’s quintessential Britpop Blur, a high watermark of what was called by Graham as the Blur Stomp, which in subsequent efforts can be taken to effortless highs (“Charmless Man”) or absurd lows (“Mr. Robinson’s Quango”. Ugh, awful awful song).
Weird fact : “End of A Century” only charted at a lowly number 19 on the UK singles chart, probably not helped by a live video filmed at Alexandra Palace that features an inferior live version of the track.
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