Paris 1995-1996
In June
In
Mix
- Yes It's Fucking Political - Skunk Anansie
- The Only Good Fascist Is A Very Dead Fascist - Propaghandi
- Cop - Alkaline Trio
- Firestarter - the Prodigy
- Sound of Da Police - KRS-One
- Things Can Only Get Better - D:Ream
- Exit Music (For A Film)- Radiohead
- Children - Robert Miles
- 2 Become 1 - Spice Girls
- The Ghost of Tom Joad - Bruce Springsteen
- Tubthumping - Chumbawamba
- Why Does Everything Happen To Me - B.B. King
Wherever somebody's fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, ma, and you'll see me
Liner Notes
This was the last and hardest album to put together and so the structure is the loosest, vaguely tracing the shape of the story's crescendo.
By the mid-90s, political music had given way to songs of personal alienation and disaffection. One exceptions to this was feminist hard rock Skunk Anansie with Yes It's Fucking Political. Propaghandi wrote The Only Good Fascist Is A Very Dead Fascist to deliberately alienate the kinds of guys who had started showing up at their gigs. Fitted earlier in the mix for sonic cohesion, Cop is a song for Javert, mocking the 'childhood trauma' excuses for somebody to become a cop in the first place.
Big beat was a definitional 90s genre, and a personal fave. Firestarter is the first of a pair of songs for clashes at the barricade. Socially conscious hip-hop was at its zenith in the overlap between the 80s and 90s - by 1995, gangsta rap and confessional stories dominated the hit albums. So Sound of Da Police (1993) is a bit of a cheat, but it's a banger.
Things Can Only Get Better is also little earlier but now closely associated with Labour party advertising in the 1996 election, and about as hard to hear without a sense of deep irony as Enjolras' decree that our century will be 'happy'. The inspiration for Exit Music (For A Film) was a viewing of Romeo + Juliet, and the feeling that the protagonists could have, and should have run away before their encounter with destiny. We've all had that one for this book. Robert Miles wrote Children as a downtempo song to end all-night raves and as an act of grieving: there had been a number of car-crash deaths of young people on their way home from raves.
Victor Hugo literally says candlelight and soul together, for tonight is the night where 2 become 1
The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the celebration of love takes place. There should be flashes of light athwart such houses. The joy which they contain ought to make its escape through the stones of the walls in brilliancy, and vaguely illuminate the gloom. It is impossible that this sacred and fatal festival should not give off a celestial radiance to the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man and the woman takes place; the being one, the being triple, the being final, the human trinity proceeds from it. This birth of two souls into one
i don't make the rules, so here's the Spice Girls christmas number-one from 1996 as Marius and Cosette consummate their union. Every word of this one is lodged in my own memory, which is rather the point of the project: to think about how far away 1995 feels, and what I can remember about it.
A couple of songs now to round off the meaning of the novel. Tubthumping was inescapable pub punk, written by actual anarchists Chumbawamba as an anthem of working class resilience. This single could only be bought by asking at the desk after the band went on television and told fans who couldn't afford the record to steal it.
A long mix needs a coda. I've chosen The Ghost of Tom Joad, a timeless Springsteen release from 1995 to bring the tempo down to earth. I liked it as a song for Valjean, the everyman, and the injustices of the novel enduring into our own time. And to end, a memory of where we began, with a reprise of Why Does Everything Happen To Me from 1958.