Stop Making Those Eyes At Me, I’ll Stop Making Those Eyes At You
So much of my musical taste today is shaped by nostalgia of some form or another – Songs that remind me of experiences, people, places, or just what it was like to be a particular age when that song was playing on the radio. My love for the first Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not isn’t any different, in a sense, because it’s almost entirely based on nostalgia, but it’s a fake nostalgia, if that makes sense.
I was too old, too married and too living-in-America to be living the life the songs on the album so vividly describe when it came out, back in… 2006, I think? But it’s a life I can remember, a life that feels like the one I used to live when I was in art school and every Monday and Thursday (and, sometimes, Friday and Saturday) would be spent out with friends at clubs and dancing and trying to pull and the whole thing turning into a blur of mundanity and optimism and hormones and music. What I love about songs like “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secured” and “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” isn’t just the spectacular spiky pop music – Seriously, these are songs that make you want to get up and dance with their singalongable melodies and bouncing basslines, even if that just means jumping up and down, pogo-style – but the lyrics, their focus on all the small details of those nights that you remember once someone mentions with a sense of “Of course, that’s what it was like, how could I have forgotten…?”
Whatever People Say I Am is a pretty perfect pop album, short and honest and filled with songs to stick in your head. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the follow-ups, and sometimes regret that, but that feeling is always countered in my head with the idea that what made me fall in love so deeply with the record is something that couldn’t really follow through on any follow-ups: The idea that this was reportage from the front lines, the way life really was. As the band became more and more successful, their lives changed, and any attempt to do the same thing over and over again would’ve seemed forced and fake, and defeated the very thing that I loved so much in the first place.
But this one album? It’s “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, but better, for an entire album.
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I think their next album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, is pretty swag. I know you like to keep it pure, but you should at least check it out, even if you guys spell favorite wrong, haha.