18/12/2007

We're all the same in this cynical age



Blog reader Filip Galetic sent me his thoughts on Roisin's song Let Me Know. I think they make an interesting read indeed.

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Anyone who has ever been to a gay circuit party with gorgeous shirtless muscled guys filling the floor - the kind where everyone greets each other with a quick kiss on the mouth and where a dull chick rock song from the 90s gets a swooping makeover into a house anthem – should recognize what Roisin Murphy is singing in "Let Me Know".

The artist herself credits the inspiration for the song to spending nights out in hedonistic Barcelona among the swingy crowds where connections are intense and brief. There she saw certain "darkness underneath", a certain "glossing over the truth".

And this very sentiment, this essence of how the club scene operates, has to my knowledge never been put into words and music before "Let Me Know". "Don't speak out every meaning/I don't belong to you/Like you don't belong to me" may as very well be an adage straight from a "Dummies for Gay Circuit Clubbing".

These very lines echo the voice in your head that stops you from declaring love to the guy you are chatting with or asking him to marry you. And the fact that she has tapped into this very real part of many lives, while being coy about it in interviews, makes Roisin a truly one-of-a-kind artist in pop music, an echelon in recent times littered with empty self-touting and lack of meaning.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to completely disagree - that's a really shallow explanation of a song with much deeper meaning IMO.

I've always thought of it was being about wanting someone who's taken. That's always what I've gotten from it. It's not about love necessarily - but the song clearly isn't about someone you don't know.

To me it's about a taboo or forbidden relationship.

Anonymous said...

I do agree with the writer. In my view, "Let Me Know" is all about exchanging one's moral standards for casual sex. So in a way it is about (breaking) a taboo and forbidden encounters, but really NOT about being a "ball and chain" in a relationship set up.

The song both celebrates casual sex and paints a bitter picture of it. What are we really after in life?

Anonymous said...

Jake, you misunderstood, my intention wasn't to say the song is about this or that, and I'm pretty sure Roisin didn't have in mind exactly what I said word by word, rather that she has, unbeknownst to her or not, touched upon something that is very present in the scene I mentioned. In fact, in the gay curcuit scene it is kind of taboo to talk about a serious relationship cuz it's in the essence all about frivolity and hedonism.

DemonLover said...

"this songs is about a girl saying 'i know we broke up, but [..] I'm fine now and we just can play around now and have fun'. [...]"

this is what róisín said in an interview...