13. Super Falling Star

Stereolab: Peng! (Too Pure, 1992);
composed by Laetitia Sadier and Timothy John Gane

One of the most entertaining aspects of pop music is how it rejects certain definitional threats while incorporating often far more disruptive ones. And the question is always: disrupting what? People like the music they like and their relative willingness to acquire it is what “popular” means. “Pop” is something else – a specific variety of seduction shared by musics that often neither sound very much alike nor necessarily make any money. Stereolab embodied both the songwriting and romantic partnership of its two principals, who coped with the strain by stringing a lot of ostensibly seductive elements into molecules your bloodstream could not readily absorb without side effects. Some songs had Ye-Ye bossa nova beats with doctrinaire Marxist lyrics sung against – or hidden under – the beat by Laetitia Sadier who pretended not to know what she was doing, whether she was singing in English or French. This first track on their first album epitomizes their other kind of dark matter: a drumless overdubbed guitar track run in reverse, setting what sounds like excerpts from a sung chant about . . . epistemology: “Re-presented: nothing but a super falling star.” And: “Seen and I've heard it (the creation).” You have been warned.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).