1985, I'm in the dark, I'd like to read her mind
I am 12. The mullet is coming in, either a moment of genuine crisis or I am living my moment. My parents have cut the cord on cable, which prompted a rare and somber family meeting. We would join a video rental store and get a Betamax. It would be ok. Still, after being current with MTV in 1983 and 1984, when I thought I was witness to the future, I am now out of touch. When I watch other people’s MTV, I store up the videos in my head, the good ones, the ones worth remembering. And that is when I am confronted with ‘Til Tuesday and “Voices Carry.” The singer is a punk noir blonde. She’s edgy, she’s confrontational. She’s not a Madonna or a Cyndi. She emerges the year they collided, but she is something else. It was not binary between sexy and quirky. One could be both, but also be something completely beyond: a writer, a grump, a visionary, the last punk and the next big thing, a woman who is not going to take it anymore. She is much smarter than you. Can you handle that? MTV is ready for “Voices Carry,” but is the world ready for her? She is a musician, an artist, a writer, someone determined to get it done her way. She studied songwriting at the Berklee College of Music. She is not fucking around. In the video for “Voices Carry,” she has a muscular yuppie tool for a boyfriend, and all he does is keep her down. She will not be under his thumb. She will not be silenced. Her voice will carry and he will be a footnote. I did not read Portrait of a Lady at 12, but in this scenario, that guy is Gilbert Osmond and she is Isabel Archer, and I want to be Ralph Touchett, but I am 12, and I don’t yet have my bar mitzvah fortune to offer her. I had never been to Carnegie Hall, but I figure that this is not how to behave.
1993, Nothing to say, but you said something anyway
The pent up synth punk from ‘Til Tuesday has now gone solo. She has pared down. The 80s are over and the 70s—not the actual 70s but the 90s version, when when we Xers reclaimed our childhoods—are being reconsidered. The hairspray has been washed out. This the Aimee Mann who loved Neil and Elton and Steely Dan. And she also loved Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Cohen. She dug Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” because it was obviously about suicide but no one else noticed it. She needed to do something like that, a figure in the carpet of her own. No one had done that, not that kind of dark and that kind of craft, not the way she did it. She’s a siren, and she seems like someone I would have known, yet she’s also unknowable. Her writing is beyond. The craft is there and the voice is less jagged. There have been three Til Tuesday albums, and the last one had a collab with Elvis Costello. By then, Epic had given up on them, and Imago, the indie label that put out Whatever, her solo debut, collapsed, and she found herself in the clutches of David Geffen. This is not the David Geffen who nurtured Joni Mitchell. This is the David Geffen of the 80s, who was looking for an artist to be Guns ‘n’ Roses or Nirvana right away. David Geffen, in other words was someone to break it off quickly, and this is the subject of “Stupid Thing,” the album’s single. The video has a 32 year old Mann with a new look for the decade. Whatever is a title like Nevermind. In the video, she’s in a London cab, and everyone who shares it with her tries and fails to get her attention, until a shaven headed gay couple, who make out and you can see a smile. The Stupid Thing is stupid for stopping something before it started, which anticipates David Geffen. When you fuck it up later, do I get my money back? Kind of on the nose. The ride would be bumpy. The songs continued to ascend. No matter whatever.