Modern Love

David Bowie's Modern Love, from 1983's Let's Dance, may not be the best pop song ever, but spun up on iPod shuffle on a glorious late spring day while biking along the Hudson and the Yankees on a six game winning streak and heading up to the stadium tonight with Dana Dee, it will do just fine. The lyrical ambivalence ("I catch the paper boy/but things don't really change") doesn't stand a prayer against the music's relentless energy, the wiry intro and drums, then guiter kicking into Bowie's spoken first lyrics. And then after the first verse and out of nowhere a minute ten or so into the song, a punching saxophone as Bowie and the chorus begin trading half-line lyrics:

Bowie: Never gonna fall for
Chorus: Modern Love
B: walks beside me
C. Modern Love
B. walks on by
C. Modern Love
B. gets me to the (chorus joins for) church on time.
C. Church on time
B. terrifies me.
C. Church on time
B. makes me party.
C. Church on time
B. puts my trust in (and again the chorus joins for) God and man.
C: God and man
B. no confessions
C: God and man
B: no religion
C: God and man
B: Don't believe in modern love.

From this peak, it just gets better, a saxophone bridge to the second verse, the chorus repeated twice, and a final 45 seconds of controlled vocal and instrumental chaos that might have happened if James Brown and Motown's finest studio musicians from the glory days had ever done an encore together. I only needed to pedal five miles up to CCNY, but with repeat play, I could have gone for a hundred.

Speaking of paper boys, I am reading the collected stories of William Maxwell (All the Days and Nights), the current one about a paper boy (certainly him in his 1922 youth) and called What Every Boy Should Know. Maxwell, more known as a long-time editor at the New Yorker than for his own writing, has more to say about things that matter and trying to just figure it out than a truckload of writers whose reliance on flash only underscores their lack of ideas or insight. He says it far better in his introduction to the stories, "...three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life characters--affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black--that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered.... '