LIVIN' JOY – "Dreamer"

Just because it had been six years since Italian House music had been fashionable didn’t mean that Italian musicians stopped making it or that people stopped dancing to it or buying it. Nevertheless “Dreamer” is the last great record in the line which began with “Ride On Time” and owes perhaps half of its greatness to its happy pitching accident. The musicians/producers behind Livin’ Joy were Italian, but singer and lyricist Janice Robinson – not, I’m fairly confident in thinking, the same Janice Robinson who played trombone in the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and Gil Evans’ band in the seventies – was American. She supplies a lyric and performance which swings between supple restraint and unleashed euphoria, from the brooding of “My Saviour is pure now/Because my lonely heart would bleed” over pondering bass synth notes to the 300 mph adrenaline rush of her choruses, in which her excitement does well to keep up with the song’s tempo as the ascending staccato organ underlines the essential spirituality at work here, making it indivisible from carnality (“Your eyes move my soul, it’s unbelievin’,” “Please don’t dumb it down and never leave me”), though fantasy might not yet be extricated from reality, achievement from hope (“Am I a dreamer?” Robinson asks semi-rhetorically).

Whether there was a mismatch of sliders at the mixing desk is debatable, but the fact remains that the vocal track is half a tone out of key with the music, or vice versa; and of course, that’s what makes “Dreamer” a special record; the headlong ecstasy rush is so cathartically joyous that it runs ahead of itself, and the slight dissonance works in its emotional favour since it suggests the yearning which may still separate the singer’s thought from her eventual expression. The imperfection kisses it closer to true perfection as Robinson eventually disappears into her own echoing whirlpool of “Am I dreamer/Am I, am I dreamer?” When Eurodance gets the punctum right – even by getting it wrong – it works like everyone’s dream.

I like revolving doors, oh yes! A most interesting response to #1 by FreakyTrigger there…

Did the genre confusion mean a point off for this then?

Spot on Tom. Perhaps the most exciting number 1 of the nineties. It hit me like a rock when I was 9, it hit me like a rock when I was 19 and right.. naaaw, it hits me like an express train, careering off the side of the Grand Canyon, backwards, full of husky dogs pepped up on a cocktail of cocaine-laced Buckfast.

I’ll leave the discussion to the more seasoned ravers/clubbers though, for now!

The first 9 Tom’s awarded since 1990!

It’s probably only a four or five for me, but that’s perhaps unsurprising given how I don’t really go clubbing or raving or that.

This one’s new to me (so evidently this isn’t a track like Set You Free or Wrap Me Up that’s stuck around much), and on first (two) listens now it’s nothing at all. I don’t know what the hell you guys are on about. Too much hi hat and too much trebly reverb on the vocal, bottom of the barrel M-1 House piano yet again – what a mess of a record. Harrumph. It doesn’t seem to have done much outside the UK, for good reason on this evidence. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I’d currently be inclined to scrape it off if so:
4

#10 is it still house piano if they’re using an organ preset? 😉 And I almost singled out the hi-hat overload for praise except I forgot to fit it in – ramps up the urgency very nicely, I particularly like those four big hi-hat hits just before the chorus.

#9 Sorry you don’t like it Billy! “U Sure Do” is fantastic, yes, its only rival this year for rushy dancefloor pop. I put “U Sure Do” on ThisIsMyJam a couple of months ago and got very few takers 🙁

#8 I am not a big clubber or raver either – actually the only time I heard this in its natural milieu was on a visit to my girlfriend in Leeds, being dragged out against my introverted will to a huge club at which Graham Gold was DJing. He did not play Livin’ Joy (far too jejune I’m sure) but one of his warm up dudes did and it lit up the night. But basically dance music is a kind of pop I listen to like every other kind of pop – mostly on headphones, mostly sitting down. I suspect if the ‘trackier’ kind of dance music (can’t remember whose distinction ‘tracky’ vs ‘songy’ is – S.Reynolds?) ever got to #1 I’d be a bit more flummoxed by it.

It’s not my music. Like flahr at #8 I’m untutored in the ways of 1990s clubbing. In other circumstances I’m sure it would bring back happy memories of wild euphoric nights, but in the bright light of a sunny Cumbrian morning (what’s this whingeing about cloud and rain in London? We’re enjoying something like a real summer here) it sounds, well, pretty much the same as all other tracks of the genre. The overplayed, overly uniform thud of synthesised percussion doubtlessly carefully calculated in its frequency and intensity to maximise the production of adrenalin on a sweaty dancefloor, overlaid with an ethereal voice so stripped of emotion and eroticism that it might well be synthesised too. No suggestion here of the vertical expression of a horizontal desire. Sex not so much out of fashion as just something you do when you’re not clubbing (but I don’t really know what was going on – was there bumping and grinding and everything short of penetration on these dancefloors?)

As Popular extends into my 40s I feel like I’m turning into an old fogey but I don’t think that’s it. The affective nature of all popular music dictates that it goes with a context, and it loses much of its power outside that context. I’m sure that many younger than me are as baffled by the pop of the 60s as I am by this.

The context is 4,000 drunk people going uniformly apeshit at three in the morning in what I will generically call The Club. Not my thing even at the time but then I was thirty-one.

As someone who was 13 when it came out, I concur with #14.

Sorry, but from my recollection half the top 40 at the time was made up of dull, soulless, unexciting, dance bilge with a female vocalist warbling dull platitudes over the top. This music was designed for cool people, for the ‘well ‘ards’, not for me. And it still doesn’t feel like it could ever be for someone like me.

I realise that is my problem, rather than the records, but this is a club record, all shined up, all product-in-hair, all stupid bloody dress code (because wearing shoes rather than trainers is going to stop fights/drugs/whatever how exactly?), all music for people who don’t actually like music.

This is dance. Chop off my legs.

2.

Good Lord, eighteen more votes and you would have got through. Meanwhile, back in Chelsea, we still had the late, egregious Sir Nicholas Scott as sitting (or flat-on-face-in-street-only-had-two-white-wines-honest) MP.

#17 – All fair points. The #1 has always been an imperfect barometer of what matters even in the charts, let alone wider music, and I think you’re right that it’ll get less so – though to some extent this is dilution, rather than a year with 20 number ones, 15 of which are ‘memorable’ for good or bad, we’ll have years with 30-40, but roughly the same amount of interesting ones. So yes, I withdraw last night’s bullishness a bit – I suspect we will see a few more very brief Popular entries, particularly for hits which follow the “fourth single of album” pattern. Possibly more combined entries too, a la the two Singin The Blues.

#3 (etc) I hope/presume part of the year 2000 “celebrations” involve setting alight a (perhaps life-size) effigy of a certain Irish boy band. (And perhaps a quantity of their CDs too). Their unworthy number ones, apart from coming in extraordinary quantity, were often even more egregious chartoppers, anomymous and forgettable than the stereotypical first week-loaded club bangers that to my mind did indeed reflect the triumph of marketing over art. (Well, that is to simplify grossly, as this went way back, and anyway from day 1 the charts were about marketing, and anyway a lot of this stuff really only very tenuously might be described as art anyway. So. In a sense it doesn’t really mark that much of a shift. But still)

Thankfully that is some way off yet…

So far, of all the songs mentioned as ‘better’ than this one, I’d agree..

I didn’t like this much at the time, like it better nowadays, still would only give it 7 as opposed to the others that’d get 9 from me.

This is one of those titles you might have to play the vid to remind youself which “dream” this one is.. “Dreamer, life gets in your way” nope not that one, “AM I DREAMERRRRR-ERR-ERRR???” ah yes.

Ah, “Freed from desire”, totally on-the-spot that one: The number of girls that had boyfriends that had definite political ideals that prevented him from working from “The Man”, yeah? Whatever happened to that couple? She found someone less dogmatic, right?

U Sure Do sampled Serious by Donna Allen

http://youtu.be/HRpTmBAnkp0

#28 – oh thanks, I knew it was one of those mid-eighties soul diva type euphoric things.

#29 – Yep. Adds to its charm.

The thing with Livin’ Joy is – is she dreamer or is she dancer?

I loved the followup to Freed From Desire too, which sounded much the same but with even more inscrutable lyrics

“And they say silver, I choose gold
I’m not afraid to be alone
Someone will judge, these gentle souls
Let a boy cry, and he will know”

http://youtu.be/LGj5XgdqUlA

#9, #23 – There might be something in that, actually. I’m almost tempted to draw a parallel with the likes of “Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter” – a song that was by no means the best example of its genre, but that was in the right place at the right time to benefit from an “all hands on deck” push. It could have been any other Maiden song of the era, it could have been any other #5-worthy dance track from ’94-’95 – and yet here we are.

I do like “Dreamer”, though. Euphoria meets brains. I’d give it a 7.

Ok I am back.

I was definitely not ‘in the clubs’ when this came out, by dint of being eight years old at the time. It’s still my favourite.

There’s a particular sort of frantic, sexy, crush desperation to it. When you’ve been driven completely mad by how much you want to touch someone, to the point of trying some kind of summoning ritual (which is what the lyrics and their delivery are) to bring them to you.

A lot of it is ‘it’s 2am and I put my best dress on and I had so badly convinced myself that you were coming home with me and don’t let this be me making an idiot of myself‘ in the middle of a darkened dancefloor, those bloopy organ presets in time with twisting lights and that’s a thing. In fact I am kind of uncomfortable about how down on that people are being; it’s neither the case that the mid-90s had a monopoly on this nor that it’s solely dance music that does it. There’s an element of this that is, like… Pulp’s ‘Babies,’ maybe. When you’ve really gone disgustingly bonkers over someone.

(It’s possibly -and ack, I hate drawing this kind of genderised comparison but whatever- it’s possibly a very female, err, euphoric shoegaze thing? Because girls get taught to crush on things and this is absolutely a fantasy song, a Totty Of The Week and daydreams-invading-reality song. It’s conjuring this person you want so incredibly badly and I think the male equivalent would probably be more inclined towards indie invocations of girls, certainly at the time? I was, as I said, eight so can’t actually verify this from any kind of personal perspective)

The thing Tom draws on, about where garage and house meet is really interesting. I’d never thought of this song as being part of that but it’s easy to see the path between ‘Dreamer’ and, in particular, bassline/4×4; T2’s Heartbroken and H2O’s What’s It Gonna Be are very much in this vein of propulsive desperation.

(This song always appeared to me as Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems so I’ve always viewed it as euphoric house but I’m totally into the idea that we could draw a new time-hopping microgenre out of it; I don’t think it’s a continuum because otherwise you’d have to go back to 60s, maybe even 40s girl groups to get to some of the root of it but I like the idea of ‘euphoric dancefloor breakdown crushcore’ or something)

(I’m a dick)

Gorgeous record – a 9 for me too, and would’ve gone higher if we hadn’t recently had Baby D.

Slightly perplexed by the lineage being traced out in this thread though. Set You Free, Gala, even right up to Heartbroken – these are *precisely* the records I’d’ve named myself. I guess handbag house, as a genre, isn’t going to have a vast unexplored hinterland, but there must be some other favourites that’re new to me?

Like Tom at #12, I have never been a big clubber, so I’m listening to this with no real knowledge of the club context and am mostly getting it through headphones and whilst sat my backside. This still sounds pretty glorious to me though – the big voice, the headlong rush in the chorus – they just give me a sense of the possible ecstasy to be found in a club. That it doesn’t quite connect with me (and thus I have it at 8 rather than 9 or 10), is my fault, not that of the song; but then, I don’t feel like I have much to connect me to the imagery of Koyaanisqatsi either but it still looks great. I guess I am appreciating in the abstract.

Its natural home at the time was in people’s front rooms, at house parties, and it still sounds great in that context. Given the Duke Dumont tune at #1 earlier this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was due a mini revival at some point soon.

It’s still a monster by the way.

Wow, this is a surprisingly polarizing record! Count me in the “meh” camp. Despite never being a clubber, I normally like a good dance record, but this just seems a dull 5 for me. FWIW, it reached #72 in the US – I remember it getting airplay but not a lot.

The side conversation about records climbing vs. debuting at number one is a bit more interesting to me. I remember this being about the time I started to lose a bit of interest in the UK chart. I still followed it (usually) but my personally held myth that the UK chart was somehow superior to my own Billboard Hot 100 was clearly being challenged by this time. Of course, the Hot 100 was also going through a strange time too – ridiculously long stays at #1 were common, but conversely its first ever #1 debut was only a couple months away….

This moment of mid-90s magic is made all the more mythic by its makers’ failed attempts to follow it up (often the way with dance music). ‘Follow the Rules’ in particular seemed very limp by comparison.

#49: NUMBER TWO BUNNY KLAXON

That’s part of MSBWT’s purpose: to demonstrate that, a lot of the time, the number twos are better than the number ones. And, boy oh boy, have we got some great number ones coming, especially the next one.