James HORNER: Titanic: Music From The Motion Picture

 

(#582: 14 February 1998, 1 week; 28 February 1998, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Never An Absolution/Distant Memories/Southampton/Rose/Leaving Port/"Take Her To Sea, Mr Murdoch"/Hard To Starboard/Unable To Stay, Unwilling To Leave/The Sinking/Death Of Titanic/A Promise Kept/A Life So Changed/An Ocean Of Memories/My Heart Will Go On (performed by Céline Dion)/Hymn To The Sea

 

Throughout James Cameron’s Titanic are dotted traces of his wanting to make an Immense Work Of Art, even though immensity had by that time come to equal scale of spectacle rather than depth of emotion. Equally, if we look at Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies or Terminators 1 or 2 in addition to Titanic, there is a case for arguing that James Cameron really wants to write about the role of one-on-one male/female relationships in a world whose technology seems perpetually ready to deny and negate such things.

Yet, was there ever any indication that the largest-grossing motion picture at that time would, in the end, prove such a small, careless affair? It is admittedly hard to access glimpses of humanity in Titanic, so vast are its sets, so visually encyclopaedic its setpieces (but are these photocopies of an encyclopaedia to excuse one from ever reading the thing?), and all that can fairly be said is that di Caprio and Winslet do their best not to be drowned out by the scenery or suffocated by the asinine script, with its solidly black and white portraits of rich versus poor, evil versus noble – if only Leonardo had been given both Con and Jack to play, although swapping roles with Billy Zane may admittedly have made the film look a little too much like a big budget remake of Dead Calm – its terribly patronising treatment of the ship's Irish passengers, stowed away in the hold, and its final gesture in the direction of Schindler’s List which transgresses onto the field of the offensive. Not to mention the waste of 87-year-old Gloria Stuart portraying the 100-year-old Winslet; if this film made Cameron “king of the world,” then Stuart, the former Busby Berkeley chorus girl, sometimes looked more than ready to close the book on movies once and for all (as it turned out, Stuart lived on well into her hundredth year, still on course to outlive cinema).

 

But the film itself proved secondary to its audience. Titanic was a spectacle to be seen on a huge screen – a computer screen or non-wall mounted television viewed in isolation will make you wonder what all the fuss was about – in the company of many, many people. It didn’t matter that its effects were overwhelmingly computer-generated and digitalised, and that models were used instead of actual ships; indeed the film’s framing device of Bill Paxton diving to investigate the wreck directly refers to a “computer simulation” of the disaster, so what we are watching isn’t “real.” Nor did it concern the billions of people who cheered, screamed and wept at the movie – many times over in a lot of cases – that Cameron played hard and fast with the facts, particularly in the film’s second half, although there is historical substance behind the poor and indigent being placed in steerage and in many cases actively prevented from escaping the hold – all for bureaucratically valid health and safety reasons, not that such a thing existed in 1912. But there isn’t a second of Titanic’s three-and-a-quarter hours that makes you think we are immersed or involved in that year. Nor was the ship’s failure to avoid the iceberg down to some crazy manly scheme to break any speed records; company policy on North Atlantic liners regarded timekeeping and sticking to the timetable a priority to ensure rigid adherence to getting passengers from A to B at the precise time scheduled, hence ice was viewed as an occupational hazard.

 

As I say, however, none of this mattered when cinema audiences viewed the horrified, frozen faces of the crew as they saw the iceberg looming up ahead and could do nothing to avoid even scraping it – which was enough to flood, split and wreck the ship – and began yelling “STOP! STOP!” at the screen. Nor when the ship split, with de Caprio’s Jack Ryan and Winslet’s Rose desperately clinging to each other as other passengers leapt to certain death, and the audience started to scream and even weep openly.

 

Cynics have commented that the movie needed that wreckage to remain interesting, since beforehand it had been a rather dull on-board romcom spiced with spoken and unspoken class resentments – Gosford Park At Sea (minus the snappy dialogue and subtly stark insights that Altman’s film offered. Where was the murder victim? Statistically there were about 1500 of them). But watching Titanic was nothing if it was not a communal experience – something to be shared, and in 1997-8, those immediate pre-internet days, plenty of people still craved that.

 

Even though everybody who watched the film knew what was coming, that didn’t quench the shock, surprise and thrill that its motions generated in its audiences, nor did it dissuade millions from coming back to see the film again, and again…because of its length, the average cinema could only screen Titanic three times a day, but those included early morning screenings, which were usually sold out. Those who watched the film, in some cases dozens of times over, felt that it had connected with them in some shallow yet profound manner. It breached something very intimate in the souls of its audiences.

 

And I feel that many of the people who watched Titanic at the time of its release were still dealing with unresolved third-hand grief. How could they have not? The passing of Diana, which at the time was still emotionally raw, affected pretty much the entire planet – don’t be a wise guy; it did - and I therefore think there was a residual reservoir to receive the outpouring of spontaneous emotion which Titanic filled perfectly. A mourning tempered by the knowledge that one of the two main characters had survived to a very old age – and much like Len Shelby and the incident in Bernie Clifton’s dressing room, the aged Rose – whom we see near the film’s beginning, contemplating and attempting suicide - had never forgotten the Heart of the Ocean necklace at all. Far from it.

 

Does any of this explain the spectacular success of James Horner’s score for the movie, which, at the time of writing, remains the only (mainly) instrumental film score to make number one? Indeed its sales surpassed a million in Britain, while in the U.S.A. it was 1998’s biggest-selling album, on top of the Billboard 200 for sixteen weeks. These are remarkable statistics for what might initially and ostensibly be seen as a fairly standard late nineties movie soundtrack – but note that pair of adverbs.

 

It commences with a lugubrious melody for Eric Rigler’s uilleann pipes and, to a lesser extent, Anthony Hinnigan’s tin whistle – picture postcard Celtic wistfulness in the manner of a scrubbed Barry Lyndon score. This stands as Jack’s “theme,” just as we are introduced to Rose’s theme shortly thereafter, and the two motifs swim around each other for much of the rest of the record. One can also dimly hear a slightly sinister descending four whole tone note figure in the far background – this will recur with greater volume later and come to represent “Iceberg Alley.”

 

Things continue conventionally enough for a time; there’s the big ship, docked at Southampton, ready to cast off, and Horner’s music – which seems equally divided between orchestra and electronic keyboards and samplers (the “choir” as such is synthesised, and this was apparently Horner’s preference; he was trying to prevent the music from becoming too “church-like”) – reflects the fact that Enya was originally approached, but declined, to compose the film’s music; her “Book Of Days” was used in Ron Howard’s 1992 Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman film Far And Away, and much of the early parts of Horner’s score are reminiscent of John Williams’ soundtrack to the latter. The music does what it says on the tin; on “Southampton” you can smell the ship as it sets sail. The Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebø fills the Enya vocal role, although unlike Enya her voice remains word-free.

 

It is only when we get to “Hard To Starboard” that things begin to turn slightly sinister. There be the Rose and Jack motifs twirling around each other like a pair of reluctant waltzing partners, but harshness and a degree of discordancy make themselves known, and the melodies become harder to sustain. In “Unable To Stay, Unwilling To Leave,” the hold calmly awaits swift and mercy-free obliteration. In “The Sinking” the tension rises and the intervals between string leaps narrow. The two main melodies are now finding it extremely difficult to remain afloat.

 

“Death Of Titanic” is the most remarkable piece of its ilk to be connected to a number one album since “The Small House Of Uncle Thomas” in The King And I. The slightest soupçon of sentimentality is swiftly swept away by open dissonance – that crashing piano is intended to be onomatopoeia for an actual piano crashing into pieces; Titanic’s microscopic fascination with the ritual destruction of expensive and elaborate things renders it an unlikely companion piece to Zabriskie Point. The climax – akin to “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana gone very wrong – sees all pleasantries and decorum utterly and irretrievably submerged by a Ligeti-like atonal synthesised choral howl as though the world were turning into fuzzy static.

 

The remainder of the soundtrack is perhaps the reverse of straightforward, as titles like “A Life So Changed” and “An Ocean Of Memories” might suggest. Yes, the elements of the score’s first half are still present, but also absent – they play at a subtly distorted distance, sound like ghosts of music. We can no longer reach them; the icy fog will not, cannot, be cleared. Memories of music, of better times, and how better these times seem when pickled in the past, thus permitting veneration. This music is as irrevocably drowned as any of the brass band or Eva Hart motifs in Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking Of The Titanic; nearer, our God, to what?

 

Eventually, and once again, we encounter “My Heart Will Go On,” where Rose and Jack’s themes now, and finally, combine. Some say that the Titanic soundtrack sold so well because of the inclusion of this song alone – but hadn’t it already appeared on Let’s Talk About Love? Well, not quite – this is a different and markedly less melodramatic reading of the song (so much for Dion having recorded it in one take) as though the singer had realised that tragedy only resonated if it were pared down as opposed to being blown up. It is as if she’s had time to think – “Think Twice” if you must – and is maybe singing the song primarily to herself, her own whirlpool of calmed memory.

 

“Hymn To The Sea” somewhat morosely sums up all that has come before; this…huge ship, at the time deemed the biggest thing mankind had ever created…but Nature (specifically its icy Canadian subdivision) was entertaining none of the pretence to Godhood. It was destroyed and fell, as had Alasdair Gray’s Axletree tower. Humans and their manifestations come and go, or are sent violently packing, but the sea, the world, will roll on forever. The piece acts as both elegy and unexpected happy ending (or, at any rate, Rose ends up happy).

 

If you can find it, there’s a four-CD 20^th Anniversary edition of the soundtrack which usefully adds the music from Back To Titanic (including Gaelic Storm’s “An Irish Party In Third Class”), a collection of light classical and popular music as would have been performed by the musicians on the upper decks (Gentlemen, It Has Been A Privilege Playing With You Tonight) and, most intriguingly, a fourth disc of near-contemporaneous recordings, Popular Music Of The Titanic Era, by the likes of Count John McCormack, Guy Lombardo, Ellington, John Kirby, Mildred Bailey and, offering a lachrymose “Nearer My God To Thee,” Nelson Eddy.

 

But the main reasons I can find for the otherwise quite astoundingly huge popularity of the Titanic soundtrack include…filmgoers who treated the record as what would today be termed an “immersive” experience; they would listen to the music and be reminded of what happened in the film (in the days when you had to wait months for films to become available on video), relive the movie in their minds. Not to mention those too young to know of Herrmann or Morricone (and there is a lot of Bernard Herrmann scattered throughout “The Sinking” and “Death Of Titanic”) who simply viewed this as a fantastic and aurally representative soundtrack.

 

So there was quite a lot of at-one-remove semi-passive listening going on in ways which have not really troubled Then Play Long since the first heyday of Mike Oldfield – music you had on in the background, rather than actively being listened to. Horner’s Titanic soundtrack reminds the unwary “expert” that the way people use and respond to music frequently isn’t the way the “expert” wants and expects them so to do. It did not sell thirty million copies across the world because it was “hip” or “cool” – it was because the record was, or came to represent, what an awful lot of people needed, as the millennium ticked ever downwards towards a presumed iceberg of its own.

 

Céline DION: Let’s Talk About Love

 

(#581: 29 November 1997, 2 weeks; 20 December 1997, 2 weeks; 28 March 1998, 1 week)

 

Track listing: The Reason/Immortality (ft The Bee Gees)/Treat Her Like A Lady (ft Diana King)/Why Oh Why/Love Is On The Way/Tell Him (duet with Barbra Streisand)/Amar Haciendo El Amor/When I Need You/Miles To Go (Before I Sleep)/Us/Just A Little Bit Of Love/My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from Titanic)/Where Is The Love/Be The Man (On This Night)/I Hate You Then I Love You (duet with Luciano Pavarotti)/Let’s Talk About Love

 

(Author’s Note: The above is the track listing of the edition of the album released in Europe, Asia and Australia, a.k.a. the edition that I used for this piece. The Canadian edition is almost identical but omits “Be The Man.” The North and Latin American editions omit “Where Is The Love” and replace “Be The Man” with “To Love You More” by the same composers [David Foster and Edgar Bronfman Jr] which was written and recorded for a Japanese television series in 1995 and now appears on this album between the Pavarotti duet and the title song. All clear?)

 

My original cunning plan had been to write about this album in French, as a quiet cultural gesture to overcome English cultural and linguistic hegemony and magnify the essential Québécois-ness of Céline Dion. Having now listened to it thoroughly, however, I feel there are urgent things needing to be said which do not merit the mask of a different language and have to be communicated directly and bluntly.

 

This was the final British number one album of 1997, a year we knew was going to be difficult to write about, with its unending procession of "big" records and statements. There is unlikely to have been a point of a "global" Céline Dion that wasn't major and loud, quietness and ambiguity being reserved for her French language recordings. And what a big climax to an exceptionally troublesome and troubled year Let's Talk About Love promised to be.

 

If only.

 

But I cannot talk about Let's Talk About Love without talking about the text which appears to have been approved for conversion into tablets of stone, namely Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson. At least that was its original title when published as part of the 331⁄3 series of album books in 2007. When republished by Bloomsbury in 2014 with hindsight-benefiting commentaries by Wilson, his ex-wife, a few minor celebrities, a fewer quantity of genuine music critics, and the single most destructive music writer of the last thirty years, it was rechristened with the screamingly unhelpful subtitle Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. The latter's retchingly-designed cover features an endorsement ("BRILLIANT") by Alex Ross, which should instantly kindle our suspicions. Wilson's book, or tract, has been described as "the most important piece of music criticism of the last two decades," a remark usually made by the sort of person who hasn't read any music criticism in the last two decades.

 

You, I suspect, know enough about the book for me not to have to drone on about its structure and content. While preparing to write this piece I wearily wondered to myself whether my readers really needed to be spoonfed this information again. Broadly speaking, Wilson, who begins by not liking the music of Céline Dion, spends a year trying to do so, exploring every historical and cultural avenue that he chooses to be made available to him. He ends up going to Las Vegas to see the singer perform live but is too tired and despondent to speak with her fans there, so ends up conversing with other fans online.

 

Finally, on page 135 of this 161-page book, Wilson deigns to review the album, which is the central premise of the 331⁄3 series ("I would not have deigned to listen to an entire Céline Dion album," he remarks of his hoped-for former self on page four). Even then it takes him the best part of three pages of waffling, to which any editor worth their salary would not have hesitated to apply their pruning shears, before he gets around to discussing the record, which he does in the contrived context of a fake magazine review of a non-existent ten-year "Aluminium Anniversary Edition" (spoiler: he isn't really convinced). He concludes, on page 151, that Dion "stinks of democracy," that awkward obstacle to personal ambition (though, to be fair, does go on to describe what he thinks democracy should be - "actively grappling with people and things not like me") and that we perhaps need to escape our notions of "selves" and endeavour to understand why people like Dion and her music, or people like her and their music, are so comprehensively loved and revered. To try to overthrow the suffocating cloak of "cool" that might end up locking us away from the remainder of civilisation.

 

In the sundry addenda to the 2014 reprint, the abovementioned destructive neoconservative writer, who in his own fiction writing habitually, laughably and fallaciously attempts to imagine himself as a woman, naturally misuses and abuses Wilson's words as a stick with which he eagerly beats any art that dares to present himself, if only to him, as "difficult" or "esoteric." This would suggest that he had not really read Wilson's book at all.

 

But I find Wilson's text deeply problematic for different reasons. The first and most obvious observation that I can make is that he undoes any really subversive intentions by framing his views on Let's Talk About Love in the context of an extended apology and justification for writing about it. The really smart thing to do would have been simply to talk approvingly about the album without making any excuses for doing so, but of course that isn't the kind of manifesto that gets you talked about or added onto university syllabuses. If you're looking for peer approval before saying you like something, instead of just saying it, you've already undermined your central mission.

 

When I wrote about The Colour Of My Love and Falling Into You I made no preparatory arguments about either except to consider, as is this blog's premise, exactly why these records were popular enough to be written about. I assumed that readers had long since recognised the Lear-like structure of a fully-functioning, enclosed and interdependent cultural world in which the Muppets, the Sex Pistols, Otis Redding, Motörhead, Max Boyce, Connie Francis, Kate Bush and Radiohead were all equal partners, united by popularity.

 

The second observation is that Carl Wilson falls into the trap which eventually ensnares all music writers - the "one album too late" syndrome, where everybody jumps on the bus saying how great they've suddenly realised somebody is, when they should have done it with the album before. Falling Into You is Dion's clear masterpiece - in the English language, anyway - both artistically and commercially; it sold twice what Let's Talk About Love managed in the U.K. (twelve times platinum as opposed to "just" six times) and should have been the subject of a 331⁄3 analysis, sans apology or explanation (of Dion's French language albums, 1991's Dion chante Plamondon and 2007's D'elles especially merit thorough critical analysis).

 

My third observation is that Carl Wilson is a rather wretched music critic and worse writer. His book is dotted with what would today - eighteen years later, at the time of writing - be described as Dated Language and Attitudes. In a discussion of the Front de libération du Québec terrorist movement on page 25 he uses the N-word - in the context of a translated song title - without any qualifying asterisks (and also incidentally remarks, in cringingly hideous Tiger Beat prose, that "a political assassination...drove Canada's grooviest-ever prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, quite ungroovingly [sic] to declare quasi-martial law when Céline was a toddler" - so why drag the infant Dion into a world over which she had no control whatsoever?). On page 33, apropos the aforementioned Dion chante Plamondon, Wilson says about its chart-topping single "Un garçon pas commes les autres (Ziggy)," "Céline had given the world its first hit fag-hag ballad" (which, even sidestepping the language, is factually wrong; I point Wilson in the direction of eighties pop per se in the very first instance, particularly that produced in the year of 1984). It is astonishing that this was ever considered an academic text.

 

On pages 113-4, Wilson nearly argues himself out of his own book; having hitherto spoken with entry-level eloquence about how much more open we should all be, he dismisses Phil Collins' cover of "A Groovy Kind Of Love" as "his goopiest tune" (whatever that might mean); "I suppose not knowing the word 'groovy' would help," he sneers about "a displaced Cambodian five-year-old," exhibiting Kissinger levels of condescension. The Eurovision Song Contest, which Dion won for Switzerland in 1988, is dismissed on page 43 as "the...Cheeseball Olympics of pop music." His comments on "Gallic pop" (page 33) are frankly ill-informed; "Recent French techno ("Da Funk" was nearly twelve years old at this point) has helped loosen up music (what music? Whose music?) considerably." I reiterate: this has been regarded as an academic text.

 

Some observations would not obtain Wilson a mid-afternoon presenting slot on BBC Radio Local; Madonna, for instance, "danced on the art/commerce borderline (get it? She had a song called "Borderline"...oh, never mind) as nimbly as anyone" (page 8) which would be embarrassing even for Dave Doubledecks, let alone his lost budgies slot and the new one from Alison Moyet who has a question for us all: "Is This Love?" (Yes indeedy!). On page 160 he says of R. Kelly, who today rivals Gary Glitter for the uncoveted title of Number One Pop Unperson, that he has "built up cachet (whatever that is supposed to mean) with the loony audacity of his musical soap opera, 'Trapped In The Closet' (I do wonder exactly which "college courses on music and popular culture" utilise this book, and would be surprised if they included any colleges of which you might actually have heard)."

 

Elsewhere Wilson succumbs (inevitably) to reverse philistinism; the song "Immortality," he says on page 140, is "a more compelling artifact of its time than, say, the deflectionary patter of overeducated/underemployed youth peddled by bands like Pavement." One has to remind oneself that this is not a Daily Telegraph columnist speaking (since such people would never know who Pavement were in the first place). "Peddled." Granted, Brighten The Corners is not one of Pavement's more distinguished albums, but we, as in Lena and I, would far more readily turn to it for entertainment for reasons I will outline in detail below.

 

At various points throughout the second half of his book, Wilson refers to the fact that he has recently gone through what was evidently a traumatic divorce, and has not yet really recovered from it. A pointer as to why this happened may appear on page 134, when he makes fun of his then-wife for liking old records from the fifties, including "Oh Boy" by The Crickets - the record was credited to the whole group, not Buddy Holly alone (Coral 45-Q 72298; B-side "Not Fade Away"). "Testing boundaries," he snickeringly calls it; "grounds for divorce" anybody else would retort. Wilson's former wife is Sheila Heti, and her side of the story can be observed in her 2005 book How Should a Person Be? She also contributed a "Playlist" (Let's Listen To Love) to the 2014 Let's Talk About Love reprint.

 

Far, far worse than any of the above, however, and seemingly unremarked upon by anybody except me, is what we find at the foot of page 78 - I quote vertabim:

 

"...I wouldn't be surprised if variances in individual brain chemistry help explain taste predilections: if Céline fans and I disagree on whether her music is fresh, maybe my brain is a bigger dopamine junkie (fully worthy of Lawrence or Leavis, that latter phrase). Likewise, that (sic) the ranks of outré-music aficionados are so full of the socially awkward suggests their nonconformism may not be entirely by choice. (Artistic, autistic - watch your pronunciation.)"

 

I mean, what is this Charles Murray shit? How different is this from blaming it all on vaccines and, ultimately, arranging for all the inconvenient, fun-preventing unmutuals to be rounded up and TERMINATED?

 

All right, enough (or enough of all this Right). Since Wilson's cuddly polemic clearly isn't going to drive us anywhere near understanding why we ought to pay attention to this Céline Dion in particular, it's high time I dealt with the record itself; all 74 minutes and 28 seconds of it. Yes, as with most 1997 albums, it is far too long and bloated, more like a pick-and-mix counter - whatever flavour of Céline you want, we have it! - than a coherent work meant to be listened to from start to end.

 

And it isn't even a particularly good Céline Dion record. Does possessing an opinion instantly render me anti-social?

 

In common with all other failed capitalists, the album blows its budget on the first track and wonders what it's going to do about the other ones. "The Reason" is a smashing and thrilling album opener. Co-written with Carole King (who drops by in person to play piano on the track) and one of the Hudson Brothers (if you're American, ask your parents), and produced by both Sir George and Giles Martin - the great man's hearing was in decline by this stage, meaning that he needed his son's assistance in the studio - it is an absolutely splendid and epic declaration of (love) principles, one in which Dion gets far closer to the carnal (as opposed to R. Kelly's "oh just LOCK him in the fucking kitchen!" pervy slapstick nightmares); the lyric sheet says "floor me" but I hear "I want you to BLOW me." Ooh, Céline; you ARE a one!

 

The singer wants you to know that this reason for living is the greatest and most important reason EVER - whether she's singing to her lover, or to her fans, or maybe (and Wilson and I might just agree on this) to God and indeed the universe, and King, Hudson and the Martins are behind her all the way, as is guest guitarist Robbie McIntosh who unleashes a terrific, agonised solo after one of George Martin's many orchestral peaks (as arranger). I like how George manages to sneak the "Strawberry Fields Forever" 'cello parts into his arrangement and applaud the McCartney-esque harmonic and rhythmic ingenuity of the song's middle eight, with its sudden "did she REALLY say that?" pauses. I appreciate the might and fullness of Dion's voice which as Lena said when we listened to it is fully comparable with Lady Gaga (who was then eleven) at her boldest. What a fantastically ornate portion of pop music this is, fully in keeping with the best of the album's immediate predecessor.

 

But then, as Starmer's government has done with an unassailable electoral majority, which would have given it licence to do exactly whatever the hell it wanted, the album shits itself in the spotlight and retreats into cowardly acquiescence.

 

"Immortality" isn't actually bad - for once, the Gibb brothers don't attempt to take over the song entirely and instead hover like ghosts in the background. Dion doesn't go over the top, and instead sings quite movingly of...mortality, and the hope of life beyond this world. The Bee Gees had had this song on tap for some while, and I wonder if they had been thinking of Andy when they wrote it. It's modest and restrained - and it works; it seems to spread its tentacles of promise as fully as the Joy Division of "Atmosphere."

 

But when Dion launches into raggamuffin toasting on "Treat Her Like A Lady," one's antennae begin to buckle. Again, this is a perfectly decent, and at times very threatening, song - lyrically it's a sort of prequel to "Thin Line Between Love And Hate" - which Diana "Shy Guy" King had written and recorded two years earlier. King herself turns up to help Céline out on the patois front, and Brownstone's cheerleaders-on-Kool-Aid backing chants and cheers are percussively rousing. Had this been an En Vogue or SWV record, it would have been an object of wonder, but Dion really does not sound at all comfortable doing this. Musically the song is a slightly (and, in 1997, already) dated variation on "Return Of The Mack" (ask your mother) but is this something Céline really feels, or something she's been instructed to feel?

 

As with Presley in 1957, this record could have been called Céline For Everyone. I think its major purpose was to establish, a.k.a. iron out, the singer in order to facilitate and even out (a.k.a. iron out) her global appeal, and we perhaps need to consider the album's main producer - it suffers from far too many producers, blanding out the broth - David Foster as the main culprit. She's been slow to catch on in Latin America, hence "Amar Haciendo El Amor," a sex song which she sings in somewhat stiff Spanish (and which still, musically, sounds enough like mid-nineties George Michael to reassure customers).

 

The problem is, as Deirdre Barlow once said of Ken, the song's about as sexy as a soggy old sock in Salford on a Sunday in September. It's just so dull - cue the cod-flamenco guitar, the hunky matador castanets and every other readily available cliché. It's the same with "Tell Him." Now this really should have been an overdone, epic clash of screaming and kvetching. But no...Streisand instead proffers scrubbed, mumsy Julie Andrews-isms about he's a good MAN you have to TELL him he earns a good WAGE he's no' BAD! Well she isn't Glaswegian but you get the picture, except Streisand doesn't even bother with the capital letters; it's all oh-I'm-so-afraid/calm-down-hen-ye'll-be-OK-so-ye-will platitudes and once Streisand was a moderately outrageous trailblazer - actually she strikes me more as a Broadway revue star born out of her preferred era - but you'd never know it from this; "girl, so confusing" it is not, a below par Lloyd Webber pastiche - more likely (the lyrical platitudes come from David Foster's wife, Linda Thompson - no, not THAT one).

 

Leo Sayer's "When I Need You" is stripped of its complex harmonic changes and seemingly any emotional input with a view to placing it over the speakers of a hotel lobby. Dion arrives at a climax far too early (no giggling at the back there) and it simply isn't the type of song built for bullhorn emotionalism - little Leo in his lemon sweater sings it as though overwhelmed but in absolute, if baffled, happiness. The song needs a relatively humble singer, but Céline seems to offer it a megaphone.

 

Whereas "Us" is just an overlong and underblown failure. Jim Steinman is listed as "additional producer" which presumably means he was given a cup of tea and a nice chair in the far corner of the studio and told to shut the fuck up. What a contrast to "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" on Falling Into You; what a tune, what a production that was.

 

"Us," however, is mainly produced by one Humberto Gatica - a studio do-anything/work-with-anyone pro, like so many of the people involved in this record - together with somebody called Billy Pace, who wrote the song and otherwise seems to have spent the nineties writing music for television commercials. All it consists of is an extended "Please Don't Go" plea/entreaty/threat to a departing lover. It squats on its flat arse for almost six minutes and even though Dion attempts some Bonnie Tyler-style croakiness at key points (if there are any) one can only wonder at what an unhindered and in-control Steinman could have made out of this. "You say it doesn't matter - THEN TELL ME WHAT DOES!!!!" Céline could have broken every wall and window here if she'd been allowed to do so. But the creeping, insidious feeling across this album is that she's not really being allowed to do anything, except make money, hence the capital letters and exclamation marks evaporate.

 

Now there are some other good moments on Let's Talk About Love. "Love Is On The Way" is a cover of a song from the 1996 film The First Wives Club, and was sung in that movie by Billy Porter. Its central message is a variation on that of "You Will Be Loved Again" and "Fool If You Think It's Over" - no matter how bad and lonely your situation is now, it isn't the end, the song seems to say. Not all of Wilson's book is absurd; I am touched that he was personally moved to tears by listening to Céline singing this song, just as I am grateful to learn the real story about Elliott Smith at the Academy Awards (although Wilson is profoundly wrong about the allegedly "so-so" Figure 8). It is an emotionally generous song to which Dion gives a fine reading.

 

Similarly, "Miles To Go (Before I Sleep)" was the work of fellow Canadian Corey Hart and is a very good song indeed, with its intentionally preposterous metaphors ("I would carry the Rock of Gibraltar just for you" etc., although Hart may have been prescient with the line "I could learn all the world dialects for you"), appealingly unpredictable chord changes and Leslie cabinet lead guitar (Hart's other contribution to the album, "Where Is The Love," is less impressive; we agreed it would have made a perfectly good Corey Hart record).

 

On the other hand, "Why Oh Why" and "Be The Man," both produced by Foster, are forgettable filler; in an era of Aaliyah, Missy Elliott and Timbaland, this view of R&B was becoming rather old-hat. Meanwhile, "Just A Little Bit Of Love" is an early nineties-style uptempo disco "banger" for those suffering from CeCe Peniston/Robin S* withdrawal symptoms.

 

*ask your parents

 

Which brings us to the uncomfortable realisation that virtually everybody who bought this album did so for one song alone:

 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Love Theme From Titanic is how fervently the director of Titanic tried to fight against the song appearing anywhere in the film – that is, with the possible exception of Dion’s own initial indifference to it. But even Kapuskasing’s most famous son eventually had to bow to the suits, if only to shut them up.

My further thoughts on Titanic, the film, will follow in due course. But “My Heart Will Go On” does come across as a small song being shoehorned into massiveness. Depending upon whether you can walk through the pain barrier of the stock pennywhistle and Irish pipes accompaniment (both of which are synthesised - it's the "Fields Of Gold" marketable picture postcard version of "Ireland"), Céline’s voice is one which wishes to be quiet, to pray softly in her abandoned bedroom to the one loved but now departed, in whichever sense; but the spectacle, the demand, won’t let her – in the second verse and chorus she increases her vocal intensity but remains careful not to drown herself out. In this context the sudden climax, with James Horner’s full orchestra sweeping into view like a suddenly toppling iceberg, literally feels cut and pasted in; Dion compelled to break champagne glasses at a distance before she cuts back and the song ends in comparative quietude. There are moments here and there where real emotion converges onto the picture, and these are usually wordless; the defeated sigh and the wordless vibrato just before that final chorus, the elongated and again word-free sustenato which finds her, at record’s end, more alone than any Rose DeWitt Bukater could possibly dream of being. But the sales pitch remains the same; easy emotions on cue to make easier money, tragedy to be spelled out rather than suggested or implied…and in the end, both James Cameron and the people pushing, or manipulating, Céline Dion find that size defeats them, the iceberg of commercialism scuppering the sailboat of art.

 

Now I am aware - and not simply from reading the anecdotal accounts in Wilson's treatise, but from the evidence of my own eyes - that I am here talking about a song which has escaped and fled all stylistic constraints and perhaps burrowed into the very fabric of human nature. People who don't know de Caprio from Winslet use it to bury their loved ones. People isolated, or oppressed, or abandoned, or on the verge of dying themselves, sense it as that rarest of things; a universal song, applicable to all human beings.

 

Does my puzzled indifference to the song make me anti-human, as Wilson might covertly be seeming to suggest? Is my general liking of Céline Dion negated by my failure to approve unquestionably of all of her work? To what machines are we, as humans, traduced if we are all compelled to like the same things to the same degree, in the same way that most of us were, and many still are, obliged by hardwired DNA programming, to worship what we perceive to be gods?

 

I will do my best to provide answers to these questions - even if they all turn out, as I suspect, to be variants on the one question - towards the end of this piece. However, there are two songs left on Let's Talk About Love to consider - and the first of these is, it gives me no joy to report, another of the worst recordings ever to appear on Then Play Long.

 

"Never, Never, Never" derives from an Italian song entitled "Grande, Grande, Grande." Given an English lyric by Norman Newell, it provided Shirley Bassey with her last British top ten single in 1973. Bassey's interpretation isn't camp because she is perfectly aware of the song's innate absurdity. Nevertheless she is also an expert at harnessing, capturing and expressing key emotions, so when you hear her violently vacillate between "I LOVE YOU HATE YOU LOVE YOU HATE YOU" you feel a pull adjacent to emotional bipolarity. She loves him BUT; she despises him BUT. Her version does not resolve but rather fades in streams of secretly contented confusion.

 

Perhaps the Bassey record made a lot more sense in a 1973 dominated by British light entertainment (in its way it was as all-pervasive as glam). But why would Céline Dion or her people, or David Foster, let alone Luciano Pavarotti, imagine that any of it would still be relevant in 1997 (certainly not Dame Shirley herself, who at this point was happily indulging in Big Beat with the Propellerheads)?

 

There is perhaps the vaguest of hints of campness in Dion and Pavarotti’s performance, and I am being generous in allowing for it. But this “I Hate You Then I Love You” is bolted-together sub-Frankenstein grotesquerie masquerading as light entertainment. There is absolutely no reason for its existence other than to allow some rich people to become slightly richer.

 

Consider, in contrast, “Barcelona” by Mercury and Caballé. That works so well for three reasons; firstly, both singers are fully aware of the song and performance’s inherently camp nature and respond to it positively – they don’t take themselves too seriously (whereas there are few laughs to be found on Let’s Talk About Love other than inadvertent ones, for instance Dion’s attempt at raggamuffin toasting). Secondly, however, it is clear that both singers mean what they are singing; genuine emotion bursts through the curtain of campness. Thirdly, it is abundantly obvious that Caballé and Mercury hit it off together as people as well as singers and personalities, click in total simpatico.

 

But the Dion/Pavarotti “duet” doesn’t even sound as though the two singers were on the same continent at the same time, let alone in the same room (see also Sinatra’s two Duets albums from the nineties, which were essentially cut-and-paste affairs – only Tony Bennett and Charles Aznavour actually sang live alongside the once-great man in the same studio). What it aurally resembles is a monetised marriage of commercial convenience. You don’t believe what either singer is singing for one nanosecond, never mind the prospect of their having actual feelings for each other.

 

As for Pavarotti, in particular, who indulged in a lot of this kind of mucky merriment in the latter third of his life (for admittedly mainly good charitable fundraising reasons); well, since this is an adaptation of an Italian song, why not just let him sing the original Italian words? Yes, I know we are dealing with two people for whom English was not a first language (yes, well, neither was it mine). Yet no emotion can be conveyed in so sterile an environment; the great tenor being forced to mouth things like “you treat me wrong, you treat me right” is several railway stations beyond embarrassing.

 

The very title of the song is altered, and Bassey’s “I LOVE YOU HATE YOU LOVE YOU” runs are replaced by a very mechanical “I HATE YOU, THEN I LOVE YOU” which halts the song’s emotional flow immediately. Neither singer sounds as though they are in possession of any life, regardless of whether it can or cannot be lived. I have to agree with Carl Wilson here – who conceived the chimerical notion that this would have been remotely relevant to 1997 audiences? Brian Eno and U2 understood what could be done with Pavarotti’s voice, as “Miss Sarajevo,” one of the greatest pop singles of the last fifty years, amply demonstrates. In this setting, however, it is merely a signifier, stripped of anything to signify.

 

The final penny drops with the five minutes and twelve seconds of the closing title song, co-written by Bryan Adams, Jean-Jacques Goldman and…Eliot Kennedy. Haven’t we heard that last name before recently? Ah yes…he was the principal writer of “Say You’ll Be There” by the Spice Girls. It really feels like a floating crap game, late nineties mainstream popular music, with the same for-hire/do-anything-for-anybody/bob-a-job names cropping up.

 

The listener’s face instantly freezes when the song begins. “Everywhere I go,” Céline croons, “All the places that I’ve been”…and with the stilted, portentous rhythm and expensive studio echo we know what we’re getting, a.k.a. An Anthem For All The World And Shouldn’t We Really Be Nice To Each Other And Love One Another (see also “We’re In This Together” by Simply Red)?

 

“Let’s Talk About Love,” the song, is ponderous. Fucking ponderous, as the late Casey Kasem would have observed. Yes, one can imagine Adams groaning its back-pages-of-The Mail On Sunday-magazine wellness tips (the hoary Rock Guitar Solo is certainly present). And OF COURSE a children’s choir is going to turn up, just to highlight the song’s similarity to…”Heal The World.”

 

And that, reader, is when the lightbulb in my head flashed to attention. What label is this album on? Epic. Who also recorded for Epic?

 

Yes. They were trying to turn Céline Dion into the new Michael Jackson – as the old one had lately been found commercially wanting – a bland-faced global doll expected, if not commanded, to communicate only the most banal and non-committal of emotions to the widest and least fussy of audiences possible. Does my hesitation to embrace this uplifting nothingness define me as being against the human species?

 

You see, that’s what theorists like Carl Wilson simply don’t get. They structure windy arguments in the hope of altering the wind of critical reception – a tactic that only carries relevance to people who regard, or are funded to regard, music in that way, as opposed to nearly every other human being on the planet.

 

Now, long-time readers will require no reminder that I have never subscribed to either poptimism or rockism. I’ll get back to that “either” and “or” in a moment. Ellington famously proposed that there were only two kinds of music; good and bad. With me there are three types, and this applies to any art form and not to music alone:

 

1.            Punctum. This is, by definition, applicable to all good music, a.k.a. music I enjoy and to which I would happily listen again. Specifically the term is applicable to the various elements which lift a piece of music out of the routine and emotionally attach me to it.

 

2.            Studium. This is applicable to what I would term average or routine music – it isn’t bad per se, but lacks any special element that might engage my attention or emotions. It comes off a mythical or actual assembly line and goes exactly where I would expect it to go, albeit not in an interesting manner. I’d hear it all the time but would never actually want to listen to it.

 

3.            Pisspoor. A.K.A. bad music. Fairly self-explanatory.

 

What I am getting at might be a very banal Paul McCartney Featuring Stevie Wonder observation – but as with “everyone,” there is good and bad in all music. It is, nonetheless, a basic and probably, in the long term, fatal component of human nature to consider life as a matter of “either/or.” It’s either my tribe or it’s my enemy. It’s either capitalism or socialism. It’s either poptimism or rockism. It’s either Céline Dion, right and wrong, or Pavement. It’s either Normal People or Abnormal People Who Look At You Funny Like At The Bus Stop And Never Go To The Pub After Work Who Obviously Have Something Wrong With Them They Are Not Like Us And Shouldn’t They Be PUT DOWN

 

What it NEVER is, is THE BEST OF BOTH SIDES.

 

All the way through his Dion exegesis, Carl Wilson never escapes the snare of either/or. Either you love Céline unconditionally or you hate humanity. Either you worship or should be burned at the stake. Indeed, the entire premise of Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love rests on that hardwired either/or bed. I don’t think that line of thought is going to get us anywhere useful as a species.

 

Let’s talk about me for a bit. I have loved music – the best of all music – for more or less all of my life, ever since the Daily Record in June 1965 noted my enthusiastic toddler responses to the work of John Coltrane and Mozart. I’ve heard and seen it all, and continue to do so. I grant that there are a few allowances to make. I am now over sixty and am pretty settled in my set of aesthetic beliefs – I do not use the word “prejudice” because one thing I never do with music, as with people, is to pre-judge anything. I base my beliefs on the evidence that is available to me.

 

But I know what I’m likely and less likely to like. For instance, I need no longer pretend to be interested in the tuneless hippy performance art conceptual bollocks largely promoted by The Wire and The Quietus these days. The Wire, there was a good magazine once upon a time before it got overthrown by Sky Bet League Two bloggers and assorted other proggy wankers. It began as a Not Jazz Journal affair and later broadened out very interestingly before ultimately entrapping itself in…oh, the irony!…niche reactionism. Anyway, I’m running out of time and have better ways of spending and using the time that remains available to me. I listened to some of that Bastard Assignments stuff. The first track I heard was a bloke making the sort of noises with his mouth and tongue that I used to do into the microphone of our Philips cassette recorder when I was ten. Think I’ll stick with Sabrina Carpenter at my time of life, thanks. Or Jane Remover, they’ve got something noisily going on. What do you mean you’ve never heard of them, you flaccid mistral of eighties flatus?

 

None of this, however, erases the fact – and it is a quantifiable fact, not merely someone’s opinion – that it is perfectly natural and normal to like some of Céline Dion’s music and be less than enthusiastic about (a different) some of it. Or to like both Céline and Pavement. Or Iannis Xenakis and Engelbert Humperdinck. Different music for different circumstances at different times – and none of it ascribable to a (non)sense of imposed would-be supercoolness; it comes from my lifelong openness to music. I grew up with my father’s Stockhausen records and my mother’s Dean Martin discs. When I went for my Oxford University entrance interview, my interviewer – a rather famous gentleman of whom you may have heard – immediately demanded an answer to the question “Lennon or Keats?” (the former had been shot the day before and I’d been studying the latter in English class). I instinctively retorted “What about Cole Porter?” which happily turned out to be the “correct” answer.

 

That’s the other thing - one of my key missions as a music writer this past quarter-century or so has been to illustrate that all of this music is, by means of intricate metaphorical mazes and street maps, CONNECTED, just as we humans are all connected to each other, whether we like it or not. If you elect to shut out and exclude even just one factor, you are shielding yourself from the light. My point is that natural eclecticism, which is latent in everybody until or unless it gets ironed out, is one of the things that distinguish us from non-humans. If the looming iceberg threatens to trump all of our visions and dreams, then we need to steer clear of the unthinking mentality that maybe secretly welcomes a violent end. Reanimate the doll and render her splendidly and imperfectly human again. As Céline Dion herself said about the Hurricane Katrina looters to Larry King on CNN in September 2005 – and it’s in Wilson’s book, mentioned and described at some length – “Let them touch those things for once!” Actually, let us all touch all things for good, and forever. Let’s also talk about how we’re going to love. We could start by permitting our emotions to be touched, by all things.