I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BERLIN–“Sex (I’m A)” (2019 version) (2019).

Berlin had a few more hits than most people remember.  There is of course, “Take My Breath Away,” and “The Metro” but also had and the infamous hit “Sex (I’m A)” which is the most 80’s song I can think of.

So here it is 2019 and the Terri Nunn has reunited with Berlin co-founders John Crawford and David Diamond for their first Berlin album together since 1984.  That album, Love Life, featured “No More Words” (I had forgotten that one).

I also didn’t know that Terri Nunn was not the original singer of Berlin.  Their first album, Information had Virginia Macolino on lead vocals.

But in 2019, the three got together to release Transcendance.  And this album has an update of “Sex (I’m A).”  Terri Nunn pointed out in an interview that she still wanted to sing about sexuality now that she is in her fifties, but didn’t want to make songs that made it sound like she was still in her twenties.

So why they decided to cover this song, I don’t know. It’s not very different.  The lyrics are (I think) the same (It’s hard to remember all of the things she “is”  in the song.

The music is different–the drums are bigger and the synth is a little less plastic sounding.  The vocals sound almost identical. Terri Nunn’s voice sounds great.

The one big difference is the inclusion of a lot of guitar. Both in the chorus (which rocks a bit more) and in the occasional solos after the verses.  And after the chorus there’s a more modern pulsing rhythm which sounds pretty good.

It’s a fine update–adding some things and not really losing anything, but it doesn’t seem entirely necessary.

[READ: September 10, 2019] “Beulah Berlin, An A-Z” 

This story was created with a kind of gimmick, but it works.

Almost every paragraph (some sections are longer than one paragraph) starts with an oversized capital letter, A to Z.  And each capital letter is the first word of the new section and (almost) the last word of the previous section.

So paragraph one begins with “Angst” and ends with “Berlin.”  Section two begins with “Berlin” and ends with “cooler.”  Section three opens with “Color” (so there’s a slight variant at work sometimes).

This formal structure sort of makes the story forced, but not really.  Mostly it’s fun to see how Boyd set it up.

The narrator is named Beulah McTurk, but she changed her name to Beulah Berlin.  She is an artist and has been married three times.

Her first husband Georg was an artist and made a performance called Stunk in which Beulah was the star.  Most coverage of the performance focused on her, which made Georg jealous.

Beulah now works in photography.  She likes to photograph peoples faces and their feet.  She likes to photograph the same people every year.  Many people find this distressing–seeing their feet age so much.

Beulah is dating Otto but is seeing Cornelius on the side–when Otto is abroad, which he often is.

She imagines having a child named Qwertyuiop.  (This would of course be the awkward transition into the “Q” section, coming from the word “queue” that ended the last paragraph.  Calling her child this first line of the keyboard would allow said child to have many nicknames combining those letters: Trey, Opi, Yute.

Some of the section changes are interesting like: “soup du jour” to “Journal keeping.”  There’s also “skip” to “Kipling” and “Teflon” to “London.”

The final paragraph begins with “Zoos.”  She talks about how much she liked rhinos–their armor and charisma.  She imagines being like a rhino and being free from (and this was a very clever last word) “angst.”

Even though this story felt clunky, I appreciated the construction of it.