#593: A is for A-ha

I

I never leave the shrink wrap
on an album I’ve purchased,
but I left the plastic on this
first A-ha album, purchased
used within the last several
years, because the original
price tag was still there, $6.99
new at Tower Records, 1985.
I did some thinking about this
recently, about the price of
a new record over the decades.
I bought my first new record
with my own money for $3.99.
I think the last album I bought
new ran me $39.99.
I get out a calculator and
can hardly believe my eyes:
Is that a 900% increase?
That’s a 900% increase.
Let’s listen to A-ha.

II

“Take On Me” just might be
the most perfect pop song
of an entire decade. That’s not
to say that it’s my personal
favorite, only that everything
about it screams greatness,
from it’s kick-ass
drum machine pulse, to the
powerful keyboard and vocal
hooks, to the calisthenics
of that singing performance
which revealed definitively
that it was indeed sexy for
a man to sing really high
notes with absolute precision.
No other song on Hunting
High and Low comes remotely
close to this perfection.
A pleasant listening experience
overall, but nothing matches
the spunk and punch of
that first track, the nine other
songs a wash of keyboard,
drum machine, reverb, and
pretty singing.

III

It’s no better to be safe than sorry.
They are equally bad or good, depending.
Nothing good or bad, Hamlet says,
but thinking makes it so.
Morten Harket has been diagnosed
with Parkinson’s and now has
difficulty singing. A question I put
to myself somewhat regularly,
when does one stop making music?
My creative impulses answer,
resoundingly: when one is physically
incapable, once the arthritis in the
hands make it impossible to drum,
or if the voice ever goes to shit,
or whenever the brain stops working
to remember how to make music.
I have felt the urge in the last
couple of years to make as much
music as I possibly can, to write
as many words as I possibly can,
in some kind of race against
the inevitable.

IV
Scoundrel Days, the band’s
sophomore effort, is sonically
identical to the debut,
but it rocks a little harder
and is lyrically a little darker,
and the songs are arranged
with a little more sophistication,
a bit more experimentation.
Morten’s got a bit of Bowie
and a bit of Sylvian going on,
which could never be bad.
There are no hits here, and
there wouldn’t be for the
rest of the band’s career.
None of that matters.
They set out, I imagine,
to simply make good records,
and to my mind and to my ears,
these are good records.

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Notes on the vinyl editions: Both Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days are original 1985 and 1986 pressings, respectively. I bought both of them used several years ago, I forget where. As were most of the records made in the 80’s, these are black vinyl editions and the records themselves are light weight–these are not even 140 grams, I’m almost certain. Here’s a mystery, though: they both sound great despite some mild warping. They are clean, mostly free of pops or static artifacts. It appears that, in this era, despite manufacturing somewhat on the cheap, the records made in the 80’s sound often better than the records made today, yeah, the one’s we spend $40 for.

Postscript in Bullets:

• This is the 3rd poem in a series of poems about records in my collection, A to Z
• All the poems in this series will have dumb titles
• The poems may or may not be a direct response to the listening, but tangential, discursive, journal-like