December 14, 2023

The Last Night and the Next Morning: Marlena, Marina, Ariana (Guest Post by Bleimann)

The Last Night and the Next Morning

Marlena, Marina, Ariana

Nothing ever really begins, not really. We come to new relationships constantly in media res, always at some point on an arc of grander movements in life, pushing or adapting ourselves and our lovers into a something-shaped hole or positioning them, like a crisis-purchase houseplant, in front of a crack that we may not know exists. The shape of these arcs and where we stand on them may not become apparent until years later and will shift through time. The meeting of the boy who starts as a deception in the death spiral of one relationship becomes the protagonist of a torrid epoch-defining love affair, becomes a footnote in a more general tale of decline and fall, of hitting a rock bottom that, of course, was not.

Things do, however, and in a very deep way, end, at least some of the time. Joni sang:

I remember that time you told me you said
“Love is touching souls”
Surely you touched mine
Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time

We’ve spent the entire history of humanity trying to find ways to express or understand what we simply know to be true: in love, things we can’t describe meet, join, act upon each other. Often, we only know that this thing has happened after it has ceased to happen, when an absent other works through us, appears in words which are not quite our own or which come borrowed from another. Or through a song that meant something to them before we fell into their lives and now, to us, means them. Some thing has ended and we find ourselves alone again, faced with working out what to do with a love whose object is now purely internal and with memories and desires and tastes that are not strictly our own; or rather, they didn’t used to be.

As I’ve mentioned before, we turn to music to get through this process of reintegration, but breakup-pop is also frequently about that very process. There’s a disco or pop song for every variety of romantic crisis imaginable. It’s a kind of collective endeavour of gradually filling out the canon with more and more highly-specific bangers that people can cry to, having found the precise song which is about them, right now.1 Even when an artist returns to a situation already covered by another, there is always another perspective. So you’re a woman, and you see the man you love walking down the street arm-in-arm with another man. How do you feel about it? If heartbroken and considering staying despite everything, turn to Barbara Mason, ‘Another Man’. If confused, but somehow vaguely approving, turn to Raffaella Carra, ‘Luca’. If unabashedly vindictive, Ariana Grande, ‘Break Your Heart Right Back’.

Which is to say, you might imagine that three different songs written over multiple decades about the specific situation of asking your lover to spend one final night with you before they leave forever are somehow about the same thing, but they’re not. Picking apart the details of heartbreak pop, or, at least, of really good heartbreak pop, where the details feel like choices and slips and revelations rather than just an impossibly-skilled team of writers mounting a technically-perfect satisfaction machine, reveals an endless diversity of angst. Life has remarkable depth in ways to feel alone.

Marlena Shaw – Touch Me in the Morning

There was an interview with Jimmy Sommerville on Popbitch where he talked about stage-directing a breakup so that its circumstances would match those described in ‘Touch Me in the Morning’, with the sole intention of listening to it and really feeling it. The more I think about it, I think it is that exact drive — not art imitating life or vice versa, but each one actively driving the other — which I find myself thinking about it my own life and which I’m drawn to write about.

I’m not going to talk a lot about the fact that Marlena Shaw’s version of ‘Touch Me…’ is a cover of Diana Ross. It is worth noting, however, that Diana jumps straight in with the central idea of the song: “Touch me in the morning/Then just walk away”. Without knowing the song, based purely on its title, you would assume that it would be a song about sexy times in the morning (Rui Da Silva’s ‘Touch Me’, which interpolates the whole line, is a song about sexy times in the morning). Instead, right from the off, we have the seemingly contradictory requests — touch me, leave me — which the rest of the song will resolve.

Marlena, however, opens with a spectacular high-camp spoken-word intro:

Now, I am strong enough. Now, I am strong enough to accept change. Yes, my darling, if you want to live in another place, I can understand it. It’s gonna hurt for a little while but, I can understand it. But, before you walk out of that door…

Marlena is insistent that she is dealing with things. The issue isn’t that her man is leaving her, it’s that the set and setting isn’t right. “I can say goodbye/In the cold morning light/But I can't watch love die/In the warmth of the night”: the issue is not the fact of the departure, but its incongruity. The night, of course, belongs to lovers. Marlena wants to split her memories into two distinct moments: the night, warm, loving, and probably fucking; the morning, cold, clear, and alone. The whole song revolves around this division of a love story into two distinct epochs. “We don't have tomorrow/But we had yesterday”.2 The strategy seems to be: I will be able to accept the end of our relationship, but tomorrow, and only if certain things happen.

The song starts with a “but” and it ends with many, many, “ifs”: the ecstatic, glorious coda, where the business end of the song’s hooks are removed and we’re left with “if I got to be strong” and “TOUCH ME!”.3 Anyone who has done the breaking-up in a separation knows that the ‘right time’ rarely presents itself. Breaking up with someone is, in the terms of philosopher J.L. Austin, a speech act. By uttering words, we don’t just communicate something; we perform an action, we change what two people, together and individually, are. By its very nature, it will always be incongruous; the time will never be right, because the words we’re trying to say belong to the reality which they themselves will bring into existence, not the one we’re living in now.

So Marlena is kidding herself, albeit fabulously. Projecting acceptance into the future and making it conditional is not acceptance. Even entertaining the possibility that we get back together, something has been said that has made the thing we’re trying to cling to or extend, cease to exist.4 The question that emerges is what happens if we get our way: what and who are the two bodies in bed with one another, now that they can no longer be what they were, and have not yet become what they will be?

Ariana Grande – One Last Time

The first sign that something may be up with Ariana in ‘One Last Time’ comes in its title. Her song comes in the grand tradition of two turn-of-the-millennium bangers, Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’ and Sash!’s ‘Encore une Fois’, both songs which promise a definitive resolution but which instead deliver unending repetition. In Spain, when a night out starts winding down, by tradition we never suggest having a final drink, but always the penultimate; in sex, as in drinking, there’s perhaps an underlying knowledge that what we promise ourselves will be the last one will not be so, nor do we want it to be. In my own experience, I’ve learned that there is no limit to denial, nothing too big or too patently there that we can’t find a way to not see. A pop song can be that friend making atrocious decisions that of course we would never make, which we can see with a clarity that we struggle to find in our own self-perception.

Marlena gave us limited context for what led her man to leave her. Ariana is more explicit from the get-go:

I was a liar, I gave in to the fire
I know I should've fought it, at least I'm being honest
Feel like a failure, 'cause I know that I failed you
I should've done you better, 'cause you don't want a liar

The loopy thinking which always asks for one final time, and then one more time after that, and again, is already here in the structure (“I was a liar”/”you don’t want a liar”, “feel like a failure”/”I failed you”; this is poetry, not lazy songwriting). Ariana entertains both imagined possible alternative actions — that repeated “should’ve”; the third conditional is never anything other than fantasy — and mitigating factors, in the form of honesty. But the way the confession or amends is framed — I shouldn’t have lied because you don’t want a liar — excludes the possibility of any advancement. When we do something and face the consequences, we have a couple of options: own what we did and accept it as something we want in our future behaviour (this would be the as-yet unrealised Ariana Grande polyamory timeline), or attempt to learn from it, from its impact on others, and make amends in a way that is orientated towards the other, not ourselves. Here, the incident is only conceptualised as wrong because of its consequences: cheating was wrong, because you left me for cheating. If breaking up is the end of something joint and of some kind of brief ability to genuinely make contact with another human being, here the resulting isolation and solipsism is all too apparent. Even in reaching out and making overtures towards a reconciliation, “at least just temporarily”, Ariana never breaks free from her own perspective: she looks to the other and sees only herself.

This becomes more explicit in the chorus:

So one last time
I need to be the one who takes you home
One more time
I promise after that, I'll let you go
Baby, I don't care if you got her in your heart
All I really care is you wake up in my arms

There is, I feel, a quite disturbing image, and a very true one, hidden in plain sight here. In Marlena’s fantasy, she and her ex, or soon-to-be-ex, prolong whatever the thing was, the connection and love and everything she wants to hold on to, for one more night, before displacing the departure to the morning. Ariana seems to be at once more rooted in reality, and more psychotic: she knows that her lover’s heart and thoughts are with somebody else, that whatever happens that one last night will not be the same as that which has been lost,5 that their individual mental and emotional states are irreparably divergent, but she doesn’t care.

Sometimes a word or a fixed phrase or a cliché suddenly reveals depths of meaning through encountering it in new surroundings. Here, for me, it’s “let you go”. In the context of this song, it signifies at least three concurrent and distinct things: Ariana promises that she will stop holding her lover’s body; she promises that she will allow him to leave; and she promises that she will get over him. In this case, the three meanings don’t seem like alternative readings but as all simultaneously present. Actually, it’s more than that: the only envisioned possibility of letting go requires a prior state of physical intimacy in which the beloved seems not only to have no agency, but to be an actively unwilling captive who will, at some point, be let go.

Sharing a bed with someone you no longer love, or who, even in a more fleeting encounter, you just don’t want to be sharing a bed with anymore, can be excruciating, precisely because the moment of supposed connection can feel so profoundly lonely. This is the state in which Ariana imagines placing her ex. Even in her fantasy, she knows that there is nothing mutual about this supposed moment of closure — “I don’t care if you got her in your heart/All I really care is you wake up in my arms” — but is willing to accept both the humiliation of the mismatch of the situation, and the disregard for other it entails. It’s selfish, but it’s also quite sad.

In Javier Marias’s Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, a man is embracing his lover in bed when, suddenly and rather unostentatiously, she dies. The fact of this event changes what is happening; it is not “touching souls”, or whatever a lower-key expression of this sentiment applicable to not-love-but-still-something might be, but a man embracing a dead body, an inanimate object. That moment of death which changes completely what is happening even as the exact position of the bodies in the bed remains the same is like the speech act which ends the relationship and transforms what is happening, not in a symbolic but in a very real way, between the two former partners.

In short, Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time” is a necrophilia banger.6

Marina and the Diamonds – Blue

Marina’s Froot is, I think, one of the great pop achievements of the 2010s. After the occasional campiness and experimentation with personae — which, it goes without saying, I fully support — on her first two records, her third album marked an opening up. Normally, a singer announcing their “most personal album yet” is a very bad sign. That’s partly because, a lot of the time, what’s being opened up about is not particularly interesting. Marina, though, put together what’s maybe the greatest album in the canon exploring what it’s like, what it actually feels like, to be the one at fault in a relationship and a break-up, and what makes us behave in ways that hurt people we love. ‘Blue’, her own take on the Last Night Together tradition, is accordingly rather close to the bone.

‘Blue’ starts with a bit of a fake-out: “We’ve broken up and now I regret it/I said goodbye when I shouldn’t have said it”. Marina, like Ariana, is in a “should have” place, regretting the actions that led to the break-up: in this case, not any cheating that led to it, but the act of speaking the relationship out of existence. The surprise comes with the gradual descent into what is a truly startling level of honesty. First:

Gimme love, gimme dreams, gimme a good self-esteem
Gimme good and pure, what you waiting for?
Gimme everything, all your heart can bring
Something good and true
I don't wanna feel blue anymore

Come back to me for one night because I feel like shit, and I want to feel better, basically. And then the kicker:

No, I don't love you, no, I don't care
I just wanna be held when I'm scared
And all I want is one night with you
Just 'cause I'm selfish, I know it's true

Here there is no longer any illusion of prolonging the love that was lost, of signing things off in the appropriate way, of making some kind of amends. Breaking up ends that connection we have with another human being and dumps us unceremoniously into our individuality. It’s painful, and the fantasy here has nothing to do with whatever that joint thing was that is over; the fantasy is that just one more fix will get us through the withdrawal from its loss.

With men, as with drugs, this does not tend to work out well. Just as Marlena descended into ecstatic repetition of the invocation to touch, forgetting that that touch was meant to be tomorrow, and would actually be one of farewell, Marina’s chorus seems to drop all the cynicism:

Gimme one more night
One last goodbye
Let's do it one last time
One more time

We’ve been given one explanation for what’s going on (I don’t care about you, I just hate being alone), and in the chorus — the part of the song, significantly, which repeats — we get another (I want to say goodbye). This can be self-deception, it can be deception of the other, it can be a lie, but I also think that at the same time, it’s also true. We’re back to Sash! and to Daft Punk and to Marlena’s crazed invocations, to that crazed but guttural need for a final touch; a need which never satisfies itself and ends up in a loop, a promised departure or ending which never happens because the resolution never arrives.7

Froot is an album which deals, fundamentally, with the irresolvable challenges of loving. Think of ‘Happy’, with the tension between needing to learn to live alone and the genuine human need for companionship, or ‘I’m a Ruin’, with the dilemma of staying with someone and hurting them through deceit, or leaving them and hurting them with heartbreak. This all applies here, too. It’s very easy to say that we need to love ourselves and not throw ourselves into the arms of a man when one leaves us. But it’s difficult, when those moments of somehow making contact seem so important to what it is to be alive. It’s difficult not to see one more night as not just a quick fix, but the preservation of a part of ourselves or a capability we’ve discovered that is, genuinely, precious. It’s difficult.

Have I Told You Recently That I Read Proust This Summer

I am not being critical of these women, or the personae they present in their songs, or the stories they tell, or whatever it is precisely that goes on in pop songs. I think it’s quite the opposite. In Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu,8 Proust talks rather a lot about love and art, in various configurations. His vision of the former can be rather bleak: his narrator falls successively in love with a series of women, but truly is seeking not contact with the other, but contact with some part of himself, just as Marina found herself pleading to spend the night with a man who bores her to soothe a need which ultimately has nothing to do with him and everything to do with her.

Art, though, is the way out of this solipsism:

[…] in this case, literature doing over again the work undone by disillusion bestows a sort of survival on sentiments which have ceased to exist. Certainly we are obliged to relive our particular suffering with the courage of a physician who tries over again upon himself an experiment with a dangerous serum. But we ought to think of it under a general form which enables us to some extent to escape from its control by making all men co-partners in our sorrow and this is not devoid of a certain gratification. Where life closes round us, intelligence pierces an egress, for if there is no remedy for unrequited love, one emerges from the verification of suffering if only by drawing its relevant conclusions.

There is something in the ability to look the pain of love in the face and put it, precisely, on paper or on canvas or in song in a way which allows others to feel it which offers a solution to the problem of lost connection. Love might be touching souls like Joni said or it might be an endless inward-turning like Proust said; but the precise and honest and fearless description of each individual experience of love in a way that others can not just understand it but live it (Jimmy Sommerville fashioning himself into Marlena Shaw), I truly believe, creates some kind of touching that goes beyond mere identification or similarity; something happens, and it happens to me or with me or through me with all of these songs.

The desire for one final night, for one last time, for one more time, is a desire to reaffirm a connection with another human being which we have lost; the impulse never satisfies itself, because the aloneness always returns. Somehow, I feel that the whole ridiculous enterprise of pop, of the bravery of deciding that ones own experience, put into song, has some kind of worth to others, of listening to the experiences of others, of my own overthinking and writing about what pop music means to me and the complicated ways in which it has intersected with my own love life, is the way out of the loop. There is no way back to the lost connection with the ex; but that sense of connection with the world, with other individuals, of not being alone, is possible through art. That I am able to understand myself and find peace and feel less isolated through the outrageous denial of an Ariana Grande song, for me, is all the justification necessary that this stuff matters.

I think this happens with DJs too. We can look at DJing in terms of selection and skill but I think that the DJs who have most affected me have something more. When I listen to Cassy’s sets from the late 2000s, or Bobby Vitteritti’s from the 80s, or Joe Delon’s right now, I get the sense not just that I’m listening to what they like, but in some way getting a sense of how they hear music, a part of how they experience the world. When I hear a track and think “This is a Joe Delon banger”, it might be disco or techno or some truly bizarre pop remix; what makes it, to me, a Joe track is something that I’m not capable of describing in technical terms and can’t be reduced to that, in any case. That feeling comes partly from developing my own taste in tandem with Joe over the course of what is now almost twenty years of friendship, but also from the separate individual process of a DJ who thinks and writes seriously about what precisely they are doing, and what happens, when they choose and sequence and play music for other people. When someone is capable of transmitting a way of feeling music which is uniquely theirs, in a way that isn’t verbal, and I’m capable of receiving it, communication happens; I can get outside of my own head; I’m less alone.

When that feeling for music is combined with the emotional sensitivity to lyrics, the ability to connect with oneself and with a crowd and know when to drop something genuinely devastating, things can happen on dancefloors that really mean something, that leave some effect in the individual after the night has ended. This is the kind of moment that happens, miraculously, on a weekly basis at Horse Meat Disco, that Prosumer makes happen, that so many old sets from The Saint or the Trocadero Transfer capture in queer togetherness. It’s why I dance.

Maybe I should adopt a dog?

- Bleimann, December 2023