Winamp Wednesday: Ooh, Talk to Me
Who Needs Guitars, Anyway?
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Alice Deejay, “Better Off Alone”
I’ll always dance to the Eurobeat.
Stick this one in a time capsule, because there may be no better sound to demonstrate what the first part of the Year 2000 sounded like. New technology and weird fashions collide under a thumping beat. This was our dream of the next century. For a few thunderous weeks, on Z100 and elsewhere, this is what the future did sound like.
I was already susceptible to the power and charms of minimal lyrics over a trance soundscape. My parents had suffered my infatuation with Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby the previous year, and I’m sure they were absolutely tickled that I had moved on to a band that used even fewer words per track. “Did you think you were better off alone?” and “Ooh, talk to me” is all you get here, but kudos to vocalist Judith Pronk for selling the humanity of it all. None of us knew where the band came from and if pressed I’m sure most of us would have assumed that her name was Alice Deejay, but what a voice to welcome in the new century.
And 2000 was the start of a new century. I don’t care what happened to Year Zero, that’s a fight to pick up between B.C. and A.D. in a coliseum somewhere. All years are made up, all calendars are fictitious to some degree. All I knew was that it was the dawn of something brilliant, and that we were finally living in the future. Here was this song to prove it. You should have seen how the opening sound cascade made the Winamp visualizer go nuts, like it was working in tandem with this new technology to show off what it could do. Out of nowhere my computer monitor would flash and sparkle like we were going to warp speed. Anything was possible here in this new century: new sounds, new sights, new ideas.
When I first saw the album cover I was taken aback by the name. Who Needs Guitars, Anyway? felt like a slam against the classic favorites that I built up as my inner sanctum. There was a bit of everything in my audio diet, but I couldn’t live without The Cars, The Beatles, The Police. Who needed guitars? I damn well did! Who were these upstarts saying we didn’t need them anymore?
My resistance fell away quick when met with those pulsing beats, and I saw the question less as a rebuke and more as a challenge. We don’t always need guitars. We can make all kinds of music. This is the future. Won’t you let Alice DJ?
It was probably no coincidence that around this time I wrote my first music for synthesizer, a reinterpretation of the score to 1985’s LadyHawke. I created that for a class project and I very much hope every part of it has been lost to time. But we all have to start somewhere.
I could have flown away on the wings of Ms. Pronk’s voice crooning “Oooh, talk to me” over and over again, hearing it on KTU and Z100 and then eventually out of my computer speakers. When you’re fifteen it’s easy to fall in love and it’s even easier to dream about the potential of it. Every teenager is the director, star, and full writers’ room of their own soap opera. And every tune could become the temporary all-encompassing theme song. This sterling year, for myself and for many people I knew, gave more than enough opportunities to talk about love and scream about heartbreak.
“Talk to me” can mean so many things in joy and sorrow. “Do you think you were better off alone” is a question for getting into a relationship and being ejected violently from one. It was an ink blot for adolescents who needed something triumphant to underscore the very important things happening in their everyday lives. In this case, less was very much more.
At its peak in Summer 2000, “Better Off Alone” was sandwiched on the Hot 100 between ‘N Sync’s “It’s Gonna Be Me” and DMX’s “Party Up”. That’s a pretty good way to show how different Alice Deejay felt, how much it was looking towards the future. The next era needs a vanguard, and sometimes it can be so different and so phenomenal that we can overlook its shortcomings. I don’t know if it feels corny or dated now. I know that Judith Pronk’s wardrobe is painfully of the moment, that moment being January-March 2000. But the music? My soap opera needed a soundtrack. I was never better off alone.