Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Beat that my Heart Skipped (Casanova Soundtrack)

The Beat that my Heart Skipped (Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip) is the fourth song on the Casanova soundtrack as outlined in Casanova 14. It is my favorite song on the album, no contest. The rhymes especially are great fun. The video will not embed for some reason so CLICK HERE to see it and read along below.

Every now and then I cower and I need to find empowerment
Empowerment is paramount to how I can begin to mount
A plan that I can implement
to make a dent on ignorance
Instead of drunk belligerence
and the dissidence of miscreants
Especially in this instance
with the never ending persistence
to use the words in each sentence
as if they were blunt instruments
to beat a hole in the defence
of this beauty and her innocence
which serves to just build resistance
in spite of all my good intents.

The beat that my heart skipped

This is the beat that my heart skipped when we first met
Now that I’ve heard it, it leaves me with a kind of regret
No disrespect
We just left a lot of people upset
And what we had wasn’t really what we’d come to expect

Well good god damn and other such phrases
I haven’t heard a beat like this in ages
To miss such a beat would have been outrageous
But when you heart skips a beat its ruthless and aimless

She caught my attention in her fishnets
Then she reeled me in expecting nothing more than kissed necks and quick sex
But that weren’t the case with this platinum princess
She’s attracted my interest
So I wanted to impress….
Upon her all the positive things
That come form having more than just a one night fling
But that’s something that’s easier in theory than in practice
Since pick up lines are tactics
To get prey to the mattress
And this actress
Is practiced
In shunning such theatrics
When put upon daily by tactless geriatrics

So my genuine advances are met with po-faced scepticism
Throwing complements but she just straight elects to miss them
Her lips were put on this earth for dispersing wisdom
God forbid I suggest she lets me kiss them

But I really want to know what she thinks of me
Because I’m loving every idiosyncrasy
But I ain’t one to jump through hoops to make a 1st impression
Been there, done that, learnt the worst of lessons
We want to be loved for who we appear to be instead of who we are
So I real selves take a backseat behind the pomp and the façade
And that’s as true of the rude boys, downing pints and acting hard
As of the kids shunning convention with clinical disregard

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of it's dead good.

But it's also kind of Sage Frances.

Yes, "Sage Frances" is an adjective. And it goes with "Brrrrr."

Marc Caputo said...

I am loving beyond words the playlist for Casanova 14. I've even guaranteed some people I know their money for many of the tracks.

What's killing me is that it's mucking up my iPod shuffle experiment (see my blog) because every chance I get I listen to my iTunes on the computer instead of playing my iPod.

All the songs (except "Taxman", because I have deep and serious problems with the Lads from Liverpool and their output) are great, but 1, 3-7, 9 and 10 are jaw-droppingly monumental.

neilshyminsky said...

marc: I'm no huge fan of 'Taxman', but what are some of your 'deep and serious problems' with the Beatles?

Marc Caputo said...

I try not to be a hater, Neil, and I truly appreciate and respect all they did - I rarely turn off a song of theirs on the radio.

But I don't "feel" them. I try to go by two Lester Bangs quotes: "The reason I've listened to music all my life is to hear passion expressed" and "From here on in, I'm only interested in pure feeling", neither of which I'm getting. I do love mid-period stuff like "Help!", "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver" however, but the rest, meh.

But, the real problem I have is with Beatles enthusiasts. I've never met one who can differentiate between the genius and the pedestrian, the good and the shit. I especially bristle at "Sgt. Pepper" being oft-listed as the best of all time for the following reasons

1. It's not the Beatles' best album. Any of the previously mentioned albums smoke it HARD. I'll even give it up for the White Album, which has been more influential over the same period of time.

2. It's not even the best album of 1967. Cue up the debuts of the Velvet Underground, the Doors and Jimi Hendrix for better music and longer lasting influence.

3. It's not what it claims or is claimed to be: a concept album. Starting and ending your alum with the same song doesn't quite do it. Play "Hotel California" for a better example of how to tell a story with songs.

The Beatles were everything that people said they were. But they ended. And why? Because they had nothing left to say. Beatle fans act as if music died with the breakup. Sorry folks. Play Squeeze's "Up the Junction". That track aces the Lads at their own game with more wit and sense of characterization and story than most anything the "Fab Four' ever released.

neilshyminsky said...

"But, the real problem I have is with Beatles enthusiasts. I've never met one who can differentiate between the genius and the pedestrian, the good and the shit."

Isn't this just a problem with fandom, though, rather than a problem with the Beatles?

Marc Caputo said...

True to a point, but why I have the problem is because I don't think that ALL of the Beatles' output is worth deification. But the Beatles' enthusiasts I've encountered do. I don't think Sgt. Pepper is a great album. I think songs like "I Am the Walrus", while sounding good with some interesting ideas is ultimately a waste of vinyl. But Beatles' fans will mine the song for clues and hidden meanings. I think it just has stupid lyrics. Take a song like R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" and its lyric, "Let's play Twister, let's play Risk" - it's fraught with more meaning than just the surface. Also, RHCP's "Under the Bridge"'s "I don't want to feel like I did that day". The song's about heroin addiction, but who hasn't had a day like that? That's what the public connects to and why the song resonated enough to be a hit.

And I just can't stomach EVERY band saying they were influenced by the Beatles. Look at Fraction's playlist - there's so much great stuff. But where's the influence of the Beatles. If it's there, it's once or twice removed at most.

Jason said...

Marc,

You should read "Revolution in the Head" by Ian MacDonald. MacDonald has the same problem as you do with fans who deify the entire canon(and has been known to make fun of Beatles books that simply pore over the total output of the Lads for meaning in every last use of the word "the"), but also contextualizes things like Sgt. Pepper and "I Am the Walrus" (both what influenced those works and what they influenced) so as to illustrate their significance. It's a great book.

Marc Caputo said...

Jason:

Thanks for the tip. You should pick up "Kill Your Idols", in which a collection of critics (mostly younger) take on the sacred cows of rock. It's edited by Jim DeRogatis, an older critic, who kicks the book off by savaging "Sgt. Pepper". It's followed by someone taking "Pet Sounds" apart - but that's one of DeRogatis' faves!

neilshyminsky said...

marc: I second the recommendation of the MacDonald book.

I'm also still seeing this as more of a fandom issue - I know aggravating Radiohead, Springsteen, Nine Inch Nails, and Pavement fans how are guilty of the same excessive mooning. (And this despite the fact that I still like all of those bands.) Perhaps Beatles fans are just more plentiful. (Which is not to say that their detractors aren't guilty of similar excess in expressing their hate of the band. Sometimes I get the feeling that they're just trying to restore balance to the universe, but other times...)

Lastly - of the touring band (re: serious musician) friends that I have, widespread love of the Beatles seems to have a lot more to do with their melodies, song structure, and production tricks than with lyrics. (Similarly, widespread love for Brian Wilson seems to have a lot to do with vocal harmonies and tortured biography.) Citing them as an influence, though, is probably also strategic: leeching off their aura in much the same way that it was once - briefly, a couple years back - cool to say that you were inspired by Gang of Four, even if you sounded nothing like them.