Living On Dreams

Why is it that we like death songs so much? Especially the slow, melodramatic kind? There are enough of them to form a full-on rock and roll subgenre. Think about it – from the car crash in The Everly Brothers “Ebony Eyes” to the bike crash in The Shangri-La’s “Leader Of The Pack” to the everything crash in Eminem’s “Stan”. It’s a thing.

My own pick of the bunch is Hot Chocolate’s “Emma”, which really oughtta be called “Emmaline” since that’s the name singer Errol Brown repeats often enough that it becomes the song’s hook.

Hot Chocolate was a British soul/disco band that had a string of hits in the ‘70’s. Most famous in America for the number 2 hit “You Sexy Thing” (you know it - “I believe in MIRACLES!”), with any justice there really ought to be a resurgence of interest in their music due to the use of their song “Brother Louie” over the opening credits of Louis C.K.’s TV show. (Which version, oddly, also becomes a death song due to the alteration of the line “Louie, Louie you’re gonna cry” to the more Louie C.K.-like “Louie, Louie you’re gonna die.” But I digress)

I was eight years old the first time I heard “Emma”.  My older sister played this morbid little tune for me, probably in an effort to creep me the hell out. It kind of worked, but I was also kind of fascinated. I demanded to hear it again, and I’ve never really tired of hearing it since.

“Emma” utilizes a formula that worked well for Hot Chocolate: a spare, pulsing bass, Errol Brown’s schizophrenically smoky and strangled vocal delivery, and their sonic signature – a guitar hook played through (according to Wikipedia, anyway) a Marshall Time Modulator, whatever that is, which ends up sounding kind of like a riff that’s been programmed into a computer and played back underwater.  

The sound pulls the listener in, that bass throbbing like the heartbeat of a man alone in a shabby motel room with nothing but his tortured thoughts, that guitar riff snaking through the song like the ghost of a long gone lover, but the real drama in “Emma” is in the unfolding story in the song’s lyrics. In a nutshell, the singer meets Emmaline at five, she wants to be a movie star even then (as five year olds often do) and everyone thinks she can do it ‘cos she has a face like an angel. Then, when they turn seventeen the singer and Emmaline get married. (Yeah, seventeen certainly does sound young, but keep in mind that twenty-one doesn’t really rhyme with “Emmaline”). He works hard and promises that one day she’ll be a star. But Emmaline can’t stand the grind of searching for that elusive starring role and one day the singer comes home to find Emmaline lying on the bed, still, cold, gone.

“Emmaline!”

The whole song pivots around this ending – Brown, who has been coolly building up to it with all the skill of a great dramatic actor, pushes himself past the point of hysteria, screaming the title name repeatedly, drawing it out, gravelly and rough, the sense of emotional catharsis for those few seconds comparable to John Lennon’s “Mother”. (Extra resonance in this comparison - Brown has said that he wrote the song as a way of memorializing his own deceased mother.)  

The delivery method of that catharsis might be called into question. It’s cheesy stuff, in a way – over the top, melodrama for its own sake. The reading of Emma’s suicide note, for instance, is a maybe a touch too far, with background voices suddenly to the fore, extra echo added for eerie effect.

But you know, “Leader Of The Pack” is cheesy stuff too, and it’s still a totally classic record. Though it might be argued that The Shangri-Las classic has one up on “Emma” in that it’s postmodernism in action, a song aware of its own schlocky over-the-topness.

Still, I think “Emma” is a classic too, give or take any degree of self-consciousness. And that suicide note, while melodramatic, also packs a punch that any listener should have no trouble relating to. Emma tries and fails, and though she loves the singer, she ends up confessing to him, in a turn of phrase that never fails to wrench my gut with its weird mixture of pith and poetry, that she “just can’t keep living on dreams no more”.

Well, nobody can. That’s no reason, of course, not to keep on living, but who hasn’t at some point felt worn out, drained, dragged down by the failure of their own expectations?

We go on. Maybe that’s why we like songs like this so much, ‘cos it gives us a chance to feel more alive, like we’ve survived while others have been swept away by their own desires. Maybe we just wanna feel superior.

I hope not. Hopefully there’s some sense of pathos in our attraction to these songs and their tragic characters.

I think there is when it comes to this one, and that’s why it’s my favorite of the death song subgenre. Unless Jody Reynolds’ “Endless Sleep” counts. Which I don’t think it does, ‘cos the girl in that song survives. Could be near-death songs are a subgenre worth investigating, too. Next time, maybe.