Open wide and say "aaaah"...O.k., you're suffering from a severe case of lack of rock'n'roll, here's a Placebo for you...

 

There’s a couple of ways you can be reminded of a record that you really liked but haven’t played in a good long while. Like, say, pick up a record from the same band at the library and think “Hey, you really should pull out that other record from them that was great the other day”. There’s also a number of ways you can find out, that it’s really been a long fuckin’ time. Like listening to the disc, seeing that it skips, check the damn thing and find some fuckin’ soot on it. Soot. From a house fire. More than a decade ago. Jesus. Besides the fact that I will be swiping of soot from my stuff seemingly for the rest of my life (“Oh, you I haven’t played in 25 years, apparently”), it also tells me that some records I don’t really play nearly often enough.

In the case of this record, Placebo’s Black Market Music, there’s a good reason for that. As most of you will agree, every record has a time in your life, and as your life changes, so do not only your musical tastes, but also the place a record can occupy in it. Who hasn’t listened back to some records, that seemed to be the hippest, or the most urgent, or ones that really talked to you when you were, say, a teenager, or young adult, and when you play them back all these years later, you go “eh...” or “meh...” or “what was all the fuss about again…?!”. I don’t do this for this album, because it is a great album, but I also see why I didn’t feel the urgency to listen to it in over a decade. 

Placebo’s mix of crunchy guitars and post-adolescent angst is young people’s music. I loved that album when it came out, coming up on 25 years ago (Damn!). But I was a young man back then, and so the mix of uncertainty, confusion, anger and despair in Placebo’s music talked to me as it should to someone in their eraly 20s who was, respectively uncertain, confused, angry and very, very desperate. It’s the sound and sentiment of this music that talked to me then, rather than, say the lyrics and song topics. Because, well, most songs circle around using too much drugs and sleeping around with too many dudes in the London underground nightclub scene. Topics I know exactly fuck all about. But there’s a timelessness and quality to these songs that make it almost completely unimportant, what kind of gay debauchery Brian Molko is singing about.

I knew very little about Placebo when I picked up that album. I had heard “Every You, Every Me” on the “Cruel Intentions” soundtrack a year before and really liked that song. And I had read a fabulous review that culminated with a line that went something like “Brian Molko here is our Holden Caulfield and our Edward Scissorhands and that’s all we need right now”, or something to that effect. And the reviewer was right! We did. I did.

And this album still works like gangbusters. I remembered most melodies right away, and some I couldn’t stop humming or singing to myself in the weeks following my rediscovery of thisfabulous record. And it brings back memories of what it was like to be young, and uncertain, and lost, and angry. To want to be loved. So. So. Badly. Take the ballad-double climax of “Narcoleptic” and “Peeping Tom”, where all of the protagonist’s and by proxy the listener’s despair pour out while the music pushes towards the sky - “I’m just a peeping tom/on my own for far too long” intones Molko, and which teenager/young adult hasn’t felt like that, being left out again while seemingly every one else around him/her has found a romantic partner, or at least someone to sleep with for a night.

Molko takes aim at other targets, a little more outside of his wheelhouse, commenting on appropriation of Black music in “Blue American” (“But now ebonics rule our song”) and then full on tackles racism in “Haemoglobin”. He casts himself as an Emmet Till for the 21th Century, singing “I was hanging from a tree/unaccustomed to such violence”, before realizing “Haemoglobin is the key/to a healthy heartbeat”.

But even is the subject matter is a little more specifically gay, he gives it a spin that lets the song out of its specific niche. Take, “Commercial for Levi”, for example, probably my favorite from the album. What a lovely, bouncy, memorable melody, that will also make you overlook the salacious subject matter. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the most misplaced sing-a-long since people sang along about “giving head” with that Top-Of-The-Pops chart topper Lou Reed or sang along loudly and proudly with Zappa’s “Bobby Brown Goes Down” because most of the song’s..uhm...details got lost in translation. So, sing along then, even lines like “You’re the one who’s always choking Trojan/you’re the one whose shower’s always golden/ spunk and bestiality, well, it’s an Assisi lie / it’s ahead of me / you should close your fly”. Molko himself said it well enough: “I love that song because musically it’s like a really sweet lullaby and lyrically it’s quite a filthy number. It puts a smile on your face”. It does. Well, a crooked one, maybe.

And when, to that very same bouncy beat, he pleads: “Don’t die, don’t die/please, don’t die”, you understand that this is a very disturbed young man sending a warning to himself. The multiple warnings about drug dependency and the price of debauchery, whether it’s mindless anonymous sex or a sniff or twelve of cocaine – weave like a thread throughout the album. Molko stated his liking for the album at the time, citing the balance between heavy rockers and more introspective, slower numbers. Nowadays, it’s his least favorite album. As for the listeners, every album is a time capsule for the artist, and I’m not sure Molko liked who he was and the places he was in in 1999 and 2000. The recording also seems to have been a bit of a drag, literally, as they took nine months to finish it, way longer than any other album before or since. So Molko’d rather move on, but we shouldn’t. I picked up a bunch of Placebo records afterwards, but it wasn’t the same. The magic wasn’t there. But for that one moment, in 2000, Placebo’s music was perfect: “It seemed / a place for us to dream”.

Placebo always liked to open their records by making some noise, usually programming a couple of pedal-to-the-metal numbers. Unfortunately, most often it was a lot of sound and fury signifying little, and that was also true in the case of Black Market Music. So the first two tracks got axed from this new, improved and resequenced version of the album. What's left is ten tracks, forty minutes, all killer, no filler rock' n' roll. Just what the doctor ordered, baby. So, open wide, and take your Placebo.

If you experience other side effects, like a strong sense of deja vu, that's because this piece originally appeared on False Memory Loss Foam Island a couple of years ago. It's also part one of a two-part project, so be back in a day or two for more Black Market Placebo.