As an interlude from Hozierposting, I bring you a song I listen to when I feel really scattered:
Sliver was not a good movie. I read the book, and it wasn't too great either, pardon me for saying so. However, you may remember the UB40 cover of "Can't Help Falling in Love," which was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1993. I was there, Gandalf, and it was inescapable. It was also the lead track on the Sliver soundtrack, despite really not fitting the movie's tone in any way that I recall. The album itself only got as high as #23; most people slept on the soundtrack as a whole, which also featured Enigma, Verve, Massive Attack, Shaggy—and this Neneh Cherry song.
It's also on her Homebrew album, which I slept on. I'm going to catch up this week on her first two albums, that one and, before that, Raw Like Sushi, because I've always liked "Buffalo Stance." Like, yeah, it came out in 1988 and I was maybe nine years old, but let's pretend I had good taste even then and wasn't just drawn like a moth to dance-beat flames. How old was Neneh Cherry at the time, 24 years old? "Buffalo Stance" is a debut with incredible confidence, and I think I associate that assertiveness, that power, with her style as a whole.
But there's a bridge in "Buffalo Stance" where the song slows down and hints at something more existential:
Wind on my face, sound in my ears
Water from my eyes, and you on my mind
As I sink, diving down deep
Deeper into your soul
"Move With Me," I feel, takes the spirit of that bridge and slows it down to something meditative—the words are firm in their sense of self, but the melody verges on mournful:
Into a world I plunge through my headphones
Escape into the streetlight
I begin to believe in destiny
When my surroundings in rhythm with me
I'm not very good at describing the technical aspects of music—I write about it from a place of enthusiasm, not expertise, so I'm guessing at what I'm hearing, really. But: her vocals here alternate between riding the wave of the synth melody, and a rap style that is sometimes soft-edged, sometimes harder, declarative, bringing out the crisp drumbeats. The heart of the song is the chorus:
So move with me, I'm strong enough
To be weak in your arms
Move with me, I'm strong enough
To be real in your arms
I think what I find so grounding about "Move with Me" is the confidence of Neneh Cherry's voice, soft and hard by turns, and the solidity of that beat against the wistful melody—like the chorus, vulnerability entwined with strength. But the words themselves are also Really Something, and just contemplating the whole thing—well, it'll make you think about why you're here and where that is, in a way that makes you (or at least me) feel more certain of both. And it's the end of the song that really does that for me. When I looked up the lyrics to be sure I was quoting them correctly, I found that most online versions don't have the final verse, which ends with:
I'm washing through the whole, saw through the one I fell
I plunge into myself, now I'm the story that I tell
For another grain of sand that we'll nurture in our shell
In our allotted place between heaven and hell.
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Out actors of African descent
Shirley Souagnon in Zérostèrone
Fisayo Akinade in Heartstopper
Dua Saleh in Sex Education
Sam Abbas in Time to Come
Michaela Coel in Black Earth Rising
Olive Gray in Halo
Neneh Cherry in Stockholm, My Love
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