All right, all right, it’s a Queen song, not a Bowie song, but it’s on a Bowie compilation so back off, okay?
Besides, I don’t own any Queen cds.
Where was I? Oh yes, guilty pleasures.
“Guilty pleasure”: really, a misnomer. I don’t feel at all guilty for love love LOVING “Under Pressure”. I can hear it in the cleaning aisle of Home Depot and I’m going to bop my head and maybe, just maybe, sing it softly to the mops and soaps and buckets.
And if I’m at home? Well, you know what happens: Kick off the slippers, pump up the volume, then silently sing the shit out of the song, complete with body swirls and stretching out my arms as I mouth
‘Cause love’s such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the Night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
I take the Bowie part in this, grooving while Freddie does his Freddie thing. We end with the finger snaps, of course.
Will I ever do this in front of you? Of course not.
I don’t know what it is about this cheesy song—and yes, I do think it is cheesy—but I am helpless before its bass line and multiple crescendos and overwrought lyrics. I could perhaps say that it is the ontological pathos of This is our last dance/This is ourselves that shivers me timbers—but you’d know that was ex post facto bullshit, right? That I bopped and flung my arms out long before I even knew what ontology was, right?
Still, my passion seems. . . unseemly. A cheesy pop song, fer cryin’ out loud! And Queen, fer cryin’ out loud! Couldn’t I have gone with, I dunno, Bob Dylan? (No.) Leonard Cohen? (He’s not that kind of guy.)
Well, passion is always unseemly to those who don’t share it, and reckless for the helplessness it engenders in those caught up in it. How can you not give yourself over?
So: Instead of guilty pleasure, I dub this “helpless pleasure”.
Um ba ba be.
AbsurdBeats 