The Earth Can be Any Shape You Want It

This is a concept that has been with me in one form or another since my childhood, though I have only learnt the word 'lila' recently. When I think of the concept of lila, for some reason, I see pebbles under limpidly clear water. This reminds me somewhat of the cover of Thomas Dolby's The Flat Earth. When I googled images of The Flat Earth, I was surprised to find that, in one place, the search engine had thrown up the cover of Human's Lib instead. These two albums are now associated in my mind in many ways.

I suppose I would just like to make a few general observations, though I'm afraid I'm not sure if there's a conclusion waiting at the end.

One of my first thoughts on actually hearing Human's Lib again after a lapse of possibly twenty years, was that it was a little disappointing. It did not seem to have aged as well as Thomas Dolby's music. I remember reading somewhere that much of that early synth pop now sounds very tinny, like a couple of wasps buzzing about at the bottom of a metal bin. This certainly had that thin, trebly quality at first listen. Also, whereas Dolby seems adroit in bringing in influences from many different styles of music, and giving colour to his songs with an edge of eccentricity and sadness, these songs seem more monochrome. I don't mean downbeat monochrome. I mean that they seem to be fairly straight, uniform synth pop. The synth sounds here like an instrument without a history, an instrument in a vacuum without influences, and the songs are not coloured by the diversity of moods to be found in Dolby's work. However, I have been listening to the album, Human's Lib, almost constantly since I borrowed it. Why is this?

Well, one thing I noticed that Howard Jones' music shares with Thomas Dolby's, is a certain clean-cut idealism, hence the quotes at the top of this entry. These boys were not making rock'n'roll, and I know that many people scorned synth pop merely because it was not rock'n'roll. But there's an earnest and optimistic philosophising here that I do not find in pop music today. In many ways, the title of Howard Jones' album says it all – Human's Lib. In the case of Howard Jones, the music is not so much about emotional moods as it is a kind of manifesto for personal liberation. The music and lyrics are constructed simply to get across the simple, but compelling messages about social conditioning, spiritual evolution and so on. Just a look at the song titles might give you some idea: Conditioning, Hunt the Self, Equality, Natural. As I said, simple, straightforward messages, all very positive and optimistic. This is perfect pop music, perfectly disposable, without a hint of pretentiousness, and yet profound.

I have been particularly taken with the song Natural. The first verse is as follows:

Everything around is natural don’t fight it
Don’t disagree with this and that, no
Astrology, evolution, this-and-that-ity
This religion and that, no

And then there's the phrase that seems so simple that I am sure many people would be tempted to blast it as naive, but which to me is just impressively right, as if it were essentially my own thought:

And if they were not meant to be
Well don’t you think they wouldn’t be

If we look at Thomas Dolby, we see the same progressive spiritual concerns in a song such as The Flat Earth. In the chorus Dolby sings:

The Earth can be any shape you want it
Any shape at all
Dark and cold or bright and warm
Long or thin or small

Then he adds, with a hint of sadness:

But it's home and all I ever had
And maybe why for me the Earth is flat

The conclusion of the song sees him making explicit a connection that is often implicit in the music of both artists – the connection between spiritual evolution and the fate of the environment:

The Earth can be any shape you want it
Any in the world
But don't you point that raygun at me
I might just explode
There are stones buried in your soul
And only a fool would blame the death of rock and roll, yeah
And in time you'll come to understand
The flat old Earth is in your gentle hands

I am more than peripherally aware that the subject matter of this entry might be surprising to some of my readers. There is, in fact, a stigma attached to the synth pop of Howard Jones. I have never been entirely sure of the reason for the stigma. I have heard a great many people refer to him as if he were some sort of musical anti-christ, what Bill Hicks might call a "sucker of Satan's cock". I do not believe this to be the case. As Mr Jones says in New Song, "I don't want to be hip and cool/I don't want to play by the rules." How many people, I wonder, are really as open-minded as they think they are?

I remember when I was at school, a friend repeated the words of his sister's boyfriend, that Howard Jones was a "bourgeois bum-bandit". I wonder exactly what the meaning of this hostility is. If we break it down, bourgeois, of course, refers to the middle-class. So, Mr Jones is not playing the traditional working class music of rock'n'roll. He is not part of the working class struggle to… er… to remain eternally working class. I can't help wondering if there isn't some aspect of being offended at the fact that the struggle in Howard Jones' music is not political, but spiritual, that he doesn't say that we're divided and must fight, but says that we are basically all the same. In other words, the class struggle, as Marx suggested, seems to be an utterly materialistic struggle, and those who support it are offended by anything that is not materialistic. Now, bum-bandit – homosexual. Well, as a criticism, this is just self-defeating. It reminds me of the way you occasionally hear a homophobic black guy saying that homosexuality is a white man's disease. Here it is a 'bourgeois' disease, and signifies some perceived lack of manly authenticity.

I mentioned to my brother, when I borrowed the CD, that I didn't actually know anyone who likes Howard Jones, but rather the opposite, that I knew plenty of people who don't. His reply was something like this:

"They probably don't listen to the words. Or the music, actually. They probably just don't like the haircut or something."

To end this entry, I would like to reproduce, in full, the lyrics to Hide and Seek, the song which is so clearly inspired by the concept of lila:

There was a time when there was nothing at all
Nothing at all, just a distant hum
There was a being and he lived on his own
He had no one to talk to, and nothing to do
He drew up the plans, learnt to work with his hands
A million years passed by and his work was done
And his words were these…

There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at all
Just a distant hum