Beyonce | The Grain

TUNES OF THE DECADE: #1 ‘CRAZY IN LOVE’ BY BEYONCE

beyonce

Dear Grant,

Such a funny thing for me to try to explain …

I can remember coming back from our half-year in Russia and hearing ‘Crazy in Love’ on Radio 1 for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. This tune felt like the one we’d all been waiting for, a tune that sounded totally of the moment, yet suggestive of the future: danceable, yearning, innovative. It seemed like a song that had stepped straight out of pop mythology, a vindication of the belief that magic can be unearthed in the unlikeliest of musical places. I listened to it over and over again throughout the summer, and for the next couple of years. At terrible, terrible club nights during my university years, just one play of this tune would be enough to salvage the entire evening. In poetic terms, I thought (and still think) that if ‘Crazy in Love’ were a physical substance, it would be liquid gold. It was the last CD single I ever bought.

I know our Tunes of the Decade list isn’t in any particular order, so ‘Crazy in Love’ isn’t technically our number one tune of the decade. I know you think Amerie’s ‘One Thing’ is the better tune, and you might have a point.

But for me, this has got to be the last tune on the countdown, the final word on our cack-handed, seven-month-long attempt at micro-macrocosmic cultural summary.

A conclusion then, of sorts.

The Tunes of the Decade countdown, and the website as a whole, has been terrifically important for me, and I really hope it has been for you too. This year hasn’t been a walk in the park for either of us, but when all is said and done (and at the risk of sounding like a sentimental gobshite), Read the rest of this entry »

TUNES OF THE DECADE: #33 ‘INDEPENDENT WOMEN (PART 1)’ BY DESTINY’S CHILD

Destiny's Child - Independent Women (part 1)

“Question: tell me what you think about me.”

“that’s not a question.”

“it doesn’t matter – I’m independent!”

“right you are Beyonce, right you are.”

Looking back on this song after 10 years is odd. I admit I hadn’t heard it in a long time and it had all but slipped from my consciousness, but re-listening to it now, it is a different song to the one I remember. Without wishing to sound parochial (which, as a 15 year old boy living in rural County Durham at the time this song was released, I certainly was) when i first heard this song, there was a distinct element of the exotic and unusual about it. Coming as it did at the turn of the decade, ‘Independent Women’ and the ‘Survivor’ album from which it was taken came probably just on the right side of the apex of contemporary RnB and this country’s obsession with it. Mariah Carey, SWV, TLC et al had paved a way into the main artery of British culture and Destiny’s child rode the wave all the way through the first half of the decade.

This song then really nailed the colours to the mast regarding the face of popular music in the newly christened ‘noughties’. However, as RnB swept like tidal wave over British music, it is harder now to pick out what exactly makes ‘Independent Women’ such a good song. The elements that once made it stand out (to me at least) are now accepted – almost expected./ they have become de rigueur and have made this song sound a bit… well commonplace.

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