Momentary Greatness: The Pipettes

I like music. It's probably the most bland and impotent thing you could tell someone, but it's also one of the most true. It's akin to telling someone you like breathing, or candy. It's a trait that will be shared by most reasonable people (also, if they dont happen to like one of those things, it's an instant blaring siren telling you to evade). I would like to be as honest with the good people of the internet as possible. So, to clarify: I like music.

I also like minutiae. Details are very important in art for me. This is also not something terribly localized to myself, but it is also an important part of me. I love to stop movies at specific moments and rewatch them, just to catch the way certain lines are said or how a facial expression foreshadows an event. This is, by no means, to brag; watching a movie with me is generally not recommended, and I often lose some of the greater message forest through the trees of camera angles. However, i yam what I yam, and music is no different for me.

So, in a reoccurring feature on music (which I've been told by my mother is totally hip and edgy to do on the internet), I'm going to brush by artists, albums, and even songs. I'm going to talk about moments - those little sparks of sound that completely and utterly transcend the song itself. In a way, it's a much more universal way to look at music - though a song may be unbearable, it may still have some tiny moment of excellence. Here, we latch on to those. Although the first entry is not particularly bad, it is exceedingly small.










Artist: The Pipettes
Album: We are the Pipettes
Song: Your kisses are wasted on me
Time: 1:53
Type: Vocal
Moment: "You still don't know it!"

The Greatness: This is, in a way, the quintessential moment to start with, if not one of the more radical. It is subtle, swift, and executed with such surgical precision that it is the musical equivalent to a floating Johns Hopkins doctor performing a kidney transplant on a deaf and dumb person who has that disorder where they cannot feel pain. It's hard to notice, but it's noticeable enough.

What makes The Pipettes so wonderful is the falsity at work behind it. We aren't supposed to know the people singing, the musicians, the writers, anything. We're just supposed to listen and have fun. Because of that anonymity, the amount of bravado and callousness displayed in "Your kisses are wasted on me" comes off as fun and spunky, rather than a character fault. There is no connection to the characters, so it's just a fun song.

But fuck that, let's analyze the hell out of this bitch.

This song, like most of the faire on We Are The Pipettes, is repetition heavy, from the toy piano hook and the shout-along chorus to the first word of every verse being "Boy" said with an equal mix weariness, disaffection and disdain. The most effective example is during the pre-chrous, when the song drops from being bouncy pop to somewhat choral and melodramatic (helped along by the formally jaunty organ going into full-on Catholic church mode). The call-and-response during these sections offers a sort of voice of reason to the song; while the main lyrics seem to point to how hurt the male in this situation would be, the further-back response seems to say something more about the true nature of the speaker. (It helps if you imagine the voices of The Pipettes to be the various voices inside the head of one woman - I call her Phobe).

The very very very very last response is where this idea gets driven home. The response throughout the song is "and you don't know it" or "no, you don't know it." What this does is puts us in the present with this sort of relationship, the moment when the bond is being snapped. The entirety of the song has this feeling where the boy is just pathetic for his inability to recognize an ending. The effect of the final callback is excessively jarring to this understanding - by saying "you still don't know it", we now can assume that this is something that has happened in the past. Helped along by the increased octave by the main vocalist during that final pre-chorus, there is just a tinge of desperation from the woman that rings through, as though she has been trying to make herself believe that this is what the young man has been thinking/doing, yet there's no hint of that. She is left punching air.

In other news, hobbits use pipettes to get stoned and for plumbing.