How soon was then?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/03 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/03/5260996.aspx

The songs injured by TV shows just keep coming out of the shadows!

Like reader George pointed out to me via the Contact link, the song How Soon is Now? is yet another example after this one.

And the song is one I mentioned before, here. 

Originally a song by The Smiths, it has probably been more widely heard due to it's cover by the Psychedelic Furs spinoff band Love Spit Love, as the theme song of both the movie The Craft and later as the TV show Charmed....

Love Spit Love almost collapsed in the fall of the Terry Ellis label Imago records (which impacted lots of careers from Paula Cole to Aimee Mann).

Now the song definitely did better in the movie than the TV show, where it was shrunk to remove the section in red (the section in purple was removed by both Love Spit Love and by the TV show):

I am the son
and the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular

You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am Human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

I am the son
and the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and the heir
Of nothing in particular

You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am Human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

There's a club, if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home
And you cry
And you want to die

When you say it's gonna happen now,
Well, when exactly do you mean?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone

I am Human And I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

Now the original source of the song is from a line in Middlemarch (by George Eliot):

To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular.

and of course in the TV show version all of that is gone and the already poorly understood meaning is warped beyond recognition  while perhaps still keeping a kernel of the original theme. Kind of sad since the song never got its due in its original form (everything was working against it from the various release mechanisms to the difficulty of playing it live to the fact that people generally did not fully get it.

Anybody remember the Lexus commercial it was in? :-)

The song was still around, and can be heard on TNT four times a day in an even more shortened form now that TNT has taken to shortening beginning credits to give them more ad time. I used to be upset by this but then remembered that the real song was already gone. And when you get right down to it, you can't wet a river....

I have The Smiths version playing right now, it has in fact been on repeat since I started writing this post. I do not mind the original Love Spit Love cover but it tends to remind me of the later assaults. The original purpose of the Morrissey-penned lyrics (about someone who can't seem to get past their own shyness) is perhaps not entirely gone now in this quite bastardized bit that is heard now:

I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does.

But something really seems to be missing. 

I do miss the original song and remember when it came out in 1984, which was a period that saw me starting to break out of my own shyness. I was convinced that I could do it, and I suppose I have after a fashion (they say that the geek extrovert is the one who stares at the other peoples' shoes!)....

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# bg on 3 Oct 2007 4:21 PM:

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