THE CURSE OF "TAKE ON ME"

 Original posted in 2009.

The musical equivalent of a Dixie Cup full of air.

I've bitched before about my almost pathological hatred of Eighties pop hits and made mention of a-ha's number one hit "Take On Me" as being quite high on my list of songs that I think should be banned by the Geneva Convention, but this weekend I was once more reminded of just how much that fucking song sends me into a state of berserker fury (which I suppose is only appropriate since the song is a product of Norway).

During a trip to the supermarket around the corner — a place that irritates me for a number of reasons but mostly because the staff refuses to listen to anything other than eighties music or shit like B-Rock & D Biz's "My Babydaddy" (a song that set black people back by at least seventy years) — the dreaded "Take On Me" issued forth from the store's speakers and I felt my eardrums tighten in an attempt to cause spontaneous hearing loss. I was in and out of the store fairly quickly but the damage had been done: the song was stuck in my head and it would not go away, no matter how I tried to exorcise it with healthy (?) doses of GG Allin's "Ass-Fuckin' Butt-Suckin' Cunt-Lickin' Masturbation" (believe it or not, a real song), Cannibal Corpse's cover of Sabbath's "Zero the Hero" or even Hurricane Smith's "Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?"

When "Take On Me" came out it scored huge thanks to its admittedly creative hit video as seen eleventy-million times on MTV and elsewhere, and if not for the video I'm willing to bet the song would have been largely ignored at the time and totally forgotten now. Have you ever paid attention to the song when separated from its visual component? Here are the lyrics:

Talking away
I don't know what I'm to say
I'll say it anyway
Today isn’t my day to find you
Shying away
I've been coming for your love O.K.

(chorus)
Take on me (take on me)
Take me on (take on me)
I'll be gone
In a day or two.

So needless to say I'm odds and ends
But I’ll be, stumbling away
Slowly learning that life is O.K.
Say after me,
“It's no better to be safe than sorry.”

Take on me (take on me)
Take me on (take on me)
I'll be gone
In a day or two.

Oh the things that you say yeah
Is it a life or just to play
My worries away
You're all the things I've got to remember
Be shying away
Oh I'll be coming for you anyway.

Take on me (take on me)
Take me on (take on me)
I'll be gone
In a day …

Take on me (take on me)
Take me on (take on me)
I'll be gone (take on me)
In a day …

Take on me (take on me)
Take on me (take me on)
Take on me (take on me)
Take on me …

I know that pop music is not necessarily high art, but come on. This is not a song. This is bullshit.

If you were born any time before 1989 you've probably seen the video and if born later you've probably encountered it on one of the installments of shows like "I Love the '80's For No Apparent Reason," but for those not familiar with it here's the skinny: Some blonde chick is sitting in a coffee shop reading a sparsely-illustrated comic book apparently about auto racing. Suddenly a rotoscoped hand pops out of the comic and beckons her into the 2-D landscape. Once there, she meets lead singer Morten Harket, a leather-jacketed pretty boy with one of those puffed-out hairdos (or don'ts) common to the era, who when I first saw him I thought was a skinny, butch lesbian.

As the inane lyrics marshmallow their way through the song's running time, the video's narrative revolves around this vile human stick insect (who bears a shocking resemblance to the young Cliff Richard) trying to woo the girl while the two attempt to evade a couple of racing-helmeted bad guys who understandably want to cave in the singer's head with a lug wrench. After much unsuspenseful mishegoss the girl escapes back to reality after the cartoon hero confronts their assailants, and when she gets home she opens the comic to find him lying unconscious, unfortunately neither dead nor being eaten by starving wolverines as one would have hoped. The guy picks himself up off the floor and throws himself against the comic's panel borders. Miraculously, he appears as a drawing in her hallway and bashes himself against the walls, ALTERED STATES-style, until the transitions between rotoscope and live-action stabilize with him as the girl's newfound squeeze.

"Talking away/I don't know what I'm to say/I'll say it anyway/Today isn’t my day to find you Shying away...What the fuck am I talking about?!!?"

Admittedly the video was a step away from the mostly uninspired fare generated for MTV and on the strength of that video the single sold a gazillion copies, ensuring it a torturous duration on the airwaves, both radio and TV. And while there were plenty of eighties hits that got played to death and made me want to go on a sadistic killing spree, none set me off like "Take On Me" thanks to it being quite literally the pop music equivalent to elevator music. You've read the lyrics, so imagine if the song had these words instead:

Blah gawgaray
I zubbazagga-zig-zig floofa poppity doo-dah
On the good ship Grilled Cheese Sandwich
I want to eat Cheez Waffies
In a day or twoooooooooo...

I fail to see a qualitative difference and while I fucking hate "We Built This City," "We're Not Gonna take It" and "Come On Eileen" with a fervency usually reserved for child molesters or organ thieves, none of those contain the sheer, unadulterated sugar water slightness of a-ha's biggest international hit. And somehow these fucksticks were allowed to record what may be the very worst of the James Bond movie themesongs, "The Living Daylights," and considering that Rita Coolidge's "All Time High" (from OCTOPUSSY) and "The World Is Not Enough" by Garbage exist, that's really saying something. (There are those who make a strong case for Duran Duran's "A View To A Kill," but I let that one slide because the music's pretty good.)

Then the late-1980's happened and it looked like "Take On Me" was finally being put out to the pop culture pasture, never to be heard from again...that is until it began to pop up all over the goddamned place as one of the songs absolutely guaranteed to be included on the many "Weren't the '80's Fucking Awesome?" CD compilations that were churned out without mercy. As I've often noted, pop music tends to get recycled and the music of the 1980's has been resurrected with a strength previously unimagined, or at least that's been my experience of it. "Take On Me" has proven to be a favorite of those two decades my junior and I have no clear idea as to why, other than that it can be seen as one of the progenitors of much of the past fifteen years' wimped-out musical confections, there to be absorbed briefly before the next pack of dildoes/heroin addicts shows up to lip-synch their hits on the People's Choice Awards.

I suppose the realization that you hate pop music after a certain period in your life is the moment when the generation gap really gets started and you run the risk of being labeled an old fart or a curmudgeon, but if that be my fate, then I accept it with pride. Just so long as I can preach for the complete and total eradication of the blight that is a-ha's most well-known product, and I do mean "product."