I’m still here

Somewhere along the line yesterday a few screws wriggled themselves loose, and I decided it was probably best to leave the blog for a day. I think I can say with full confidence that no one was particularly distressed at my absence, but in case you were, rest assured that if you had been exposed to any of my thoughts yesterday, the experience would’ve driven you to eye-clawing insanity in sympathy.

I’m exaggerating – of course! – but it got pretty bleak at times. There was a moment when, after entering the Co-op with honourable intentions and leaving with two bags full of refreshments for my pity party, I dropped my iPod in the snow and scrabbled – actually scrabbled, like a grizzled old man in an HBO drama would scrabble for his crackpipe – to pick it up. I’m not a scrabbler. If I dropped my first-born son in the snow, I would muster up a bit of dignity and coolly gather him in my arms without breaking a sweat. But at that moment outside Co-op, I needed the song. I needed the release of Jack’s uniquely dazzling blend of dance and funk and heaven. I knew that only with Starz in Their Eyes buzzing loudly in my ears, removing all sounds and threats of the outside world, could I convince myself that everything was going to be all right.

So I realised I’d gone a bit mental and decided to tone down the whole thing. Listening to the song by myself, with headphones, for eight-hour stretches was not doing me any favours, so I’ve started playing it in groups of people. (Maintaining my sanity probably makes up for the number of friends this is losing me.) It got a few interesting responses. Some of them I put firmly on the ‘tenuous’ pile, like one friend’s idea that the track is speaking out against sexual abuse (he thought he heard ‘Gary Glitter’ in the spoken-word section, which led him to retrospectively reinterpret ‘stifling your screams,’ ‘private bedroom dance routines’ and ‘rigour-mortis Ken and Barbie dolls’. I think his friendship’s going on the ‘tenuous’ pile.)

But there were other points raised that have led me to suspect that Starz in Their Eyes is a bit cleverer than I’d thought. A friend pointed out how hesitant Just Jack was about his lyrics – in the first verse, for example, after singing that “And they’ll just put you in the spotlight/And hope that you’ll do alright,” he rethinks, adding “Or maybe not.” In the next verse, we get “Your mum and dad, they can’t believe/What you appear to have achieved.” Why “appear” to have achieved? Even the incessantly repeated title is too passive-aggressively wordy to be properly incisive – instead of “Why do you want to go and put stars in their eyes?” he could just say “Why are you putting stars in their eyes,” or even “Stop putting stars in their eyes”.

This whole time, though, I’ve assumed the song only consists of Just Jack taking a crack at pathetic Z-listers. I’ve been glibly pointing out the irony to one and all of a man who has jumped ship from trip hop to house music to electro-pop to – judging from his latest album Sexy R’n’B – sexy R&B, of a man who’s had two or three moderately successful singles since his entry into the music business in 1990, of a man who pretty much embodies the term ‘Z-list’ – the irony of this man poking fun at aspiring musicians desperate for a piece of the celebrity pie.

But, checking Wikipedia (shut up, this isn’t my dissertation, Wikipedia is fair game), I’m seeing that Starz in Their Eyes was the first track Jack has made that charted above 164^th. There’s no way he could’ve convinced himself that he was enough of an established artist to offer advice to newcomers. I think, just maybe – and forgive me if this is obvious to everyone else – he’s talking about himself. This is a self-aware pop song, and we did not appreciate it. We didn’t cherish Starz in Their Eyes for the multi-layered indictment of popular culture that it so clearly is, and look at him now: last August he announced the completion of a home-made four-track EP that, half a year later, he still hasn’t been able to release. And he has less than 4,000 Twitter followers. That’s a thousand less than an account dedicated solely to posting polaroid pictures of rabbits (@TheDailyBunny, worth a follow). Come on, Jack.