And so the year draws to a close...or rather it doesn't, as this past year has been the greatest of my life and I do not want it to stop...all the clocks around the world will soon enough change over, time zone after time zone, to 2007, but to me it will just be more of the same until Marcello gets back and we can write each other every day again...I do not want to leave this year behind me, but carry it with me - every ecstatic and beautiful and sacred moment...

...though of course I do savor the rightness of everything, the sense (he has it too) of some horrible wrong being righted at long last...(I wish I knew a happier version of something like "Time Has Come Today" - yes, my soul has been psychedelicized...)

I wish all regular and irregular readers of Stereogirl a very happy new year, with more of what you want and need and love and less of what you don't. I will be going out for a small dinner but I doubt if I will be staying for very long, particularly if I am tired, which is happening more & more lately. But I like being out when there's anticipation in the air; especially if the weather's cooperative...

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To introduce this album is to wade into a thicket of problems. One of them is to explain where New Pop comes from and its roots and basic attitudes. To say it is purely post-punk art school damage is not quite enough. In this case to say that it's purely British is also false. Scritti Politti has always been Green Gartside plus others, but the others in this case were American - David Gamson and Fred Maher. They all met in New York City and worked there at first but also in London - Cupid & Psyche '85 is nothing if not a truly transatlantic album, which lends it a certain something that is hard to define, but is obviously there.

The roots of New Pop are spread across the musical spectrum, from Kraftwerk to T. Rex, Henry Cow to Chic, reggae to bubblegum to Motown. In short it happily embraced everything that the mainstream rock community did not respect or did not quite know what to do with; and by community I mean critics and writers who had (by 1980) solidly decided what was canonical rock and what was not. (A good example of said hegemony is the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.) New Pop turned its back on this list in general (Green's fondness for The Beatles' ambiguity is in keeping with this, I feel, as that is not exactly the canonical reason for their being Important). As you might expect, the canonical writers, who value the 60s above all else, were and still are hostile to New Pop, which is proof that it worked and continues to work as something other, to be grudgingly admitted amidst more 'serious' albums, whether they be old or new...the irony and subversion and strangeness can still work on new listeners, who have not been told a hundred times that what they are listening to is 'classic' or (God help me) 'seminal'. New Pop smartly turned its back to all this, dug into its own crates of difference and then loosely set upon changing things up a bit, giving the public & critics a chance to see how things could be - it is not their fault that things did not change.

The technique: to write catchy songs and smuggle the irony and subversion in the lyrics. Nowhere was this done with more audible shine and polish than this album, with its machine grooves and endless discourse on love, from hope to happiness to hypnosis.