Former Eurythmics frontwoman Annie Lennox has a new album, Songs of Mass Destruction.
People have this bizarre idea that Annie Lennox is a singer. Nuh-uh. Alicia Keys is a singer. Annie Lennox is a conceptual artist. Her voice is beautiful, but it's not the whole story. *What* she sings, and how, matters more. Every time.
Eurythmics, with their often-abstract videos ("Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This," "Here Comes the Rain Again") and their evocative, mysterious lyrics ("There's a lock of hair/An invisible smoke trail/This is your shadow..."), were heaven to me. You couldn't pin them down. What *were* they? What if anything did they want? They seemed to be about those moments that happen just before or after the more conventional ones; the thing you see out of the corner of your eye and don't quite understand, the emotion you don't have a name for, the things that crop up when you're waiting and alone. Sometimes they seemed like the hallucination of a sensory-deprived brain, or an alien's view of us--complete but unrecognizable.
People seem to have forgotten how ineffable they were, how strange, in a pop landscape which was otherwise so universal in its aims. From others, you got "Cherish." "Faith." "Freedom." "I Love Rock n' Roll." "Born in the USA." "Turn Me Loose." "Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong." "Love To Love You Baby." "Love Is Love." With them, you got "Love is a *Stranger.*"
That's what they were--strangers who haunted our party, a pair of performance artists who played pop stars. On their terms.
The Stranger is still going strong, and I'm glad.
