What Spandau Ballet
are doing in “Through the Barricades” -- what they are doing
in all of their best work -- is constructing an emulator of emotions.
Their songs look and sound like expressions of feeling and descriptions
of events but are in fact neither. They are whirlpools of deferred
meaning. They do this sort of stuff too often for us not to take it
seriously: every song on Gold - the Best of Spandau Ballet
is the potential site of a terrible ontological crisis. But unlike
the meaning-is-for-suckers posturing of Natacha Merritt, Spandau Ballet
know their game, and circle around the listener like jackals around
a wounded animal, now offering some possibly profound meaning (“Now
I know what they’re saying - it’s a terrible beauty we’ve
made”), now taking it away and obliterating its memory (“So
we make our love on wasteland, and through the barricades”).
Dressing up pornography as art? This is an old trick. Spandau Ballet
spent the 80s dressing up the void to make it appear three-dimensional.
Try doing that with a digital camera.
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