Alicia Keys - 'Doesn't Mean Anything'
I would hate to work in a CD shop right now. Every day, you'd be putting amazing new music out on the shelves, enjoying the fact that your passion and your paypacket come from the same place, and not even really minding that it's Christmas time and therefore the queues start to snake all across the shop before you've even had your morning tea break.
But over there in the corner, where the CD singles sit, mournfully, in between one massive wall of Wii and X-Box games, and another massive wall of DVDs, there's bound to be a snickering bunch of kids, sometimes all boys, sometimes a young couple, sometimes two girls with a haughty demeanour. They've spotted something, and it's making them point and giggle....
"Look! Look! 'Alicia Keys Doesn't Mean Anything'...HA! She DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING, yeah?"
It is at this point that you count your blessings that you don't live in America, cos otherwise the high-fiving might well send you over the edge...
(. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ would like to point out that mountaineering without the proper safety equipment - and especially in HEELS - is extremely dangerous.)
It's an especially ironical moment, because this is a song in which Alicia is definitely trying to mean something quite important. You might think she's just singing a silly old love song about feelings and stuff, but really she's sending an important message to anyone who thinks money will buy you happiness. It won't.
(Unless of course you mean the film Happiness, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Money will definitely buy you that. It's in the 'Cult DVD' section, to your right, just past the Wii Fit boards, and around the giggling teenagers.)
'Doesn't Mean Anything' is one of those circular, four-chord-trick sort of songs, where you start quietly and build, and the chorus is the verse only different, and the longer the song goes on, the more voices there are. This gives it an anthemic structure, in that it sounds like A Mighty Nation would eventually Rise Up and All Sing As One, if the music could just keep going for another hour or so.
I'm not sure if it's entirely convincing, mind. It seems weird that we're expected to gather together and unite on a song which basically says sorry for acting like 50 Cent. Some of us already knew that viewing the world through cash-tinted spectacles is not a nice way to behave.
Plus, there is that uncomfortable moment where you think about people who really do live "out on the street", sometimes through no fault of their own, and have neither love nor anything much to give up for love.
Maybe the snickering teens had it right after all. Too much meaning can be a dangerous thing.
Download: Out now
CD Released: November 30th
´óÏó´«Ã½ Music page
(Fraser McAlpine)
Comment number 1.
At 5th Dec 2009, SheffTim wrote:Complain about this comment (Comment number 1)
Comment number 2.
At 5th Dec 2009, SheffTim wrote:Oops, clicked prematurely above. Umm, the link isn't to the video; its to her site, click on that and your redirected to the CD's page on Amazon.
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Comment number 3.
At 24th Dec 2009, Harlom wrote:O i hate seeing all those immature kids and adults who make all those snickering comments. I think Alicia Keys has awesome music! I particularly love the song 'Doesnt mean anything'. It's just different to her other songs and thats what i like about it. I always get her stuff from www.kazaa.com and it's always as awesome as eva!!
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