The Baker Act: You sit around gettin' older, and it's called love

After contributing heavily to this ILM thread about 1984, still the standard by which I judge any year-in-pop, I played the worn 12" of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," bought for $1 a couple of years ago (and for which I got a steady glare from the lol-indie cashier). On a hunch I followed it with a couple of other tracks manhandled by Arthur Baker that year: New Order's "Thieves Like Us" and the remix of Hall & Oates' last American Number One hit "Out of Touch." Surprisingly, I found the latter soulless and gimmicky -- a sterling pop act besotted with technology because their songwriting no longer demanded their attention. Where the album version of "Out of Touch" is diverting enough, the drum clatter and Mariana Trench cavernousness of Baker's remix exposed Daryl Hall for the dickhead he is (dickheads are tolerable insofar as they only stick around for a few minutes).

Besides a penchant for donating tracks to ailing R&B divas, Springsteen has little in common with Hall, but, still, I was still surprised when he and Bernard Sumner lined up emotionally -- a proposition that would rightly amuse Springsteen and cause Sumner to hoot in derision. It's got something to do with the way in which Baker foregrounds Springsteen's voice and guitar. As I wrote on the ILM thread:

It's more straightforward electric rhythm strumming than "Skunk" Baxter-esque prickly lead type of thing. There's a nice friction between the singer/songwriter trope of alone-ness and the frenetic rhythm; Bruce's ordinary-guy persona has never been more naked (he evokes Bernard Sumner, of all people: what's this human voice doing trapped in this machine?).

Treading carefully over the ever-shifting keyboard and drum programs of "Thieves Like Us," Sumner can hardly keep from falling, which is exactly the point -- it's called love, and "it cuts your life with a broken knife," singing these verses as if Bryan Adams hadn't chanted a variant a couple of years earlier, as if discovering them for the first time. Natality remains Sumner's great subject: as the new dawn faded for Joy Division the frighteningly ordinary guitarist (notice how spooked he looks in those early concert stills) became the frontman, as unable to hide behind affect as Springsteen. He got away with singing doggerel because he understood how we cling to doggerel in moments of crisis, or -- in the case of "Thieves Like Us" -- ecstasy. Sumner makes us feel his struggle with words; they often can't match the swirl of the music. If "Temptation" chronicled realization, "Thieves Like Us" is summation. Although Springsteen's music relies on other modes and tropes to create similar kinds of entrapment and release, he understands how verisimilitude -- the folksy "Misters" he can't resist interjecting on other songs, his slurs and growls, reliance on monosyllables -- grounds his narratives. And Sumner was listening. New Order's "Love Vigilantes," released the following year, strikes me as Sumner's attempt at a Springsteen ballad, complete with plainspeak, strummy guitar, and simple twist of fate sprung from the Boss' sometimes creaky determinism.

Did Baker know what he was doing? "Dance On Your Knees," the track preceding "Out of Touch" on Hall and Oates' Big Bam Boom, is a summation of a sort: of every trick Baker had mastered in 1984 (there's even a few bars that sound like New Order's "Confusion," surely no accident). Hall was always too much of a slickster to qualify as any kind of "authentic" soul man -- his vocal prowess bespoke facility, not ease, much less comfort -- and that's why the Baker mix robs him of his mystique. In 1984 Hall was too sated to evoke the isolation of Springsteen and Sumner; he was a superstar who didn't know that his latest multiplatinum certification would be his last. Rest assured: the other two would soon know what he felt.