Bil Sabab Power Hour: Sparks - When I Kiss You I can hear Charlie Parker Playing

"When I kiss you (I can hear Charlie Parker Playing)" is a song by British extraordinaries brothers Mael of Sparks. It was released in 1994 on their comeback album "Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins". The song itself is demented, twisted inside out backwards spin on then burgeoning genre of eurodance pop trash that was at the peak of its popularity by mid 90's.

The thing with eurodance genre is that it is so limited in its aesthetics you can't really do much with it. It is based upon a barebone templates. You have this imposing rhythm backbone upon which "verse - chorus - verse - chorus - break - chorus" structure is tacked on and it can go until the end of time and two more minutes just in case. The song closely follows its formula and in the same time it manages to subvert every single element of it and make something of its own that resembles the other thing while being fundamentally different.

The arrangement is the fascinating element of the song. It is obnoxious and gaudy. The tempo pumped up to eleven and gallops at the ridiculously breakneck speed. It brings displaced cognitive dissonance inducing cartoonish feel to the song. It blasts through.

The instrumentation contributes greatly to this uncanny notion. While being completely synthetic, the arrangement is based around typical traditional pop orchestrations - it is strings of all walks and tembres mashed together in a melted plastic something-something peppered with splashy orchestral hits. Underneath it goes by the numbers bumbling eurodance rhythm track. At times it feels as if it wandered into a song from some other placed and stuck around because he enjoyed the vibes.

The lyrics are stylized as machine gun ratatat stream of consciousness circling around desire and longing and also pitiful merciless waste of passion. The images move in jump cuts - from one thing to another.

The sequence of images slowly but surely builds a narrative out of these blocks. It paints a vivid story with very masterful fleshing out of the scene, characters and their dynamics. There is yearning, deception and treachery, despair and restlessness and abrupt shutdown of feeling.

It is really impressive how it manages to tie train of thought and the story into one knot so seamlessly. You don't even notice how much information is spelled out throughout.

"When I kiss you (I can hear Charlie Parker Playing)" is a master-class in turning things inside out make doing something special with extremely limited form eternally banished in the template purgatory.