11 Lorde: Virgin

Today, I’ll go to Canal Street, they’ll piss in my ears

Hammer

Oh, wow, OK, to have such an honest admission on your album’s opening track is quite a statement! It sounds wrong to call ‘Virgin’ sex positive, per se, but it’s definitely Lorde’s most ‘sex aware’ record (counter to its title, I guess), and to ensure that it opens like this definitely warns listeners to leave their kink shaming at the door.

I fear that some of my oversees readers might not get the reference here, so think of this post as a bitesize educational supplement as well as the usual incisive musical journalism. Canal Street is about a kilometre walk away from my house, so I feel a degree of closeness to it to the extent that explaining the history and significance of the reference would actually be something of a pleasure.

In the early 19th Century, Manchester became known as ‘Cottonopolis’, as the factories in the city would produce 30% of all the world’s cotton. Cotton that was… yeah… picked by slaves in the British colonies… But then Britain outlawed slavery! Yay us! So Manchester… just imported from American slaves until their pesky Civil War put an end to that… Anyway: Stone Roses! Happy Mondays! Mad fer it mad fer it mad fer it! In Manchester, when times were good and the blood soaked cotton was produced by the hands of the indentured Working Class, Manchester’s vast canal system would transport all of Capitalism’s illicit winnings across the city. Canal Street, as the name might possibly perhaps maybe suggest, was a bustling street alongside one of these canals. However, America’s abolition of slavery was terrible for business, and by the later 19th century areas like Canal Street became abandoned from lack of trade. The vacuum, as it often does, attracted a lot of attention from people who’d prefer to conduct their business away from prying eyes, which considering what was illegal at the time meant – to use the scientific term – the gays and the prossies. By the middle of the 20th century, the area was essentially a full blown red light district. Even after 1967’s legalisation of homosexuality as long as them poofters kept it to themselves, the police would always play very close attention to the goings on in Canal Street, often busting bars and arresting people under the ‘Licentious Dancing’ law, which prevented two men or two women dancing together. As the AIDS crisis of the 1980s erupted, Greater Manchester Chief Constable Sir (!)James Anderton (who was, I might add, a colossal cunt, but thankfully he’s dead) justified his overzealous policing of Canal Street by saying “Western civilised society is being hastened and facilitated, in my opinion, by our increasingly degenerate conduct as a human race. I see more and more evidence of increasing numbers of people swirling around in a human cesspit of their own makin“. So that was nice.

In defiance of this Biblically charged witch hunt (you should absolutely practice whatever religion that gives you the feels. If you confess to making decisions based on it you should be barred from public office) – and also alongside protests against Ken Clarke’s ruling that people with AIDS should be kept in hospital against their will, which was only ever used in Manchester – Canal Street hosted Manchester’s first Pride celebration in 1985, with the support of Labour Councilors including Ken Livingstone. Because this was back when Labour were on the side of good. Not cunts. Yeah, Manchester Pride would eventually morph into a disgusting consumerist hellhole that priced out the very communities that it was supposed to be celebrating, and now has gone fucking bankrupt, but it was a good idea at the time! The opening of Manto bar in 1990 was another landmark, as its glass fronts now signified how people had no need to feel ashamed for attending. Then, in 1999, the pioneering ‘Queer As Folk’ TV show made Canal Street look like the coolest fucking place in the world and…

Fucking hell, does everything have to be in fucking New York?? Can’t you get people to piss in your ear’s anywhere else?? Oh, is pissing in people’s ears one of those only in New York things that…

Whatever they’re doing – there are compelling arguments on both sides – am I the only person who still loves Lorde?? I mean adores Lorde, and still thinks they’re making some of the most interesting and intelligent pop music out there?

Who cares, this album is another absolute classic and it’s your God-given duty to appreciate her IUD.

2021 #11 (= That’s so cooooool!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳)2017 #2, 2013 #16

And that also means:

AOTY: 81

Aight, maybe it’s not just me… But the users only gave it 77!!

Oh yeah, I’m using the explicit LP cover for this post’s image, too few people read this blog for me to care about tanking my socials