Eurythmics – Sexcrime (1984)
#quotefromthe80s
And so I face the wall
Turn my back against it all
How I wish I'd been unborn
Wish I was unliving here
Sexcrime
#Eurythmics #Sexcrime
We are, of course, in 1984. In October, exactly in the year that gives the title to the novel, the movie inspired by George Orwell’s masterpiece is about to be released. The title of the movie will simply be “1984”, and the production is working on the soundtrack. The producers, however, played a dirty game, assigning the same task to different artists. Obviously without informing them.
And so, a Dominic Muldowney is working on the movie’s soundtrack, when he learns that another group is doing the same thing. He listens to their music and decides that it is “crass rubbish”, and therefore the production will have to use his soundtrack. The other group, discovering the situation, will simply define the producer as “two-faced rat”, and think of withdrawing from the task: after all, you don’t really need a soundtrack, if you’re Dave Stewart or Annie Lennox, in short, if you’re Eurythmics. It’s the soundtrack that needs you. After all, you already reached fame with hits like “Sweet dreams” and “Here comes the rain again“.
This may have also been the opinion of Sir Richard Branson, who at the time was not Sir yet, but was already the head of Virgin Films (and of the whole Virgin empire). And so the decision was clear: Eurythmics material will be used, and gaps will be filled with Muldowney’s songs.
Eurythmics created a spectacular song. The video, in addition to showing footage from the film, shows a fantastic Annie Lennox, with her look both androgynous, but also extremely sensual. Dave Stewart is simply outstanding, both as a sound engineer and as a singer and guitarist. In short, Eurythmics at their best.
Lyrics also contain interesting pearls. Orwell writes in his masterpiece, that the totalitarian government of Oceania (which had in England the extreme outpost, on the border with Eurasia) created a new language, called “newspeak”, to simplify English, actually weakening it by deleting words, synonims, rules and exceptions, in favor of an extremely schematic and absolutely massified speech.
And in this song we find some words of newspeak, sung by Annie Lennox, especially in the words “unliving” and “unborn” to say that she wished she had never been born and not being living there. Absolutely fantastic! The title itself is a double word with a deliberately vague meaning, a common situation in newspeak.
In Eurythmics’ career “Sexcrime (1984)” is considered a bit of an exception because it did not come out with a new album, but it still remains a fantastic song that had an amazing success in England and throughout Europe. And it certainly helped the success of the film: Sir Richard Branson was definitely right!!!
Eurythmics, Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox on Wikipedia
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