Six minutes and two seconds: “For Tomorrow” is Blur’s most self-conscious record, which is saying a lot. Its calculation was born of necessity: this was a band smart enough to realise they were on the very lip of the dumper, trying to think their way back from it.
So this single - I bought it on cassette, to get this full-length mix - was presented to the press as a statement, kicking off the campaign for Modern Life Is Rubbish. I was slap in Blur’s target market - student, indie listener, Select reader - but it all seemed a bit obvious and unfocused to me. The song too: nobody had used a Langer-Winstanley style brass section in British pop for a decade and it felt forced, way too knowing.
They were on the right side of history, though. What sounded like a cynical gamble in 1993 now sounds like a band groping, in realtime, to invent an audience and pull a genre together. The song itself - it’s OK, it’s catchy enough, nice “Waterloo Sunset” theme, Rowntree bringing the best hook (dum-dum-dum-DUM), but it’s too idealised, too abstract, doesn’t resonate. So the horns come in, a break between rounds, and Albarn steps back, then with a minute to go he’s back in with a sing-song chanted coda about Jim and Susan and it clicks: suddenly he’s singing about real people in a real city, spoiled and directionless and frustrated people, the people who’ll be buying his records and all the records they cause. In two years’ time he’ll be No.1 and it’s Jim and Susan who’ll put him there.
Interesting take on the transition from the first to the second Blur album here. I was paying attention back when this happened too, but perhaps because I am a bit younger than you (I was a senior in high school, and young for my grade—maybe you were in college?), or maybe because I’m so incurably wide-eyed and ready to believe wholeheartedly in anything that I am unusually susceptible to guile, especially subtle guile… well, whatever the reason, instead of taking the cynical view that Blur had changed their sound to try to sell records, I was very impressed with their much more interesting new direction. I had been really into the post-Stone Roses rave-rock/Madchester scene, and the shoegaze scene, so I’d picked up on their debut, Leisure, and thought it had a couple of good songs, but really just figured they were the generic downswing of a previously interesting scene.
The first song I heard from Modern Life Is Rubbish was “Chemical World,” which got played on 120 Minutes in the summer of 1993 (right after I graduated from high school, in fact). I was blown away—a band whom I’d thought would only ever at best be mildly entertaining had a new sound that mined a far more interesting pool of influences than were typically exhibited by the Brit bands of the time, and were using those influences to write pop hooks of a caliber not previously approached. From that moment on, I was a believer. I just considered the first Blur album raw and immature work from a band capable of much better. It never occurred to me until I read this post that the whole thing might have been calculated.
But I’m going to propose an alternate theory. Maybe this is just my own unwillingness to ever accept a cynical interpretation, but I find it far more believable to imagine that it was the first Blur album on which Albarn and company were attempting to fit into a demographic, to find an easy audience. When they realized after Leisure’s failure that they were probably doomed, I figure they decided that if they were doomed, they’d at least go down swinging, pulling out all the stops and doing something that kept their interest, that wasn’t easily slotted into a current trend or pre-existing genre. It might look different to us in hindsight for the obvious reason that it worked—that instead of going down at all, Blur rose up on the crest of a new wave later dubbed Britpop—but keep in mind that they never could have seen that coming. Maybe instead of cynically attempting to cobble together a sound that would make money, they were quixotically following their hearts, and just happened to get lucky. Maybe their Parklife-era success was actually a triumph of art over commerce.
Besides, you can’t convince me that a band whose entire career was a calculated attempt to sell albums would ever take the chance on releasing a half-baked turd like Think Tank.
P.S. - I never noticed the “Jim and Susan” thing in “For Tomorrow” before. Those are my parents’ names. Weird.
