Oh, Allison

I was talking all weekend about how Phil Spector songs constitute little snowglobes of perfection, of short periods in life when there’s a pure emotion that hasn’t been tainted yet, regardless of which emotion.

The snowglobes of each Phil Spector song keep those ephemeral yet perfect experiences locked inside, where they can stay undamaged forever. We all have these snapshot-moments in our lives that we wish could last inside the safe refuge of a perfect, impenetrable sphere.

I love Phil Spector because even though he is so damaged and understands completely how messy and horrible and fucked up life can be (especially since his perspective is one of an extremely fucked-up person), he captures these short, rare periods of time when the only thing that matters is how hopeful or fantastic or even full of despair you feel, along with the purity of it.

The lyrics and the melody focus on the joy at hand, but his Wall of Sound contains these minor-key undertones of the near-inevitable heartbreak to come. The song hints that perfection is ephemeral, but the perfection of that three-minute pop song says, “We’re going to focus exclusive attention on the hope and exhiliration of right now by excising the potentiality of the near-inevitable disappointment … except there are always remnants of that excision.”

What makes it even more interesting is that Phil Spector became Pygmalion. He married the woman who served as both muse and interpreter, Ronnie Spector.

Senior year of college, I wrote this paper about William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition,” and I wanted to seize on the element I considered the most beautiful and interesting. There’s this woman who’s essentially a vegetable, but they hook her brain to electrodes to make these stunning, ephemeral images drawn from the visions in her mind. It really upset me that I couldn’t articulate its profundity, and I failed to do the concept justice in my mediocre paper.

But I realize now what I wanted to say six years ago that I couldn’t yet express. It’s a statement on the artist’s passivity. The artist is a channel. You almost need to be that damaged to produce something so beautiful.