After being warned by LE's comment – which mentioned pretty much everything I have a problem with in some of Mark's songs - I finally mustered up the courage to listen to
Good on You Son yesterday evening. I feared for the worst, but what I heard was ... even worse. I think a doctor would diagnose a state of shock. This song is easily the most cringeworthy thing ever to land on an official MK/DS album.
It's not the song itself that's the problem. It surely doesn't help that it's quite banal compared to other MK songs, and that it's really a rehash of
Early Bird, both lyrically and musically. But it is
not a bad song. It has a groove, and the lyrics aren't uninteresting. God knows why they chose this as the "single" - probably because it's the most radio-friendly song - but okay. Mark's record company almost has a habit of picking unrepresentative songs as singles (and God, do I hope this is unrepresentative!). We've become used to that. Not a problem.
The problem is how this song is produced, or, more precisely, destroyed by Guy Fletcher's awful-awful-awful keyboards and synths. It's quite unbelievable what amount of harm he is capable of doing, and even more unbelievable that Mark actually seems to ask him for it. I was planning to go into more detail here, but I won't; it's just too painful. The song is basically ruined before it even starts 38 seconds in, and from then on GF just heaps more and more layers of shit on it. I'd never ever thought I'd say that, but when the saxophone finally kicks in, it actually comes as a relief. After that, the song at least
really sounds like the cheap 80s TV-series soundtrack it may be trying to evoke.
Which brings me to this: Of course you could argue that this whole shitty soundscape is supposed to be listened to with the "irony" mode on. The song seems to be about an 80s TV director, so why not make it sound like 80s TV. But even if it
was meant ironically - and I'm more than ready to believe it is, if only to save whatever is left of my trust in MK's aesthetic judgement - it wouldn't be very successful in it, and it would be very much at odds with the more raw and real approach of most of MK's solo work.
At some point in MK's career - around The Ragpicker's Dream and Shangri-La - I was confident that he would eventually leave all these awfully cheesy synthetic sounds that occasionally crept up in his songs behind. I was hoping that he would part with GF, and maybe work with a producer that has some sense of taste, and a feel for what makes Mark Knopfler so special. Someone like Daniel Lanois or Rick Rubin. To see that the opposite is happening is truly heartbreaking.
I'm used to getting emotional after hearing a MK song for the first time. But not in this way.
