(5) Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”
sent home
(1) Dexys Midnight Runners, “Come On Eileen”
260-176
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/21/23.

BUHM BUHM: irene cooper on “tainted love”

The primary image is disembodied: me seeing me in the backseat of a rust-ruffled Ford Country Squire station wagon, aurally bathed in the subject of this essay. And isn’t that always at issue, this idea of being in or out of the body, or of realizing the Schrodinger state of being both in and out of the body until some practical, clinical asshole says different.

I am sixteen, July 17, 1982, and soon to be headed to Rio de Janeiro as a Rotary exchange student, when the synthpop single peaks at #8. It is entirely lost on me, though not for long, that I am to be released from the paranoid Catholic lockbox of my childhood into the technicolor (albeit still Catholic) extravaganza that (to my virgin eyes) is coastal Brasil.
I am not, at this point, a virgin by choice. In 1982, presumably straight Catholic boys in Queens are less tempted to sin than one might presume.
Gloria Jones records the original version of “Tainted Love” and releases it as a B side in 1965, the year of my birth. Jones re-records it in 1976, and includes it on the album Vixen, produced by her lover, glam rock icon Marc Bolan, of T. Rex. In choosing to cover the single, Soft Cell duo Marc Almond and David Ball cite Bolan, as well as the rough and ready UK Northern soul club scene—manifested in clubs such as Va in Bolton and Wigan Casino, which spin Black American soul music out of Chicago and Detroit almost exclusively—as major musical and aesthetic influences.
Soul. Glam. Industrial. Conceptual. Wowza.
And then there’s the video. WTF.

July 17, 1982, is seven months and six days away from Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, the final day of Carnival, the celebration that precedes Lent, the Catholic period of deprivation before Easter. Growing up in a predominantly Irish enclave in Queens, I understand the sere implications of Ash Wednesday. The absence of meat on Fridays, the giving up of one’s pleasures—be that chocolate or bread or alcohol or, secretly, masturbation—is an imitative martyrdom endemic to what I understand as faith, and subsequent redemption. Sacrifice is holy; just say no. Nothing comes before Lent, and Lent is always coming.
Plucked from the muffled greyscale grit of a Jacob Riis photograph, I would drop, that next February, into the psychedelia of a Pablo Amaringo painting, 3D and fully animated, sound up. During Carnaval do Brasil, parades of samba school dancers, strategically feathered and blindingly bedazzled, lead a six-day party in an ecstatic orgy of indulgence that almost requires the restorative promise of forty days of sobriety. It’s a suspension of reality, a free pass on no-holds-barred dancing, drinking, and sex that ceases, cleanly, according to doctrine, on the threshold of the most somber liturgical observance in Catholicism.
A week or so before Carnaval, I am travelling in the north, in the Amazonian city of Manaus, staying with friends of my Carioca (Rio de Janeiro-based) host family. I am seventeen and still, reluctantly, a virgin. The couple who has welcomed me into their home are in their twenties (perhaps the man is thirty), and new parents. The woman is preternaturally gorgeous, if visibly tired. The man smiles at me a lot, says, repeatedly, I should stay in the north for Carnaval.
The woman takes me aside at some point to warn me about lança-perfume. My Portuguese is not yet fluent, but I manage to get the gist of it: lança-perfume (akin to poppers) is a mix of ethyl chloride and scent, emitted from a pressurized canister and inhaled for a quick and short-lived rush. During Carnaval, it is not uncommon, the lovely woman tells me, for someone to sneak up on an unsuspecting (non-consensual) other party with a blast of lança-perfume. Along with the high, I learn many years later, ethyl chloride ingestion can result in arrythmia, diminished motor coordination, dizziness, drowsiness, slurring of speech, loss of feeling in the legs, and hallucination. I have yet, at seventeen, to hear the phrase, rape drug. It’s all in good fun, the madonna says. There’s a song about it. But I am made aware: giving oneself up to the moment is not necessarily an act of generosity; it can, instead, look and feel a lot like sacrifice. The lamb does not consent.

In the video of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Marc Almond’s disembodied head leers over the cosmic boredom of a young man tormented with sleeplessness, subjected to the intrusion of fiery blue balls of light and the cage-dancing antics of two mudflap girl starlight demons more interested in each other than in him (though he is clearly, also, disinterested). Almond is Puck, is Mephistopheles, is a Pee Wee Herman’s evil cousin of a second-tier god, toying with the virgin, whose dream and subsequent awakening lie somewhere outside his closet of an apartment.
My own sexual awakening, unbeknownst to me, is concurrent with the emergence of what would be an epidemic of HIV and AIDS. I live in Houston after returning stateside from Rio. House of Pies in Montrose is more tenderly known as House of Guys. I work at a Stack ‘n Stash with Milton Doolittle. We sell fashionable doodads to organize one’s various closets. Still relatively recently deflowered, my worst case scenario involves herpes, maybe chlamydia, the odd crab. Milton, barely forty, eschews the clubs that yet pulse and throb with young men, is perpetually trying to quit smoking, and has a penchant for eating cold casseroles over the sink, despite intestinal troubles. He asks me to go with him to visit a friend in the hospital. Milton is afraid of hospitals. We bring a king-sized bag of M&Ms. A man who might have been young lies in a bed behind a curtain at the end of the ward. He is skeletal, and lesioned, and somehow funny, in his whisperings.
AIDS is wildfire and information is repressed, as it will be for years to come. There is medical infighting and a proprietary tussle between western nations over research of a disease that is not being mitigated, let alone championed.
In July 1982, Terry Higgins dies, the first acknowledged British casualty of AIDS. In 1982, AIDS is still widely held to be a Gay disease, a reckoning for a tainted love contained to a so-called deviant population.
In September 1982, the Tylenol Murders terrorize Chicago. In December 1982, surgeons perform the first heart transplant into a human, who lives 112 days. Also in December, Time’s “Man of the Year” is not a man, but a computer. By 1982, everything is or will be tainted: the water, the air, and of course, love. We know a kid one block over who jumps to his death, full of yearning and poisoned hope. Occasionally, a leaking body is found in the trunk of an abandoned car in the Kmart parking lot, across from the tennis courts. A ninth grade girl goes into labor in the stairwell of the E wing of the junior high school. Purity, in respect to that which is untainted and untouched, is not a thing, and certainly not a thing to be confused with innocence, a state of being wholly separate from inexperience. Innocence, in our case, does not preclude knowledge, but absorbs it, transcends it. Aspirationally, to be innocent is not to be unbroken, but to live joyously in defiance of the caustic drippings of those legacies that would make broken our only signifier.

New Zealander singer-songwriter Lorde’s 2021 cover image for her album Solar Power celebrates this kind of freedom with the depiction, photographed from below, of her very own taint, a slang term for the part of the body defined as the area of sensitive skin between the genitals (scrotum or vagina) and the anus; the perineum. Taint this, taint that. Tis, though.
For release in China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the image of Lorde’s taint is obscured by a sunburst. Sunlight is, for all purposes, shining right out her ass. “[H]oly light,” one Weibo user in China suggested. And indeed, the image recalls the prominent print of a crucifix emitting heavenly light that hung in my grandmother’s boarding house.
Taint obscured or in full view, Lorde’s cover reads unavoidably wholesome. Is this a generational shift, this sun-kissed embrace of oneself? But then I remember all the beautiful men and women on Ipanema beach, back in 1982, a slip of lycra to keep the sand out of the bits, bodies burnished and glowing and turning to and loved by the sun; me in my second-hand maillot, prim as a pre-Vatican II habit, shame-splotched patches of exposed Irish-Scottish flesh blistering at the suggestion of freedom and vitamin D. Love and light (as in sunlight—not neon, not dashboard, not the cloaked glow of a streetlamp) was not how I experienced, or how I believed I could experience, love. I thought (I may yet think): One must be seeded and grow in the sun to be of the sun.  

Voiced by Almond, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” is an exaggerated wink at the indulgences and excesses of the moment, a pleather-chapped nose-thumbing to the would-be utopians of the previous decade. You can smell the cocaine, it’s been said. Jones’ earlier, arguably more soulful rendition is plaintive. She’s got to—buhm-buhm—get away. In Soft Cell’s video, while the young man does indeed flee the teasing of the two curvaceous star-figures, it feels less like an escape and more like a rejection of a heteronormative fantasy.
In the 1980s, Pee Wee Herman, aka, Paul Reubens, animates Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A childlike jester, Pee Wee embodies both innocence and bedevilment. Never sinister, Pee Wee yet emits a whiff of grown-up naughtiness, an awareness that is both costumed in and elucidated through heavily made-up character. Truth and complexity otherwise inexpressible can sometimes breathe through the veil of entertainment, the arena within which such dichotomies of innocence and knowing are allowed. But only within. Without the suit and the bowtie and the makeup, there’s just Paul Reubens, getting arrested in Florida for lewd conduct—reportedly masturbating in a pornographic theater, which was presumably pretty dark and likely hosting other people engaged in similar behavior. Gay, as Black, is an acceptable anomaly in entertainment: a costume, a stage persona, acceptable—celebrated—as long as it remains contained to the arena. Self-love: Tainted love.
Unless the situation calls for a pariah. Should anyone be tempted to confuse the popularity of the resurrected Queer Eye as evidence of widespread social progressiveness, the father of the man who shoots up the LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs in 2022 provides a reality check when he tells the press that he thanks his god his son wasn’t in the club to dance, that he wasn’t infected with the gay. Whew.

Other covers of “Tainted Love” include recordings by Marilyn Manson (2001) and by Spanish cover band Broken Peach (2021). The latter, especially recorded for Halloween, features three zombie insane asylum patients playing guitar, bass, and drums, along with three zombie nurses performing vocals. The undead: Tainted love.
Broken Peach’s version mixes in riffs from Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” and what one YouTube commenter identified as the intro from German hard rock’s Rammstein’s Deutschland. Controversy exists over whether Rammstein’s philosophy is, as the band maintains, left wing; or if it promotes, as some critics insist, a right wing national agenda, the very agenda that manifested the Holocaust. Nationalism, as Fundamentalism: Tainted love.
In an interview with fellow Soft Cell member Dave Ball, Marc Almond talks about their efforts at the onset of the endeavor to turn their art school, multi-media aspirations into something commercially attractive. Almond uses the term, Industrial Cabaret. Ball suggests they were after an amalgam of Northern soul + Kraftwerk; Almond chimes in that maybe they were more like Kraftwerk meets Judy Garland—Kraftwerk being the iconic pioneers of electronic pop.
The original members of Kraftwerk (trans., power plant), Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, cite influences from German Expressionism including film directors Fritz Lang (Metropolis), and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), as well as architects of future-focused and unsentimental movements such as New Objectivism and Bauhaus. The period after World War I and before World War II was, for Germany, a highly creative and artistically dynamic moment, and not a naïve one. No one didn’t know trouble lay ahead. But some artists and thinkers tried to stem it.
Of Kraftwerk’s ambitions later in the century, Simon Reynolds of NPR Music writes, “Kraftwerk were inventing the '80s…Crucially, it was music stripped of individualized inflection and personality, no hint of a solo or even a flourish. ‘We go beyond all this individual feel…We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine.’”
Reynolds talks about riding in a car on the actual Autobahn between the Black Forest and Cologne,  listening to Kraftwerk’s music: “It might have been…‘Autobahn’ itself—I had to [BUHM-BUHM] turn my face away and look fixedly out of the window to hide my tears. I’m not sure why the music, so free of anguish and turmoil, has this paradoxical effect. But…[it has] to do with what Lester Bangs called the ‘intricate balm’ supplied by the music itself: calming, cleansing, gliding along placidly yet propulsively, it's a twinkling and kindly picture of heaven.”
Gloria Jones is at the wheel when Marc Bolan dies in a car accident at 29. Clean, self-propelling machines that they are, Schneider and Hütter travel from venue to venue by touring bike. By July 17, 1982, I have no taste for sloppy tragedy or fresh air utopia, but I crave, oh, how I crave, the inflection. How I ache for flourish.

Despite Soft Cell’s spoken aspirations to the likes of Kraftwerk, something is most definitely lost (or scuttled) in translation. There is no heaven in Soft Cell’s driving “Tainted Love.” I do not cry in the backseat of the station wagon (going nowhere), nor do I feel cleansed. Technically pure, I am scoured, too, by the scraping losses of the seventies, and broken enough to let in a kind of joy, even innocence, forged in ruin, sharp as Eliot’s shards, crusted in last night’s cocaine shared among last night’s friends and lovers at the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that is 1982, if I can make my way to the right dimly lit place, away from the basements and fluorescent sprawl and mall-infested interstates of suburban paranoia. Love is all there is, teases the emcee through the greasepaint, and isn’t it resplendent, tainted through and through.
Touch me, Baby, please.

Irene Cooper is the author of Found, crime thriller noir set in Colorado, Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family, & spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, & elsewhere. Irene is co-founder of The Forge writing program & Blank Pages Workshops. She teaches in community & supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, & lives with her people & Maggie in Oregon. irenecooperwrites.com

EM PASEK ON “COME ON EILEEN”

“Come On Eileen” is a masterclass in unabashed corniness. There is simply nothing that can possibly be taken seriously about a grown man adopting a falsetto and the perspective of a teenager who is soulfully attempting to seduce his girlfriend by talking about how depressing their hometown is, all while his friends chime in with little nonsensical asides like "too-ra-loo-ra too-ra-loo-rye-ay" and some peppy strings play a jaunty little countermelody in the background. Any attempt to defend the song’s merit by defending its musical credibility only makes it sound more ridiculous. (Oh, it merges the sounds of Celtic strings and a Motown-esque beat? Still silly. It samples an Irish folk song about still liking your partner when you both get old and they aren’t hot anymore and concludes with an a cappella verse from the same? Even sillier.) And the song's pop culture legacy doesn't do it any favors in the non-goofy legitimacy department, either. (Most of the folks to whom I've chatted about this song associate it with Dean of Greendale Community College making up silly little lyrics to its tune in Community.) Ultimately, though, “Come On Eileen” doesn’t need to be serious: its beauty lies in how uninhibited it is. It’s a song meant to be howled in karaoke bars and played over and over again on long drives, when your tapping feet and your off-key call-and-response don't need to be serious and you can get on with the business of having a good time.
Behind its lovely absurdity, though, there’s a hint of darkness in “Come On Eileen” that suggests that something not-so-fun was going down when the song was written. It’s there when frontman Kevin Rowland takes a second away from crooning about being horny to allude to the “beaten down, eyes sunk in smoke-dried face” of the people around him. It’s in the odd attribution of the single to “Dexys Midnight Runners and the Emerald Express”, suggesting some kind of division among the people who recorded it.
The idea that something charming and unserious can result from a period of struggle is nothing new. After all, we live in a world where goofiness levels reaching a fever pitch in the misery pit of the past few years necessitated the popularization of the phrase "goblin mode" just to accurately describe what everyone's whole deal was last year.

THESE PEOPLE ‘ROUND HERE

The deep-seated conflict at the core of Dexys' story goes way beyond anything that a reasonable onlooker might expect from an ensemble with only five albums to its name. They've spent their forty-some years of on-again, off-again banddom breaking up; making up; and near-constantly onboarding, losing, and occasionally regaining members: as of this writing fifty-one individuals have, at some point, been counted as members of the band. Those hardy souls who persisted through multiple album cycles were treated to whiplash-inducing stylistic and lifestyle changes, record label disputes, and endless infighting for their trouble. At the heart of this constant churn is the band's founder and only consistent member, Kevin Rowland, a man who is extremely serious about being serious about music and who, for much of the band’s history, held that virtue above all else.
On the spectrum of all-consuming experiences that it is possible for a person to endure, being a member of Dexys in its heyday sounds like it might have fallen somewhere between "being a member of an extremely weird military unit" and "joining a fairly ill-managed cult that never got completely out of hand because you could walk out before things got completely out of hand". You had to wear a uniform, which changed dramatically to suit Rowland's idea of what a serious band should look like every couple of years. You were expected to participate in a mandatory athletic training regimen alongside your bandmates. If you, like most of the band’s members, were English, you might be assigned a more Irish-sounding name to suit the group’s Celtic image. (Rowland himself was born in Ireland and has resided in England for most of his life.) If you were recruited to the band as a horn player, you might, seemingly on a whim, be instructed by Rowland to take up strings. And your time in the band would most likely be marked by periods of intense secrecy – from your label, from the press, and maybe even from your fans.
Too-Rye-Aye, the dreadfully-named album on which “Come On Eileen” appears, was recorded in a period of particular turmoil for Dexys. It doesn’t sound like anyone was particularly happy with what went down: half the band had one foot out the door after reluctantly agreeing to stick around for the recording, Rowland apparently hated the way the album was produced, and by all accounts the process of trying to promote the single was exhausting.
The thing that really stands out about "Come On Eileen" is that Kevin Rowland really loves music and really loves talking about where he got his ideas. The song wears every one of its influences, from the Johnny Ray name-drop in the first line to the is-it-Tom-Jones-or-The-Jackson-5 groove of the beat, on its sleeve, and the thing to which Rowland was aspiring when he wrote it is obvious in their presence. Even without his ridiculous "James, Stan, and Me" lyric, he tells you exactly what he wants to be: not just a guy who is cool enough that girls named Eileen wanted to hook up with him as a teenager, but a guy whom people will mention in the same breath as the musicians who inspired him.
"Come On Eileen" doesn't quite live up to that lofty ideal, but that's also what makes it worth revisiting again and again. It's a song about a guy who is trying unbelievably hard—at being deep and smart and cool enough that his totally real non-imaginary girlfriend will put out, at getting his barely-holding-it-together band to record something that will stand the test of time, at doing literally anything to make music even if it means ending friendships and fabricating stories to make himself and his songs sound worthwhile—and failing so utterly at all of those things that he accidentally transcends them. While there's no way that Rowland was fully aware of what he was doing with the song back in 1982, "Come On Eileen" has always known exactly what it is. In its perfect silliness, the song shows us every one of its pretensions and anxieties and then throws them away, lets go of the need to prove anything to anyone, and drags us out of our own existential crises and fears of getting old and boring to finally have some fun. 

THINGS ‘ROUND HERE HAVE CHANGED

Making sense of the particular magic of “Come On Eileen” is made more complicated by the fact that Rowland has refuted, contradicted, and reevaluated almost every single aspect of the origin story behind his band's best-known song so many times that it's almost impossible to sum it up without sounding like a wide-eyed madman standing in front of a corkboard covered in red string. The first incarnation of his story was pretty normal: Rowland's first love was a girl whom he had called a friend for his whole childhood. When he was thirteen, their relationship became romantic. Rowland was an altar boy, and although the conflict between his Catholic upbringing and his newfound feelings was scary, but it was also intoxicating. Though the relationship didn't last, the memory of those emotions stayed with him. This is a nice story: sweet and simple and just relatable enough to keep it from being too embarrassing, just like the song that it inspired. It isn't true, though. Rowland didn't write the song with a childhood girlfriend in mind. Instead, the song's iconic chorus once bore the confusing and self-congratulatory lyrics "James, Stan, and me," referring to James Brown, Van Morrison, and Rowland himself and their shared musical legacy in the genre of soul. (The substitution of "Stan" for "Van" is apparently part of some convoluted inside joke that Rowland had at some point in his youth and that he legitimately believed would make sense to a broader audience.) Rowland has, at various points, stated that he changed the lyrics to make a point about Catholic repression, or just because he got angry in a session with his label.
Years after the dissolution of Dexys Midnight Runners and deep in the doldrums of a poorly-received solo career, Rowland made a confession that might have shocked the world had the world not largely moved on from him and his musical endeavors: he had stolen “Come On Eileen”.
Here's what happened, according to Rowland: at some point in the leadup to the recording of the second Dexys album, Rowland's ex-bandmate, Kevin Archer, who was a founding member of Dexys but who had already left the band, recorded a demo tape which featured a particular mix of Celtic strings and a "bum-da-dum" bass line that sounded like something off of a Motown record or maybe a Tom Jones single. Rowland listened to that demo tape, and he knew from the moment that he heard it that he needed it to be his. He recorded Archer’s song as his own, making up a story about falling in love as a teenager to sell it as an original project. The song was a sensation, but it was also the band's downfall. Rowland's friendship with Archer deteriorated over the theft, his band fell apart, and neither he nor any of the musicians with whom he had once been associated managed to achieve the “Come On Eileen” career high ever again. Years later, apparently still wracked with guilt, Rowland confessed to stealing the song publicly.
In more recent years, Rowland has recanted this confession. Today, he says that, suffering from depression and impostor syndrome after his most recent failure as a solo artist, he overattributed the song to Archer when, in reality, he had merely taken inspiration from the combination of beats and string sounds that his now-former friend had used.

What is “Come On Eileen” actually about?
The thing that really stands out about Come On Eileen is that Kevin Rowland really loves music and really loves talking about where he got his ideas. The song wears its influences, from  – and yes, even his ridiculous “James, Stan, and me” lyric and the  – all speak to

NOW YOU’RE FULL GROWN

“Come On Eileen” isn’t a good song. It’s a perfect song, the kind that you can come back to forever.
Dexys is still kicking, somehow. Some of the band’s former members have come back, and the group’s lineup has been somewhat consistent for the first time since it formed. They’ve got a new album coming out this year, and while their modern-day output isn’t likely to achieve what ““Come On Eileen”” did, it’s been well-received by critics and fans and everyone involved with creating it seems a hell of a lot happier than they did in the 1980s. And Rowland mentioned in an interview a while back that he and Archer spoke during lockdown and came to the conclusion, once and for all, that Rowland is not a song-stealer, so that’s nice to have settled.
In 2022, Dexys released Too-Rye-Aye (As It Should Have Sounded), a 40th anniversary reissue album which consists of the original Too-Rye-Aye recordings and all-new production to achieve a sound closer to Rowland’s original vision for the record. Some of the songs sound quite different, but “Come On Eileen” is almost untouched. It was perfect all along.

Em Pasek is a geoscientist and PhD student from Michigan currently residing in the central Sierra Nevada.