It’s high time I stopped calling things cheesy and just used the word ‘great’ when it’s what I really mean. The new Space Cowboy single is great. I’ve never liked power rock, and I suspect I never will. But I feel I can understand it. I feel I can understand it because of singles like this one. Just Put Your Hand In Mine is part of a French house revival which becomes more fascinating with every new release.
It’s changing my life, more than one record or album ever could. And it’s shocking just how much emotion is being rammed into these songs. French house artists have always liked to mess with the standard repetition styles of dance music, but now it’s become a vocal thing too. The main ‘trick’ in house music has always been repetition to make certain sounds and samples resonate in the brain, but now more than ever this is being done to make certain lyrics resonate in the brain.
In this case it’s ‘just put your hand in mine’ which is repeated. It’s a vocal which begs the listener to love the record, to believe in it. Bangalter and Falcon’s forthcoming ‘So Much Love To Give’ single is the same. One lyric, one message, one riff, if you have no faith in repetition as a method for creating fantastic music, then this song is a wild eyed evangelical preacher. And the only other message is positivity.
I have issues with listening to techno every week on ecstacy because I am a human being! Make me feel human! Let me sing ‘just put your hand in mine’ and make the experience more fake in its total euphoria, but more real because love is. And because ‘just put your hand in mine’ is a real expression of it which everyone has said or wanted to say in some way.
And if writing this article is the closest I can get to becoming the man who preaches through Fatboy Slim’s ‘Song For Shelter’ then so be it ‘Stomp your feet, clap your hands and say sweet Lord speak to me!’