GLOBAL CONNECTOR
Like Franz Ferdinand's best known songs — “Take Me Out,” “Do You Want To,” “No You Girls” — “Huck and Jim” makes hard turns. One of the standouts from the Glasgow group's latest album, “Always Ascending,” “Huck and Jim” shifts from jerky guitar riff to post-punk drone to a kind of '70s Berlin discotheque groove to thundering rock hook. The changes unfold in just 3A minutes.
But compared to the lyrics, the music is downright straightforward. In the song, frontman Alex Kapranos manages to link universal health care and great American literature. He sings in the chorus: “We're going to America/ We're gonna tell them about the
NHS (Britain's National
Health Service)/When we get there we'll all hang out/Sipping
40's with Huck and Jim.”
“It was a pretty straightforward train of thought,” Kapranos said, maybe with a dash of sarcasm, ahead of Franz Ferdinand's House of Blues show on Tuesday. “We'd written the backing music first, and I was wandering around the house, strumming the chorus on a guitar, taking the piss out of us, out of myself, as the slacker chords sounded so American.” Kapranos considers his band thoroughly Scottish (even if their sound nicks from Germans Kraftwerk and Brits New Order and Gang of Four). But these chords remind him of something American bands Archers of Loaf or the Silver Jews might come up with. He began to laugh and sing, “We're going to America.
“I started thinking about what I'd talk about if I was going to America, if I could talk about anything, and the NHS burst into my mind,” he said. “It was at a time when it was particularly present in my thoughts. Over on your side of the Atlantic, the Affordable Care Act was being dismantled, and on our side, the Tory government was surreptitiously selling off the NHS to private contractors. I was aghast.”
His mind began to freeassociate, and Kapranos connected to the classic American pastime of hanging out. But who would he hang with?
“That's when Huck walked into the path of my train of thought, except he wasn't alone,” he said. “(`Adventures of) Huckleberry Finn' hasn't one hero, but two. Huck and Jim. … Then I saw them from the perspective of an adult in 2017, and it was a shocker. The 14-year-old boy running away from his violent, abusive, alcoholic father and Jim the slave running away.
“In those two characters, there is so much of America, the freedom, determination of your own destiny, friendship,” Kapranos added. “But also so much of what is screwed up.”
It's a lot to unpack in one song. But that's the band's style. Equal layers of musical complexity and lyrical depth can be found across “Always Ascending.” “The Academy Award” explores our relentless need to use phones and social media to document every moment of life; “Lois Lane” sharply cuts into the desperation of the compromises we make in middle age.
But don't worry that you'll spend too much time caught in dark introspection at Franz Ferdinand's House of Blues show. The band still loves to make people dance. Their talent lies in hiding deep thoughts in disco-rock nuggets.
As Kapranos has wisely observed: “Just because you write a pop melody doesn't mean you have to write silly bubble gum lyrics.”