Coffee & TV - Blur

February 7, 2008

It could only be so long before Old Roads gave a nod to a band that released an album entitled Modern Life is Rubbish. The song "Coffee & TV" comes from 1999.. when they had left behind some of the social critique and satire that came with albums like Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). But stylistically this song is a throwback to the music of those earlier albums.

Let's work through the song:

Do you feel like a chain store?
Practically floored
One of many zeros
Kicked around bored
Your ears are full but your empty
Holding out your heart
To people who never really
Care how you are

The opening line is ponderable: what would it be like to feel like a chain store? A chain store is very similar to a whole bunch of other stores. It lacks personality. It is expected. It is scorned. The question also seems to point us away from a possibly working class background and toward a bland service sector position. Once we have identified ourselves as being chain store like, it is not too far of a stretch to picture us there hollow and holding out our heart in earnestness to people who couldn't care less. These lines end up being a compact reference to life in the city: "one of many zeroes.."

The next stanza is the chorus, to be repeated several times:

So give me coffee and TV
Peacefully
I've seen so much
I'm goin blind
And i'm braindead virtually
Sociability
It's hard enough for me
Take me away from this big bad world
And agree to marry me
So we can start all over again

Coffee and TV enter as a sedatives to mask the chain store emptiness. But now the life that coffee and TV encourage unexpectedly come in for a critique. Presumably it is the TV that enables the singer to see so much that he feels like he is going blind. Coffee is a social drink.. and the singer finds this sociability likewise a burden. But now comes the strangest turn in the entire song: the singer calls out to someone with a marriage proposal: "Take me away from this big bad world/ And agree to marry me/ So we can start all over again." It is the romantic vision of a new start.. a marriage proposal that could be ripped from the pages of any cheap romance novel. It is hard to know whether we should take this outburst seriously.

The next stanza brings us to the second and final verse, which lands us in an explicitly romantic situation:

Do you go to the country?
It isn't very far
There's people there who will hurt you
'cause of who you are
Your ears are full of the language
There's wisdom there you're sure
'Til the words start slurring
And you can't find the door

This is a reference to William Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads".. in which he argues that the language of rustics is more pure and metaphorical than that of city dwellers. If the first verse of "Coffee & TV" is addressed to someone long pent up in a drab urban world, this second verse asks about the alternative of getting out to the country. For a second time this person's ears are said to be "full".. but this time it is with the language of the country people.. where there must be wisdom. But the singer warns that the country is not such a great escape: people get violent and drunk.

We now get the chorus repeated a couple of times.. and finally it gets pared down to just "we can start over again." This beautiful line is haunted in the background by some troubled guitar work and sonic fuzz, but its sentiments seem the real anchor of the song.

I wonder if Blur is parodying the harder "Cigarettes & Alcohol" (1994) of Oasis.. only from a more grown-up thirty-ish perspective. The sentiments for this song run along recognizable lines:

Is it worth the aggravation
To find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?
It's a crazy situation
But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol!

The repeated line in "Cigarettes & Alcohol" is the call: "You gotta make it happen!"

Those lines smell of a quite different social situation: to be 20 years old and looking for the standard rock and roll escapes. Blur sets out "Coffee & TV" as the escape for a more philosophical type of angst. The Romantic hope that "We can start over again" hovers over the song.. but we cannot tell who the singer is talking to.. nor does the reference to a "big bad world" fill us with hope that this is anything more than an idle dream. And so perhaps one is left with just coffee and TV?