Brilliant piece of cultural analysis:
Excerpt: ″“Killer” was a disturbing record from its cover inwards – Adamski’s pet dog scowling at the camera, at an angle, while a queasy orange psychedelic backdrop swirls in the background – and perhaps its most disturbing factor was the fact that the title is never uttered at any point in the song. Yet it didn’t need to be; the backwards boomerang of the fade-in intro quickly gives way to a brutal variant on post-Acieed beats, with a rhythm and right-angled bassline which are demonstrative and in your face but also questioning.
Both lyric and vocal delivery – both provided by an unknown singer named Seal – personify anxious urgency. Seal’s vocal here is like a grainier, colder rationalist Richie Havens, but he is pleading for warmth and bonding and, indeed, a true society. “Solitary brother! Is there still a part of you that wants to live?” he cries as the music gradually escalates behind him; the car horns following in the trail of the charity fundraising sideswipe “Will you give (if we cry)?,” the scythes of stuttering cymbals which enter with “Tainted hearts,” the stately string synth lines which essentially halve the speed of the song’s topline in preparation for the chorus; all seem like totems of a crumbling Establishment which Seal is urging that we bring down. The cut-up of the “be” in the line “The way we wanna be” symbolises the attempts by unconcerned government to turn the living human into a docile machine but is instantly defeated by Seal’s half-ecstatic growl of “Yeah!” which in turn leads directly into a minor key Jack-The-House piano line, percussion dots and loops – and a sampled dog bark – raining all around. In the third line of the final chorus Adamski’s synth plays a tortured, high-register melody, like a weeping computer; and finally it settles with Seal’s closing, out-of-tempo warnings: “Racism in amongst future kings can only lead to no good…and besides…all our sons and daughters already know how that feels” before culminating in a sad smile of a 1967 memory: “Yeah, yeah, yeah…Love, love, love.” It is one of the most minimally articulate anti-New Right protests in all of pop – and little wonder that neither Adamski nor Seal ever surpassed this, that Adamski settled for novelty Elvis covers (and, later, anonymous ambient techno) or that Seal (with the aid of Trevor Horn, producing his most commercially successful work and also his worst) became merely a slightly higher-tech Cat Stevens. “Killer” is the necessary conscience of a culture which should have changed everything.″
Source: popular-number1s.com
Source: popular-number1s.com