January 27th – She did exactly what she was told never to do
21.55-22.05
‘Can’t touch this’, MC Hammer categorically stated.
She touched it anyway. It was disappointing, ultimately, and not what she would have expected, had she thought about it at all, although to be fair, it wasn’t something that (to her knowledge) had ever crossed her conscious mind. But she had touched it anyway, because she’s been told not to. She was like that.
And it wasn’t as if MC Hammer, he of the poorly-conceived trousers, was categorically telling her not to touch it in the first place. ‘Can’t touch this’ might just as easily have been saying ‘You can’t touch this, you mere mortal. It is beyond you and the reach of your arms, because it is untouchable.’ If that was the case, she had chosen to ignore this potential meaning, and go with the more direct, ‘You can’t touch this, so don’t touch it, OK?’
As has been established, she touched it anyway, and was underwhelmed. MC Hammer’s response was, as far as we know, unrecorded.
Touching it was not the first time she had acted in direct contravention of a musical message. Many would probably agree with her stopping Queen, once they had brazenly and bombastically come out with the provocative ‘Don’t stop me now.’ Preventing the spaniel-haired Brian May from leaving the baker’s shop was another triumph in her catalogue of perversities. Not perversities, obviously: she didn’t catalogue those, but if anyone on the radio told her not to do something through the medium of song then you could be sure that she was going to do exactly what they had instructed her not to do.
‘Don’t stop believing,’ instructed Journey. She stopped. She didn’t believe in them any more. To her they became no more than a primitive belief system, an outmoded deity in a changing world, left behind by enlightenment. Again, Journey’s response was undocumented. The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’ took the pressure off in the bedroom. Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ was particularly stressful. Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t you (forget about me)’ rendered Jim Kerr obsolete.
And the list went on.
And it would have gone on longer, had she not been browsing the record store when all three minutes and fifty nine seconds of The Prodigy’s 1996 number one single ‘Breathe’ was played by a Saturday boy with freedom of the decks.
And that was that.
Inspired by a prompt from here