poptimists | Josh Turner Firecracker

Its not as a good as Yr Man, or to put it more bluntly, Yr Man turns me on, and Firecracker doesn’t.

Maybe its because Yr Man works better formally, the tone of the music literally matches the tone of the music---when he sings put some music soft and low—the music is soft and slow, its seductive in a soulful kind of swagger, but one so smooth that the first impression is one of fidelity, of married couples making love, when it is a song of explicit eroticism with out being ribald, each proposal comes with its own safety catch —“where alone now, you don’t know how long ive wanted to, lock the door and turn the lights down low”, or “lets go over what I had in mind” or “I’ve been thinking of this all day long/never felt a feeling quite this strong” or “aint no body loves me the way I love you” The conversational negotiation of what is desired and what will occur, of the desires of a lover and the commitment of a spouse.

The privacy, the intimacy, the tenderness of the delivery, all suggest that a song made for radio is almost too intimate to be played there. I think it is a song that seduces the audience, a text that manages in a singular fashion to be a song to marry too and a song to fuck too.

This dual working thru of a singular purpose is absent on Firecracker, though its as well written, and it’s extended metaphors work well with in the blues/rockabilly tradition of dirty double entendres, I just don’t believe him---I might believe him if someone else sang it (well its almost too tame now, it might be believable if someone ca 1950 sang it—it would have been perfect for Carl Perkins or Wanda Jackson or Little Richard or Jerry Lee, people who might have done some damage with their voices) Also, Turner is too tame, he of the slow voice, the croon, the basso profundo, who has a certain moral core, cannot bring the fire necessary, yr man requires a smoulder, this requires a flame.

It starts with a yea—it goes fast but not fast enough that the lack of control that the song requires, it doesn’t have the dominance or the fight for dominance that lines like “son of a gun she’s fun to handle, she packs a punch like a roman candle or we might not oughta to roll in the hay because we might burn down the barn one of these days. Plus, by calling her both a firecracker and the light of his life, means he lacks commitment to the impermanence and the sheer destruction of the women in question. (Also if she’s so hot, isn’t burning the barn down a good thing, and isn’t going out in smoke what fire crackers do?) The sheer anxiety of losing control makes a song safe, and a song about arson, and coded references to female orgasm should be anything but safe.

50 years ago, this year Wanda Jackson sang “I’m a fujiyama mama/about to lose my top” and you believed her—that when she finally got what she wanted, cataclysmic destruction would occur. Turner should keep with the ambiguous odes to marital hotel room sex or take lessons from Jackson.